Parliamentary debates: Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Almighty God, we give thanks for the blessings which have been bestowed on us. Laying aside all personal interests, we acknowledge the King and pray for guidance in our deliberations, that we may conduct the affairs of this House with wisdom, justice, mercy, and humility for the welfare and peace of New Zealand. Amen.

Eleven petitions have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.

Petition of Allan Wallbank requesting that the House compensate landowners for carbon they sequester from their indigenous forest

petition of Speak Up for Women requesting that the House define that “sex” in the Human Rights Act 1993 has the biological meaning

petition of Christina Gillmore requesting that the House establish nationwide regulations and standards for laser tattoo removal

petition of Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand requesting that the House prohibit the advertising of gambling in Aotearoa New Zealand

petition of Tamati Warmington requesting that the House refer MP David Seymour’s actions on 10 February 2025 to the Privileges Committee

petition of James Bond requesting that the House require hospitals to notify the police immediately if a patient has an unexplained injury

petition of Heather Tanguay requesting that the House urge the Government not to reintroduce semi-automatic weapons in New Zealand when the Arms Act is rewritten

petition of Duran Nair requesting that the House of Representatives urge the Government to add skilled trade occupations, including welders and other essential trades, to New Zealand’s Green List

petition of Scott Savage requesting that the House urge the Government to pay each survivor $3.5 million for the abuse experienced while in the care of the State

petition of Walter Hicks requesting that the House urge the Prime Minister to advise the Governor-General to dissolve the 54th Parliament of New Zealand and call a new election

petition of Dannielle Davis on behalf of He Tangata Facebook group requesting that the House urge the Prime Minister to remove David Seymour from his portfolios.

That’s very good. I’m sure the House will gather itself after that and look forward to similar affirmation from the public for themselves. Those petitions stand referred to the Petitions Committee. There have been four papers delivered by Ministers for presentation.

Government responses to the petitions of:

Christian van der Pump

Anne Henderson, and

Stop Institutional Racism.

Government response to the report of the Māori Affairs Committee on its review briefing on the 2022-23 annual review of Te Aratuku Whakaata Irirangi Māori (Māori Television Service).

I present the reports of the Ombudsman, entitled:

The Chief Ombudsman’s Reflections on the Official Information Act

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Te Tari o te Pirimia me te Komiti Matua

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in Kainga Ora Housing New Zealand

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in the Pharmaceutical Management Agency Te Pātaka Whaioranga

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in The Treasury Te Tai Ōhanga

OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in Transpower New Zealand.

I also present the annual report of the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards for the year ending 31 December 2024. Those papers are published under the authority of the House. Twenty-five select committee reports have been delivered for presentation.

Reports of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee on the 2023-24 annual reviews of:

Callaghan Innovation

New Zealand Growth Capital Partners Ltd

Commerce Commission

Meteorological Service of New Zealand Ltd

reports of the Health Committee on the 2023-24 annual reviews of the:

Ministry of Health, and

Pharmaceutical Management Agency

reports of the Justice Committee on the 2023-24 annual reviews of the:

Crown Law Office

Department of Corrections

Electoral Commission

Human Rights Commission

Independent Police Conduct Authority

Parliamentary Counsel Office

Public Trust, and

Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill and the Report of the Attorney-General under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990

report of the Māori Affairs Committee on the 2023-24 annual review of Te Puni Kōkiri—Ministry of Māori Development

report of the Parliament Bill Committee on the Parliament Bill

reports of the Petitions Committee on the:

petition of Deb Hayes

petition of Erin Tiplady

petition of Kath McDonald

report of the Primary Production Committee on the Dairy Industry Restructuring (Export Licences Allocation) Amendment Bill

report of the Regulations Review Committee on the Parliamentary Counsel Office Annual Report on Legislative Practices 2023-2024

reports of the Social Services and Community Committee on the 2023-24 annual reviews of the:

Ministry of Disabled People, and

Ministry of Social Development

reports of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee on the:

2023-24 annual review of Auckland Light Rail Ltd

Building (Overseas Building Products, Standards, and Certification Schemes) Amendment Bill.

The bills are set down for second reading, and the Annual Report on Legislative Practices 2023-2024 is set down for consideration. The Clerk has been informed of the introduction of a bill.

Plain Language Act Repeal Bill, introduction.

The bill is set down for first reading. [Interruption] You ready?

Yep.

Good—well, you’re next.

My apologies.

That’s all right.

I seek leave to move a motion without notice and without debate regarding membership regarding the Parliamentary Service Commission.

Is there any objection to that course of action being followed?

I move, That under section 15(1)(d) of the Parliamentary Service Act 2000, Glen Bennett be appointed as a member of the Parliamentary Service Commission.

to the Prime Minister

Does he stand by all of his Government’s statements and actions?

Yes, and especially our actions to go for growth. Wasn’t it absolutely great news last week to see Stats New Zealand confirm that the economy grew by 0.7 percent to finish 2024, with the first increase to GDP per capita in two years. We know that growth matters, on this side of the House, and more growth means more jobs, higher wages, more opportunities for all New Zealanders to beat the cost of living and to get ahead. That’s why just in the last two weeks we’ve been at it hard, fighting hard for trade in India, making sure we’re taking action to scrap and replace the Resource Management Act, and hosting investors worth trillions of dollars here in New Zealand so that we can build the roads, energy, and homes Kiwis need to thrive. There’s always more to do, but it’s very exciting to say that growth is back, and I’m sure that member, in a bipartisan way, would fully support and endorse those comments.

Does he agree with the statement made by Christopher Luxon in September 2023 with regard to the school lunches programme: “We’re very supportive of it. I just want to make sure that I’m sure it can be improved, I’m sure it can be optimised, I’m sure it can be enhanced.”; if so, is he confident that the school lunches programme has been “improved”, “optimised”, and “enhanced” under his Government?

Yes. The free lunch programme is there so that hungry kids going to school can actually focus and get something to eat so they can learn. There’s been some practical issues, which the Associate Minister of Education’s working his way through very well, and again I just say I think it’s fantastic that savings have been generated, and those savings can be generated back into health and education to help support our kids.

Why did the Government select Libelle and Compass to deliver the school lunches programme, given Libelle had lost nearly 60 percent of the schools it had been serving under the old programme due to quality concerns, and Compass had lost 23 of the 53 schools that it was serving?

There was a standard procurement process. But if the member wants to direct more specific questions, feel free to direct it to the Minister.

So why did the Government—[Interruption]

No, just a minute. If questions are serious enough to be answered, they should be listened to, by and large, quite seriously.

Why did the Government ignore official advice that Compass had failed to meet the nutritional standards required in more than half of the assessments of its meals under the previous programme and had prolonged issues with undersized meals and inconsistent portioning, while Libelle had been the subject of 163 complaints about food quality, food safety, and food suitability?

I think the member would understand that I don’t have that detail in front of me around a procurement process, but I would encourage him to put his question on notice.

Supplementary question—supplementary question. You’ve had three.

The Rt Hon Winston Peters.

Thank you very much.

I can count.

Oh, can you?

Yeah. Surprising.

I’m glad to hear that. Can I ask the Prime Minister as to whether he was aware that those three supplementary questions were all written before the primary question from Chris Hipkins, which meant that, no matter what the Prime Minister said, he wasn’t paying attention?

I don’t think that the Prime Minister has any responsibility for anyone else’s concentration span.

Good to see he’s awake, though. Does he agree with the statement of Christopher Luxon in August 2023, with regard to the school lunches, that a Government led by him would “make sure we get better delivery and better execution”; if so, why did they award the exclusive contract to deliver school lunches to Libelle and Compass, who had amongst the highest rates of uneaten lunches and food waste in the previous programme—almost double the average?

Well, again, I’d just say to the member, I’m not party to the details of a procurement process. If he wants to put his detailed questions on notice, feel free to do so. But this is a programme that has been able to generate savings that can be redirected back into health and education. Yup, there are some practical issues; the Minister’s working his way through them.

Why didn’t David Seymour bother to tell the Minister of Education that the major provider of school lunches, Libelle, was going into liquidation, given he’d found out five days before it happened, yet the Minister was left to find out about that through the media after it happened?

Well, again, I’m very comfortable with the delegations and accountabilities that we have between our Ministers. The Associate Minister and I talk all the time. We’ve talked about the school lunches. We’ve talked about many other things as well. I’m comfortable with it.

Does he agree with the statement of Christopher Luxon in September 2023: “I’d work harder on education to make sure we give people healthier choices in the school lunch programme.”; if so, why is the nutritional value of school lunches now being provided consistently lower than under the previous school lunches programme that his Government scrapped?

I agree that we are working harder on education, because I remember who was the Minister of Education when kids stopped going to school, when half our year 8s are not at the standard they need to be at on reading, and 80 percent of our kids going into high school are not where they need to be at on mathematics. Who was the Minister for 5½ years?

Is the Prime Minister aware that last week the healthy school lunch programme delivered 99.8 percent on-time delivery, and surplus meals of 5.7 percent compared with 9 percent surplus last year, and is he then surprised to hear feedback from a teacher just last night: “The meals are varied, wholesome, and, in my opinion and that of the majority of my class, far more filling than last year. They are a meal!”?

That was more an advertorial than a question, but OK.

Can I just thank the Minister for his hard work in working through the issues so well.

Does he agree with Christopher Luxon’s statement in July 2023: “I’m not interested in how much money is being spent; I’m interested in the results that are being achieved.”; if so, is his spending less achieving better outcomes so far?

What we’re impressed about is that we’re getting more value for money. The money that’s being saved is going into education and health for our kids and the issues that are being worked through are being worked through.

Does the Prime Minister agree that the Government’s approach to the healthy school lunch programme has been agile and adaptive, changing its approach whenever things start to go wrong, which is a lot better than Chris Hipkins’ approach to this line of questioning?

Yeah, well, that’s—none of that question actually complies with the requirements of the Standing Orders, but the Prime Minister may make a brief response.

Look, I appreciate that there is a lot of effort going in to improve and work through the issues with the new providers, and I commend the Minister and encourage him to keep going. [Interruption]

When we’re all ready—when we’re all quiet.

to the Prime Minister

E tautoko ana ia i ngā kōrero me ngā mahi katoa a tōna Kāwanatanga?

[Does he stand by all of his Government’s statements and actions?]

Yes, and especially our action to crack down on criminal activity and to restore law and order. Kiwis are sick of the large discounts and the short sentences regularly handed down, even in instances of serious offending. The good news is that, this week, the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill will return to the House for its third reading. That bill will cap discounts and bring in tougher consequences for serious and repeat offending. It doesn’t stop there, though, for convicted criminals, because the last few weeks have, sadly, shown the longer you spend in prison, the more likely it is you’ll get visited by a Green MP of a convicted criminal.

No, sorry, that last part of that question, the answer is not acceptable. So we’ll have no more of that.

Do the companies that the Prime Minister is asking to build our schools, roads, and hospitals want to make a profit?

Well, they may well do, and I would hope they would want to see a return. But what I’m excited about is that there is massive interest from investors who want to build public infrastructure in New Zealand, and the benefits to New Zealanders economically, socially, and environmentally are profound. If we can pull forward infrastructure development, get more roads built, more wind farms built, more energy delivered, that’s only good for New Zealand.

When our country has to pay for the profit of shareholders on top of the cost of building public infrastructure like our schools and hospitals, does that equation ultimately cost New Zealanders more or less?

This is a strange line of questioning, and it just speaks to the degrowth agenda of the Green Party—the degrowth agenda of the Green Party. Not only do they want to abandon prisons but they now don’t want to grow the economy. To that member: we want investment in this country. It is capital thin. We need to get public infrastructure built. Iwi want to get on and actually get projects built, and private companies in our growth sectors need support too.

Will the profit that the private companies make through his Government’s intended public-private partnerships stay in Aotearoa New Zealand or go offshore?

Well, again, our focus is on attracting investment to New Zealand so we can get public infrastructure built. The member seems to be confused about how economics works. We want New Zealanders to get ahead. We need them with more money in their pockets. We want them to have higher standards of living. One of the ways we do that is we attract investment to New Zealand as well as use domestic pools of capital as well.

Is it Government policy that profit is a good thing or a bad thing?

Profit is a good thing.

Does the Prime Minister accept that his plans for public-private partnerships will ultimately, then, cost New Zealanders more and send that profit offshore?

No. We are looking at the right funding and financing tools and mechanisms to support the right infrastructure. We need to get a lot more infrastructure built in this country. The member may disagree with us, but we are going to grow New Zealand because it’s good for New Zealanders. And part of that is getting infrastructure built faster, quicker, and if we can do that in partnership with private capital, we will. [Interruption]

The Hon David Seymour—are you all right?

I’m sure he’s fine, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]

No, just a minute—wait on. Questions are heard in silence. I thought there was an issue down here.

Has the Prime Minister seen any reports that profit is not a cost that you just add on and charge the customer but a surplus that remains if you do a very good job of using your resources more efficiently, and could failing to understand that be a reason why someone’s one-time business of a little hole-in-the-wall cafe on Mount Eden Road only lasted a few weeks?

No, no, no. No, just a minute. These little digs across the House are not acceptable, particularly from Government Ministers having a go at the Opposition. It’s also a trend that I think—

Can’t even run school lunches.

I beg your pardon?

Sorry, Mr Speaker.

That would be a good thing to be. I’m not saying it’s a trend, but there has been a little bit of a move towards personal reflections, which are completely unacceptable under our Standing Orders, so they are to stop.

Who can borrow money cheaper: the private companies that the Prime Minister wants to build our public infrastructure, or the Government?

Again, as I’ve said to that member, we’re going to find the right funding and financing mechanism that supports the right project. But I make no apologies for wanting to partner with private capital—international or domestic—to get things built for New Zealanders. You may disagree with us ideologically on that point, as a degrowth party, but we want growth in New Zealand, and that’s what we’re going to do.

to the Minister of Finance

What recent reports has she seen on the economy?

Last week, Statistics New Zealand released the latest GDP figures. These showed the New Zealand economy expanding 0.7 percent in the December quarter of 2024, led by a pick-up in tourism-related spending. Growth of 0.7 percent in the quarter was stronger than economists were predicting. For example, both the Treasury and the Reserve Bank were forecasting quarterly growth of 0.3 percent. In terms of per capita growth, GDP per person rose 0.4 percent in the December quarter—the first such increase in more than two years.

What is the significance of the GDP result?

The significance is that it marks a turning point. It marks the end of a protracted and painful downturn in the New Zealand economy, and the beginning of an upturn, with per capita GDP having fallen around 5 percent since the third quarter of 2022. From 2021 to 2023, of course, members, uncontrolled Government spending helped push annual inflation to more than 7 percent. Interest rates were hiked to bring inflation down, and there was little to no growth in the economy over the past two years. Inflation is now back within target, interest rates have come down, and last week’s result is the confirmation that growth has returned.

What do more recent economic indicators show?

Of course, the GDP results are backward-looking: they tell us what happened in 2024. More recent information indicates what is happening this year and identifies positive signs, challenges, and risks. On the positive side, goods exports are doing well and tourism is stronger than expected. The most recent BNZ—BusinessNZ Performance of Manufacturing Index (PMI) indicates that the manufacturing sector is continuing to expand. BNZ economist Doug Steel said that the improvement in the PMI this year is “one of several indicators that suggests the broader economy is turning for the better.”

What are some of the risks to the economic outlook?

As members know, one of the biggest risks is from the global environment. The OECD has just reduced its forecast for global growth. In its latest economic update, the OECD warns that rising uncertainty around tariffs will lead businesses around the world to defer investment and that higher prices will reduce consumer spending. That could impact the New Zealand economy. Forecasters expect the economy to continue picking up over 2025, but the journey could be a little bumpy.

to the Minister of Finance

Does she stand by all her statements and actions?

Yes. In particular, I tend to make the same statement to one audience as I do to another, unlike that member, who took so many positions on public-private partnerships last week that she ended up having to apologise for the confusion she’d caused.

Does she agree with Nicola Willis, who said in October 2023 that the Government “will never hit surplus and debt will blow out even further than it is today” when she has shifted surplus out, will not deliver in the forecast period, and debt is growing under her watch?

Well, I stand by all my statements, and I welcome this turn of fiscal prudence from the Labour Party, in which, suddenly, for the first time, that member, instead of encouraging me to get out the money hose, is saying that she cares about debt and surplus. Stick to those guns, Barbara.

Look, the Minister of Finance knows that referring to someone by their first name is not appropriate in this House—their full name, if at all.

Does she agree with Nicola Willis, as reported by the media in July 2022, that “the government could not keep blaming external events”, and, if so, why is she now concerned about international headwinds?

Absolutely, because under the last Government, what we had was a spending approach which was so excessive compared to other countries around the world that now numerous studies have shown that our inflation went higher and stayed higher for longer and that our interest rates needed to soar higher to control that, and that was not a result of global factors. It wasn’t global factors that made every former Minister sitting opposite me spend like a drunken sailor on bureaucrats, go-nowhere projects, and wasted initiatives. It was your Government that chose to do it; it drove up inflation, and it caused real pain for New Zealanders.

OK, I’m just going to say this once before anything else comes. The Standing Orders make it very clear that the Government cannot use its own questions or answer questions that are an attack on the Opposition. They can refer to matters that affect their portfolio, but not be an out and out attack that might be more in the nature of a public meeting somewhere. So we’ve just got to calm things down a little bit.

She’s got to stop with the patsies, then.

By the same token, the question—I beg your pardon? By the same token, questions that invite political comparison—for example, asking a member, effectively, if they agree with themselves—is virtually like saying, “I’ve got you here.”, and then it’s going to get some sort of answer along the lines of the one we’ve just had. It’s very difficult to walk the balance between the two.

Does she agree with Nicola Willis that “we have”—

Now, there we go!

The Minister of Finance. Does she agree with the Minister of Finance that “we have huge amounts of Government debt”, or does she agree with her statement at the international investment summit that “We have relatively low levels of government debt compared to other countries,”?

Yes—yes—another set of wise statements by Nicola Willis, because, on the one hand, the previous Government added more than $100 billion to debt with just about nothing to show from it, which I believe was pretty reckless, and, on the other hand, because of the great work by Sir Bill English and other prudent National Party finance Ministers, our debt had started in a low position, and so it ended up in a lower position than some other countries. But if that lot had stayed in, I can guarantee you this: the debt would have got out of control.

Why did she tell the international investment summit that “we need more capital investment” while cutting back Government investment into schools, hospitals, and housing?

The member should be very cautious before she makes statements in this House that cannot be backed up by the facts, and I would sincerely ask her to go back, look at the words she used in that question, and see if she can find factual verification for them, because this is a Government that in its first Budget invested more money in school buildings, invested more money in transport infrastructure, invested more money in housing, such that we have added more than 4,000 public homes since we came to office, such that we have added more classrooms, we have built more schools, and we have more than $6 billion worth of roads under construction. So get your facts right. [Interruption]

Just wait. It’s your own colleagues that are holding things up. Just a minute; just a little bit of time here. All right.

Why is it that she says one thing about the Government’s books to international investors but is more than comfortable to say the complete opposite to the New Zealand public?

This is like patsy hour! I’ve given the member the answer, and I’ll give it to you again, which is this: on the one hand, we have had years of prudent fiscal management, including by Sir Bill English, who managed to get debt down to extremely low levels. We then had the spendthrift days of the Labour Government, who brought that debt up to 40 percent of GDP, and because we started from a good base, because of the prudent work of previous National Governments, it meant that, relatively, our debt is still quite low compared to some countries in the OECD. But I would caution the member this: New Zealand is a country that is prone to significant economic shocks, be they climatic events, be they seismic events, be they trade-related events. So it has been the longstanding position of both Labour- and National-led Governments that it makes sense to keep our debt at low levels. If the member wishes to depart from that longstanding consensus, I would suggest to her that most New Zealanders would not agree.

Supplementary question.

The Rt Hon Winston Peters, just a minute. A question like that will get a response like that, which makes it very difficult to apply in the strictest sense the Standing Orders.

Can I ask the finance Minister as to how she’s been able to deal with the much-vaunted promise of economic recovery by mid-2024 of growing GDP, higher wages, higher incomes, higher housing, and the actual facts that she had to deal with when she found out the truth?

The Deputy Prime Minister makes a very good point. I think it is highly regrettable that the previous Government made promises that it had put in place strong economic foundations that would lead to recovery and job creation. The facts are clear. Actually, what they left was record inflation, soaring interest rates, and a crushing effect on the economy, which has led to a very high cost of living for New Zealanders, destroyed jobs, and taken this economy backwards, and we on this side of the House are fixing it.

to the Minister responsible for RMA Reform

What recent announcements has he made regarding the replacement of the Resource Management Act 1991?

Yesterday, the Government announced that we have agreed on the shape of the Government’s replacement legislation to a far more liberal planning system with less red tape premised on the enjoyment of property rights. In our first year, we repealed the previous reforms of the last Government and made a series of targeted amendments. We also passed the Fast-track Approvals Act, and now we are getting on with the job of replacing the Resource Management Act (RMA) completely. We set 10 principles for the new system. We’ve received a report from the Expert Advisory Group; I want to thank the chair, Janette Campbell, for the reports—an excellent high-quality piece of work that Cabinet has now endorsed—and we’ll be getting on with developing the legislation.

What are the key features of this new, more enabling planning system?

Well, Cabinet has agreed to two new Acts, a narrower scope, property rights at the core, simplified national direction, clear environmental limits, more standardisation, streamlined council plans including spatial planning, and stronger environmental compliance enforcement and monitoring. Standardised zoning will be a key feature of the new system, and it might surprise members of the House to learn that across the country there are currently 1,175 different kinds of zones; in the entirety of Japan, there are 13. It’s our view that elected representatives should spend more time focusing on and talking to their communities about where density should and should not occur, and less time focusing on the enormous number of technical details that go into regulating that density. Standardised zones make up just one part of the new system but do give a sense of the ambition that we are aiming to achieve.

What are the key benefits New Zealanders can expect to see from this new planning system?

Well, there’s been some preliminary economic analysis done by Castalia which estimates a 45 percent saving in process costs compared to the RMA. There will be further economic work done as policy is developed and as bills—plural—are prepared, and that is before we consider the wider economic benefits. The broader point is this: we need to change the culture of “no” that permeates decision making in this country. Whether it’s aquaculture off the coast of the South, or a new green six-star building replacing a heritage gravel pit next to a train station in our biggest city, the RMA has obstructed growth instead of enabling it. Our aim is to change that.

What response has he seen—[Interruption]

Just a minute. Away you go.

What response has he seen to this announcement so far?

It’s been quite overwhelming in terms of support. The Employers and Manufacturers Association said they strongly support the direction of travel: “The proposed changes will allow for more efficient development”. The Planning Institute welcomed the announcement: “Spatial planning … is a no-brainer. This will be a game changer for proactive planning”. Business New Zealand also welcomed it. Following announcements yesterday, today I have written to the relevant spokespeople from the Opposition, from Labour and the Greens, inviting their involvement in the process to replace the RMA. Our core policy intentions remain obvious, but we do want to try and work—

You said yesterday you weren’t going to listen.

Well, Judith Collins wrote to David Parker in 2021. We’re still waiting for a reply, so we have reached out in good faith and I’m looking forward to meeting with the relevant spokespeople and providing a briefing from the chair of the expert group.

How is the Government going to protect property owners from busybodies seeking to impose restrictions on their enjoyment of their private property rights?

Well, that is a very good question. The ability for people all over the country to object to quite minor developments is one of the real battlegrounds in the RMA right now. For example, I saw people in I think it was Waipukurau objecting to the building of a McDonald’s in Wānaka. Why the people of Waipukurau get to have a say on what gets built in Wānaka is beyond me. The entry points for people into the system are too easy. Participation should be targeted at the plan-making process. Of course, only those materially affected by an activity will be able to participate in consent processes, and there’ll be more limits around the notification process. We don’t need every Tom, Dick, and Harry trying to have a say in how people use private property.

Hold on.

Minister, how is the Government—

Hold on. Just wait on. I’ll call you. Simon Court.

How is the Government going to ensure people can get on with building, developing, and farming without having to get consents for everything?

There will be fewer consents required as the system is more permissive. The new Acts will also not control as many effects and there will be a higher threshold for those it does control, focused on the economic concept of externalities. There will be more standardisation of plans. Spatial plans and national policy direction will make it clearer where environmental constraints are and where they aren’t. Where councils want to impose regulatory controls on private property that have a regulatory impact akin to a taking, there will be compensation required, because the free ability of councils to impose regulatory restrictions that devalue land on private property has led to regulatory overreach by councils doing exactly that. On this side of the House, we believe in private property as the foundation stone for a market economy that grows over time. That’s what the RMA changes will do.

to the Minister for Economic Growth

Does she agree with the statement of Hon Nicola Willis, “On our watch there may be fewer people wearing lanyards on Lambton Quay, but there are going to be a lot more people wearing high-vis and hard-hats”; if so, why?

Can I first welcome the member to her new role. Yes. That statement was said in a previous capacity, during a time in which I was the Minister for the Public Service, and I am happily informed by the current Minister for the Public Service that the Government is continuing in our success in moving roles from the back office to the front line, with a significant reduction in money spent on lanyard-wearing consultants and an 8 percent reduction in policy roles, which has allowed us to invest more in front-line roles, including more than 2,000 additional front-line nurses.

Why has there been a reduction of over 13,000 people working in construction, wearing high-vis and hard hats, since her Government took office?

I thought the member might use this dubious statistic that a number of members opposite have been using in their media releases and so I would encourage the House to listen. Certainly, the construction sector has been affected by the downturn, but she is over-egging the impact of jobs, because she is using a novel data series that Stats New Zealand says only “has provisional status”. What Stats New Zealand says are the most reliable job-related statistics for New Zealand come from the quarterly employment survey (QES) and over the last year—that is December 2023 to December 2024—the QES shows a slight increase in construction jobs, up by 400.

Does she agree with Engineering New Zealand Chief Executive Richard Templer, who said the pipeline of infrastructure work had “all but dried up” and that it was having “a devastating impact on the profession”; if not, why not?

What I do agree is that when interest rates soar as high and quickly as they have in recent years, one of the most sensitive sectors is construction, who, when those interest rates are high, are less likely to borrow for more projects. That has certainly had an effect on the New Zealand economy and many people in the construction sector have felt it. However, I would also note that, since coming to Government, we have built more than 5,171 social houses. [Interruption] We have more than $6 billion worth of New Zealand Transport Agency projects in construction. See, the members laugh because they are so unacquainted with the facts that when I use them, they find it laughable. [Interruption]

Please stop. That barracking will stop like that. The Minister will pick up her answer halfway through.

I totally respect, sir, your role in maintaining order in the House. However, when we have a situation where the Prime Minister has previously claimed in this House to have built so many houses, the housing Minister has said in this House that they have funded none, and now the finance Minister is making a similar claim, what option have we got but to call that out?

You do have an option, and that is to refer the matter as a matter of privilege. Misleading the House is an extreme breach of privilege and if the member thinks that it’s happening and Ministers are doing that, then he should bring a privilege charge.

Point of order. I do feel my honour has been impinged, so I would like to refer the member to the source, which is the change in public homes dashboard, which shows the net change in total public homes, December 2023 to January 2025: 5,171 homes added, including 4,096 Kāinga Ora public homes and 1,075 community housing providers public homes. Those are the numbers I’m relying on. I don’t know which ones he’s using.

I’ll just make the point that that’s the last time someone is going to use a point of order to attack another part of the House. That’s not acceptable. [Interruption] Excuse me. Put your hands up. Who wants to go? [Interruption] Mr Bishop, do you want to go on your way? I’ve made the point, and I think people should just take it on board. Ginny Andersen.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Why did her Government suspend—

Mr Speaker? I hadn’t finished my answer. We had the back of—

No, well, I’d finished listening to it. [Interruption] And that is disorderly. Don’t do that. When the House goes quiet, ask your next question.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Why did her Government suspend Kāinga Ora’s build programme when the construction sector themselves warned the “indecision or pause [for] Kāinga Ora is actually contributing to the recessionary effect on the construction sector.”?

This is a very important point and it’s one that I would encourage the member to get acquainted with the facts on, because I have seen that this is an issue that has caused a lot of consternation for members opposite. Go and look at the public housing dashboard. What that shows is in the period since December 2023, more than 5,000 public homes have been added, and that is because the Kāinga Ora build programme has continued. In addition to that, at the last Budget, our Government—[Interruption]

Sorry, stop. It can’t carry on. Keep asking questions if you want to, but barracking across the House is not helping, nor is the intensity of the answers being given. Factual answers: good; heavily emotional answers: not good. The Minister may continue.

In addition to that, in our first Budget, the Government made additional funding available to deliver social housing places from community housing providers, and I am advised that since December last year, more than 1,075 new community homes have been added to the public housing stock. So I welcome a debate with the member—

You’ll have delivered homes that are not yet funded for—that’s just wrong.

—but to say that we have stopped building public houses is factually, completely, wrong, and Mr Hipkins should stop saying it.

Point of order, Mr Speaker—point of order, Mr Speaker. Mr Speaker, the Minister has just made a very misleading claim in the House herself, where she talked about funding that her Government had allocated for some new social housing and then said how many had been delivered. The new funding the Government’s allocated doesn’t come in till next year, so she’s made a claim that is simply not true.

And there will be—obviously I can’t know that, but there is a remedy for you if you choose to use it.

In the interests of planning going forward, could the Minister tell us as to whether there’s been any period in the last 40 years where the housing construction has shrunk in the way it did between 2020 and 2023?

Well, the Deputy Prime Minister highlights a very important point, which is one of the most difficult periods, of course, for the construction sector—[Interruption]

No, hang on. Wait on, sorry. We’re just going to go into silence for the rest of this brief answer.

A very difficult period for the construction sector was during the lockdowns, during COVID-19, and, subsequently, additional challenges for the construction sector have come from very high interest rates.

Does she agree with the National Party’s infrastructure spokesperson Chris Bishop, who said in 2020, “the construction sector is crying out for certainty. Jobs literally depend on the Government getting on with the job.”, and, if so, why does New Zealand have the lowest number of people working in construction since June 2021?

Well, yes, I completely agree with the Minister for Infrastructure, which is why as a Government we’ve taken steps to fast track major developments, which those members have opposed. And when the hundreds of construction jobs that result from those projects come on board, I look forward to members opposing those too. It is why we have introduced new reforms to the Resource Management Act, so that construction activity can get under way faster. It’s why we have an extensive programme of reform being led by the Minister for Building and Construction, to make it cheaper and faster to build homes. We are a Government on the side of construction and building and doing it faster. Fewer people like Duncan Webb saying “No” to supermarkets, and more people saying “Yes”.

How many times do I have to say don’t bring attacks on Opposition members into it before I take some action? I’ll get a ton of letters tomorrow saying I’ve been far too lenient, so I won’t be from this point on. Is this a point of order or a question?

Supplementary.

Supplementary question, the Hon Chris Bishop.

Can the Minister confirm that in 2024 the Government built more school classrooms than in 2023, with better value for money, through standardised design and modular off-site builds?

Yes, I can confirm that. That was a result of the additional $1.5 billion dollars that we invested in school property. The cost, I understand, has gone down from $1.2 million on average per classroom to $800,000 per classroom. Of course, what that means is we can build more classrooms with taxpayer money, which is a good result for New Zealand students and their families.

Supplementary. [Interruption]

No, just a minute.

When she said that there would be more people wearing high-viz and hard hats under her watch, was she just referring to people in the National Party caucus?

Well—

No, sit down. The question’s out of order.

to the Prime Minister

Does he stand by his Government’s statements and actions?

Yes.

How can he justify Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms that, according to Cabinet minutes, will “require changes to be made to settlement redress,” without first having consulted with those iwi settlement agreements?

There will, of course, be—we will honour our obligations in our settlements that we have made; there just won’t be a generic open-ended Treaty clause statement.

What does he say to the 65-plus iwi we spoke to this morning, who had no idea these reforms were taking place until they saw it on the news last night?

Well, there has been targeted consultation with iwi since the end of last year.

How does he plan to recognise Treaty settlements through the RMA reform, when his reform will violate every settlement that has been reached to date?

Well, I reject the characterisation of that question. This is a Government that wants to get RMA reform and planning under control so we can get things built. I found it very interesting that there are a number of iwi that are actually wanting to work with fast track—for example, because they find the planning laws incredibly frustrating and constraining.

What does the Government plan to do if it cannot reach agreements with iwi on potential changes to their settlements?

Well, we are going to make sure we change our planning laws, period. It is happening. We are revoking what has been in place. We’re putting two new laws in place. We’ll have our first reading in the House before the end of the year. This is a complex area. We’ve got lots of conversations to have with lots of stakeholders across the piece, over the next few months.

Can the Prime Minister confirm that the Minister responsible for RMA Reform has written to many iwi on many occasions about RMA reform, and that the Minister has extensive meetings with the pou taiao branch of the Iwi Chairs Forum in relation to these matters on a regular basis?

Yes, I can, and that’s why I don’t understand where the members questions are coming from.

Can the Prime Minister advise the House which iwi said that they support the changes that are being proposed to the RMA?

Well, they haven’t seen the changes. What we’ve announced is a high-level approach that Cabinet has taken decisions around to actually rewrite our planning laws, because we need to get things built in this country. I’m sure there are many iwi, as we’ve seen through the fast-track process, that actually want to be freed up so they can actually build things in partnership with others, as we’ve seen.

How will the Prime Minister guarantee to New Zealanders that these reforms won’t ignite further legal action from iwi against the Government?

Well, we’ve seen iwi, actually, through their partnership with us in the infrastructure investor summit recently—we’ve seen iwi submitting projects under the fast-track legislation because they want to get things built and done. We’re very aligned on that; we both want to get things done.

How does the Prime Minister explain to iwi that he deeply acknowledges the power of the Māori economy, but not their Treaty rights under iwi settlements?

Sorry, can you repeat the question?

How does the Prime Minister explain to iwi that he deeply acknowledges the power of the Māori economy, but does not acknowledge their rights within the iwi settlement?

Well, I reject the characterisation of that question.

Can I ask the Prime Minister: is it not the fact, though, that the Māori people can be assured things are on the change, as Hone Rankin recently said, because they are sick and tired of this sort of woke leadership from certain parts of Māori politics and they’re coming back home?

Well, I can just say Māori, or non-Māori, want this Government to deliver for them and improve outcomes. One of the ways we do that is we change our planning laws because it’s been holding New Zealand back for a very, very long time.

to the Minister of Internal Affairs

What recent announcements has she made about the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19?

Five years ago today, New Zealand was placed into COVID-19 alert level 4, or “lockdown”—a decision made by the Government at the time that had significant impacts on families, businesses, health, and education. Last year, I announced there would be a second phase of the independent inquiry into COVID-19 to cover outstanding matters of public concern, including the use of vaccines and lockdowns. The inquiry is now open for submissions from the public. Today, on the anniversary of the first lockdown, I reminded all New Zealanders that they have the opportunity to tell the inquiry how the Government’s response to COVID-19 impacted them, their family, and their business.

How can members of the public submit to the inquiry?

It is easy for any New Zealanders to make a written submission about their own personal experiences living through the COVID-19 period. This could include how they were impacted as an individual or their family or their business. Submissions can be made through the online portal at covid19inquiry.nz—submissions close at midnight, 27 April.

What issues are in scope of the inquiry?

ACT’s coalition agreement included a commitment to expand the terms of reference for the inquiry after public feedback. The Government then expanded the scope of phase 2 to include the use of vaccine mandates and safety, public health tools, extended lockdowns in Auckland and Northland, and the impact on health and education. The full terms of reference are available on the inquiry’s website, and I would ask any member of the public to please read the terms of reference before they make their submission.

to the Minister for Infrastructure

What recent action has he taken on infrastructure growth?

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister and I hosted the New Zealand Infrastructure Investment Summit in Auckland, which was attended by over 100 world-leading investors and construction companies. It was great to have New Zealand firms and iwi leaders there, too. We talked about our infrastructure vision and pipeline, how we’re making it easier to do business here, and other investment opportunities in our growth sectors and the Māori economy. It’s a real demonstration of our plan for economic growth and was a huge win for New Zealand.

What announcements did the Government make at the investment summit?

It was great to announce investable and developable opportunities in public infrastructure, including Christchurch Men’s Prison and the Northland road of national significance, the Northland Expressway. We also announced exciting market soundings for tolling concessions on our roads and the second harbour crossing in Auckland, so we can get expert feedback on how to maximise the efficiency and public benefit of these nation-shaping projects. Of course, we also showcased our long-term infrastructure pipeline, to try and give the private sector confidence to stay here and invest in people, plant, and equipment.

What tangible outcomes have come out of the summit so far?

There have been many outcomes. To give just a couple of examples: Plenary, which manages more than $100 billion in assets worldwide, is opening an office here in New Zealand. They’ve committed to bidding for public-private partnerships over the next five years, partnering with local suppliers to ensure local businesses benefit. And it was great to see the Italian tunnel company Ghella, which was preparing to leave New Zealand after completing the 16.2-kilometre Central Interceptor. But after the positivity of the summit, they have decided to keep their workers, expertise, and tens of millions of dollars of plant, equipment, and associated services here. It was also great to see the Italian company Webuild. Their executive vice-president said, “The Italians are coming back.” Fantastic news. They helped build the Tongariro hydro scheme in the 1960s, and the Italians are coming back.

What feedback has he heard about the investment summit?

It’s just an enormous dose of positivity. Civil Contractors’ Alan Pollard said, “This holistic, united approach renews our confidence in the pipeline. It is what we need right now.” There was also the chairman and CEO of Spanish investor Acciona, José Manuel Entrecanale, who said the Government was to be congratulated for bringing investors together at the summit and indicated interest in bidding on the Northland Expressway and the second harbour crossing. And, of course, global investment group CDPQ, which has had an interesting history in New Zealand, was also encouraged by the messages. The Sydney-based managing director, Jean-Étienne Leroux, said, “We are looking for predictability and stability. I have been covering this region for more than 10 years and we are now very happy to feel our capital is so welcome in this country.” It was a great success.

to the Minister of Health

Does he stand by his statement regarding the health workforce, “understaffing—more fake news”; if not, why not?

In the context of talking about Labour’s bloated bureaucracy, yes, as I went on to say—and I quote—“They’ve talked about leadership. All they’re focused on is the bureaucracy. We’re focused on the front line, and on delivery. I will be relentless in my focus on the five health targets and making sure New Zealanders can access their GPs. I don’t stand here not conscious of the challenge in front of me, and in front of this Government, because we know how important this is to every single New Zealander.”

Is it “fake news” that understaffing at Whakatāne Hospital means that families are having to travel long distances to access basic maternity care such as epidurals and caesareans, putting pregnant women and their babies at risk?

As the member will know, there are always services where there is need for healthcare workers. In that instance, there has been a resignation, I think, of a couple of the surgeons, and that has left vacancies. Health New Zealand is rapidly filling those and intends to have that service up and running again as quickly as possible.

Is it “fake news” that a new mother who couldn’t be cared for at Whakatāne Hospital because of understaffing was taken to Tauranga Hospital where she was told that her care couldn’t be prioritised because they too were understaffed?

I’m not aware of that particular instance but I suggest the member put that question in writing. Health New Zealand cares for tens of thousands of people around the clock, across the country, and provides care. My mission and this Government’s mission is to ensure that all New Zealanders can access the timely and quality access to healthcare that they all deserve.

Is it “fake news” that palliative care for children is understaffed when there is nobody available to give terminally ill children end-of-life care?

As that member will be aware, it has been traversed in the newspapers. It is a highly specialised service. There has been a senior clinician who has taken extended leave. Health New Zealand is backfilling with other clinical teams at Starship to ensure that those children get the care that they need. At the same time, they are recruiting for additional roles, and there is work under way around a national model of care for paediatric palliative care, which is, of course, an issue in an area where there is a lot of interest by all New Zealanders.

Does he stand by his Government’s decision to spend $216 million on a tax cut for tobacco companies when it would cost an estimated $8 million to fund end-of-life care for children throughout New Zealand, and why won’t he fund it?

As I just said in my previous answer, there is work under way around a national model of care for paediatric palliative care. This Government has invested significantly more money into health. We’re spending around $30 billion a year in health, and our expectation is that Health New Zealand delivers the timely, quality access to healthcare that all New Zealanders deserve.

Point of order. In that question, there was an allegation of $200 million spent in tax cuts for tobacco or cigarettes. That is demonstrably false and has been repeated in this House over and over again, and I’m asking you to next time demand that that sort of question comes up with the evidence behind what they’re saying. It is a total and unfathomable lie that it’s got away with for month after month now, and we’re not going to stand here and take it any longer.

Well, if I sat here and required validation or confirmation of any claim that’s made inside this House, the House would make no progress whatsoever as I was wading my way through it. What I would say to you is the same as I said to the Hon Kieran McAnulty earlier—if you believe someone has misled the House by way of statement or allegation, there is a remedy under the Standing Orders.

Point of order, sir. You are quite right to point out the proper process, and we will pursue that but it is totally inappropriate, regardless of what point any member wishes to make, to accuse another member of lying, and the Rt Hon Winston Peters did just that.

No. I was listening very carefully—very carefully—and there was a general statement that the claim that was being made was being made too frequently in this House. It wasn’t directed at any particular member, as I can recall.

Speaking to that, sir. There’s only one member that he’s referring to, and that is the member who was asking the question.

No. I’ve heard it said by many members, actually, over the last 18 months.

When any member says that a statement is a lie, is it your ruling that that is appropriate language in this House?

Well, he didn’t say it was a lie.

He did, sir—he did.

Then I’ll look at it and do something about that at a later point. I’m not getting into the argument today.

How can New Zealanders have confidence in his leadership when hospitals are having to operate without doctors, mothers and children aren’t getting the care they deserve, and he stood up in this House and called understaffing “fake news”?

Well, as I said in my primary answer, I was referring to the bloated bureaucracy which the last Government focused its six years on while wait-lists ballooned. They let wait-lists balloon, they removed the targets, and they focused on bureaucracy, rather than on delivery. That’s what I’m focused on—getting this thing fixed.

Why won’t he just apologise for those comments when every single day there are more real-life examples of mothers and children going without care?

If that member wants to talk about wait-lists, we can talk about the 2,500 percent increase in people waiting for elective treatment under that Government. We are turning the health system around. We’re investing more money. We’re making sure we are putting the focus back on front-line services rather than the bureaucracy that he and his Government were focused on.

to the Prime Minister

E tautoko ana ia i ngā kōrero me ngā mahi katoa a tōna Kāwanatanga?

[Does he stand by all of his Government’s statements and actions?]

Yes.

Does he agree that millions of dollars of Government funding going to private hospitals to do elective operations could help many more patients if it was invested in the ailing public system?

No. Many Governments under different political persuasions have had contracts between Health New Zealand and with private hospital providers. It makes a lot of sense, frankly, when we’ve got things like knee replacements, hip replacements, cataract surgeries, to use the private hospital capacity as well. When you’re lying on a bed, looking up at a ceiling, you’re less hung up as to whether it’s being done in a public system or a private system; you just want relief done as quickly as possible.

Then, does he agree with Dr David Bailey that “Had that money been available over the last 12 months, we could have treated many more patients than they are going to do with this. This is a political move to make them look good.”, and, if so, will he instead put this money into the public health system?

Well, as I’ve just explained to that member, we want to make sure we have a very strong public healthcare system, but we also use private health system capacity in order to deliver for patients. What matters most here is patient outcomes. Given the remarks I’ve just heard, I just would point to the former Minister of Health, who said, in 2020, “I am not opposed to the use of private providers to help speed up treatment.” Of course, that was the Leader of the Opposition, Chris Hipkins.

Does he think New Zealanders will be happy to know that our collective resources are being spent on helping private companies make profit off healthcare?

I think, when New Zealanders are facing massive wait-lists for elective surgeries and getting access to first specialist appointments, what they want is a Government that’s focused on patients and outcomes for patients. And as to how it’s actually delivered for them, they want their issues fixed and they want their service delivered. That’s what this new Minister is focused on—is patient centricity.

Then, did he prioritise equity when his Government decided to invest in private hospitals, considering that this is likely to disadvantage people with acute health needs?

I think the member is misunderstanding this conversation and was part of a Government, and a Minister in the previous Government, that also had contracts with private health providers in order to deliver health outcomes for New Zealanders—that’s what we’re focused on. Private healthcare capacity should be used. Public healthcare capacity should be used and continue to be built up. It’s an “and”, not an “or”.

Then, what does he say to the Associations of Professional and Executive Employees union, who gathered at Parliament this morning to warn against the failures of corporately owned private lab testing that results in lab workers being paid less?

Again, we are here to deliver outcomes for patients and New Zealanders. If that means we are using public and private healthcare resources and capital and capacity to deliver those outcomes, we will.

to the Minister for Trade and Investment

What recent announcement has the Government made regarding New Zealand’s trade relations with India?

Last week, the Prime Minister and I announced New Zealand has formally launched negotiations on a comprehensive free-trade agreement with India. This is a significant breakthrough in the economic relationship, with the last negotiations ending almost 10 years ago. This comes after a concerted period of increased engagement led by the Prime Minister. Through these negotiations, we aim to deliver economic opportunities to benefit all New Zealanders.

When will negotiations on the New Zealand - India Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement start?

Well, yesterday, I published a call for submissions for interested New Zealanders to share their views on the comprehensive free-trade agreement with India. Negotiators will have their first discussions this week and they will start to exchange texts in the coming months, and I expect the first in-person negotiations to take place in New Zealand next month. Both sides have made the conclusion of this agreement a priority, however we’ve also agreed that we must take the time required to secure a high-quality deal that delivers for both New Zealand and India.

How will a comprehensive free-trade agreement deliver on the Government’s growth agenda?

Well, when we came to Government 16 months ago, we committed to making our relationship with India a priority. Over the past six years, Australia increased their exports to India by $7 billion per year and concluded a trade agreement during that time, while our exports fell by $550 million per year. Since then, led by the Prime Minister’s close relationship with Prime Minister Modi, we’ve lifted our engagement across all levels, including a very important visit by the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister Peters, last year. Every New Zealander can be assured that through our free-trade agreement negotiations, we aim to level the playing field with Australia so that New Zealand exporters can also benefit from greater access and lower tariff rates, which in turn will grow our economy.

How else is the Government strengthening ties with India?

Well, the comprehensive free-trade agreement or negotiations are only one part of the Government’s commitment to stepping up all parts of the New Zealand - India relationship. Just last week, the Prime Minister led the largest ever trade mission to India—over 120 delegates—during which 33 business memorandums of understanding and six Government memorandums of cooperation were signed. These included Air New Zealand and Air India committing to better air connectivity between our two countries, including direct flights by 2028, and increased cooperation on defence, customs, horticulture, education, sport, culture, and forestry. This is all part of our ambitious goal to lead more trade missions than any Government during this part of Parliament and to double exports by value in 10 years.

on behalf of the Minister of Finance: I move, That the Appropriation (2023/24 Confirmation and Validation) Bill be now read a first time.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

I move, That urgency be accorded the remaining stages of the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill; the third readings of the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill, the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill, and the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill; the remaining stages of the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill and the Customer and Product Data Bill; the third reading of the Arms (Shooting Clubs, Shooting Ranges, and Other Matters) Amendment Bill; and the remaining stages of the Dairy Industry Restructuring (Export Licences Allocation) Amendment Bill, the Social Workers Registration Amendment Bill, and the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

Again, I’m not moving urgency with any particular pleasure, but the very necessary amendments to the Bail Act in the Parliament’s last sitting period, which took a considerably longer length of time than, frankly, was required but also was expected, has led us to this point. The first two bills in the urgency motion must both be assented before 1 April, coming up in a few days, so we need to progress the remaining stages this week. There are three bills in the urgency motion the Government has committed to passing by the end of the month, which we will do. The dairy industry restructuring and the social workers registration bills both have provisions that enter into force in May, so we’re looking to progress these measures as well.

As I say, the real reason for urgency is the Bail Act amendments in the last sitting period that took up a lot of time. I’m not moving it with any pleasure, but it is what it is. Thank you.

Members, the House is in committee on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 202425, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill. When we were last debating this bill, we had finished the debate on Part 3. Members, we now come to Part 4. Part 4 is the debate on clauses 154 to 186, “Amendments to Goods and Services Tax Act 1985”, and Schedule 1. The question is that Part 4 stand part.

It’s good to be back here debating the committee stage of this bill. Just to remind the committee, we have been working through it clause by clause—

Question.

—in a pretty orderly fashion—a very orderly fashion, Mr MacLeod.

I note that we have now been moved into urgency because this whole bill must be passed, as a constitutional matter, by 31 March. The GST section itself doesn’t need to be passed, but the whole bill does. However, I do want to go through some of the amendments that are being made to the Goods and Services Tax Act 1985. Of course, many of the terms used in GST are very similar to the terms used in income tax and other taxes, but there are some notable differences and some real attention to our accounting detail in the GST Act.

So, just to begin with, I have a fairly simple question for the Minister of Revenue, but, I have to say, it is one that as a former accountant—and I know that the Minister is a former accountant, as well; Mr MacLeod looks quite interested over there, too—I find quite interesting. I want to draw the Minister’s attention to clause 155, which is on page 153 of the bill as reported from the Finance and Expenditure Committee, and it has got a very simple set of changes to definitions in section 2 of the Goods and Services Tax Act. But the one that I’ve found interesting is that in clause 155(2) and (3), we’re repealing the definition of a “credit note” and repealing the definition of a “debit note”. Now, it does seem like a very, very small change, but, of course, in order to account accurately for GST and in order for a business to account accurately for it, they need to be able to work out what the GST portion is on each transaction and record it in the GST section of their accounting system. Then, where money goes flying back and forth and where, perhaps, goods are returned so there’s a credit note, and further goods are sold, or all sorts of things go on, so that there’s a debit note, it just seems to me that those credit notes and debit notes are basic bookkeeping records.

No matter how much we have transferred our bookkeeping away from the old-fashioned books and ledgers and the old-fashioned writing it out by hand—which, frankly, is the way that I first learnt to do accounting, which does date me a little bit. We use computers and very sophisticated software to do our accounting, and a lot of the time people can’t even track where a transaction happens. Nevertheless, sitting right beneath it all is that old-fashioned system of books of account, of journal entries, and of those documents of first record, and in the event of an audit—

So what’s your question?

I’m getting there, Minister; I’m getting there. In the event of an audit—

Yeah, come on—we’re wasting time.

No, you can’t call from the chair.

—we actually need to know where those items go back to. We need the evidence of them, and yet here we are, repealing the definitions of “credit note” and “debit note”—some of these basic accounting records.

So, presumably, something has changed, whether in accounting systems or the like, and those definitions are no longer needed. But I would like the Minister to explain exactly why we actually no longer need something which has been an integral part of our bookkeeping systems for a very, very long time.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a series of questions which relate to clause 159(1). These are of particular interest to communities in South Auckland who both rely on the port and the airport for jobs. We are very proud to have 16,000 jobs at the Auckland Airport, and half as many at the two ports that function together at the Auckland port and the Wiri port. So I’m asking here about zero-rating of vessels, which is impacted by these rules, but I’m going to ask the Minister of Revenue some particular questions about the impact on workforce because of these changes.

Just to explain this, GST has always been intended to be a tax on goods and services consumed in New Zealand, so it would make sense perhaps to zero-rate goods and services that are associated with vessels which are not intended to be in New Zealand for any length of time. This is a change that makes that sort of update, but it will have an impact on not only those places in South Auckland but also on the people who work around them. This bill changes the GST zero-rating rules for international vessels.

It’s a technical change, but the real-world impact is that for these people who work in these areas, particularly in the marine jobs, and are represented both by the Maritime Union of New Zealand and other unions in this area and in the aviation sector by the Public Service Association and by E tū, there are some real questions around how jobs will be affected, or if they will in fact have more opportunities to work on international vessels that are here in New Zealand and are sort of transiting because of this effective tax treatment they’re getting.

So the services provided directly to commercial vehicles that are temporarily in New Zealand are zero-rated under this. That means that—I assume and want to test with the Minister—repairs, maintenance, refuelling are all included in that. My question is really about: if there is no tax take on those activities, what is the expected outcome on the number of those activities and the impact on those industries, and should this as well include other vessels? Did the Minister consider the effect—if it’s aircraft and ship vessels, does that also include, say, military vessels? Does it apply to goods transiting through Auckland as well, say through China through to South America and using Auckland as a hub? What will be the expected impact of that?

The workforce questions in particular are around, you know, New Zealand’s strong maritime workforce. We’re incredibly proud of that workforce. Engineers, dock workers, wharfies, fuel supply—all of those people might be impacted by this, and we wanted to flesh out with the Minister how they will be impacted. Does this change bring more ships into our ports to New Zealand for servicing, and, if so, will it increase those work opportunities?

Thinking through the impact of, say, our maintenance and repair industries, what’s our workforce plan there? These are some of the construction jobs that just this question time we were asking about the impact from the perspective of making sure that we have enough people to work in our maritime industries now. Do we expect the workforce to have significantly different sorts of opportunities, given New Zealand might be more effectively used as a hub for these sorts of services? We know already that many of our ports around New Zealand are used in this way for transiting vessels, and so is there an opportunity here to increase that, and, if so, what is the likely impact on the workforce going to be?

In our shipbuilding industry as well, are we expecting more work in this area, particularly around those shipbuilding hubs like those in Auckland that have grown up over the years with our incredible reputation on the world stage as yacht builders? Will we expect any change there?

My final question to the Minister on this is: how do we ensure that any impacts on our industries around the sector—particularly our maritime and ports—make sure to prioritise those skilled workers in New Zealand here first? In many of these large-scale projects with construction and maintenance and skilled work that requires machinist skills in New Zealand for many decades, we have had a reliance on the migration in this sector. So I want to ask the Minister: what will the impact be of these changes and can they be used to benefit New Zealand workers first?

Thank you very much to the members for their questions. The first question raised was in regards to subclauses 155(2) and (3), the removal of “credit note” and “debit note”. This is in regards to the supply correction information changes that were introduced as part of the 2022 omnibus bill, which means that, as a result, these two elements are now redundant, and that aspect has replaced that concept within the Goods and Services Tax Act.

The second question that we’ve had is in regards to the zero-rating of GST on commercial vessels coming through temporarily. I mean, what this is doing is fixing a disparity between the GST treatment that’s applied to the services that are provided to those vessels that are temporarily here in New Zealand. It’s obviously not the intent or the policy intent for GST, too, to be applied to services, particularly where the vessels are merely passing through New Zealand to get to their ultimate destination. The reason for this change is because the consumption of goods and services will most probably occur outside of New Zealand in that context. And ultimately, the change that we’re putting through reduces the compliance costs on foreign entities that operate commercial vehicle vessels here. It is only limited to shipping vessels; it isn’t more broad than that. I do know that the Finance and Expenditure Committee did get into this point in significant or in a reasonable amount of detail, but I won’t repeat that.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the Minister of Revenue for his answers there. As my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell indicated, we are working through this clause by clause. In particular, I want to now, I guess you could say, leap forward to clause 157 and ask the Minister some questions around that, particularly as it pertains to the transfer of an emissions unit and the rules for transferring assets. So what we have here, an emissions unit, for the purposes of the Goods and Services Tax Act, is a unit as defined in section 4(1) of the Climate Change Response Act. And the supply of an emissions unit is almost always zero-rated under the GST Act. However, the technical notes to the bill say there’s an error with the interaction between one of the deregistration provisions in the GST Act in the zero-rating rules. What the bill’s commentary doesn’t go into any detail around, though, is specifically which deregistration provision in the GST Act—what is the mischief that we’re trying to rectify here through these amendments in clause 157?

I guess, as well as that, there are some broader questions around that. Why are emissions units deemed to be equivalent to assets; in what circumstances are they like financial services, which is the broader area that it’s falling under here; and how is the ownership and transfer of emissions units determined? Further to that, just in terms of the policy formulation of this part, whether or not there was interplay between the Minister’s own streams of advice in terms of the market for emissions in terms of what advice he may have received from the example of the Climate Change Commission around what it might do in terms of the ebb and flow of emissions. I mean, we’re obviously talking about secondary markets, but I do just want to clarify that this is just pertaining to the secondary market for units and won’t affect the options as they go through. So it’s quite a small area and there are some very specific questions there. I think, in terms of that zero-rating rules and the deregistration, we are looking for some more clarity on exactly which of those provisions in the primary legislation is the mischief that is trying to be rectified through this clause.

Following on from my colleague’s very learned question, I just want to go back to clause 156, because I do have a couple of questions around 156. Now, what 156 is is it amends section 3A, and that is the meaning of input tax. For people watching along at home, input tax is the amount of GST that’s charged when a business buys goods for use in their own business. So it’s the amount that the business itself pays. It’s a tax on the inputs to the business.

There’s a difficulty for people who buy second-hand goods for use in their business—second-hand traders, obviously, because they’re buying from people who aren’t registered for GST. And typically you can claim an amount of GST you’ve paid because someone has charged you an amount of GST. But, of course, if you’re buying from the garage sale down the road, where the person isn’t registered for GST, the way it’s sorted out is you claim a notional input tax deduction, so it keeps all the GST records fair and square and enables businesses to claim what they could ordinarily claim. It’s a nice point and the stuff around that input tax deduction to the purchase of second-hand goods has been there right since the Act first came in 1985.

But there’s an interesting little bit going here in replacement section 3A(3BB)(b), inserted by , and it seems to contemplate a scenario where the GST-registered person who buys a second-hand good or buys a good or a service from someone who is—well, it’d have to be a good—unregistered can claim a greater input tax deduction than would ordinarily be the case. This is where I find it hard to follow—in the circumstance where the particular good has changed hands several times between unregistered people. It might particularly apply to land where it happens. So it seems to be that through the way that the law was written, it contemplated allowing this deduction, but the way it’s written enabled a circumstance where people could possibly swap back several times, swap land around several times, and then the eventual purchaser gets a rather more substantial input tax deduction than they ought to have gotten.

It’s a little complicated and probably needs diagrams to show exactly what’s going on and the flows of money back and forth or input tax deductions back and forth and so on. But in terms of putting this sort of clause in, you’d have to think that there had been some mischief actually going on. It’s a good point for us lawmakers. If you look at—just bear with me for a moment—Henry VIII’s court, Henry VIII issues repeated regulations banning small dogs from his court. So he’ll ban the small dogs, but then just a few months or a year or so later, the same ban is out there again, and then they creep back in and the same ban is there again.

Did he tax them?

No, he didn’t tax them. The point is you only make bans against something that’s actually going on. So this is a rule that’s been put in place. But what I want to know from the Minister of Revenue was whether there was any actual mischief going on or whether it is just a possible mischief that could have gone on. So I get that we need to shut down possible loopholes as well as actual loopholes or loopholes that are actually being exploited, but if the Minister could just give us some insight into what was actually going on and whether it was a significant amount of revenue that was involved. Of course, if it was something that was actually going on, well, it’s great to see that particular loophole being shut down. People should pay their taxes—no more and no less than they ought.

I thank the members for those questions. I’ll start with clause 156 and then come to clause 157. The member may recall, from select committee proceedings, that the New Zealand Law Society identified a scenario on this exact point. The purpose of the amendment here is to address an integrity issue where taxpayers could potentially generate unintended GST refunds, in certain circumstances, by selling the same land multiple times between a chain of associated persons. That’s the purpose of what the amendment’s doing. The Law Society identified a scenario where that could play through; hence, the select committee made some amendments but accepted and put this change through, and it’s got retrospective impact back to 30 March 2022, in order to remove that risk. So it is a remedial item to deal with a scenario which may eventuate, and that’s what it does.

The member’s question in regards to clause 157(1)—a question, I recall, in regards to amendments to ensure that there’s a deemed supply in regards to emissions units, particularly in the circumstances when these emissions units are deregistered from GST—the purpose here is to ensure that, when they are deregistered from GST, this is zero-rated instead of standard-rated. Now, the member noted, in regards to emissions units—I mean, these are generally always zero-rated for GST purposes; however, there is a minor technical error with the interaction between deregistered provisions within the Goods and Services Tax Act and the zero-rating rules, and so this technical amendment here is dealing with that error. There is a potential risk with the current law, as it can derive unintended consequences around a deemed supply in regards to those emissions units; hence, the proposed amendment, which the select committee considered and didn’t make any changes to, will deal with this.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to continue the debate in relation to Part 4, specifically in relation to the Minister of Revenue’s Amendment Paper 247, which he has tabled. I think it’s always important that if an Amendment Paper has been tabled by the Minister, we do have the ability to scrutinise it a bit more, because it hasn’t gone through the select committee process. There’s a number of pages here, so I do want to try and work my way through the Amendment Paper just to get a bit more information around the policy intent of the changes which the Minister intends with the Amendment Paper. Again, we weren’t able to contest it as part of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. It’s quite clear that since the report back and the revision-tracked version that the select committee put through, there were additional changes which officials recommended to the Minister.

Why I say this, why we need to debate the Amendment Paper in particular—I remember many, many, many, many moons ago, having to be an IRD official in the place of the Minister’s officials and having to ensure that, actually, if there was a remedial amendment that was put through a Supplementary Order Paper, you can’t depend on the select committee report to provide you with the policy intent. You, basically, have to go through Hansard, through the times where the bill’s actually debated in the House, to figure out, OK, first of all, hopefully, the Minister has talked about that Amendment Paper, and then, second of all, about the provision.

So I just want to ask some clarifying questions for the Minister in relation to his Amendment Paper, particularly around new clause 155B. New clause 155B, which is on page 12 of the Minister’s Amendment Paper, brings in, within section 3 of the Goods and Services Tax Act (GST Act)—basically, provides the definitions that are used within the GST Act. It says section 3 has been amended, the meaning of the term “financial services”—so it’s obviously a subparagraph in there. It says “services provided by the collection agency under section 24 of the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act 2023.”

Now, we have debated the reason, in previous clauses, around this particular provision, the resale right for visual artists, but I want to be able to ask the Minister: does this mean, by including it within the definition of “financial services”, if you look further down into the clauses—you look at clause 157 and it adds a new subsection (29), that “The amount of a resale royalty retained by the collection agency under section 20 of the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act 2023 is treated as a fee paid by the right holder for the collection agency’s services.”

Then again, at clause 170, there’s a new insertion there, new subclause (1B), and then a new subparagraph (ib), “in the case of a registered person who receives a resale royalty during the taxable period for the resale of an original visual artwork under section 18 of the Resale Right for Visual Artists … the tax fraction of the amount of the resale royalty retained by the collection agency under section 20 of that Act; and”. Then, it continues with new clause 176B, inserting new section 26B, “Resale royalties”, and then it says, “This section applies to … registered [persons]” and then it gives a breakdown of those registered persons, how they fit into that test.

So just while I go into those tests, my question to the Minister is: are you clarifying—because, again, this is a new Amendment Paper—that services provided by the collection agency under section 24 of the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act is now a financial service and is therefore subject to—because financial services are exempt under GST. So are you saying it doesn’t apply for GST? Then it talks through the different—again, under clause 157, 170.

So just while the Minister considers that, I’ll go through the test for resale royalties where it does apply—new clause 176B, and that’s “This section applies to a registered person who—(a) receives a resale royalty under section 18 of the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act 2023 … and (b) was notified by the collection agency under regulation 10 of the Resale Right for Visual Artists Regulations … that the resale of the original … artwork which gave rise to the resale royalty was not a supply that was charged with tax under section 8.”

Then there are some qualifying subsections underneath it, such as subsection (2), which says “subsection (3) applies, the registered person must add to the output tax under section 20 for [that] taxable period in which they receive the resale royalty an amount equal to the tax fraction of the amount of [that] resale … including any percentage”—I won’t continue with that particular clause, because it is quite long, but if you go down then to subsection (3), “If the resale of the original visual artwork was zero-rated under section 11” of the GST Act—or is it the resale royalty Act?—it’s “paid to the right holder by the collection agency [and it] must also be zero-rated.”

So my reading of this—and, again, it’s an Amendment Paper by the Minister—under the GST Act, financial services are zero-rated. So they’re subject to GST, but, actually, the amount is zero. Are we bringing in, via the transaction for services provided through the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act, are we saying that that third transaction—so it’s been sold, a royalty’s been paid, then it’s been resold after that; is that not subject to GST because we’re now classing it as a financial service and we’re clarifying under clause 176B what is not a financial service, unless those other criteria apply? Or are we saying it’s subject to GST, it’s a financial service, it’s zero-rated, however it is not classed as a financial service because under clause 176B, if it meets those tests, which I’ve set out, under subclauses (1), (2), and (3), actually it is subject to GST at the 15 percent rate?

I do have a follow-up to the discussion we had a little bit briefly on clause 156. I was asking what mischief there was amongst this that was actually there, and the Minister of Revenue, on 156, did actually say that there was no particular mischief that had occurred, but the possibility was there, that it had been brought to our attention by the New Zealand Law Society, and so the fix was in.

But I guess the follow-up question to that is just the point: why weren’t the existing associated persons rules sufficient? Because we do actually have associated persons rules already sitting in the Income Tax Act 2007—I just can’t recall whether the Goods and Services Tax Act 1985 ones just piggyback on the Income Tax 2007 ones or not. But there are associated persons rules all through our tax legislation, so why were those rules insufficient to deal with this particular potential mischief?

Again, I’m just concerned that—I appreciate the New Zealand Law Society might have identified this particular potential issue, but whether or not we really needed to go to the extent of changing the law to fix it is a different matter, because, surely, our associated persons rules could have dealt with it, because, as the Minister said, the particular mischief only arose in the case of a number of associated persons being involved. So why weren’t our existing rules good enough, Minister?

Thank you very much to the member, and I just acknowledge those at home watching this; hopefully you’re enjoying it as much as we are here. In regards to technical queries in the Goods and Services Tax Act 1985—isn’t it exciting? Those particularly in the gallery watching, I’m sure are intrigued.

The point that you were raising there, if I recall back around the New Zealand Law Society, was in a scenario where you’ve got a farmhouse that sits on a piece of farmland and, in effect, the potential for the farmhouse to have a different categorisation under GST purposes than the farmland. That was the scenario that was played through and hence what triggered the amendment around a potential loophole. So that’s the background context around what was going on there.

We had another question by a prior member in regard to clauses, I think, 155B, 170, 157, and 156—

Clause 176.

—clause 176, that’s right, and 185. Anyone, any other bids? No, that’s all.

It’s good coverage.

They will relate to artist resale royalty tax changes. So just for the member’s interest, the amendments that we’re making across all of these clauses will ensure that GST is payable on the resale royalties that are payable to artists under the Resale Right for Visual Artists Act 2023. What we are simply doing here is ensuring that the artists and right holders of that artwork are entitled to a resale royalty on the resale of qualifying artwork, and that that is subject to the Act that I noted before, and then making sure the appropriate GST, where appropriate, is considered.

In effect, these changes are ensuring that there is an economically equivalent position—I think you would refer to it as—to non-GST-registered artists and right holders. So the amendment would ensure, in effect, that the appropriate GST treatment of amounts is withheld by the collection agency from the resale royalties by classifying them as fees. So, in effect, that’s what those amendments are doing. As I recall, the Finance and Expenditure Committee spent a bit of time on these clauses, obviously, and didn’t look to make any changes in regards to that.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will take a brief call on both the Minister of Revenue’s answers to the clause 156 questions and to the clause 159 questions, which have really only just begun. Firstly, I will mention clause 156, given the Minister’s answer about farm land and farmhouse land being treated differently for GST purposes and that not being a change which is about intra-group transactions, which would be covered by the added persons rule, which my colleague Deborah Russell spoke about; I want to ask him: is this change going to have an unintended consequence on those businesses that are in the trade of second-hand sales? For example, an excellent Manukau business, 266 Bikes, will buy up second-hand bicycles from community groups, organisations, churches, and individuals and families as well as accepting donations, and then repurpose those to different uses, whether it’s parts of other repair cafes or to sell on to, say, the school bike programme at Manurewa High School—an excellent programme too.

Is this this technical change for an integrity issue about another thing that will then affect some sellers who make a business from transacting with second-hand goods that might have an unintended consequence for some of these smaller retailers? I do think of every electorate MP here in this House who will have experience of these businesses that do great work to repair, and this Parliament is moving forward on further legislation that will actually incentivise more of this sort of retail where businesses are encouraged to be able to repair and prepare parts for repair for consumer use.

My further question is on clause 159(1). He answered that this was simply about fixing a disparity for those vessels that are not intended to consume those goods and services in New Zealand, because that’s not what GST is for. But my question to him was: then doesn’t this rule in the legislation now create further disparities around similar sorts of vessels that are not covered? I think his mechanism makes a remedy to the Customs and Excise Regulations 1996, but those regulations don’t cover all of the sorts of vessels that might logically be included in this change. It doesn’t cover, logically, military vessels, for example, where the consumption will certainly not be in New Zealand. It doesn’t cover certain types of air vessels. There are certainly lots of other categories now that will be knocking on his door, and I want to know what advice he has had about this being a logical extension of these GST rules—so where should he be drawing the line?

I also want to ask him this: Auckland Airport has a real aspiration to be an airport hub for many of the routes that will travel past New Zealand. Is there an impact here on goods that will be transiting through that service—for example, if you are fumigating goods in the whole of craft, should you be exempting that and should you not be exempting services that are to do with those goods? I want the Minister to clarify for us where he has drawn the lines here and whether that does make sense. If he says that it’s about fixing a disparity, then, surely, there shouldn’t be more disparities after he’s done with his amendments.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you very much to the Minister of Revenue as well for his response in relation to clauses 155 to 167B. If I understand the Minister’s response, it’s, effectively, that it is subject to GST unless clause 176B(3) applies, which is where the original visual artwork was zero-rated under section 11, then it must also be zero-rated. So, therefore, economically, it’s the same equal treatment, if I’ve got that right. I just want to acknowledge the Minister for his response and I bet you a policy analyst or a senior policy analyst in 30 years’ time, when they look at this bill, will be very thankful for that response.

Going now to the Minister’s Amendment Paper and to amendments to Student Loan Scheme Act. This is the wonderful about tax omnibus bills.

Sorry, that’s actually in the wrong—

OK. My apologies. That goes back to clause 185B, so I will wait for that call to go through that and I will let the member take another call before I go to the next call.

I’m going to take another call from the Hon Dr Deborah Russell, but I would like perhaps more questions than—we’ve had a reasonable period on this part, and I’m happy that there might be some more questions, but I want questions rather than, you know, full speeches on this piece. And I’m not pointing at that member; I’m talking generally here. I’m listening for new questions but not speeches.

Thank you for that direction, Madam Chair—I notice that you’re always a very fair Chair.

Well, I just think this is what the committee of the whole House stage is—it’s about opportunities to ask questions of the Minister. So I think we’ll home in a bit on that.

In that case, I do want to move on to a clause we haven’t mentioned at all yet: clause 157, immediately after clause 156 which we have discussed. In particular, it’s around the meaning of the term “supply”—a supply is an amount you supply and you pay tax on it. But clause 157 amends section 5 of the Goods and Services Act, and subclause (2) adds, as far as I can tell, new subsection (6E)—oh, no it’s a replacement. But it adds a little bit of information there, that “a payment in the nature of a grant of a subsidy—(a) includes a suspensory loan or advance when the loan or advance becomes non-repayable by reason of its conditions for non-repayment being satisfied:”. So that’s really quite straightforward. It’s basically: had a suspensory loan, the conditions for which the suspensory loan suspends entirely play out, so, in effect, it turns into a grant, and therefore that gets a different GST treatment.

But, again, the question is the same as the one I raised in relation to clause 156, which is, again: was there any mischief being done in this case? Was it something where officials noted that there was a potential for mischief and therefore it should be tidied up, or was it a case where there was an actual problem, where people had noticed a way around the law by sort of using suspensory loans and then converting them to grants, that enabled people to do something was perhaps not quite, shall we say, as straight as we’d like people to be with their tax law?

So a pretty straightforward question there: what mischief was being done, if any; how much of an impact was it having; and why was it worth us taking the time to change the law, unless there was some particular mischief being done this circumstance? So if the Minister of Revenue could answer that, that would be fantastic.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to allow time for the Hon Dr Deborah Russell, the member who spoke previously, to have her question responded to. I just want to check, in relation to clause 161, which amends section 15B of the Goods and Services Tax Act, “Taxable periods aligned with balance dates”—so it’s a remedial change. And it’s a taxable period—for those who aren’t aware—for GST purposes. It’s basically the time period, whether it’s a month, two months, or six months, that people use for accounting for GST. So it basically allows people to align their taxable period with their standard balance date for income tax purposes.

I just want to check in with the Minister of Revenue: is there a scenario where the provisions under clauses 161; 162—I won’t go through it—163; 164; and 165, which replaces section 15EB, would differ in any other case? Again, just making sure that we’ve covered all the different scenarios, because they had come through in submissions. Also, these provisions operate with the Commissioner of Inland Revenue’s approval, so are these circumstances—and, again, it’s a discretionary measure; there are some different discretions within the different tax Acts for the commissioner to use. But clarity is so important, whether that be in a tax information bulletin that’s published by IRD or a standard practice statement, which basically explains when the commissioner’s discretion will be used. Certainty is so important when it comes to tax, particularly around your taxable period, because you could get penalties or you could get use-of-money interest applied. So are there circumstances that the Minister is aware of—knowing that, again, it’s a discretionary measure; we don’t have those tax information bulletins or standard practice statements because usually they’re not released until after the bill—where the Commissioner of Inland Revenue would refuse to allow someone to change their GST taxable period?

So I have two particular questions in relation to clause 161. Would it differ in any other case, in relation to that taxable period? And given it’s at the commissioner’s discretion, are there circumstances in which the commissioner would refuse to allow someone to change their GST taxable period, given we don’t have the supporting documents in order to clarify the intention of the commissioner when applying this discretion in the future?

Thank you very much, members, for your questions. The question in regard to second-hand goods was raised—clause 156. Just clarifying that this amendment would not impact a typical second-hand goods business, as identified by the member within her electorate.

There was a question in regard to non-taxable Government grants and subsidies, under clause 157(2), (3), and (4)—just out of interest, it does impact clauses 185 and 186 as well. In effect, what we’re doing here, these aren’t policy changes, they are consequential changes to move and improve the accessibility of some of the definitions. So, in effect, we’re moving the content into the Goods and Services Tax Act and removing it out of what was an Order in Council. The reason is Order in Councils can be difficult to find and aren’t that accessible; again, the Finance and Expenditure Committee considered that, thought that was sensible, and put that through.

I think there were some other questions in regard to clause 157(8)—again, that relates to artist resale royalty tax changes—and I think the question was in regard to: “Why?” I mean, in effect, this was a matter, and that’s why it’s in there. Why in the Amendment Paper? Well, basically, the issues relating to artist resale royalty tax changes were identified subsequent to the bill coming into the House, and hence why it was put through as an amendment. But, again, the impacts of that deal with points that, in effect, are remedial in nature and improve the effectiveness of the bill.

The last question the member raised, in regard to clauses 161, 164, 165, and the discretion of the commissioner: well, it sort of goes without saying that the commissioner does have discretion, and we’ve got a very competent commissioner of IRD who’s well respected. Obviously, there will be circumstances where the commissioner may use their discretion to refuse a situation—again, that’s an operational matter that’s within the discretion of the commissioner, obviously, but we’re simply allowing that to ensure that appropriate decisions are made in regard to taxpayers’ situation.

Thank you, Madam Chair. A further question to add to my colleague the Hon Barbara Edmonds’ questions around the taxable periods and the circumstances in which people can get the commissioner to approve a change in their taxable period—sometimes it’s aligning with balance date; there are various reasons why. I just want the Minister of Revenue to think for a little bit and to consider the circumstances in which a GST-registered person could repeatedly change their GST taxable period. I think these rules allow the space that a person could change one month and then change back the other way a few months later, and then change again.

Of course, the backstop against that would have to be the commissioner’s approval, but the rules do seem to contemplate that a person is able to do that—that it is permissible within these rules. So, unless the Minister can point me to a particular clause that says a person may do it, say, only once within a particular calendar period—I couldn’t see it sitting in these rules in here, but perhaps it is elsewhere within the GST Act. It would be useful to know. There would be the opportunity for some interesting tax planning there if the commissioner’s discretion was fairly freely granted. So I want to know what protections are in place against that particular sort of behaviour—whether it’s within these clauses. I couldn’t find it within the Act itself. Or are we just relying, in that case, on the commissioner’s discretion?

Well, obviously, taxpayers have the flexibility of choosing what their reporting requirements are in the Goods and Services Tax Act. The circumstances may and can change, hence why there’s flexibility around that. In regard to taxpayers that are deliberately using that for purposes that are deemed by the department as either avoiding or evading tax, then there are provisions within the broader tax system to enable the Inland Revenue Department to deal with those circumstances, which they do regularly.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The question is,

Members, we now come to Part 5. Part 5 is the debate on clauses 187 to 204, “Amendments to other enactments”. The question is that Part 5 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ll just take a call on this. I’m looking here at the amendments to the Income Tax Act 2004. What I’m interested in is clause 200C. I’ll remark here that it is remarkable that we’re amending an Act that was repealed by the Income Tax Act 2007, but yet it seems still to be relevant.

But what’s happening here is that the definition of “business use” has a small change so that the words “and exclusively” are added. So business use in the 2004 legislation is defined as “for a motor vehicle and for a person, means travel undertaken by the vehicle wholly in deriving the person’s income”. So I presume that they will now read, “for the usage undertaken by the vehicle wholly and exclusively in deriving the person’s income”.

I’m interested in why “and exclusively” is needed, and does not “wholly” already cover it? I mention that because I think there was a bill introduced today about plain English or something, and “wholly” would already seem to mean that everything was included, so the inclusion of “and exclusively” would seem redundant.

So I’m interested in why this bill includes “and exclusively” and if that means that the word “wholly” in other pieces of legislation—and I’ve not reviewed all the other legislative references to “wholly”, but if there is now an indication that when something applies to something “wholly”, that that means that there can be other things that somehow are not part of the “wholly”, which is why we need the “and exclusively”. Thank you.

I’m looking at clause 188, and in particular 188(4) and (5), where it talks about “QROPS”, which is a new acronym that’s being introduced into the Act. Interesting, given we’ve just had that plain language bill introduced, and yet we have another acronym coming in. Now, in order to know what “QROPS” is, we have to go back to Part 2 of this particular bill, where it’s defined. It’s “a superannuation scheme in New Zealand”—so a New Zealand KiwiSaver scheme, a New Zealand Super scheme—“that is a qualifying recognised overseas pension scheme”—a qualifying recognised overseas pension scheme, or QROPS; and this is the interesting bit—“for the purposes of the Finance Act 2004 (UK)”.

We didn’t actually discuss this much during our Part 1 debate—I don’t want to go back to—

That’s good, because we won’t.

—the Part 1 bit or even the Part 2 bit or whatever it was, but I do want to talk about this QROPS accumulation, which is sitting in clause 188(5). It talks about, “in relation to a member of a KiwiSaver scheme, [it] means the net value of the foreign superannuation withdrawal derived by the member from an interest in a superannuation scheme”. It’s quite a complicated little definition there, about where a person has accumulated super scheme amounts.

What I’m asking from the Minister here, in relation to this, is it amends the KiwiSaver Act, but it does seem to involve some quite complicated calculations and analysis and sort of trawling through transactions and so on that is required in respect of the QROPS schemes, of the QROPS accumulation. In particular, this is because it goes back to the Income Tax Act 2007 and that has been reinvested in KiwiSaver schemes before 17 July 2015. So we’re already going back nine years on that—well, nearly nine years on that. So going back quite a few years doing some complicated transactions.

What I want to know from the Minister is: what are the compliance costs associated with this for KiwiSaver schemes in New Zealand? We know that this particular section of legislation has been changed in order to ensure that people don’t end up with a double tax burden or with an extra tax charge, but there’s also a compliance cost for the schemes in terms of calculating all this and keeping track of all these records. I wonder if the Minister could just talk us through the extent to which compliance costs were taken into account when working out whether or not it was sensible to make this change to our tax law.

Thank you very much for the members’ questions. In regard to clause 200C, interestingly, at that time the Minister of Revenue was Dr Michael Cullen, and he made a decision to remove the word “exclusively” from the definition.

A very, very sensible man.

Well, no, in retrospect, maybe it wasn’t, because, subsequently to that, there’s been a lot of confusion. We’re simply 19 or so years, or not 19—21 years later, we’re reversing it back to what it was before 2004 and adding “exclusively” back in there. So, there we go—a little bit of history for those that are studying taxation law, or whatever they’re doing at home while watching this, no doubt.

With regard to clause 188(4) and (5) and the term “QROPS”, just for those that are wanting to know, basically, if you go across to the UK, get a pension over in the UK, and then you return to New Zealand, you would want to bring that pension back with you, that’s the model. The UK legislation has rules where those pensions have to be within a specific entity in New Zealand, and that entity is called the QROP. That, basically, maintains the same structure and form as what it is in the UK, and then, when you hit your retirement age, you can also get that money out. It just stops people taking retirement savings from the UK and spending it on whatever they like, and there’s no integrity between countries.

What we’re simply doing is adding flexibility in these changes. Where someone originally brought their pension over and, say, stuck it in one of the KiwiSaver funds or, hypothetically, one of the banks, at the moment they can’t change that and move it to another provider. So we’re bringing in flexibility to allow those individuals to move that QROP from, say, bank A to bank B, or to another provider which offers QROPS, and that’s, just again, flexibility.

The compliance costs in that actually give more taxpayer flexibility. It also means that, obviously, some KiwiSaver funds have better returns than others, and that allows taxpayers, in terms of personal responsibility, to be able to make more informed investment decisions around their retirement, which I think is a good thing. So those are the answers to those two.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a question for the Minister of Revenue from his Amendment Paper 247, and this is clause 200H. I just want to say I’m learning a lot from this bill in terms of how taxation systems work. But I think for this one, with 200H, I know we explored some parts of the final-year fees-free scheme under Part 3, but I think new section 195B, inserted by clause 200H, is something I want to get clarification on from the Minister. So the Minister has given us clarification under Part 3 that when the final year is free, it, essentially, is a reimbursement after the completion of the degree, which is confirmed here.

Let’s say, in an example where a student needs to take on a student loan to pay for that final year, and upon the receipt of their qualification, that final amount is credited to them with that qualification. However, let’s say there’s a scenario where a student was intending on doing that, got a loan, and decided to take a gap break after one semester, and then decided to go overseas on work experience, which then would trigger student loan interest as a part of that, despite the fact that they would decide to come back to Aotearoa at some stage to complete the degree. Would the credit from the final year’s fees-free against the borrower’s consolidated loan balance include the additional interest that a student would accrue during the gap year when they no longer become a tax resident of Aotearoa and then triggers that international loan interest rate and potentially debt rate? Can I just check with the Minister on whether the final-year fees-free has taken this into consideration. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Again, focusing on the Minister of Revenue’s Amendment Paper, because they are amendments that have not been through a select committee process, so I just want to ensure that we have the policy intention really clear. I’m looking at the Amendment to Taxation (Annual Rates for 2021-22, GST, and Remedial Matters) Act 2022. That’s on page 14 of the Amendment Paper, AP 247.

Now, I notice that there’s been a change of a previous Act. It’s been an extension to what looks like a sunset clause. So the application date for when this provision basically closes—so it’s been extended for two years from 1 April 2025 to 1 April 2027. It looks normal, right? It looks like a remedial matter until you look at, actually, what that section is extending and it’s extending Schedule 7 of the Tax Administration Act 1994—the disclosure rules. These are disclosure rules that were brought in during COVID-19 and, from my reading of it, it had a sunset clause of 1 April 2025, but that’s now been extended. New section 200I(2): “In section 231(3), replace ‘1 April 2025’ with ‘1 April 2027’.”

So you look at Schedule 7 amended by the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2021-22, GST, and Remedial Matters) Act 2022, the disclosure rules, it makes changes to when the Commissioner for Inland Revenue may disclose the information, which is information for COVID-19 purposes, with other Government agencies, but only if the commissioner considers—and it’s got four different qualifying tests to get in there because it’s “and”, “and”, “and”, “and”. So you look at the clause that it’s amending.

You’re going through now the Tax Administration Act, which the Amendment Paper is now changing. It talks about section 18—which is the secrecy provisions for the tax Acts—“does not prevent the Commissioner disclosing to a government agency information about a person or entity for the purpose of enabling the government agency to provide or fulfil any duty, obligation, or other thing in relation to any person or entity in connection with COVID-19”.

Then, through that particular Act, it states all the different Government agencies where the secrecy provision doesn’t apply—so the New Zealand Customs Service, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, workplace safety, agencies for charities regulation, agencies for foreign trust regulation, Government agencies with voice recognition analysis, the Financial Markets Authority with the KiwiSaver information, Land Information New Zealand, the registrar of courts, credit reporting agencies. It keeps going: agencies for the gambling levy, the Department of Internal Affairs offshore betting charges, the New Zealand Film Commission, the Registrar of Companies—but I think that’s now being repealed under these changes—the Registrar of Companies again, KiwiSaver providers, agencies for R & D, agencies for Australian wine producer rebate, regulators under the Overseas Investment Act, the chief executive responsible for the administration of the Residential Tenancies Act. And that’s just Subpart 1 of those disclosures.

Working off a phone and it’s difficult to cross-reference different Acts which you don’t have a paper copy of, but if I understand it, all those disclosures, unless they’ve been repealed by subsequent Acts—so there’s been a couple of Acts between 2022 and this one in 2024. Is that correct? Am I reading that correct? I would like the Minister to correct me if I’m wrong; I’m happy to take it if I’m wrong.

Is it correct that now those disclosures which allow the Commissioner of Inland Revenue to, basically, breach the secrecy rules, the secrecy rules won’t apply to all that list of Government agencies has now been extended from 1 April 2025 to 1 April 2027? If my interpretation is wrong, I’m happy to be corrected, but I just want to check if that is the case, because it’s quite serious if it is.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I haven’t had the opportunity to participate at this part of the committee stage yet, so it’s always a pleasure to receive a call and to be able to do that. I wanted to focus specifically on the Minister of Revenue’s Amendment Paper and look at the changes to the student loan scheme. But I want to cover some different material from what’s already been discussed in relation to that.

One of the papers that has been tabled to support the Minister’s changes under the Amendment Paper to the student loan scheme is the supplementary analysis of the final year of fees free. This is a regulatory impact statement which goes over the impact of what the implementation of this policy would mean. The thing that really stood out for me, and I wondered if the Minister would be able to reflect on this, was the Treaty of Waitangi analysis that is included within this document. I also note that this particular document is dated 22 October 2024, so I have questions about how this was taken into account at the time when the policy was decided and also if the Minister has had an opportunity to reflect on some of the quite blunt statements which are included in this document. That is the overall opinion in this document: that the new final-year fees-free policy does not fulfil the Crown’s obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

It goes on to say that the new final-year scheme is not the best approach to address financial barriers to equity of tertiary education access and achievement for all learners, including Māori learners. There was also limited engagement with Māori learners, and the conclusion of it is the Crown’s obligations under article 3 are not fulfilled by this particular policy. This has real implications for learners, Māori and non-Māori, in the implementation of this particular policy.

The Minister, as well—I have a question around this particular policy and how much advice, if any, he received around the particular implications of the employment statistics at the time that information was gathered about the first-year free policy and then looking to change that to the final-year policy. Because, of course, it is very well known that in situations where there is high unemployment, tertiary education enrolments tend to go up, and in situations where there is low unemployment and plenty of jobs available for people, then there are fewer enrolments. So it seems to me that the data collection in relation to first-year fees free was impacted by periods of time under the previous Government where there was significantly more job opportunities available for people and now we’re seeing—and I’ve heard this reported recently—the increase and, in fact, the financial increases, which will, I’m sure, be of interest to the Minister, especially the budgeted financial increases in relation to tertiary education. So the statistics, when you look at them side by side, really don’t necessarily tell the full picture.

One of the big things that has been advocated over many years in terms of engaging populations that haven’t historically engaged in tertiary education, especially university education, to the same degree as other population groups, has been the deterrent factor of the expense of education and the fact that that is a significant cost outlay—different cultural approaches towards going into debt, which are different between different cultures. We shouldn’t assume that taking on debt is seen as acceptable in every single culture. My experience and information that I’ve heard about from different people is that it’s a vastly different proposition to some cultures to take on a student loan, compared to other cultures. I think that is something that needs to be taken into account when the switch occurs.

My question, really, is in terms of this quite substantive advice and also adding to the fact that due to the time lines available, there wasn’t enough time to do significant stakeholder consultation—did the Minister consider that at the time? Has the Minister considered this advice further? Has he looked specifically at the differentiation in employment data between when the first-year fees free and last-year fees-free scheme was implemented, and has that caused him to reflect and perhaps think of changing any of those decisions in relation to that?

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Working our way through those questions, we had a question in regards to extending the date of repeal of information-sharing provisions—new clause 200I. This is particularly focused around extending the repeal which relates to the current authorisation for provision of information sharing between IRD and the Companies Office. It’s making sure that the repeal of that aspect is on the same date that the proposed new information-sharing agreement will come into force. So it’s dealing with the Companies Office and IRD, and that’s the purpose of that clause.

There was a question from the Greens member in regards to student loans, around interest. Obviously, if a student loan borrower goes overseas, in that instance, they would be subject to interest on their loan. However, when the individual returns and completes their final year, which, I think, was the question raised, they will only be credited back for the fee portion of their fees—they won’t be credited back for the interest portion—which is the policy intent.

Lastly, the last member notes around the fees-free—I mean, it’s not within my scope to be commenting around the broader policy intent. Obviously, that is a policy that is being implemented by our Government; we think it’s a very effective and appropriate policy. It makes a lot of sense to do fees-free on the last year, versus the first year. It turns out that people stay on and finish their degrees, surprisingly, under that little incentive, versus just doing it and then deciding to do other stuff. It’s a common-sense policy, very practical and realistic, but what we’re really talking about here, in the context of the tax Act, is how we deal with that flowing through in terms of student loans. I didn’t hear a question in that regard.

One member also just asked a question about not having a physical copy of the legislation. For those members who haven’t been here too long, there are copies of the legislation sitting on the Table in front of us, if they want to refer to those.

I want to move on to—this is in Part 5, so it’s clauses 197 through 199, which are amendments, of all things, to the Stamp and Cheque Duties Act 1971. Interesting that we’ve still got this, given that most of us no longer have cheques or use them—I can’t recall the last time I wrote out a cheque—but, of course, it does have particular relevance in this particular tax bill, in particular because this is where the Minister of Revenue asserted that there was a growth measure in this bill. When we asked him to name, way back in the Part 1 debate, one measure in this bill that was something that would promote economic growth, this was the particular set of measures he cited, the AIL clauses—or the approved issuer levy rules.

So here it is, the actual particular clauses he was referring to—also, 128 and 141. In particular, this clause 199, what it does is it allows the circumstance where someone has forgotten, through oversight, to register that they are paying interest as a New Zealand borrower paying interest overseas, and they’ve forgotten to register for the approved issuer levy—the AIL. The impact of this is paying, I think, a 2 percent interest tax rather than 15 percent and so on. What it does is it enables this to happen when there’s been an oversight and someone’s made a mistake somewhere along the way, and they get to put it right and therefore get a lower tax burden because they have the opportunity to put things right.

Now, that’s a little unusual. Most of the time, people are expected to know what the tax law is and they’re expected to comply with it. Turning up to Inland Revenue and saying, “I didn’t know.” is usually not taken to be a reason for getting some kind of concessionary treatment. Indeed, one still has to pay one’s taxes, and, in fact, one ends up paying fines on it as well if you’ve gotten it wrong. So there does seem to be a circumstance here where a particular set of people who might be subjected to taxation are getting, maybe, preferential treatment—maybe the sort of treatment that lots of us would like to have through the income tax system.

Now, I know that Inland Revenue can be really quite good when people do make mistakes with their taxes or do make mistakes through oversight. We always encourage people, if they run into problems with their taxes, to contact IRD and to sort it out, and IRD do work with taxpayers to ensure that they get their taxes right. Nevertheless, we have legislated here provisions—so not just within the commissioner’s discretion but we have sat here and legislated a set of rules which, basically, say that if someone got it wrong and didn’t get something done in time, well, then they can claim this concession. That does seem to be quite an extraordinary thing to do.

I’d like to hear from the Minister, just for the benefit of the committee, for the benefit of those watching at home—and my dad will be watching, because that’s what he does on the afternoons. But just if you could explain it for the benefit of my dad—and, Dad, I will return that phone call—that would be good to hear, just the Minister’s explanation of that.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Thank you so much, Mr Chair. I’m just wanting to elaborate on the questions that my colleague Camilla Belich already raised. I think we’ll appreciate that this Amendment Paper hasn’t had a chance to go through the normal select committee process, particularly the changes around the fees-free scheme. I appreciate that the Minister of Revenue said that these changes were sensible and made sense, or something along those lines—I’m paraphrasing; I can’t exactly remember what he said—but I think it is worth exploring the policy rationale for this. I appreciate that the Minister said that he either wasn’t able to or wouldn’t get into that debate, but this is the reason why they’re changing this through the Amendment Paper. So it would be appreciated to have some engagement.

It’s really interesting that one of the key statements in the regulatory impact statement is “we do not expect a net benefit with final-year over first-year Fees Free, beyond moderate cost savings.” So, in fact, is that actually the real reason this is going to be put in place? I mean, there’s been some stated policy rationale for the changes to this legislation that they articulated here, which was to, “incentivise learners, particularly disadvantaged learners, to progress through and finish their programme of study”. The problem with that statement is that when you go through the cost-benefit analysis table—which is on pages 18-19 on the supplementary analysis report—they stated that the impact of that on rewarding successful completion of tertiary education was estimated to be low, and the evidence certainty that it would have a low impact at best was high.

Another reason that the Minister, I think, articulated in his previous intervention was for taxpayers to be able to have confidence that their spending would have a positive effect in terms of tertiary education. But, again, in the supplementary analysis report, the section that analysed whether the confidence that their investment has a positive outcome rewarding completion, the impact was estimated to be low. So, again, there’s been this rhetoric that this legislation is actually going to make a substantial difference, but the analysis that we have in the supplementary analysis report doesn’t seem to indicate that.

Worryingly, it appears to have quite negative impacts on the Crown’s relationship with Te Tiriti o Waitangi. If you look through the section it analyses, it says this policy does not fulfil the Crown’s obligation under the Treaty of Waitangi, and that this policy does not effectively address real barriers to equity of tertiary education access and achievement of Māori learners.

Again, is the actual point of this to save money? I acknowledge that the supplementary analysis report seems to indicate that it does generate substantial savings, that the table on figure 20 indicates about $180 million in the 2024-25 year, $261 million in 2025-26. So these aren’t trivial sums of money necessarily. But, I guess, if the Government’s intention was just to actually produce cost savings, then they should just say that, instead of going through this rhetoric about incentivising learners and rewarding learners when the evidence for that just seems skimpy at best.

Again, to the Minister: is the actual point of this just to save money? That’s certainly a valid objective; you are the Minister of Revenue after all. If not, just have that as the actual objective instead of going through this pretence that it’s actually going to improve outcomes for learners in any reasonable way.

Well, the member Francisco Hernandez and I are not going to agree on a point of policy in regards to whether we should have fees-free in the first year of university, which was the case, or moving it to the final year, which is the policy intent. We are here to talk about the taxation bill and the implications of that policy decision on the tax bill, which I didn’t hear a question on, so I’m not able to comment any further other than it’s a policy which is being edited, and the changes within this bill are, in effect, dealing with the tax implications of that policy decision.

In regards to the question on approved issuer levy that was asked previously: obviously, the approved issuer levy tax model reduces the cost of capital on New Zealand borrowers. The change in the bill that we are implementing here simply allows retrospective registrations, which allows people that have made a mistake with their registration to be able to go back and correct that. As a result of that change, that will mean that those people can take advantage of that piece of tax legislation, and that reduces their cost of capital, which obviously has an implication in terms of increasing economic growth, which we as a Government are very focused on.

Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s just a really quick question in relation to the response that the Minister of Revenue gave for new clause 200I. The Minister said that, basically, it was to repeal the Companies Office and that the repeal date of 1 April 2027 was to align with the sunset clause for all the other secrecy provision exemptions. I just want to confirm: are all the other secrecy provisions 1 April 2027; if so, why was the Companies Office the incorrect one—out of that huge list of Government agencies, why did that have a separate sunset clause date, given everything else was 2027?

Quite simply because the agencies have entered into a new agreement between IRD and the Companies Office, which will come in and be effective from the date on which this remedial change repeals the old model. So it relates to those two entities only—hence, why we’re repealing that date, to allow the new agreement to come into effect.

If that’s the case, do all the other provisions, then, still apply for all those Government agencies under the disclosure rules?

They do apply, but this specific remedial, under new clause 200I, deals with the agreement, in particular the Companies Office and Inland Revenue only.

Therefore, under section 231(3)—I just want to be clear, because it’s really difficult to find the application date for that previous Act, again, without having the paper copies to work through it. Do the rest of those Government agencies which had disclosure rules which applied during the period of COVID and subsequently—because I can understand why you might still need those disclosure rules to ensure that IRD can share information with other agencies, particularly around auditing, given the Small Business Cashflow (Loan) Scheme, I think, has payment dates which have come up. For all of those other Government agencies—and there was a huge list of them—is their sunset clause now 1 April 2025 or 1 April 2027? Just to be clear.

Just to be clear, as I said twice already, the specific aspect only deals with the Companies Office and IRD.

So what is the application date for the sunset clause for all the other agencies?

Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to start by thanking the Minister of Revenue for his history lesson about “wholly and exclusively” and to say how pleased I am to be in the same boat as the late Michael Cullen on my thinking about those words.

Now, I just want to talk briefly, and I have a simple question around clause 204. So this is “Goods and Services Tax (Grants and Subsidies) Order 1992 revoked”. That order from 1992 made in the name of Cath Tizard when she was the Governor-General—talk about history!—goes through a number of grants and subsidies that are non-taxable. I see, of course, in the bill in front of me that Schedule 2 includes Government grants and subsidies: non-taxable amounts, and that this was part of the Part 4 discussion, the words in that schedule, but clause 204 is in Part 5.

So my question simply is: why is the order revoked, and is it because everything is transferred into the schedule, or are there some differences between what is in the order and what is in the schedule?

Thank you, Mr Chair. I just want to go back to my previous question from the Minister of Revenue—and thank you, Minister, for the response that you’ve given. Understanding that, if a student takes a student loan in the final year and, halfway through between the two semesters or between that final year, the student goes abroad and no longer becomes a tax resident of Aotearoa, in which case they will accrue interest as part of their student loan. But consider a loan balance on that date does not include the additional interest that is accrued. Just for clarity: this is still the Amendment Paper 247, section 200H, the newly introduced section 195B.

But I wanted to check with the Minister: in that particular case, let’s say the scenario is that a student, for example, has a three-year degree. They have a $60,000 student loan and the final-year student loan is $20,000. Halfway through the semester, they go overseas, they come back for a year, they complete a degree. With universities in general, they allow you to pause your degree for up to three years and potentially longer, depending on your discussion with a particular university, let’s say. You know, they come back and then they complete their degree so they’re eligible for the final-year fees-free scheme. Therefore, the $200,000 is considered a credit against the consolidated loan. The student will still need to pay interest, but in that situation would the student be paying interest on the basis of $40,000 minus the final year, or on the basis of the entirety of the $60,000 loan? Thank you.

Well, as I noted to the member Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan before, if in that scenario the individual went overseas for a portion of time, at that point, interest would be subject to the loan—or the portion of the loan—that they’ve currently incurred at the point at which they depart New Zealand; interest would be applied to that. But, irrespective of the timing of that and the interest relevant, the only amount that would be accredited back to the individual relates to the fees portion only. There is no crediting back of interest under the model which we are putting in place.

I understand that, but, again, what we are seeing here is that a student did not actually, in fact, in those cases, have a $60,000 loan, because that $20k is supposed to be earmarked to be returned. This is, I think, fundamentally one of the concerns that we have when it comes to the previous system, which is that students apply, and that gets money directly to the university, whereas now the system is that a student has to take a loan first, in which case it actually does punish and penalise students further.

So, in that sense, are you saying that it has not been considered at all that student loans would be, or, at least, the interest amount, which is not going to be paid—I get that. But even the interest on the total sum of the loan isn’t going to remove the portion that gets consolidated as part of the credit as the final-year fees-free scheme.

Just reminding the Minister of Revenue of my very simple question about clause 204 and the revocation of the Goods and Services Tax (Grants and Subsidies) Order 1992, and is there any policy difference between what was in that order and what is in the Schedule? There’s COVID payments, which is obviously something that was added after 1992; there’s also the earthquake support payments; there’s payments made by the New Zealand Agency for International Development; and other loans of the Crown; and other various different benefits there. So a very simple question.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to Part 5 set out on Amendment Paper 247 be agreed to.

The question is that Schedule 1 stand part.

Members, we now come to our final debate. This is clauses 1 and 2. This is the debate on clauses 1 and 2: “Title” and “Commencement”.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I’ll just help members with this point: the title of this bill is the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill. The title was chosen because that’s, in effect, what the bill does and that’s exactly what it focuses on. The commencement dates are outlined as part of this, which is very standard, and I’m aware that the Finance and Expenditure Committee, while undertaking a full six-month process, did not suggest any changes in regard to both those points.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’m sure that there are other colleagues who may be speaking more fully in terms of the commencement date—where there are many, many, many, many subclauses. But I have a broader question around the commencement date, noting that a number of the commencement dates are retrospective. I’m just checking in terms of the consistency against the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report that it doesn’t seem to mention anything in terms of retrospectivity.

I wondered from the Minister of Revenue’s perspective: was there any test or any advice that the Minister has received regarding if there were any sort of retrospective penalties—which, to be fair, often we think of from the perspective of criminal penalties, but it could also be financial penalties in some ways around section 26(1) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. So because of the fact that there are substantial areas which are retrospective, I just want to check with the Minister if that has been a consideration.

Thank you, Mr Chair. And, yeah, two particular questions in relation to the application dates for both clause 138, which is the “Assessment of penalties related to crypto-asset reporting framework”. If we look at the commencement date for it, it looks like it’s 1 April 2026, so it’s in a couple of years’ time. Is that to align with the OECD when the crypto-asset reporting framework does come into force?

And then my second question is actually in regards to the donee status—so that is clause 115, page 128 of the bill; so donee status, or Schedule 32. Generally, if you are a charity in New Zealand, basically taxpayers, if they donate to you, you can get a tax credit back for that donation. If it’s an overseas charity, they need to be listed on Schedule 32, which shows—there’s a number of them that are new in clause 115(2), so there’s six new charities. But then it also deletes charities off the donee status list, so the Help a Child Foundation, Operation Vanuatu, Sampoerna Foundation Ltd, SpinningTop Trust, The Food Bank of New Zealand, Together for Uganda, and then at (4), it deletes Support Services for Humanity.

Now, if you look at clause 2(28), which is the commencement date for the charities that have been taken off, it does talk about clause 115(4), which is Support Services for Humanity. But just checking: should that also apply to clause 115(3B), given they’re also being deleted, and should those charities which I listed—Help a Child Foundation, etc.—also be deleted, from 1 April 2029?

Yeah, thanks, Mr Chair. I mean, the questions in regards to both the Green member Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan’s point around retrospectivity, and the member the Hon Barbara Edmonds’ points around clauses 138 and clauses 115: in regards just to the point around clause 138 around crypto-assets, the member is correct in the context of the timing of when that legislation comes into play.

Clause 115 for standard adjustments around commencement when we are putting in place a new donee charity: in this case, we’ve got Le Quesnoy, which is the World War II charity in France, which is obviously well known and something that has been well supported across the board. That’ll make it a donee charity in the context of overseas charity status, but the context that the member mentioned about the removals and parts, those are standard aspects.

The point that the Green member made in regards to whether we consider that throughout the passage of the other parts: there were a number of questions asked in regards to clauses which had retrospective commencement provisions and, from my recall, we did talk about those as they came up throughout. But that is to be expected in a taxation bill of this size and scale which deals with remedial issues. Retrospective changes are not done lightly. They are well considered, but often the reasoning underpinning that is to ensure the integrity of the tax system and also to be flexible in regards to taxpayers being able to take advantage of that, such as the point that we noted before around making a mistake and being able to retrospectively fix it.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I have a question around the title clause and I just wanted to confirm my understanding of all the things that this bill is doing so I could potentially suggest some changes to that title clause, which is currently the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill. Now, look, I see the “Annual Rates for 2024-25” there clearly and I see the “Emergency Response” bits there quite clearly.

But there’s a number of provisions there that are quite substantial that aren’t reflected in the title clause—for example, the Auckland Future Fund and all the amendments that exist to kind of further enable that, and also all the amendments in the Minister of Revenue’s amendment that deal with the final-year fees-free scheme. Also—this was in the original legislation even before the amendment—the crypto-asset reporting framework. Would the Minister consider amending the title to either reflect all of these things that this bill actually considers, or to shorten it so that it just says “Annual Rates for 2025 and Remedial Measures Bill”, which I believe does cover all of those wonderful topics?

No.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Really short question. Again, to clarify that clause 115(3B)—because there is an application date for clause 115(2) in clause 1(23) of 1 April 2024. I can’t find the application date for clause 115(3B), which is the deletion of the list of charities. But then in clause 115(4), that actually has an application date which the Minister clarified before, 1 April 2029. So I just need to ask the Minister of Revenue—because unless it’s an application date that is missing—when does clause 115(3B) come into force?

It is an important question because I can’t find the commencement date in those clauses. Again, my apologies if I’ve missed it. There are a number of commencement dates. But it does seem unusual that there is a commencement date for subclause (2), there is a commencement date for subclause (4), but there is no commencement date for subclause (3B). It could be the date in which the bill comes into force or it could be, again, back-dated to 1 April 2024, which you see in clause 1(23). Or you could see in clause 1(28) it comes into force on 1 April 2029, which are very different dates. One’s retrospective; one’s prospective. I just want to clarify: when does clause 115(3B) come into force?

I appreciate the member Barbara Edmonds is as excited about getting this bill passed as I am, because the answer to the member’s question is: the point at which we pass this bill—hopefully, very soon from now.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Looking for new material—the Hon Barbara Edmonds.

Yeah, the Minister of Revenue responded that that provision should come into force very soon. What is “very soon”? It’s quite clear—again, I went through the dates. There are different dates for the commencement. I am responding directly to the Minister’s response. When does that section come into force? If the commencement date is missing from the commencement clauses, then that’s an issue. When does it apply? Is it a default position as to when the bill comes into force? Is it the position which was taken for retrospectivity around 1 April 2024 for clause 115(2)? Or is it prospective—1 April 2029—for clause 115(4)? Just a very simple question, but it’s important because it’s the commencement date of when these charities are deleted from Schedule 32. Again, that applies because taxpayers who donate to these offshore charities can get a tax credit for it. It can be quite substantial because it can be up to the amount of their income here in New Zealand. I just want to clarify: when does it commence?

Yeah, I appreciate the member Barbara Edmonds’ questions. The commencement clause will come into force on the day after the date on which the bill receives the Royal assent, and that is noted in clause 2, which is the commencement of the legislation, which the member has in front of her.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to clause 2 set out on Amendment Paper 247 be agreed to.

Madam Speaker, the committee has further considered the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill and reports it with amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

I present a legislative statement on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill be now read a third time.

Well, I’m very proud to be part of a Government that is all about going for growth and making it easier to do business. That is exactly what this bill is about. I would like to thank the House and the members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee for their work on this bill, and their comprehensive input in terms of it. In the progress through the House, the bill has been considered by the Finance and Expenditure Committee, who recommended a number of changes, which we have discussed through the committee of the whole House. The bill as it is now has also had further amendments added through my Amendment Paper through that process.

The first aspect in regards to that was the added measure in regards to helping implement the replacement of the first-year tertiary education fees-free scheme with the final-year fees-free scheme. We’re proposing data collection and sharing processes between the Inland Revenue Department and the Tertiary Education Commission to allow the two agencies to assess learner eligibility and to enable entitlements to be paid. This proposed change will allow eligible learner fees to be paid following the completion of a student’s qualification or programme. This is an important change as New Zealand needs a skilled workforce. A skilled workforce obviously means that we can boost the economy by increasing productivity, attracting investment, and fostering innovation. It will also, importantly, mean that Kiwis have higher wages and more opportunities, particularly in high-skilled sectors. That is why it is important that we incentivise students to complete their studies. This approach will also reward learners who complete their programme of study and, of course, reduce the overall cost of study.

Importantly, there are also changes in the bill which relate to the Le Quesnoy - New Zealand Memorial Museum Trust. This second measure honours our New Zealand troops who served in World War I. In the final week of World War I, the New Zealand division seized control of the French town of Le Quesnoy. Even today, the residents of that community continue to commemorate an important role that New Zealand played in its history, including by having a New Zealand memorial at that spot. That is why I am very proud that this bill includes another new measure within it that adds the New Zealand Memorial Museum Trust - Le Quesnoy to Schedule 32 and gives the trust permanent overseas donee status. This change means that the memorial museum will be treated the same as charities that operate here at home. I acknowledge members across the House, and past members, who have been working diligently to get this change made. At long last, that change has been made here in the House as a result of today, and that acknowledges those that have come before us.

A primary focus for the Government, as I’ve noted, is in the context of economic growth. We are very much committed around supporting the tech sector and start-ups—key drivers of growth and also the aspect in regards to higher-paying jobs and attracting capital. The existing way that we support that tech sector is through encouraging the use of employee share schemes. To keep the exempt scheme effective, the bill also proposes measures to ensure it remains fit for purpose. We want to also smooth the path for migrants wanting to move their overseas pension funds here to New Zealand. Amongst a host of other measures, the bill also contains amendments to provide greater flexibility for the tax system to respond to emergency events. Also, importantly, it introduces measures to enact the crypto-asset framework into New Zealand legislation.

As with many bills under this Government, it also includes a wide range of remedial matters removing the compliance costs on New Zealand taxpayers. The bill covers a wide spectrum of tax system changes, but only one thing remains constant: the need for remedial measures in future tax bills. We can all look forward to those. Remedials are vital. They are important because the world keeps changing and we need to keep our tax legislation up to date. As society evolves, so must the tax system. Business models also change and the tax system must change with them.

While headlighting tax policy changes may come and go, the key for New Zealand taxpayers and tax agents is ensuring that our tax system operates as quietly and efficiently as possible in the background. The private sector is keenly interested in our remedial work to keep the tax system fit for purpose in a changing world. That’s why the bill includes a wide range of remedials, many small but all, of course, very important. They keep the tax system running efficiently, which keeps the entire machinery of Government operating.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the policy officials from the Inland Revenue Department and the drafters of the legislation, all of whom do a significant amount of work for us in supporting our tax system. I acknowledge all of them as this bill is brought to its third reading. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

This bill has been through a long, long examination in the committee of the whole House stage, and I thank the Minister of Revenue for his persistence with that. I thank, also, the officials who sat there and supported the Minister and, through that, supported the House in examining this bill.

Democracy done well.

It was a lot of work, and, yes, as my colleague the Hon Dr Megan Woods says, democracy done well.

The Minister said this bill was all about growth—growth in the economy. It’s an interesting claim for him to make, because when we asked him during the committee stage if he could name a measure for growth in this bill, he could come up with only one: the approved issuer levy. It took us to point out that the changes to the stock measures for shareholders in tech start-ups and the like was also a growth measure. It seems he didn’t quite know his own bill as well as he might have. But it’s an interesting thing, because just saying a bill is about growth doesn’t make it so.

There are a number of taxpayer-friendly measures in this bill, as would be expected—measures to tidy up the tax system, to make it function better, to ensure that anomalies are tidied up, that the tax system, as the Minister said, must move to meet new conditions. But the bill itself is named after the emergency measures that were put in place. Now, let’s just step back to this. These emergency measures are measures that are pulled out when we have black swan events—events like the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods, events like Cyclone Gabrielle, events like COVID—where we needed to put in place special measures to help businesses through those times. Under our Government, we did that repeatedly, to the point where we said, “Actually, we need to have these measures ready to go when the next black swan event occurs.”, as it will—as it will. Now, I suppose that could be characterised as a measure for growth, but, really, it’s an emergency measure, and that is what the bill is named for. If we go through all the other measures in the bill, they are tidy-up measures—they are taxpayer-friendly, but they are tidy-up measures. It’s more the silences in this bill that matter, not so much what’s in here but what isn’t there.

As we went through the committee stage of the bill, the Labour Party voted for all the sensible amendments there are in this bill, because the actual technical detail of tax in this country is, by and large, a very bipartisan matter. We tend to agree on the technical detail, and that’s because the tax community, the tax policy people, the tax experts working in the big firms, even the politicians, tend to agree that we need to get the tax system right, that it shouldn’t be full of special little measures for this lobby group and the other but we should just be getting it right, and that’s the overall objective here. We voted for those measures, but the Labour Party will be voting against this bill overall, and that is because it fails to address a critical issue—absolutely fails to do so.

Back when that Government took office, in the briefing to the incoming Minister of Finance, Treasury warned very, very clearly that there is a structural deficit in our tax system; that the way that the tax system is set up, the way that Government expenditure is set up, means that over time there will be a permanent gap between the revenue that the Government collects and what it spends it on. That is because we have some needs in this country which we simply must meet—around health, around welfare, around homes, around education—expenditure that Governments are absolutely committed to no matter what banner they run under. There is a structural deficit in our tax system, and it is caused because there is a giant, gaping hole in the tax system.

That party will say, and parties have said over time, that we have a broad based - low rate tax system. That is simply not the case. We do have a low-rate tax system, but we do not have a broad-based tax system. We do not tax capital income. It creates a huge, longstanding gap in our tax system. In fact, the IMF has talked about it, the World Bank has talked about it, the OECD has talked about it, banks are talking about it, business leaders are talking about it. It is a critical gap in this bill. This bill does not address the overall structure of our tax system, and yet it is a critical need and it is a responsibility that that Minister of Revenue has. It is that Minister’s job to protect our revenue system, and he is notably failing to do it.

It has consequences. Failing to collect the revenue that this Government needs means that our health system is under strain, that there is unmet need in our health system, that there are people being pushed out on to private waiting lists where they are not getting seen, and it means that children are not being treated for palliative care. It means that people are queuing up at emergency departments because our health system is understaffed, and it’s understaffed because it is underfunded. Why? Because we are not collecting sufficient revenue. So we have a huge problem there.

We have an increasing number of people on the unemployment benefit. Why? Because that Government is not supporting jobs. It’s worth supporting jobs. We support jobs because when people are in work, there are all sorts of benefits, of course, to the people themselves, but that is part of what grows our revenue base as well. That Government’s short-sightedness in cancelling construction projects that has left 13,000 workers leaving this country has also left our revenue system short. Jobs actually matter, and that Government needs to support jobs. In supporting jobs, we support our revenue system.

That Government stopped building homes—it stopped building homes. It said it couldn’t afford to do it anymore. Why? Because they are not collecting the revenue they need. Jobs, health, homes—that Government is not supporting them, and the reason they cannot support them is because they are simply not collecting revenue. They are refusing to address the gaping hole in our tax system.

We’ve heard some hints from the Minister of Finance, we’ve heard some hints from the Minister of Revenue that there’ll be some work done on charities and the taxation of charities. There’s a discussion paper out at the moment. We’ve had some hints that there’ll be some announcements in the Budget; we’ll have to wait and see. So that Government, instead of going after the giant, gaping hole in our tax system, is going after the charities sector instead.

There might be a case for it when charities are engaging in the sorts of activities that aren’t real charitable work, but while they’re going after the charities sector, they’re also going after the small not-for-profits—the small not-for-profits in our communities who’ve been told in this latest tax discussion paper that they too may be up for taxation. I mean, that’s the local embroiderers’ guild. It’s the local potters’ club. It’s not sports clubs—they’re exempted—but it’s all the small, little, local groups that operate as not-for-profits, working in our communities, supporting our communities, being part of our daily lives. That Government is saying, “Perhaps we ought to consider taxing them.” They are certainly saying we ought to consider how we tax charities, but what they are not considering is how we tax capital, and that is the gap in this bill.

So I say to that Government over there that they need to grow up. They need to get past the slogans. They need to get past just saying growth, growth, growth, growth, growth as though it’s some kind of cargo cult. They actually need to do the hard work. They need to take a long, hard look at the structure of our economy, a long, hard look at the structure of our tax system, and then they need to take some hard decisions. But they won’t. No courage, no capacity to do it, no interest in doing anything that’s going to rock the status quo. So there’s some good measures in this bill, but overall this bill is a failure and we will be voting against it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s welcome to hear the speech from the previous member, the Hon Deborah Russell. I’m glad that after having comprehensively ruled out a capital gains tax in the previous election, Labour seems to be following the Green Party’s lead and actually taxing capital, taxing wealth, and actually making sure that we have a fair tax system. Very welcome that we’re still leading the left. That’s welcome to see.

Now, what this bill—

Oh, yes, you are.

It’s very acknowledged. Thank you for the acknowledgment, to that member on the left.

Now, this bill does several things. One of them is to implement the changes to the annual tax rate. That’s where we see a lot of the flaws—and I’ll get to that later—because what they’re proposing is actually deeply regressive in not only what it does but what it doesn’t do, and the previous speaker went into that.

What it also does is enable a generic response to emergency events. That is one aspect of the legislation we do support. It should be easier to provide tax relief and we should enable the extension of emergency end dates much better. The crypto-asset reporting framework is also an important step forward. Some members were able to hear a briefing from Binance through the Finance and Expenditure Committee, and we heard through that this is something that the industry does support and it is something that will enable better protection of consumers.

It enables the Auckland Future Fund, which is something that we have voted to support. But one of the things that it does do is that it enables the Tertiary Education Commission and it enables a lot of the frameworks around the final-year fees-free. That is something that we do not support. We don’t support it because the supplementary analysis material that came with it was very clear, very adamant that this legislation would actually not have a net benefit compared to the status quo, which is the first-year fees-free, beyond moderate cost savings.

The supplementary analysis paper also went into some detail about how this policy does not fulfil the Crown’s obligation under the Treaty of Waitangi and that this policy does not effectively address real barriers to equity of tertiary education access and achievement for Māori learners.

Now, I signposted earlier in my speech how the changes that this bill was enabling were deeply regressive. They’re regressive in that they don’t actually address the fundamental issue. The previous speaker was right; there is a gaping hole it doesn’t address: the fact that 311 households hold more wealth than 2.5 million New Zealanders. It doesn’t address that fundamental problem.

The tax rates that it enables are deeply regressive, for example—and I ran this through the Government’s own calculator. A deputy chief executive at a ministry—say, the Ministry for Regulation—making $348,000 a year would get a tax cut of $20.50 a week. A minimum wage worker would be getting $12.02 of tax cuts, and a single parent on the benefit would be getting a tax cut of about $2 a week. Now, if someone who’s at the top, someone who’s making disproportionately more—10 times more than a beneficiary—is getting a large amount of tax cut, then that just goes to show how regressive this truly is.

Now, one of the other things that we would have liked to see and that came up during the discussion was a question by my colleague Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan around the provisions around the emergency management measures and how, in some measures, it enabled tax relief for people earning an income, but we did ask a question about whether that could be potentially considered to extend to beneficiaries as well. But, alas, we, unfortunately, didn’t get a response from the Minister of Revenue, and I think that’s really sad to see. It’s really important, because climate—well, no, not just climate but disasters impact people unevenly. They impact people unevenly depending on the social strata and the socio-economic status that they belong to.

Someone who is on a high income, who’s making quite a lot of money, is able to respond to the shocks of disaster in general, depending on the level of disaster and how impacted their home has been, say, compared to a beneficiary on a more limited income. So we would have liked to see some consideration of the ideas that we are proposing.

I talked about what the actual impact of ignoring that gaping hole is, and it is the broader context of the fiscal and economic decisions this Government has made since they’ve taken office, and it’s the legacy of cuts and degraded public services. Around the country, from Auckland to Dunedin, I’ve talked to people, and a lot of New Zealanders are realising that something has fundamentally gone wrong with this country. They’re seeing that their dollar isn’t going as far as it used to, and they’re seeing that the critical public services that they used to be able to rely on get degraded and get cut so much that they’re not able to access what they need.

One of the things that this bill does is enable better emergency management response but, unfortunately, at the same time that this Government has enabled an easier emergency response, they’ve made cuts to the critical infrastructure that underpins our emergency management capacity, such as GNS Science. This is a quote from one of the media releases that described their work as “critical work helping New Zealand adapt to climate change and manage natural hazards and risks from earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic erosions.”

We’ve also seen the negative impacts of the cuts felt across our police and our law and order services. This is a media release from the Police Association and they’re saying, “We think that this will be a scattergun headcount-reduction exercise made in a silo by people who don’t understand the work people do, who they do it for, and who also won’t personally be affected by the outcome of the ‘realignment’ exercise.”

That was about the cuts in the civilian workforce, but we’ve also seen that there are 72 fewer police. This is something that is happening because the Government has chosen to prioritise tax cuts to the people making the megabucks that this legislation enables. We’ve seen the impacts of it: a 12 percent increase in thefts at retail premises.

Now, one of the other services that, unfortunately, is being starved the funding, thanks to the tax regime that this legislation helps enable, is the health service. We’ve seen the Public Service Association call out the nearly 3,300 staff going at Health New Zealand and the impact it has on the front line has been well reported. One doctor who was speaking to RNZ said, “One shift I made seven beds, answered a million phone calls, and fixed the printer. Is this a really good use of my time? I suspect I’m the most expensive person there.” But what that also shows is the bogus division between the front line and the back line, because, actually, a lot of the front-line workers know that they rely on the critical work that the back-line staff do, the administrative staff, the people who actually go on to support the critical work that the front line is doing.

But we’ve seen the impact of actually trying to do more for less; this rhetoric that you can somehow cut the funding and still get better or at least neutral outcomes. We’ve seen that in the school lunches programme. We’ve seen that in the impact of children having to put up with burnt lunches or plastic or just really degraded quality. That ideology fundamentally doesn’t work.

But help is on its way. We’ve got the Green Budget coming up in a couple of months and we’re presenting an alternative vision of what we think Aotearoa should be.

Degrowth.

We’re presenting a comprehensive policy that will actually enable the critical public services that we rely on, that doesn’t rely on imaginary market-based mechanisms, that actually relies on making sure that everyone has what they need to thrive, unlike this Government with its record unemployment rate, with an economy that’s still actually—well, one member there was saying “degrowth”, but the economy is actually more than it was this time last quarter, so they’ve done the degrowth and we will green grow New Zealand. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to rise on behalf of ACT to speak on this Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill.

Now, the ACT Party does not like lots of tax, but some tax is all right, and you do need to have it. So I am very proud to be supporting this Government’s agenda to make business easier, to have an efficient background tax system that makes it efficient for New Zealanders to go about their business without the large admin costs—not just for the businesses and trusts and charities but also for the Public Service that is administering the tax system.

I think I can agree with one thing that the Opposition has said today: it has been through a thorough committee of the whole House. I think we spent a good amount of time getting into every little bit and asking multiple questions, sometimes on the same topic. This is going to lead to a swifter tax response in emergency events, providing earlier certainty for affected taxpayers I think we can agree that the work done in that space has been a good thing. There are some tidy-up measures, as Dr Deborah Russell has said, but she also said another thing, which was quite interesting: this is to address structural deficits in the tax system.

Well, I think the Piketty cargo cult that Modern Monetary Theory would just keep raining down from the sky on to the landing strip of a South Pacific island and all we have to do is dress up as if it was going to work for ever is really the definition of the “cargo cult” that Deborah Russell was talking about there. Industry supports it. I support it. Thank you very much.

New Zealand First is proud to support this bill. It aligns, as far as I can see, with our commitment to fairness, to efficiency, and to economic resilience, and we believe that these changes are about an efficient and effective tax system. As we’ve heard, the bill has been through a thorough process. It’s about providing for a practical, well-balanced tax policy.

Look, what I’ve heard from the Opposition—it’s really quite interesting, they’ve basically said, “We like what’s in there; we don’t like what isn’t in there.” That’s a really strange approach to take, saying, “Well, we’re going to vote against it because you didn’t include a whole lot of other stuff.” Well, funnily enough, most legislation doesn’t include everything you want, but at least if it moves you forward, that’s quite a sensible thing.

So what does it do? Well, some of the things we’ve already heard about is that it improves the ability to be able to respond to emergency events and provide tax relief for people who are under pressure as a result of emergency events—that makes sense. We’ve heard about the FamilyBoost—that makes sense. We’ve heard support from the Greens around the way in which crypto is dealt with in terms of taxation, and they like the Auckland Future Fund, but they’re still going to vote against it. Why are they going to vote against it? Basically, what both parties across the aisle have said is they want to see a wealth tax—they want to see a wealth tax. That’s the approach that they’ve taken.

Deborah Russell stands up and says that there is a giant, gaping hole in the tax system. Well, part of that is because our economy got so damaged by her very party. We now are paying something like close to $10 billion a year, and rising, to fund the deficit—to fund the deficit. That is just the interest cost on that debt. That is part of that giant, gaping hole. If we didn’t have to do that—it’s like a family with a mortgage versus a family without a mortgage: you’re a lot better off. So that is part of that giant, gaping hole, and that is part of the response to that.

Across the other side of the House, their approach is just to say, “Let’s tax more and more and more.” The effect of taxing more and more and more is going to drive business out of business. It’s going to mean that people who would invest in New Zealand are going to say, “No, I’m not going to invest in New Zealand.” So what that will do is reduce the size of the economy, all other things being equal. That is not what this this Government stands for.

This Government stands for growing our economy. If we grow our economy, we start fixing that giant, gaping hole that Deborah Russell was talking about, because we have more money to be able to spend on the things which we all want to do. We want to spend more on health. We want to spend more on education. We want to spend more—actually, we want to have a high-quality lifestyle. We cannot do that by taxing our economy into the floor. That is what we’re hearing from the red party and the Green Party over there. They talk about growth as if it is a bad thing. But it is not a bad thing. That is what we have to do if we are going to remain a First World economy with high living standards and good quality services. What I heard, particularly from Deborah Russell, was, “It’s a good bill, but it’s not good enough, and therefore we are going to vote against it.” To me that seems to be a particularly strange approach, a very unproductive approach.

The other thing I heard from the Green Party: this bill simply confirms the tax rates and the tax brackets which have already been agreed through the Budget process. Now, you might not like those, but this is giving effect to those processes. Francisco Hernandez stood up and said, “Well, the people who’ve got the most money”—the higher tax brackets—“get a bigger tax reduction than the people who are further down.” Well, actually, all of those tax targets were about the lower and middle income at most. If you’re paying a whole lot more in tax, funnily enough, when you get tax reductions, it tends to benefit you slightly more, not in percentage terms—not in percentage terms—but in dollar terms. Funny that—because you’re paying a lot more tax.

Can I remind the people on the other side of the House that it’s only about half of our population that actually pays tax net of transfers—only about half of it. So those people at the top, the people you like to malign all the time, are the people who are paying the taxes. They might earn more, they might own more, but they are still paying a heck of a lot more tax than the people at the bottom who earn less.

This is a sensible, practical way of giving effect to decisions which have, effectively, already been made. It’s been through a thorough and rigorous process. I understand the Opposition not liking it, but it is a very counterproductive argument to say, “We like the bits that are in there; we don’t like the bits that aren’t in there.” Obviously, what we’re hearing from the Opposition is political speeches saying, “We want wealth taxes.” That is a message, loud and clear, that New Zealanders should hear: “We want wealth taxes, we want capital gains taxes, and we want to make sure that our economy is not a robust, First World economy.” This Government rejects that approach, and I would like to commend the bill to the House.

The next call is a split call with—

I guess I’m doing the first split.

—Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am particularly heartened by the fact that the other side of the House is listening very intently in terms of what the Greens’ vision for taxation is like, and I do find that heartening.

But let us just be very clear about this—and I think we do need to start off with some of the context—because we are in the third reading, and we do want to round up some of the conversations from the committee of the whole House stage. I think from the committee stage, one of the important things—and we discussed things around health and safety and emergency response. Those were key components of this bill which we did discuss. We did talk a little bit about FamilyBoost.

I want to just sort of mention in terms of the final-year fees-free scheme in particular, alongside my colleague Francisco Hernandez, the fact that what we are seeing is a policy that is ill-thought-out and will actually not benefit the students anywhere. Particularly when we are asking the Minister of Revenue about how the students are going to have that reimbursement if they go overseas and their interest rate was to be compounded as part of their original loan.

It seems like a lot of these sorts of nuances of our interest and loan—particularly in light of the fact as of next week, as of 1 April, we are going to be seeing New Zealanders overseas having their student loan interest rate increase by 1 percent, and the debt increase by 1 percent as well on the fact that they are already unable to pay for some of that debt. We are actually not getting that debt back. There is no evidence to suggest that the repayment has increased. We are actually just punishing our own people overseas. It is a concern when we are having a policy such as the final-year fees-free scheme which has not thought that part out, also, in light of record immigration of our young people to other countries because we have not given them the opportunities to stay in Aotearoa after they complete their degree.

That is a problem because we are taking—or more precisely this Government is taking—an austere approach to our economy. We have seen record numbers of unemployment. If unemployment is the growth that this Government is talking about, then, yes, we are seeing a growth in unemployment. We are seeing a growth in more homelessness, particularly in Māori communities. We are going to be seeing a growth in our prison population, particularly from Māori, as a result of the issues that we are seeing in this case.

But just in terms of when we’re looking at particularly this bill, and just to remind this House of some of those key stats that we have seen in the regulatory impact statement: the top 40 percent of people in Aotearoa will receive $1.6 billion in tax relief, which makes up 55 percent of the total relief package. The bottom 20 percent of Aotearoa, if you really want to look at—and you can talk about all of the pretty terms, of the fact this benefits low and medium income earners, but the bottom 20 percent of Aotearoa only will receive 5.4 percent of the relief package. That is not us making that up; that is in the stats and that is in the document that we have received as a part of this bill: 130,000 people will get nothing at all, and 8,000 households will be worse off as a result of this package. The top 311 households, as we know, hold more wealth in Aotearoa than the bottom 50 percent of the population.

These are numbers, these are facts, and this is what we mean when we say that we do not support this bill because what we want to see is a fairer tax system. It doesn’t necessarily mean that for some people we will be taxing more, but it needs to be fair and equitable. If we want to keep some of the money in Aotearoa as opposed to sending it overseas—just to give another example, Bupa, a retirement manager, as we have been told, made $900 million, but they paid an effective tax rate of $11,000. That is what we’re seeing when we don’t have a fair tax system. So we will not support this, because this is not fair for most people in Aotearoa.

I stand up here today, proud and sad, in some respects. I’m proud to support this, being the third reading of a bill which has had much deliberation, but sad because the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee’s father passed away in the early hours of this morning. So, whilst he can’t be here, I just want to acknowledge that loss of Cameron Brewer’s dad, David, and I know that David would be very proud of the big impact in a short amount of time that Cameron Brewer has made in Parliament, and now as chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. So, while the family grieves, on behalf of Cameron and his family, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I do want to acknowledge the previous speaker Ryan Hamilton’s condolences to the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, Cameron Brewer, and his whānau on the loss of their father. I do want to echo those sentiments. This is still a House where people work and we may have differences of opinion and show them across the House all the time, but, ultimately, we have families, and when family calls, that’s where we should be. I want to acknowledge the Brewer family and the whānau.

It’s been a really interesting period. Since December, I have attended 10 funerals. That’s a lot. They were between December and March, and in one week in December, there were actually four funerals that I attended. For some of these people, a lot of it is in relation to dying very young. You realise your age when your friends around you and people who are not too much older than you pass away. So I do want to just extend those further condolences to the families of the people that I’ve attended—including workers from this House, with Jenny.

My very good friend Marina, or Bino, Akavi—she was 49. She had three children who were between the ages of 18 and 23, and she died from bowel cancer. Now, the reason why I want to mention in particular our friend Bino and why she died from bowel cancer is that she was a Cook Islander. There are statistics out there that show that for people who get bowel cancer, generally you get it younger if you’re Māori or Pacific, and a really important part of treating bowel cancer is being able to get it quickly.

I want to acknowledge that there have been some changes to the bowel cancer screening programme and that this will help more New Zealanders. However, it is a fact that Māori and Pacific people die earlier from bowel cancer, and so we want them to be screened even earlier. The question, and why it’s related to this bill, is that when the resources are stretched and when finance and funding for Government services, including healthcare, are stretched, it is really important that Governments make the choices, backed by evidence, to ensure that the scarce resources that the Government receives through revenue and through the way that we tax revenue—whether it’s a levy in other Acts or revenue from within the tax Acts—that it is sufficient enough to deal with the choices that Governments have to make.

This is my concern and it’s why Labour is not supporting this bill. The main reason why we’re not supporting it is because it has provisions that include tax cuts, but those tax cuts come at a price. They come in and they limit choices made by Governments, and we can stand on this side of the House, in the Opposition and in the Labour Party, and we can fire across the House every day, as we do—sometimes we stand there gracefully and just accept the fire coming back—but we stand here, fighting for those choices for people who have no voice in this House, which is why we stand here in this House, why we fight for those resources, and why we fight for that funding.

As we’ve seen with this tax bill—because, again, it confirms the annual rates for the next tax year, because it has to be done through Parliament—it gives a tax cut. But the Opposition has clearly shown to the Government that through its choices, it means that services to the everyday public are being cut, because you have to pay for the tax cuts—you have to pay for it. If you’re going to reduce the income tax rates, it means that there is a hole in the Government Budget. It means that this Government has made the choice to cut services and funding for key things like healthcare, and I don’t need to repeat the amount of examples almost every day that different members of this House are asking the Minister of Health about. What about the mothers in this area, what about these cancer patients, and what about these patients who are having to wait even longer for their surgery, even longer at the A & E—which is now being replaced in many places by telehealth?

These are the choices you make as Government, and I can hear members on the other side saying, “Bring out the banjos. Bring out the instruments.”—say that to your constituents when they can’t access their doctor or when they can’t go to their doctor because their GP fees have gone up too high because this Government has made a choice not to fund GP services by more than what was required by officials.

What did you do for six years?

Then I hear—no, no, this is for the annual year. It’s quite clear that I’ve hit a bit of a sore point with Government members. It’s quite clear, because you can hear the interjections—because they don’t want to face their communities and say, “I’m sorry your GP fees have gone up because we chose to fund it by only 4 percent, even though officials were saying 5 percent.” It is an annual formula. It is an annual decision. Your decision to give tax cuts comes at a cost. It comes at a cost, and that is the cost of these decisions.

As we’ve heard from other members on this side of the House who have talked about that structural deficit, they’ve talked about the spending that had to be done during a pandemic. But I can still hear New Zealand First members piping up, so let’s talk about those tobacco tax cuts, if the members of New Zealand First really want to go there. The tobacco tax cuts, or the $2.9 billion that was given to landlords—these are all tax choices, and, again, it’s the confirmation of the annual rates in this tax bill.

You didn’t mention this in select committee.

And that member, who’s quite new to the select committee, says, “You didn’t mention this in select committee.”—Dan Bidois. You don’t mention this in select committee, because the purpose of select committee is to try and make a bill workable. That is the purpose of a select committee, and you’ll have your chance here in the House to defend your decisions to confirm the annual tax rates, to take more money out of Kiwis, and to take more money out of the healthcare system. Again, I remind the members, every day we are getting examples. [Interruption] And then we hear “More money for health.”, but do you know what? The assessment of the health budget last year showed that it wasn’t sufficient for inflation and it wasn’t sufficient for population growth, so it’s going to be really interesting to see how this year’s Budget is going to address a lag already for population growth and already for inflation.

But that will be a speech for another night, because, again, we go through this House fighting for the things that everyday people want us to fight for. They want to be able to send their kids on the school bus because it’s cheaper, they want to be able to see their doctor but sometimes they can’t afford it, and this bill, basically, creates the hole in which that Government had to make choices to take things away from everyday Kiwis, and what for? So that we can have a sicker population, so that we can have fewer people in jobs, and so that we can have fewer homes?

Do you know what, when you have this revenue hole, what they’ve had to do is borrow more money in order to cover the revenue hole, and it doesn’t make sense—it really doesn’t make sense—given that we’ve heard, time and time again, the Minister of Finance say that we don’t need to borrow for these tax cuts. It was pretty crystal clear in the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update that the Minister of Finance had had to borrow for those tax cuts, but, again, it’s all come at a choice. These cumulative choices that the Government has made have meant that we are standing here in the House not supporting a bill, because all the choices that those members have made since they’ve come into Government have had a huge impact on Kiwis. They have meant that more people are waiting and that they can’t afford their GP fees. [Interruption] Every member on that side of the House will have a chance to respond, but these are the stories that we are hearing from the different electorates which we represent, and these are all the different—

Which electorate are you in?

I’m still the MP for Mana until 2026. At least I know where Mana is, unlike Tim Costley from Ōtaki.

Therefore, we do not support this bill. It provides pitiful choices for everyday New Zealanders, and this bill is a travesty because it is creating a bigger hole in our revenue system.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30.

Members, the House is resumed. The question before the House is that the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill be now read a third time. There are four calls remaining. The next call is a National Party call.

Madam Speaker, thank you for reading that entire, long name of the bill for me. I’m standing to support and to commend this bill to the House. A little bit of myth busting, because our Opposition members seem to think that 3.4 percent of New Zealand taxpayers get most of the tax cuts and pay less of the tax income, but that is not the truth—they pay 30 percent of New Zealand’s tax income. That is, on average, $112,000 per person, compared to the remaining taxpayers, who are the 96.6 percent of taxpayers, who pay, on average, $9,000 per person. Regardless, this bill is to make sure that our tax system is more efficient, more up to speed, and more up to date for the modern society and for New Zealand as a whole, which will benefit all New Zealanders, no matter where you live and who you are. That’s why I’m commending this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to stand and speak in the third reading of this bill. Our spokesperson on this matter has already made Labour’s position clear that we will not be supporting this bill in its third reading, and highlighted how going through a strong democratic process has truly teased out these important matters that find themselves locked in bills like this. It’s easy to have a look at the title of this bill and think it only adjusts the annual rates. It makes mention of the emergency response matters and other remedial matters. But it is important, as we move to pass this—well, as the House considers this bill—that we make sure that those matters within the bill are interrogated. It is true that the devil is in the detail.

I want to pick up on a couple of points made by Government members in the third reading of this bill. The first point I’d like to make is regarding a New Zealand First member who said that Labour’s stance on this bill is, at least to their mind, unfathomable. I can’t recall the word exactly that he used, but he did say that he found it odd that Labour supported bits of the bill as it was going through the committee of the whole House, but, in the third reading, opposes the bill in its entirety. It is the right of the Labour Party and all parties in this House to take a considered position on this bill. But I do highlight to that member and his party: it’s a lot like saying, “We support the Treaty principles bill but it’s dead in the water.” It just doesn’t make sense, on a scale far greater and far more costly than the accusations that were put towards the Labour Party just before the dinner break.

So to this bill. We spoke at length about some of the emergency matters in this particular bill, about how it was designed to streamline the way that we are able to respond with respect to tax matters during emergency events. I know members canvassed it well, but I still want to place this caveat for consideration, as members consider this bill in its third reading but also its implementation into the future. And that is this: every emergency situation is unique. Now, it’s easy for one to say a flood’s a flood, a drought is a drought, or whatever, but the fact of the matter is every single one—and, Madam Speaker, no stranger on the West Coast—no flood is the same, no particular emergency is the same. As we consider the application of the parts of this bill looking towards streamlining emergency response and support, in particular with regard to tax and business matters around regulation settings, we must make sure that we continue to remind ourselves that there are different circumstances as we look towards emergency matters.

Another part in the bill is we look towards adjusting the annual rates, and we’ve heard a lot of figures in this House, on both sides, speaking of what’s in there, what’s not in there—how, if you tinker, it looks like this; how, if you had made wholesale changes, it looks like this. One of the firm beliefs I’ve always had, and I said it in my second reading speech on this particular bill, is that Kiwis just want to understand that when they work hard and they go about their daily business, the tax system is going to do what it does, and it does it well and it does it fairly. One of the challenges—and my colleagues have pointed out how, in particular, if you tinker around the edges, there is also the fear that many of our taxpayers or all of our taxpayers out in New Zealand continue to be far more confused by what’s happening as a whole; but also the minor changes around the edges that we see dotted throughout this bill.

Just in the final 40-odd seconds that I have left, it was spoken about the World War I war memorial in Le Quesnoy—Le Quesnoy? I’m pretty sure?

Le Quesnoy.

Le Quesnoy. I remember the Rt Hon Sir Don McKinnon was a big supporter of this particular matter, and I sat on a number of boards with him where he would continue to grab my ear and continue to talk to me about why this was an important matter. I was defence Minister at the time. I’m really pleased to see that that particular matter has come through this particular bill. But as I stated at the start of my contribution, we will not be supporting this bill.

The matters involved in this bill have been traversed extensively through this House. In fact, we spent more time at the committee stage in this House than we did in the select committee process, and all we heard from the committee stage is “More tax” from the opposite side. We are a Government that believes in an efficient tax system but, ultimately, a minimal tax system, and that is what this bill tries to do.

I commend the Finance and Expenditure Committee, of which I am a proud member, for doing the due diligence on this bill. I acknowledge and just want to shout out to my dear friend and colleague Cameron Brewer, who is dealing with the loss of his father today. Our thoughts are with you, Cameron. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to echo what my colleague the Hon Barbara Edmonds started with in her contribution: on this side of the House: we give our well wishes to the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, Cameron Brewer. It’s never easy to lose a parent, and our thoughts are with the whānau as they work through this.

My colleagues have stood in this House and they’ve made it clear that Labour won’t be supporting this bill, and we’ve made clear our reasons. Although it doesn’t look like it—it sometimes looks like a very dry, very technical piece of legislation, when you have a tax bill in front of you—it is in taxation legislation where the values of Governments really are laid bare. And that’s what we see with this bill. The Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25 Emergency Response and Remedial Measures) Bill is laying bare the values of this Government. We’ve heard members of the Government stand up and say that this is a bill that is about going for growth, despite the fact that, when the Minister was in the chair for 7½ hours in the committee stage, when we examined this bill, he could not point us to where the growth was coming in this bill; how we were going to create wealth in New Zealand. There is nothing in here. Seven and a half hours, the Minister had, to tell us where that was, and he couldn’t show it.

What we were able to drill down into—what we’re seeing in this bill—is the fact that there is not sufficient revenue to pay for what New Zealanders need. I think all of us have just spent a recess week back in our electorates. What have we heard? I’ve had people coming into my electorate office who are homeless. That’s not the celebration of saying you’ve reduced the number of people in emergency accommodation. This is now kids who are living in cars. These are people who cannot be housed. This is me going to visit one of my constituents in Hornby who had Kāinga Ora (KO) coming round to visit her that day because her KO house is now for sale. That’s the kind of Government that we have. Instead of building our public housing stock and people’s houses, what are they doing? They are reducing them.

Labour sold thousands.

Did you sell KO houses?

I can hear bleating from the Government benches that they are increasing it. No, all they are doing is building out the funding that Labour put in. What we saw in this Budget, from these revenue measures, was insufficient revenue going into housing, going into keeping New Zealanders safe in their homes, and providing them the most basic of shelter and safety that they need. So, when the Government talks about how many houses have been delivered, make no mistake: these were houses that were planned, contracted, and funded under Labour. It is from June 2025 this year that we will see this Government’s values come into play, and that is the fact: that their growth in public housing is miniscule. In fact, what we will see is again State house sell-offs, and I know because I’ve spoken to constituents who have had KO visiting them. So do not stand here and tell us you’re increasing houses; the Government is running down the funding that a Labour Government put in to make sure that New Zealanders had that security of a home.

I don’t think there’s one of us that sits in our electorate offices and doesn’t hear and listen to constituents talking about the health system. We had a Government, during the campaign, that waxed lyrical about how they were going to fix the health system. Well, I’m having constituents come in who are waiting longer than ever before to see a specialist. I’m having constituents come in who are going to face increased charges at general practice. I’m having constituents come in who actually just cannot access that health system. What are we seeing? We’re seeing just a constant barrage of headlines about a Government that is not generating sufficient revenue to adequately fund a health system. Instead, we’re seeing headlines about job losses within our health system. We’re seeing the fact that people on sick leave won’t be covered. We’re seeing that vacant positions won’t be covered. These are front-line workers. These are the front-line workers of our health system that are required to make New Zealanders feel safe when they enter their health system, not to have it run down.

What else have we seen? We’ve seen people that are losing their jobs, and we’ve heard in this House today—we’re reminded about Nicola Willis who gloatingly said that we’re going to see a reduction of people walking down Lambton Quay wearing a lanyard. What we’re seeing is thousands and thousands and thousands of construction sector jobs disappearing overseas because this is a Government that has got its priorities wrong. It’s got its priorities wrong when it comes to taxation. We’ve seen that: we saw tax cuts for landlords rather than actually stimulating a housing market. We’ve seen pulling back on infrastructure projects. And it is inevitable that those workers who are not going to find work—and secure work—in New Zealand are going to up sticks and they’re going to move to Australia, and they are voting with their feet. We are seeing that. We are seeing the loss of that, and we are seeing the loss of that because of decisions that this Government is making.

When it comes to that job security, something that New Zealanders should be able to rely on their Government to have their backs when times are tough, we’re not seeing it coming from this Government. Instead, there are tax cuts for landlords and there are tobacco tax cuts in the Budget. That’s what we’re seeing in terms of the priorities. Meanwhile, our health system is crumbling and is not being adequately funded, and we certainly are not seeing the investment we see in that most basic of need: a home for New Zealanders, to make people feel safe.

There are other cuts, and the Government is trying to dress up these cuts all over the show. One that I’m most aware of is one that has just occurred in Christchurch, where the Government came down—the Minister of Transport and the Prime Minister came down—and said, “Christchurch, you are so lucky. Our largesse is going to mean we’re going to reinstate a project we’ve cancelled.”—that Labour had fully funded. What they did not tell the people of Christchurch is that they were robbing funding that had been put in place to pay for improving the public transport system in Christchurch—$78 million that Labour had put in place to improve public transport in Christchurch—has been pilfered by this Government to pay for other projects. The people of Christchurch deserve better. They deserve both projects, because that is what Labour had delivered for them. All we’re asking—all we’re asking—is that they do no harm. They haven’t put any additional funding into Christchurch. All we’re asking is they don’t take away what Labour had already put into Christchurch. They are halving what the people of Christchurch are getting. National is not backing the South Island, and it certainly is not backing Christchurch.

More money than you did.

Instead of putting money in, it is taking away money that a Labour Government put there for the people of Christchurch, and any amount of yelling across the House that “it’s more money that you’re putting in” simply does not stack up. It is simply incorrect, and it is simply, at best, disingenuous to say that is the case. Christchurch people can count; they can see, when you take away funding from one project and then reinstate it by cancelling another, that it’s half of what you had before. That is exactly what the National Government is delivering to the people of Christchurch.

So, when it comes to what people should expect of their Government through a taxation bill, it is about generating enough revenue to pay for homes, to pay for an adequate health system, to make sure the kind of things that are going on—that we can have a place where people have security of work and feel like they aren’t going to have a Government that is going to start putting in measures that is going to cause them to up sticks and leave, like we’ve seen with 13,000 construction workers. And what we also think people deserve from their Government is for them to be transparent and honest about where funding is coming from. So, when you come to town and are delivering a funding cut, have the backbone to front up and tell people that’s exactly what you’re doing, rather than trying to dress up a funding cut—not you, Madam Speaker—as some kind of largesse, because people are not buying it. What we have is a Government that has laid clear its values. It certainly is not on the side of New Zealanders, and it is a Government that is letting down New Zealanders.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s an honour to be the final speaker in this third reading of the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill. I commend the bill to the House.

It’s an even bigger honour to be the final, final speaker on this bill. The reason that we reject this bill is that even though it has a technical sounding name and it has many, many technical elements to it—as we have heard through the 7½ hours of committee of the whole House stage—actually, the substantive part in the bill that would have afforded this Government to show that it cared for New Zealand is contained in Part 1, and they did nothing to make sure that they had enough money to look after the needs of New Zealanders.

I want to focus my comments on the key areas of jobs, health, and homes, because what this bill basically does is reinforce the movement from New Zealand to Australia of many of our most qualified people—including the 13,000 mentioned by my colleague the Hon Dr Megan Woods—who have gone to Australia or elsewhere from the construction sector because there is not enough money to be able to support the pipeline of construction projects.

When we look at health, there are numerous examples of where there has just been enough money in the last Budget to keep the lights on and there is no more money to support surgeries. We’ve heard this morning in the media about the Government contributing an extra $50 million to, essentially, buy private services to try and ease the waiting lists in the healthcare system because there has not been enough money put into health. The effective investment in health, despite what the Government says—and the new Minister Simeon Brown got it wrong and had to be corrected by my colleague the Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall about the funding for health—the effective amount of health that has gone in to all the regions is a cut of between 4 and 16 percent across each of the regions.

No wonder we are hearing the social services saying that there is just not enough money to provide the services that Government need—either through the Public Service or through the NGO sector—which the Government funds. That is clearly the message that I heard when I was at the seniors sector expo last week, where there were numerous Government agencies talking about cuts to the front line—what it meant for them—which was cuts to NGOs, cuts to the type of services they can give, for example, to support families who have had people impacted by stroke or other debilitating medical conditions. So that is the area of health.

We’ve got Dunedin Hospital—months and months of waiting to get a half-decent response on the hospital because there was not enough money from the tax take to be able to simply go ahead and give the southern region the hospital that it needed. And still today there is no solution for pathology in the Dunedin Hospital. In fact, there was a picket at the front of Parliament because the pathology unit is not in the hospital, and pathologists in the public sector do not get paid the same amount as in the private sector because some time ago, under a National Government, pathology was privatised.

This is the kind of direction of travel we’re seeing from this Government. Now, they could have corrected that in this taxation bill by simply making sure they had enough tax revenue to look after the needs of ordinary New Zealanders, but they’ve chosen not to do that. That is why we are seeing in the education system the school lunches debacle—trying to squeeze lunches down to something like $3 a lunch rather than the previous providers under the last Government where there was no problem with the lunches being provided. The Government has shown that it simply cannot afford to provide the services that were provided under the Labour Government and so instead it is moving to what I believe is a privatisation agenda.

Finally, we look at housing. Every New Zealander deserves to live in a warm, safe, healthy home. What do we have in Dunedin, in the Octagon? We have, at the moment, NGOs trying to get tents for people who are homeless living in the Octagon because of this Government’s cruel and shameful approach to housing.

Now, all they had to do was make sure they had enough tax take to be able to afford a baseline for New Zealanders to get the services they need. They had that opportunity in Part 1. They have failed to do it. This is all about choices, and they can say this is a technical bill but they have failed New Zealanders on this bill and that is why Labour very proudly does not support this bill. We will do better in Government.

on behalf of the Minister for Economic Growth: I present legislative statements on the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill.

Those legislative statements are published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I’m pleased to stand here before the House today for the third reading of the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill.

Regulatory systems amendment bills are a relatively recent phenomenon. The first such bills were passed in 2016, and around a dozen such bills have been passed to date. These bills are the seventh and eighth bills amending legislation administered by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), one of our largest regulatory agencies.

The current bills have been a long time in the making. Many of the amendments were agreed by Cabinet in 2019, and some of the changes came out of policy reviews done a decade ago. It can be a challenge to get priority to make relatively small changes to legislation, but these changes are important if we are to keep our stock of legislation up to date and fit for purpose. In that context, I note that eight regulatory systems amendment bills have been before the House in the current parliamentary term. I want to thank the Education and Workforce Committee and the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee for their thoughtful consideration of these bills, and submitters who suggested a number of improvements to the bills and raised issues for further consideration.

By their nature, regulatory systems amendment bills make minor changes that are non-contentious, so some of the important issues raised during consideration of these bills will require further policy work which may come back to the House in future. Between them, the two bills amend 31 Acts and associated regulations administered by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. In keeping with the broad span of MBIE’s responsibilities, the bills make a wide range of different changes. Some of the amendments will save businesses and other organisations time and money. Many of the amendments will allow MBIE, and other agencies, to operate more efficiently, ensuring greater value for money for the taxpayer. In the case of the change to the Health and Safety at Work levy provision, the ability for ACC to issue a single invoice will directly benefit certain levy payers by an average of $20 per year.

Many of the amendments will make legislation clearer and easier to navigate and more in keeping with the modern world. Several amendments will ensure that MBIE collects and publishes accurate information about people and organisations, and that MBIE is collecting the most relevant and useful information about people and organisations. Amendments to the Telecommunications Act 2001 will facilitate the continued uptake of fibre broadband services. Amendments to the Electricity Act 1992 and the Gas Act 1992 will make it easier to take account of technical standards that can be expected to change frequently.

Some amendments strengthen regulation where that is required to ensure that people are not unduly harmed by unscrupulous actors. For example, visa applicants can face significant costs when they are represented by unqualified and/or unscrupulous advisers, so tightening of a regulation here is warranted. In particular, the change is to the tighten up the regulation of immigration advisors. Other amendments to the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007 will allow some people with a good knowledge of the immigration system to become immigration advisers or to administer the regulation of administration immigration advisers more easily, and will make it easier to make a complaint.

Some amendments clarify important legal protections, such as the requirement that an employer hold copies of employment agreements, intended agreements, and terms and conditions of employment, and that these are readily accessible. Other amendments clarify entitlements such as the right to a pre-term baby payment, additional to entitlements to parental leave and payments.

While few of these amendments are individually significant or exciting, it is important that regulatory agencies continue to identify such changes, and they are brought to the House for consideration. This will ensure that we give sufficient priority to maintaining and updating New Zealand’s large stock of legislation, which underpins economic activity and is an important contributor to economic growth. I commend the bills to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Madam Speaker, thank you. We’re coming to the end of this beautiful journey that the House has been on with these two regulatory systems amendment bills—one on economic development and one on immigration and workforce. It’s been great spending time with the minutiae of legislative maintenance, which I think was first recommended by the Productivity Commission in 2014. They ran the ruler over this House’s legislation-making performance and concluded that there was a need, actually, to set aside a bit of time to review and tune up laws so that they could be properly and efficiently implemented. That’s what we’re doing here.

I wanted to reflect on the consensus that this bill has attracted as it’s gone through the House. It has widespread support, and there was a lot of consensus at select committee. Now, that’s characteristic of bills like this and, in this time, internationally, actually, when we see so much political polarisation in political systems, it’s important to note that there is substantive agreement across the House on quite a bit of the legislation that goes through this Parliament. Often the public don’t see that; they see the areas where conflict is at its sharpest. So, when you consider whole parts of the governmental agenda—I’m thinking security, for one; large parts of foreign policy—there is quite a lot of consensus. In trade policy, I think, there’s a lot of consensus. I think about my own area of responsibility, immigration policy; on the fundamentals of immigration policy, I think there’s a lot of agreement—I wouldn’t say across the whole Parliament; not all the governing parties are on board with those policy fundamentals, but certainly, I think most of the parties in the House—on immigration.

But I wanted to say that this bill, and the consensus that it has attracted—the support across the House—should not distract people or disguise the really fundamental political and ideological differences on many key issues in the political debate. When you think about it—between the Government and the Opposition; between the Labour Party, the National Party; between the left of politics and the right—there are some very, very stark differences at the moment. If you take, for example, jobs—and there’s a number of provisions in these two bills that we’re looking at here tonight that deal with employment policy and workforce—really, there is quite a big divide, policy divide and political divide, between the different sides of the House. This Government has, through a number of decisions it’s made, driven the country into a deep recession, far deeper than any of our major trading partners, and it’s only just beginning to emerge from that.

We’ve got 5.1 percent unemployment at the moment in our communities. I see it on the streets of my communities in West Auckland and the damage that that level of unemployment does to people, to families. It undermines the wellbeing of our communities. This Government deliberately laid off 5,000 public servants and stopped dozens and dozens of construction and infrastructure projects. Then they wonder why demand collapsed in the economy and suddenly every tradie, every small business, is looking around, going, “Where’s the work? Can we actually make payroll this week?” For a party like the National Party that loves to talk about economic growth, they’ve done more than any Government in living memory to actually destroy economic growth in the first 18 months that they’ve been in office, and it’s our communities and it’s our people who pay the price for that.

Housing is another interesting example—and Megan Woods made some very, very perceptive comments, I thought, about housing. It’s quite interesting: there are some parts of the housing agenda where there is quite a bit of cross-party consensus, around the need to reform the zoning system to allow our cities to grow, to tackle the financing and funding of infrastructure that enables urban growth. But, actually, alongside that, there’s a massive debate and a clashing of the views about, for instance, the importance of public housing. With this Government, one of the most important things they’ve done in housing is take $1.5 billion out of the maintenance and construction budget of Kāinga Ora. In West Auckland, where I’m from, they have stopped several hundred houses from being built. There are vacant sections that were slated for new housing developments, and National deliberately decided to stop the construction of those projects.

At the same time as that, they have stopped—cut off—the provision of emergency housing, so that, right now, if you do not have a roof over your head, if you have nowhere to sleep tonight, and you turn up at a Government agency like Work and Income and you say, “I am homeless. I do not have shelter. My only option is to sleep outside or in my car.”, you are likely to get turned away or given a lecture and a flea in your ear by Work and Income New Zealand—

And that relates to the regulatory systems bills?

Well, Madam Speaker, housing is one of the most important parts of our Government’s delivery, and I’m sure there are some aspects of, if not the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill, the other one, that relates to housing.

We’ll get back to that, then, shall we?

I use it as an example of what a huge difference in approach there is between our two Governments, regardless of the fact that, on a bill like this, on the little things, we agree. But, actually, where it really matters, there’s a huge debate, and we are seeing rising levels of homelessness in our communities right now—people who simply don’t have anywhere to go and are sleeping in their cars because of decisions that that Government has made, because they think that actually reducing the waiting list is not something you do by building extra houses and putting a roof over people’s heads; it’s by telling them they’re no longer entitled.

I also wanted to say that, in relation to the Charitable Trusts Act, this is very important, because there are many organisations who do much of the front-line work in dealing with homelessness who are charitable trusts, and the kind of governance reforms that you see in the regulatory systems amendment bill in relation to charitable trusts will have a significant effect on these organisations, and we rely on them. I was visiting one of them last week in my electorate, who told me exactly what is going on with the emergency housing that they provide. They are having so many people who are coming directly to them, desperate to get a roof over their heads, and they’re being turned away because of Government policy, because the gatekeeper role that Work and Income New Zealand plays means that they are, essentially, disentitling people to the kind of assistance that, on this side of the House, we think is a fundamental human right. The other really striking example in this area is health—

Rather than examples, can I ask the member to come back to the bill?

Yes—OK. Let’s talk about the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill provisions in relation to the Employment Relations Act, which is, you know, a useful thing, but we’ve seen so many reforms in the area of employment relations—

Oh my word!

Yeah, it’s fine to support this, but, actually, what about the destruction of fair pay agreements, which would have given low-paid workers in New Zealand, at last, the opportunity to bargain to get a decent wage and conditions at work? It’s very important that we remove ambiguity in the current wording of the Employment Relations Act—that’s a worthy thing—but, actually, at the same time, we saw members on that side of the House, only days ago, voting against a bill that criminalised theft by employers against their employees. And there are so many other examples in the employment relations area where people on the side of the House we’re looking at over there are so out of touch with what New Zealanders want and need. Regardless, we do support this bill.

The member’s time has expired. It was a great general debate speech—thank you, member.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. So, yeah, this is the third and last call on behalf of the Greens—well, 10-minute call on behalf of the Greens; we’ve got a five-minute call coming up—on the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill that we’re looking at.

There is a reason why this has been relatively collegial and consensus-building. It is because the amendments here are relatively non-controversial. I do want to reflect before I go into the detail of the bill that there is a reason why we can’t agree on some of the fundamentals, like, for example, whether housing should be a human right, whether people should have level incomes, and that is because there are ideological divides in this House that prevent us from doing so. But at least we can come together for the maintenance of our legislation that we have in front of us.

What we’re looking at here were updates to a piece of legislation including the Electricity Act 1992, the Employment Relations Act 2000, the Gas Act 1992, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007, the Mines and Rescue Act 2013, and the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987.

During the select committee stage—if I reflect back to that—we didn’t get a massive amount of submissions. But I think we particularly got submissions that we engaged—in these changes to the amendments to Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007. Before I go into reflecting on those, I wanted particularly to commend a former member of the committee—Camilla Belich—who while I was quite focused on the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007, she was very focused on issues relating to the Employment Relations Act 2000, and the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987.

I think, as I said in the second reading, what bills like this can help do as well is to bring a collective subject area expertise into bills, because, at the end of the day, as legislators, we have limited reach and knowledge. That’s just the reality of the human experience. But, actually, by working as a group you can actually put your heads together and focus individually on bits of this Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill that we each have a connection to.

When it came to the amendments to the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007, the bill itself looked at issues like whether we should have a 12-month stand-down period preventing former Immigration New Zealand officers from being licensed as immigration advisers in the two-year stand-down period—preventing them from being employed by the Immigration Advisers Authority. I wanted to touch on that because that was the subject of debate by submitters. I think there were some good debates being brought to us around the fact that the reality is that Immigration New Zealand officials—well, former immigration staffers—do hold knowledge around the internal processes of Immigration New Zealand that, say, an immigration adviser wouldn’t have, had they not worked in that space previously. It is acknowledged that gives them a competitive advantage.

But at the end of the day, there’s also the reality that when it comes to immigration advisers, their role, ultimately, is to help navigate people through quite complex immigration processes. In some ways, one could argue that, well, yes, people could have a competitive advantage if they came straight off working at Immigration New Zealand and then working as an immigration adviser, that that competitive advantage ultimately results in better outcomes for the people that they are meant to serve. So, for that reason, I think that was a quite a sensible change that was made.

There were also other issues that were being brought by submitters who hoped that we could also aspire to take a deeper look at the issue of offshore immigration advisers. This is an area that continues to be massively unregulated. As somebody who works with a lot of constituents who have been on the receiving end of really poor advice by immigration advisers onshore and offshore, what I can say is that submitters did want us to have a much deeper look at the reality that that area continues to be massively unregulated. The end result for everyday people who are receiving offshore advice is that they may end up paying a huge amount of money only to then realise that, actually, they were not supported to get the right visa, or they were promised, for example, false jobs that didn’t exist, and that has a real impact on people’s livelihoods.

My message on the third reading to the Government in relation to this part of the bill is that the Government does look—because even though, at the end of the day, it ended up considered to be outside of the scope of the bill, those contributions at the select committee stage, my message is that we do look and the Government looks at regulating offshore advisers to the benefit of our communities. Ultimately, it also benefits local communities too, because no one wins when we have people who are entering our country in debt or in hardship or with a wrong visa due to those professions overseas not being adequately regulated.

There are also other issues that were considered around that part of the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act, such as clarifying that persons are prohibited from applying for a licence to be an adviser for the duration of an order preventing the person from reapplying for a licence made by the Immigration Advisers Complaints & Disciplinary Tribunal, and other issues such as expanding the person subject to restriction of being licensed to include a person convicted of an offence under the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act. This is important because, as I’ve mentioned earlier, we do have incidents where immigration advisers have not acted in good faith, or have acted negligently and, again, turned people’s lives upside down.

I worked with a Brazilian couple, for example, whose case ended up being in the media as we were trying to do a ministerial intervention. They were some of the people who had been done by an immigration adviser who acted negligently. I think to me, tightening the screws of ensuring that the people who are in that profession actually are held to really high standards is really, really important because the advice that they give can be life changing, and in some cases, if not given correctly, can be life ruining.

Then there are other issues in that area around clarifying that employees of a lawyer or law firm are exempt from the requirements to be licensed. The way I would see that is in relation to recognising that expertise; extending the circumstances in which the registerer must cancel the licence where an adviser is no longer fit to be licensed according to section 16 and 17 of the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act; as well as modifying interim court orders which allow advisers to continue to provide immigration advice to act as a stay on the relevant order or decision being appealed.

There are other issues that have been brought forward which have to do more with the Immigration & Protection Tribunal. Those are really important as well because at the end—pardon?

You don’t have to.

That’s OK. At least I’ll take a much more substantive contribution than I’m sure members on the other side will make on this. But at the end of the day, what we’ve got is tightening the screws on the processes that are available for people and for advisers to ensure that the profession is acting really, really well.

I do want to briefly comment on the other components of the bill—I think of other members of the Education and Workforce Committee who focus on areas in relation to the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act. Obviously, as the committee report talks about, it creates amendments to clarify and update statutory provisions to give effect to the purpose of the Act and keep the regulatory systems up to date and relevant. That also sparked a conversation around what else it is that we need to do in relation to making parental leave equitable. I acknowledge that some of those contributions by submitters not just in the immigration space could have been deemed as being out of scope.

But I actually think the contributions that we receive from members of the public when we have a bill that looks at such broad pieces of legislation should, I think, still be taken into account by Government when they look at what other reforms they need to do. I think, to me, just using language like “non-controversial” and “to modernise pieces of legislation” misses an opportunity to actually capture important feedback from members of the public and legal experts on what else the Government needs to put on their agenda. So I really hope that the Minister in charge of this bill—the Minister for Economic Growth—and other Ministers that would be overseeing the other relevant bills affected by this take the feedback from the submitters and put that in the legislative work programme where it is suitable so that we cannot just do these kind of non-controversial amendments but genuinely improve legislation to serve the needs of our communities.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of ACT to support these two bills which are being debated together: the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill.

As we know, these two bills are omnibus bills, and it was through the agreement of the Business Committee that we decided to debate both these bills together. These bills make small fixes, but these fixes are important fixes. As time goes on, as technology advances, as we change our ways of doing things, there are many, many provisions, on an ongoing basis, in legislation that we have to change, and that is what these two omnibus bills do.

Listening to the previous speaker, Ricardo Menéndez March, one would think that these bills are just about immigration, but, actually, these two bills amend 31 Acts between them, and all these Acts are actually administered by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. We know that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has a huge portfolio and they implement close to 150 pieces of legislation. So 31 Acts; we are talking about close to one-fifth of the 150 pieces of legislation that we are improving, because, with time, we know that some regulations or some provisions may become irrelevant, so they need to be removed. There might be some provisions that need updating—that needs to be done. We want to make sure that legislation is clear and that people—those who are interpreting it, those who are implementing it—have good understanding, and because the provisions are clear, we are not causing any unnecessary cost to businesses or regulators. So those kind of things need to be kept in mind, and these kind of changes need to be made.

In my second reading speech, I talked about the changes that we made in the select committee and the feedback and the submissions that we received from submitters, so I won’t repeat that. One thing that is really good is that I am on both committees that considered these two bills. I chair the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, which considered the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill, and I’m—

A hard-working committee.

That is a very hard-working committee, thank you, Dan Bidois. I’m a member of the Education and Workforce Committee, which considered the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill.

As I mentioned before, these two bills are not just about immigration. If we just look at the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill, it amends 24 Acts, and these Acts are across five portfolios: commerce and consumer affairs; science, innovation and technology; media and communications; justice; and energy. The Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill amends seven Acts across three portfolios: immigration, workplace relations and safety, and energy. We want to see that these changes are implemented as soon as possible, so I won’t take too much of the House’s time. The ACT Party supports these bills. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand on behalf of New Zealand First in support of the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill. I was on the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee with Parmjeet Parmar, and it was a very efficient select committee. One thing I would like to also do is thank all of the staff, actually, who assisted us in understanding a lot of the technical changes in these bills. Now, they are small changes, across these two bills. However, collectively it does make very important, big change. It creates more clarity, cuts red tape, and streamlines processes that are identified over time. There isn’t much more to add. I would just simply like to commend the bill, on behalf of New Zealand First—both bills. Thank you.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pika, otirā tēnā rā tātou, e te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mō te Pāti Māori i te pō nei. Ka reo Māori katoa tōku nei kōrero, i tōku nei kauhau hoki. Koinei tōku wā tuatoru kua kōrerotia ki tēnei o ngā pire. Hākoa te moroiti o tēnei pire, kua panoni i ētahi wāhanga i roto i tēnei kāwana, waihoki i ngā pire tae atu ki ngā rautau tahi mano iwa rau. Nō reira e tautoko ana mātou Te Pāti Māori i tēnei pire. Ko ētehi o ngā pire ka whai i roto i te ohu pakihi, waihoki i roto i te MBIE i raro i te wāhanga tekau mā rua o te Public Service Act 2020. He moroiti tēnei pire ki a au nei. Tētehi o ngā wāhanga e kaha taunaki i tēnei o ngā pire, ngēnei pire e rua, aroha mai, ko tā mātou pakihi Māori i roto i te ahumahi tāpoi. Waihoki, ko tā rātou mahi ka whai pēhitanga pai ki roto i te taiōhanga i roto i tēnei o ngā, arā koirā te kupu mō te economy. Nō reira ko ā mātou pakihi Māori e kaha tutuki ana i ngā wawata o te wā, hākoa ngā āwangawanga o te ōhanga o tēnei rā tonu.

Nā reira e mihi ana ki ngā pakihi, e mihi ana ki te ohu o MBIE, e mihi ana ki te Minita, a Matt Doocey, e kōrero ana ki tēnei o ngā pire. E tautoko ana tō mātou pāti. Tēnā rā koutou.

[Greetings to the Speaker, and to everyone in the House. I stand to voice the sentiments of the Māori Party tonight. I will speak te reo Māori only at this time. This is the third time I have spoken about this bill. Although it is only a minor bill, it impacts this Government and other bills from the 1900s. Therefore, the Māori Party supports this bill. Some bills relate to the business sector, that is the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), under Section 12 of the Public Service Act 2020. This is only a minor bill, in my opinion. One group that fully supports these two bills are our Māori businesses in tourism. Furthermore, their task is to apply good pressure in the economy. Therefore, our Māori businesses are fully meeting the aspirations of the time, in spite of the economic worries of today.

Therefore, I thank the businesses, the people at MBIE, and I thank the Minister Matt Doocey, who speaks for this bill. Our party is in support. Thank you.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, as well, in support of these two bills: the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill. Now, first of all, I want to say that although during the committee stage there weren’t a lot of things that we felt needed to be discussed in depth—because, again, both of these two are really technical bills that provide quality of life within our legislative system—I was very heartened by one particular Minister’s response, saying that clearly us Opposition are not working hard enough by examining bills in detail during the committee stage. So I will be taking that advice to heart in every bill that we are seeing under urgency this week.

But to begin with, in terms of the immigration and workforce bill—and I kind of want to talk to both of them in turn. I think one of the areas—there are a lot of quality of life improvements, like I mentioned. It amends seven Acts and it went through the Education and Workforce Committee.

But one of the things that I really, really want to focus on, and I mentioned this during the committee stage as well, is the changes to the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act 2007. One of the things I pointed out specifically which I think should be in the scope of this bill is the inclusion of offshore advisers for student visa or other forms of temporary visa as part of the requirement to be registered with IAA—or the Immigration Advisers Authority. The reason for this is that as we’re seeing that post-pandemic and our borders opening, and me coming from a background of having worked in international education and having worked with educational agents, I know for a fact that when it comes to international students—who are incredibly vulnerable when they are applying to an overseas institution—the most exploitation that we do see of international students is with predominantly offshore educational agents.

Now, Australia has had a system in place for a long time now whereby immigration advisers offshore must also be registered and there must also be a compliance process for these immigration advisers that’s up to the standard, as required by the Australian regulatory system and legislation. We are not seeing the same thing here. With the concern that we want to see more international students as part of, I guess, our immigration reset or etc., we are also going to be, as a result, seeing more exploitation of international students because we have not offered that particular protection.

That is also really concerning and really problematic: when a student arrives onshore and they realise that their agent didn’t apply them to the right course or has given them misinformation, or the private training establishment that they are part of also didn’t give them the qualification or has other nefarious reputations or ulterior motives. It is really, really, really hard for us as a country to say, “Well, sorry, you’ve been scammed. There’s nothing we can do about it.” when, in fact, through the changes that we can see in such a regulatory systems bill, we could actually make those changes to give those kinds of reassurances but also accountability and quality assurance to offshore educational agents. So that’s the big part that I want to mention in terms of the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill.

But in terms of the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill, like one of the previous speakers mentioned, this bill does amend 24 Acts. It is something that is quite comprehensive and it covers a lot of different portfolios as well. Again, these are things that are incredibly necessary within our regulatory systems to be able to upgrade all of them to ensure consistency. But it’s interesting that this is sort of the bill that gets introduced in the House with reasonable frequency, but people kind of talk about it from the perspective of, like, “Oh, look, we need to cut red tape. We need to cut green tape. We need to cut all of the tapes.” But, at the same time, you can say all of that that you want, but these sorts of bills and the quality of life it provides are still really important. But if other people are politicking, I also think that it’s really, really important that we do have those sorts of regulations in place that are robust, that can give the people of Aotearoa the reassurance that they need in anything that we do in our day-to-day lives.

So, yes, as a matter of fact, in that case, regulations are incredibly important; regulatory systems are incredibly important. It’s something that we should be looking at where we just sort of hack and slash in that particular system, because the bottom line is they are important to our society. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise in support of the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and associated bills. These are sensible pieces of legislation that tidy up a lot of small changes, in many cases, to many different bills. I was on the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee as we considered this legislation. There were many useful and interesting parts to it, and the advice that we had was excellent, so I thank very much the staff that were able to advise us, as well as the submitters on these bills. I commend these bills to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Once again, one of these types of bills deserves the kind of scrutiny that these particular bills and the previous bill, the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2024-25, Emergency Response, and Remedial Measures) Bill, have had, not just in the House but through the select committee. I’m encouraged, as I read the legislative statements and a number of the comments from across the House, how well the committee worked together. You can see that in the legislative statements to the House this evening in its third reading, where recommended changes by the committee were considered and actually put in place and implemented. That doesn’t always happen that way, sadly, in our democracy, but we certainly try our best. I think that’s been fleshed out quite well on a number of matters because these are technical, these two particular bills—and I’m going to address each one separately.

It is important, though, that we don’t lose sight of that detail, and I want to start, first and foremost, by speaking to the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill. We’re the Labour Party and there are some assertions on the other side of the House that they’re the party for the worker. Well, we laugh in the face of claims like that and can say that the Labour Party quite proudly stand by our record in supporting workers and workplace safety.

Now, this particular bill does make a number of changes in and around workplace safety that must be scrutinised to make sure that when people leave their house and kiss their whānau goodbye or get on with their day to go to work, that they come home safely. There are a number of things in this particular bill that will look to make some minor adjustments around the way that instruments can be used to measure certain aspects through the workplaces that are defined here—namely the electricity suppliers but also gas suppliers and others. It’s important to make sure that we scrutinise those correctly in order to make sure families who have loved ones go to work, come home in the evening.

Out of curiosity, over summer I read a book around the history of the goldmining boom in New Zealand—predominantly in the South Island, of course, but other places around New Zealand. One of the points that the historians made about the boom of the goldmining industry in New Zealand was part of it was replicated on some of what was done in Australia. One of those is what they call “tourism mines”—“tourism mines”. The reason they did that was sometimes to save costs: you bring tourists in, allow them to think that they’re out there and they’re prospecting for the opportunity to, as a tourist, discover gold or get their small nugget or their flakes of gold, and then be pleased with their outing. What that did for those who owned the permits—owned the titles for particular areas of the river and other places where they were mining for gold—was they would use that to then scale up their opportunity, in turn, from the tourism mining operation into a full-blown commercial mining operation. It was quite a tried and true method.

Why I reference that is there are the amendments in Part 4 in the Health and Safety at Work Act in this particular bill that specifically reference this, then clarifies the difference between a “tourism mine” and a fully commercial mine. We’re going to keep an eye on this because we know that mining is on a strong part of the agenda of this particular Government, and so we want to make sure that as we look towards safety and making sure that the very precious tourism industry—

Where was the Labour Party founded?

—that we have in the country, as well as the priorities that this Government have already been quite clear on with mining—the lines aren’t blurred. I think that’s really important because we know and we’ve seen it in the past and the historians have said this, that it was very lucrative.

I hear “Where did the Labour Party start?” Of course, it was in Blackball and it was because of mining. So it’s only our duty to our heritage and our whakapapa that we continue to look at these matters.

Another particular one that I know the Labour Party—and other parties in Parliament—have worked hard on is the immigration licensing matter. All of us, as members of Parliament, have been approached by certain sectors in our community who continue to speak of their unfair treatment. Some have spoken of how they’ve put their trust into a particular person to manage their immigration applications and visa applications—and, in fact, paid their entire life savings to get those things done for either themselves or their family—and have only been ripped off. That’s certainly something that members in particular this evening have already made comment on, and they’re important as well.

I come now to economic development, so the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill. Having read through this particular bill, I can say that there are a number of things that were started under our final term in Government, and I’m really glad to see that some of them have been carried into this sort of omnibus bill, if you will. Some of them are quite sensible, but some of them will continue to leave a question on the table and certainly on the conversation tables in our community. Those are around the changes to the charitables Act and the Incorporated Societies Act.

Madam Speaker, you’ve been involved in matters like this in your community, but also in your experience in the House, here, where there have been attempts to make fundamental changes to the Charities Act and the Incorporated Societies Act. For whatever reason, some of those organisations will continue to ask the question, “Well, why weren’t those fundamental changes made?” I do think that is a question that will have to be answered at some point in time. But in this particular bill, they do make some sensible adjustments and some minor incremental steps, if you will, towards what could be a possible answer to those questions about incorporated societies and the Charities Act.

Another part in here which I found quite interesting was one of the very simple—well, seemingly simple—in Part 13, where it speaks to the amendments to the Heavy Engineering Research Levy Act, a rather old Act which is 1978. I can hand on heart say it was before I was born, but it is important. The reason I say this is because one of the things it does there—it says removes gender-specific pronouns. Gender-specific pronouns are very hot topic—a very hot topic—at this particular point in time. I’m wondering if this Government’s signalling to the House and indeed the New Zealand public whether or not they’ll be taking a ruler, line by line, across Acts old and new and recent about looking towards, “Well, what does this mean?” Because we’ve had some strong rhetoric from the Government; we’ve heard terms such as “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and all these other things, but it seems pretty sensible here. But what does this signal to the community? That’s one of the points I want to make here for the House this evening.

Another one, as I looked across this and coming back to the incorporated societies, there was a recent omnibus bill that Minister Potaka had brought to the House that made some changes around the charities and the incorporated societies and how it related to, in particular, lands that were held under te ture whenua Māori. Now, our colleague Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, in her very good contribution this evening, made reference to the way Māori business operates and what does this mean with respect to the way post-settlement governance entities (PSGEs) have established themselves because not all of the land or asset base that they—in fact, very little of the asset base—control is governed by te ture whenua Māori. So it requires and behoves the House to look at these particular matters with keen interest.

We say that also as it signals the intent of this House when we think of upcoming matters such as the Resource Management Act that will continue to cross across boundaries, if you will, on PSGEs and matters of incorporated societies and charitable trusts. So we’re keen to continue to look towards those particular changes and make sure that we can give it the due consideration that is required.

Once again, in this particular bill, there was clear goodwill and hard work in the committee to make sure that some reasonable and sensible select committee recommendations were taken on board, and I want to acknowledge the Education and Workforce Committee for doing that. Some of them, once again, easy tidy-ups; others of them will make incremental steps which will ultimately have to be answered in a more fulsome way and fulsome question by either this Government or future Governments as they arise.

We do support these bills in their third reading and we look forward to continually working in that collegial way that we’ve seen across these two bills that I’ve mentioned this evening.

Excellent, thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a great honour that I rise to speak in this third reading of the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill. A lot of these two bills has been traversed already this evening. Of course, we have a whole range of legislation here in New Zealand, and often some of these pieces of legislation need to be brought up to date. These bills make changes to 31 different Acts, including the oldest, from 1908, and I think the latest one is from 2002. They’re all really sensible changes, therefore I’m happy to commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, e te Māngai o te Whare, otirā tēnā tātou katoa i tēnei pō. E tū ana awau mō te Pāti Reipa ki te whakaae i tēnei pire, arā [Greetings to the Speaker of the House, and to everyone here tonight. I stand on behalf of the Labour Party tonight in support of this bill], the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill, Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill—geez, Madam Speaker, you’re probably going to ring the bell already after just reading that!

Hoi anō rā e te whānau, I am here on behalf of Labour to support this bill. As you all know, I am the proud MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, and several times I’ve stood up to acknowledge that Ikaroa-Rāwhiti is the food bowl of Aotearoa and therefore heavily productive and heavily dependent on having a really good workforce. This legislation is quite broad, but amongst other areas, obviously one thing that stands out for me is migrant workers. As a member of the Primary Production Committee—which I leave, very sadly, hoi anō, to move on to other equally exciting committees and portfolios—I heard throughout the rohe from various industries, including the wool industry, about the value of migrant workers and ensuring that we create positive work environments for them. So my contribution is not just about supporting industry but, of course, supporting our kaimahi we bring to Aotearoa and ensuring that they have good experiences in return for the quality mahi they do, that naturally contributes to our economy.

Sadly, my colleague the Hon Peeni Henare alluded to some of the negative experiences some of our kaimahi have had, and as tangata whenua I think it is incumbent upon us to ensure that when they come here to work for our country, we provide excellent manaaki for them—furthermore, not just for the worker but for their communities and the whānau that they bring with them. That has been an issue experienced in Tairāwhiti, sadly, and throughout Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and, of course, throughout Aotearoa.

One of the other positive aspects of this bill is perhaps the clarity it will provide for employers and agents who bring, effectively, these manuhiri who come to make Aotearoa their home and contribute to our economy. I’m not up here just scathingly talking about employers and agents. Perhaps some of them purely need clarity, and the amendments in this bill can provide that.

Furthermore, talking about economic growth, however, I think we have to think about the fact that I’ve said in this House before: growth starts at the roots. We are the roots of this country, and we need to think about how we develop our own workforces and our own communities’ capacity and skills throughout Aotearoa. So that’s why I want to bring up, once again, progressive procurement and how disappointing it is that the opportunity, I think, has been lost. We see firsthand the direct impact that progressive procurement made on the expansion of the Māori economy, and I think if one of the focuses here is on economic growth, that’s an opportunity lost and something that I think we should all reconsider.

Hoi anō rā, I am very happy to commend this legislation for the protections, supports, and positive impacts it will have on the economic development and growth of Aotearoa. So, on behalf of Te Pāti Reipa, tēnei anō te mihi atu ki a koutou. E tū ana awau ki te tautoko i tēnei pire.

[So, on behalf of the Labour Party, I thank you all. I stand here in support of this bill.]

I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise and speak on the Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill. I see harmony has broken out across the House and everybody is in agreement that these are very good changes. So, with that, I commend the bill to the House.

David, oh—Reuben Davidson.

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Early in the evening.

It’s my pleasure to stand up and take a call—lucky it’s a 10-minute call—on the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill and Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill. I am rising to speak in support of these bills. I did want to acknowledge the very sage words of one of my parliamentary colleagues, who called this a beautiful journey, earlier this evening, in his opening address to this bill. Part of that beautiful journey is because there is consensus in the House, and there was at our Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee. But that consensus and that shared support isn’t always black and white. One of the issues with this bill and with the issues that this bill addresses is that the very people it serves are seeking, from bills like this, certainty. The risk, when these bills contradict what’s been promised or leave open opportunities for uncertainty—then that puts some members of our community and some people at a disadvantage.

So I want to come back, as one of the final speakers, to the summary of what this bill is. It is an omnibus bill that contains amendments to legislation administered by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. The four points are: reducing unnecessary compliance burdens for businesses and implementation costs for regulatory agencies; clarifying and updating statutory provisions to give effect to the purposes of the principal Acts and their provisions; addressing regulatory duplication, gaps, errors, and inconsistencies within and between different pieces of legislation; and responding to the changing environment—for example, by ensuring that legislation responds to changing technology or is technology-neutral.

That’s really good, that that’s the aim: to provide what I’ve spoken of earlier—certainty—but it’s not necessarily the reality. That lack of certainty—and other members have spoken of this, too—is often what we see in our electorate offices around Aotearoa when people come to us with sometimes complex and sometimes what should be quite straightforward and quite simple immigration cases. Because of shifts and changes and because of contradictions, some of those very simple immigration cases can become very confusing, and, more importantly, they can become deeply painful for the people going through those processes. Every week, I have examples of that—obviously, I’m not going to go into people’s personal details about the complexities of the cases that come—but also about some of the promises that were made prior to the last election around some of the types of support for immigration and immigration visas that have not been kept in this term of Government. I think that the very human conversations you have with the people, on a weekly basis in our electorate offices—who are deeply and painfully affected by promises of action and, after the election, complete inaction in that space—are very, very sad to see. That, ultimately, comes down to the choices of what this Government is choosing to prioritise.

I want to read a passage from an article that was published on RNZ’s website—Radio New Zealand’s website—earlier in February, about thousands of overseas parents whose children have immigrated here who are waiting for news on applying for residence, and others are hoping for quick news on a long-term visitor visa to stay with their families: “More than 10,000 migrant families have submitted applications—on behalf of one or two parents—which are in a random ballot to be selected every three months. If they win a spot in the random ballot, they can apply for residence to settle here.” Now, the really tragic part of this is that the reporter goes on to detail that there are families who have been spoken to by RNZ who’ve had parents die while they’re waiting or become so frail that they cannot travel or they no longer qualify for that visa, on health grounds. I think that’s deeply disappointing, to see that the opportunity here in this bill was to go further and to move away from some of that grey uncertainty, and provide real clarity for those people and make good on promises that were made.

Now, another thing that I wanted to talk about here—and this is about immigration in the opposite direction—is about some of the other choices that this Government has made in this term around things like housing and around cuts to health and not being able to provide the basic services that all New Zealanders deserve. In one of my communities, deep cuts to the school lunch programme, which sees terrible, terrible meals being delivered to schools, if they even turn up in this community—we sat down to have a conversation around the table with one of those children in one of those schools. We talked to several children, and we asked them what they wanted to do when they left school. One of those children’s answers was to move to Australia. That is the aspiration. That is what happens when you don’t look after people and when you don’t provide the kind of support and services that all New Zealanders deserve.

Now, I want to get back to the point of certainty, which is what I think this legislation should be providing and what we’re not seeing—what the grey creates and what should be simply black and white. I want to reflect on what happened last week, which was that our Prime Minister took a trip to India. That was quite the contrast to the lack of certainty we see here. There were banquets, there was cricket, there was a handshake, there were promises of real-time free-trade agreements and direct flights. I have to say, I haven’t seen our Prime Minister looking so happy for quite a long time. One of the reasons that I thought—because on reflection, I thought, why is our Prime Minister all of a sudden looking so happy? I realised this is probably the furthest away he’s been from those unhappy voters who backed him in the election and now have buyer’s remorse. All of a sudden, he was having a holiday and he was getting some time away from those people, but no sooner had he returned, still—

Just like you’re going to return to the bill very shortly, aren’t you?

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Thank you for your consideration. I’m coming back to the point of immigration here, because that was one of the key pillars of the regulatory systems immigration—I’ll read the full title, just to make sure for members on the other side of the House it’s not lost on them—the Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill and Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill. One of the key things that it deals with is immigration. That was one of the main topics of conversation, with regard to the free-trade agreement being discussed on the Prime Minister’s happy holiday.

No sooner than the Prime Minister returned to New Zealand: “New Zealand First’s Winston Peters,” it says here, “sees no need for a relaxation of New Zealand’s immigration settings in any trade talks with India.” If anyone wonders who this Mr Winston Peters is, he’s the man who claims he made Luxon Prime Minister. Yes, that man. On Morning Report, on the Monday after the Prime Minister returned from his free-trade agreement negotiations, Winston Peters said India “had the biggest population in the world now—1.4 billion people. Do you really think Immigration New Zealand is going to help? Get serious for goodness sake.” So the man who claims to have made the Prime Minister the Prime Minister doesn’t support the very thing that that man needs to have in place to be able to get his deal over the line. That’s why a bill like this needs to give people the certainty that in grey times, in changing times, there’s some black-and-white structure in place to give them the certainty they deserve.

That was a long 10 minutes—for a bill that is unanimous in the House. On this side of the House, we are really keen to drive productivity and growth and efficiency. With that, I commend these bills to the House.

I present a legislative statement on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill to the House.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I’m very pleased to present this bill to the House for its third reading. This is Parliament’s third attempt in about three or four years at introducing oral fluid testing for drugs at the roadside. Hopefully, it is third time lucky, because I for one do not want to be back here in 2026 or 2027 or 2028, legislating again to bring New Zealand into line with many other jurisdictions that see drugs out there in the community and want to make sure that people who get behind the wheel are not on drugs, because we know that they’re a major factor in many road deaths and serious injuries. We had a go back in 2022, but the approval criteria was incompatible with commercially available devices. We’re now making sure that police are equipped with roadside oral fluid screening as a road safety tool to enable the enforcement.

The way I think about it is it’s a little bit like breath testing for alcohol. They’ll be able to stop any driver of a motor vehicle to administer an oral fluid screening test—a key part of deterring drug-driving, making sure that people can be tested anytime and anywhere. A driver who tests positive on the first screening test will be required to undergo a second screening test and to provide an oral fluid sample for laboratory testing. Two positive screening tests triggers a mandatory 12-hour stand down from driving to address any immediate road safety risk. An infringement notice is only issued following a positive laboratory test. The Minister of Police will set out in notices what qualifying drugs, or families of drugs, will be tested for at the roadside and in the laboratory. The requirement for two positive screening tests before a person is stood down and a positive laboratory test before an infringement offence is committed are measures to address concerns about the accuracy of the devices. These devices have been used in Australia for many years. Two tests have 98 percent accuracy.

There were changes in the committee of the whole House stage, resulting in changes to the way oral fluid samples will be able to be collected for future independent analysis. This allows drivers the option to challenge the infringement notice issued following a positive laboratory test by paying a private analyst to test their oral fluid sample.

The Government’s moving quickly on this bill. We expect Police to be ready to implement the bill by the end of this year, once it becomes an Act. Before it is rolled out, they will have to procure and approve the devices and the laboratory services, and they’ll have to train police officers and develop regulations to support the regime. But it is a good step forward. I think many people will welcome it. As I said at the start of my brief remarks, drugs are a contributor to many deaths and serious injuries on the road, alongside alcohol. Now, of course, we will soon have a method of testing for drugs on the road. And I think we will look back in five to 10 years and we will say, “What was the fuss about? How crazy was it that you could be high on weed or coke or meth—”

MDMA.

Oh, “MDMA”, says Tom Rutherford.

Butterick told me!

Oh my! Tom says Mike Butterick told him. I’ll just be a bit careful about what I say here, particularly in relation to Tom Rutherford, the youngest member of the National Party caucus.

It doesn’t actually matter—the point is drugs can impair your driving, and the idea that you could be high and drive is nuts. Up until this law comes into effect and is implemented, there is, essentially, nothing to stop you doing that—certainly not in the law, or certainly not any ability to check that. It’s a good bill. We’ve worked pretty hard on it, and I’m looking forward to seeing its passage through the House today. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure this evening to take a call as the Opposition’s transport spokesperson on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. This is a piece of legislation that Labour supported at first reading; was very constructive, I believe, through the select committee process; and supported at second reading. We did have some issues that weren’t resolved at the committee stage, but, despite that, we come to third reading and as a party we will be supporting this bill this evening.

It’s interesting, just listening to the Minister outline the Government’s belief that this will prioritise road safety. It’s interesting because, at the same time, of course, this is a Government that is not responding to the needs of communities when it comes to road safety, in relation to lower speed limits in communities where they have called specifically for that. So it is interesting to hear that from the Minister. But I do hope that the rationale, which is one based on road safety, is one that is one to be enjoyed by the House this evening.

When we step back and have a look at the impact of drugs in the systems of drivers of motor vehicles in New Zealand, it’s very clear that the data and the statistics indicate that a significant proportion of serious injuries—and, need I say, fatalities—are easily attributable to that particular criteria as well. That’s why, when Labour was in Government, we sought to introduce roadside testing. We had a very clear view that procurement should not be what drives this legislation. It’s something that has been expressed, I think, at all stages and did become perhaps more apparent through the select committee process: that this is a piece of legislation that, I still believe, should not be driven by decisions around procurement but should be taken from a principled approach as to how things would be rolled out and what is the right thing to do.

That is why, up to this point, Labour has been deeply concerned about the concerns that have been expressed right throughout by the Attorney-General around the potential breaches that an individual who might be going about their normal business, any day of the week, any time of the week, would be, effectively, detained at the roadside. This is something that we were hopeful the Government during the committee stage would not only turn their mind to but actually give some serious consideration to making some changes. It’s something that was contained in the select committee report, by all members, and the reason as to why there was no specified change in the select committee report is because we were not in a position, given time, to land ourselves on what an appropriate time limit would be, nor were officials able to provide the committee with what an appropriate level of time might be.

For the benefit of folks perhaps at home, what we’re talking about here is if someone is going about their business on any day of the week and they come across a random checkpoint, a police checkpoint—as they will experience when it comes to alcohol breath-screening tests at the moment—and it is for the purpose of a drug test, under this legislation it is possible that they could be detained at the roadside for any length of time, because the bill as currently drafted has no limitations on how long someone could be detained. It’s something that the Attorney-General herself did raise.

There is only one other piece of legislation in this country when it comes to land transport where there is a time limit, and that’s 15 minutes for the police to, effectively, detain someone for the purposes of establishing their identity. So there is precedent for this in legislation, and so it is disappointing that the Government and the Minister didn’t actually follow through on that. I am hopeful, though, given there is a review period and the review must be commenced within a five-year period, that the Government would look at the implementation of this bill and turn their mind to sort of time considerations to address the specific concerns that the Attorney-General had raised. I want to just really stress that these were concerns that were brought to the committee’s attention and brought to parliamentarians’ attention by the Attorney-General. The concerns that Labour has had and expressed through this process have been a direct result of the concerns that she has raised. So it is disappointing that we have landed there.

There are some really interesting changes that have come through as a result of this being in front of the select committee. One of the things that didn’t change is the nature of the consultation by the Minister of Police, who would be the person who needed to be satisfied that these would be devices that could, basically, detect a list of families of qualifying drugs. The change in the legislation is that the Minister no longer has to be satisfied that the threshold would be met at a level that there was impairment to be followed through. That is an extremely high threshold, in terms of the nature of the devices being approved for that purpose. So we would have liked to have seen the opportunity for the Minister of Police, in this circumstance, to be able to consult with others outside the Minister of Transport and the Minister of science, if that was the case indeed.

One of the interesting things that this bill does also provide is a pathway for the police to engage the compulsory impairment tests. The select committee heard from the Police that there is an undertaking to sort of roll out the numbers of trained individuals that would be able to administer these tests. If we are in rural communities where it might take some time to get a trained compulsory impairment test person to the particular site, that does cause some limitations in itself. So it is pleasing to see that there is going to be a pathway that’s available to the police there.

I have no doubt that the police are well-intentioned in this space. Actually, I spent Saturday night out with my local Palmerston North police, and they do a fantastic job. But there is a concern that there needs to be limits that are baked into this legislation that provide certainty around liberty, and the ability for folk who are just going about their normal business of the day or night to be able to do that. It’s really interesting that the ability for someone to elect for an independent analysis at the lab was something that was a new addition. I want to thank submitters for identifying that and the committee for bringing that in, because, as it stood as originally drafted, there wouldn’t have been that ability for someone who might have an issue with the laboratory process to independently seek—at their own cost—to have their sample tested. And then, of course, it needs to be bio-verified and authenticated in a laboratory. But provided that was followed through, then that was another safeguard within the legislation.

One of the interesting things that we’ve heard from the Government is that they intend to roll this out by Christmas. I hope that this is a procedure and a bill that’s really implemented in communities in a way that’s safe. That procurement is something that still needs to be worked through, and, again, I really don’t like the sense that procurement is what drives legislation. We should be looking at what good legislation is and then procurement falling within that. But I do hope that—you know, the Government have indicated they want to roll this out by Christmas; that’s not a very long runway. I hope that there is a lot of confidence in being able to do that.

But I also hope that whilst this is being rolled out in communities all around the country, there is also an ability to be able to collect the information for the review process that will follow, because one of the changes that we have seen with this bill is the review would have undertaken quite an explicit list of aspects—for example, the impact that this legislation may have on Māori and Pacific communities, which is something that submitters did raise. That was taken out by the Minister’s amendments. So I do hope that the review is able to be undertaken in a way that really does address and turn its mind to some of the real issues that were raised at select committee that haven’t been worked through in a fulsome way, in my view, by the committee of the whole House.

So, as I say, this is a bill that will be important, because road safety is absolutely important. As I’ve said, that is the reason why Labour, in Government, sought to do something about this. This legislation passing—if not tonight, then tomorrow—will be a further step towards ensuring that roads are safe and that communities are protected. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to oppose this bill for a number of reasons. But I want to say, first and foremost, that, yes, everyone should be free to travel around their communities and around our country without risking death or serious injury, and we can have that transport system that is free of death and that serious injury. Yes, it is true that no one should ever drive while seriously impaired. It puts themselves and others at risk. However, there is a lack of evidence that this bill or the drug-driving regime will address the root cause of dangerous or impaired driving, or of drug harm. I just want to unpack some of that, and what we observed in the committee stage.

I think one of the first things is the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill has often been equated with drink-driving, but the thing is, we must understand that the way that we quantify and look at drink-driving in terms of the interaction between ethanol and our body and our digestive system is vastly different from the myriad of drugs that have been discussed in this particular bill.

Indeed, in clause 4, when we’re looking at qualifying drugs—or a “family of qualifying drugs”, under the definition—one of the things that we did try to explore during the committee stage was around the idea of what it means when something shares a substantially similar chemical structure, particularly in light of benzodiazepine or amphetamine. Unlike ethanol, there are a lot of different compounds, particularly for medicinal uses. So, for example, anxiolytics or, potentially, central nervous system stimulants for ADHD treatment are some things that can have that particular chemical compound, particularly when we’re looking at benzodiazepine and having similar structures, which benzodiazepine, for example, have in terms of having both a benzene as well as a diazepine ring structure in its chemical structure.

The other concern that we have, for example, is the inconsistency when you’re talking about pharmacological effect. So, again, pharmacological effect is when we’re looking at the interaction between a particular drug or particular substance with the human body, and particularly when we’re looking at what is considered the first-pass effect through the liver. But when we are looking at some of these clauses—let’s say clause 12(3), which replaces section 64(6)—we’re looking at the idea of the proportion of the drug in the system. It is not simply about impairment, and it doesn’t take into account that certain people process certain compounds faster than others. So, naturally, we are seeing—again, unlike ethanol—possibly a discriminatory effect when we’re looking at people being stopped for these sorts of tests. I think nothing in this bill finds itself with the baseline of impairment, because a lot of these come down to the proportion of the available drug, or the proportion of a qualifying drug, in a person’s blood.

So it does beg the question, from the very definition of qualifying drugs: are we looking at a discriminatory element, especially when you’re looking at someone who is having certain mental health issues which will require certain drugs being administered—or, indeed, who has certain neurodivergences, such as ADHD—not being a part of this? We’re seeing that even in the primary Act, under Schedule 5. For what is considered a qualifying drug, it actually determines the amount that should be present in the system.. But this bill, again, doesn’t actually show those amounts, and we have no indication and no clarity from the Minister of Transport on when that Order in Council will be made that clarifies the actual amount within that, in terms of families of qualifying drugs. The example that I gave during the committee stage was bromazepam, which is anxiolytic, but it does share a similar structure to benzodiazepine, but it’s not currently in the schedule of the primary Act, so we do need to have an amount that’s specific to this.

The other concern—and it also ties up, in general—is that, indeed, very rarely, do we see a bill that fails the BORA test, and that’s the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act test here in Parliament. This particular one does require the Attorney-General to produce a section 7 report. But I think what has been quite a disheartening factor about that is even though there is a section 7 report that has been done on this, there are a number of sections which I think would have been pertinent for the Attorney-General, and also for the Government, to consider under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and which have not been considered as a result.

To give an example, when we are looking at—for example, I gave a couple of cases on this particular issue. One of them is the Taylor v New Zealand Poultry Board case, which was from 1984 and went all the way up to the Court of Appeal, which very much challenges the very essence of natural law theory and particularly the presumption against self-incrimination. Indeed, this particular one touches on the BORA principles in sections 23(4), 25(d), and also 27(1), none of which were explored as part of the section 7 report, despite the fact that, again, we have a section 7 report as opposed to a consistency report against the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

This is a serious concern because, for many of us, we know that, under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, we have natural rights under natural law, one of which, the presumption against self-incrimination, very much doesn’t allow one an absolute right—potentially, if you want to argue that—against self-incrimination. By having a police officer pull you up and force you to take a test, that very much touches on, some would say, one of the fundamental rights against self-incrimination. I think one of the things that has been particularly evident in the Attorney-General’s report as a result of this was actually that, yes, maybe one could argue that, on balance, particularly if you are applying section 5 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the limitations, maybe there is a reason for us to limit that particular right. However, we have also seen that the oral fluid test cannot prove impairment. That’s one of the major issues because it is not like alcohol, where the relationship between breath and blood levels is more strongly correlated with impairment. Yes, there may have been some things that have been said in terms of the accuracy of this particular oral test, but, to be honest, it doesn’t actually offer the same level of reassurance as what we’re currently seeing in terms of the breath alcohol test.

The other thing that I want to mention as also part of the same vein in terms of potential challenges in terms of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act is actually a very recent case where the ruling just came out a few days ago, which is aptly named Lawrence v New Zealand Police. This is a High Court ruling that talks about when a person—in this case, Mr Lawrence—was stopped by the police. He was allowed to consult a lawyer, as your natural right is to consult a lawyer. But one of the things that the officer failed to consider is that under section 23(1)(b) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, the right to consult the lawyer also requires the right to privacy, as in you are supposed to consult the lawyer in private. Because of the fact that the police officer just happened to be in the car with Mr Lawrence at that precise time, it also meant that that particular test was considered inadmissible in court because of the fact that the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act had been violated.

So we are actually going to be seeing a lot more potential challenges when it comes to this. With regards to clause 27 of this particular bill where it talks about how an enforcement officer must forbid a person to drive a motor vehicle for the 12-hour period if the person fails or refuses to undergo an oral fluid screening test without delay, one of the other things we haven’t managed to get clarity on during the committee stage is what “without delay” actually means. I think what it does is it opens our enforcement officers up for a lot of legal challenges under the court of law.

So, to sum up, the Green Party will not be supporting this. Not only, from a pharmacological component, have we not gotten the reassurance that—when we’re looking at qualifying drugs or interaction of drugs or even drugs that are available for certain treatment of anxiety and neurodiversity—it has the protection for those people, but we’re also seeing some severe challenges in terms of the fundamental New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, both through the section 7 report and also through some of the case law that I’ve expressed.

But there are other ways to deal with this. I just want to leave in saying that unsafe speed is actually a factor in more fatal crashes than alcohol or drugs. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party to speak on this third reading of the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. It has been traversed by many others in the House, but I will do so again: driving while impaired is a dangerous activity on the road, and that is what this bill is trying to address. It’s not good enough for New Zealanders and their families to go about their lawful business on the road and have the risk of someone who is seriously impaired through drug-driving also sharing that road and creating a danger for all of us in this country. Serious impairment is something that needs to be picked up on, and the best that we can do right now is with the tests that we have. This bill is also supposed to repair something that has been in place already, and the Labour members have spoken on it, and we’ve had a bill of a similar nature trying to achieve a similar goal in 2022. It wasn’t, despite the good intentions of the time, able to achieve that, and so this bill is in place to try and remedy that situation.

I was on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which examined this piece of legislation, and as has been traversed, again, there were some issues raised at the select committee. On one of those issues, I took the opportunity to speak to the Minister who introduced this bill, to raise my concerns about the time which someone could be delayed from undertaking their lawful business on the side of the road and also the ambiguity around whether that person could be required to accompany a police officer to a further location than what would be deemed necessary by any reasonable person. I have been reassured, and something in the statutory review in the bill has reassured me, that we will be able to address this issue and others in future, because, as the select committee said in our commentary, we think that the statutory review process of the bill needs to happen. Our request for the Government is to consider further whether this bill should include a time limit in which enforcement officers may require a driver to remain stopped.

This bill contains within it a statutory review, which must be undertaken between three and four years from this bill passing, and I think, at that point, there are quite a few issues which do need to be traversed. Some have been traversed tonight; some, I’m sure, will be brought up by other members. But, for my part, I think some serious attention needs to be given to the time which a New Zealander or a visitor to our country can be delayed from going about their lawful business and how far they can be expected to remove themselves from an unsafe area, and whether that has been properly accounted for with the new knowledge that we have. Part of what the select committee was unable to make our decision on was the lack of options around suitable time frames. That was fair enough. The officials told us, “We don’t know what the procurement’s going to be right now, so we’re going to have to build some of this into the bill.” OK, we’ve accepted that, but that means, when the statutory review comes up, that’s the right time when this stuff needs to be taken into account.

There was one other issue that I think should be in the statutory review, and that came up during select committee, and that was the regime of random testing. Randomness was acknowledged by the officials as a euphemism for a strategic approach that can be applied through operational planning. It doesn’t mean random—just pick up every 20th car—it means that Police will use a strategic approach on how they operationalise this. I think that this House would see it as quite important that that also is included in the statutory review.

So, with that out of the way, I think it is important that this bill passes, so that New Zealanders can have confidence that, when they go out on the road, they are doing so amongst a community of safe drivers who are not impaired. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. I just want to follow my colleagues, mostly from the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and say thank you to them and to the other members who doubtless will speak shortly for the hard work that they’ve put together and the collegial work that they did to bring this bill to where it is and to recommend a number of amendments to the House, many of which are part of this bill.

This bill is about road safety. We’ve already had Tangi Utikere talk about road safety in a broader context, and road safety best practice usually would say that’s about safer roads and roadsides, about safer speeds, about safer vehicles, and about safer road users. This bill is about the safer road users part of that because drug-driving we know is a major problem on our roads. We had 289 people who tragically lost their lives last calendar year on the roads. That is the first time below 300 since 2014 and, actually, according to the Automobile Association, is the lowest per capita rate of death since the 1920s. But it is still 289 people who died on our roads, and that is 289 too many.

Of those, 64 had drugs in their system, and a further 32 had drugs and alcohol in their system. So there is no doubt that drugs are playing a significant role in road death and injury. That is why this bill is here. This bill aims to put in place a drug-testing regime. The whole purpose of that is not so much to catch people but to discourage people from consuming drugs, being under the influence of drugs, and then driving, and then potentially causing death or injury to themselves or to other people.

As we’ve already heard, the previous Labour Government saw this as a problem and had a crack at fixing it. The intention was good. The problem was that for the regime that was put in place, the technology just simply doesn’t exist to be able to do the testing at roadside and be able to determine someone effectively guilty at roadside, because the technology is not there.

So what this regime does is, instead of doing that, it says we do a screening test at roadside and then we do a laboratory test to say, “We’re going to fine you.” That laboratory test is recognised as being much, much more robust. So the advice that we had from the experts was that they couldn’t stand behind the accuracy of the roadside test—the oral fluid test. It’s pretty good, but it’s not perfect. There’s always that issue of saying—whether you like the numbers or not—it is better that 100 guilty people go free than that one innocent person is convicted. So I guess that that is what that thinking is about. But what they did say is that they would stand behind the lab test as being just as good and just as accurate as the blood test, which we already are familiar with.

So this regime puts in place that two-stage mechanism. The bill is based, in theory, on random, but random, as you’ve heard my colleague Cam Luxton say, actually is a bit targeted. It’s targeted to places where, while it is in theory anyone, anywhere, anytime—that’s true—it is likely to be operationally targeted. Part of that is because the number of drug tests is going to be very, very much less than the number of alcohol tests that are done at the moment. But it is still intended as a deterrent.

Look, that does take me to the one issue which did exercise the select committee and also, as we’ve already heard, the Attorney-General, and that is in the first instance, before somebody’s been tested—they’ve not been found guilty, there’s no behaviour, and there’s no evidence of drug taking at this stage. There may be later on, after they’ve been tested. But before they’ve been tested, what rights do they have? Now, the Attorney-General said, “You’re stopping somebody. You’re detaining them for a period of time. You are taking a saliva test, so there’s some level of intrusion.” So the Attorney-General and quite a number of the submitters expressed concern about that. The select committee spent some time thinking about that.

So, look, I just wanted to put on record that this was a concern that we raised. There was exploration of whether we should suggest a time limit by which the testing should be done. Look, I understand why there isn’t one that the Minister has taken up. Part of that is because, while Tangi Utikere said we don’t want to be led by the technology which is available, the reality is that until we’ve got technology, we don’t know whether it’s a 10-minute process, a 15-minute process, or a 20-minute process, and allowing for some time left over to make sure you do that process properly. So I understand that; any time that we’ve put in there at this stage would have been a bit random. But we were concerned—and I did want to put this on the record—about the potential length of detention. We were concerned, also, about the 12-hour stand down, which occurs, essentially, if you’ve tested positive at the roadside—you’re still going to get that 12-hour stand down, even if the lab test says “No, you’re actually in the clear.” So there’s an issue there. But it is an issue about road safety, so we thought that that took primacy over the inconvenience of that 12-hour stand down.

There were concerns expressed about prescription medicines, but I think the answer to that, really, is to say, well, look, if you’ve taken a prescription medicine, most of those things say to give yourself a reasonable length of time before you actually drive after using a prescription medicine.

The other one, as Cam Luxton also said, is the issue around accompanying a police officer. What we really anticipated there was that if you’ve pulled over on the side of the road, the police officer might say to you, “Look, we want you to move to a safer place.”—so you’re not on the road itself; you’ve moved off the road—rather than taking you 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or whatever it might be to a police station, particularly in the rural areas.

Look, we were concerned about the power of the State, I guess, and the Attorney-General said that as well, and we want to make sure that’s exercised properly. One of the things we did do was to say that we wanted to make the process more flexible, so we allowed the police to flick between the oral fluid testing and the existing good-cause-to-suspect regime. But, really, what I wanted to finish off with was to say, despite all of those concerns, which we want to put on record, those things, I think, can be dealt with by the process, which is in the legislation, of monitoring, of reviewing, and then, potentially, of changing as a result of those things.

I think, to put on record, these are the things which we think the executive of the Government should be paying attention to. With that, I think it will be a good regime. It will be a step forward for road safety, and the monitoring regime, hopefully, will provide—or we expect will provide—the protections for civil liberties and for our people. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Greens to give our last call on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill for tonight. I just want to say that I think, on principle, everybody here has acknowledged that impaired driving can be an issue and it can result in harm. Whether this bill actually addresses impaired driving is a whole other issue.

To me, the previous speaker, Andy Foster, gave us a lot of good reasons as to why we should be cautious about this bill, and there’s actually a lot of really good, valid reasons that would lead us to believe and argue that this is not the solution to the problem. One of the issues that was identified by the previous speaker was the sort of technology that was emerging in relation to having accuracy in those roadside tests, including in the laboratory. That is an emerging area that is developing. I think the problem is that we’re having legislation being introduced where the technology is not fully there, when we actually do have experts who have told us about the initiatives that can be put in place at the community level to reduce the harm that substance use can cause. So if the concern that we have is that drug use can result in harm—in this case, by people actually going on the road while being impaired—that can be addressed right now with the evidence-based stuff that we have available at our disposal. That needs to be funded by the Government in order for us to minimise the harm of substance use.

As many have identified—including the New Zealand Law Society, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, and the New Zealand Drug Foundation—this bill fails to address some key issues, such as actually ascertaining whether a driver is impaired, which is very different from whether a test actually registers that there’s a substance in someone’s body. This is a really, really important distinction that needs to be made. There were examples of how medicinal cannabis, for example, could cause people to return a positive test while having no signs of impairment. That actually disincentivises people from seeking medical treatment when they need it, out of fear that they may face repercussions. While those penalties may not be put in place until the lab test comes back, actually, even the roadside testing may result in people being prevented from driving for 12 hours. That cannot be understated as a harmful effect of a piece of legislation that is not grounded in evidence. Those 12 hours could have quite severe real-life implications for people.

The previous speaker spoke about the randomness, I guess, of how this may be administered. But what we do know, and the evidence can point at this, is that, actually, Māori and Pacific communities are already disproportionately targeted by our authorities. So the reality is that because we do have that systemic issue within our Government agencies, what we will actually be seeing is the targeting of those communities in this piece of legislation when they’re already targeted in other parts of the system. When people are already profiled based on their ethnicity or socio-economic background, for example, and associated with drug use, I just cannot see how this bill—when it cannot present a robust, evidence-based argument for, for example, how accurately the technology that we’ll have will deliver a positive result when it comes to impairment. Yet we’re relying on the authorities to make calls in relation to roadside testing that will actually reduce harm in our communities.

If the Government was so, so serious about reducing injuries and deaths on the roads, what they would not be doing is campaigning on increasing the speed limits and taking selfies to celebrate increases in speed limits. Those are the things that actually can make our roads safer. Those are the things that are grounded on evidence. If the Government wants to reduce the harm that substances cause, I think we need a Minister in charge of issues that has a track record of actually campaigning based on the best research available. When we have Ministers that have shown very little knowledge on issues relating to the evidence when it comes to health, I think it is concerning to see, then, a Minister championing an issue that will actually not deal with the real harm that substances can cause in our communities, that can result in death. This is why our communities deserve far better than a dog-whistle bill that doesn’t address the fundamental, underlying issues that can lead to harm in our communities.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the hard-working members of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee—past and present—of which I am a member, for shepherding this bill through the House. In particular, my colleagues Tom Rutherford and Grant McCallum, who have been replaced on the committee, but, no doubt, did a lot of work on the select committee—as did others from around Parliament: Tangi Utikere, Andy Foster, Cameron Luxton, and other members.

I think a lot of issues have been traversed tonight on the importance of the substance of this bill that we’re looking at. I think most of us here acknowledge the importance of making sure we keep our roads as safe as possible, and doing as much as we can in a practical sense. I’ve listened intently, as I’m a new member of the select committee. I’ve listened to the debate and it’s quite clear to me that there was a gap between rhetoric and intent and actual delivery on the ground. That is what this bill actually seeks to achieve: to develop a mechanism and a policy that can be operationalised so that police can go out there—as you will well know, Mr Speaker—and apply the best tools available to keep our communities safe.

I am certainly well and truly supportive of this bill. I do want to acknowledge, yes, there were many issues that have been raised in the last few speeches. But I think that is why there is a five-year review of this bill. I am encouraged by, particularly, my colleague Cameron Luxton, who did raise some serious concerns through the select committee and has reassurance that through the five-year term the bill will be revised and improved even more. So, with that, I commend this bill to the House.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. First of all, I would like to note that there is a level of disappointment on this side of the House that the Government have not supported imposing a time limit on how long those drivers can in fact be detained at the roadside, because we know, as per the report from the Attorney-General, that this would have mitigated those concerns raised in that report. It sought to have a 20-minute time frame for drivers to be detained for the initial oral fluid screening test. We would have liked to have seen the ability of the Minister of Police to have the option of consulting with any other Ministers, in addition to the Minister of Transport and Minister of science, if that was considered to be appropriate.

Saying that, though, look, we continue to support the bill, because it is about road safety and it is about making sure that people who are impaired are not endangering our roads, as they currently do. I would like to highlight the point that it’s good we’re having this legislation coming into place as soon as possible, because what we’re seeing in New Zealand right now is an absolutely unprecedented level of methamphetamine use. We do know, through anecdotal reports, that those driving for long hours can use methamphetamine in order to keep awake if they’re required to, and this is incredibly dangerous for other drivers on our roads. Given the fact that in a period of just 12 months, we have seen a 96 percent increase, in the waste-water testing that Police released just last Friday—so that’s in a 12-month period—we are seeing record levels of methamphetamine coming over the border, finding its way into organised criminal networks, and then being distributed across streets and communities in New Zealand. If people are taking methamphetamine 96 percent more than they were a year ago, the risk of those people driving on our roads impaired has increased as well. So it’s timely and appropriate that we have the ability for police to stop and check and make sure that someone does not have those substances within their system, if they are in fact in charge of a vehicle on our roads.

It’s good to see that this legislation is progressing. It builds upon our support for the fact that police can already conduct those compulsory impairment tests on drivers if they have in fact good cause to suspect that they could be impaired or the driver could have consumed drugs. The introduction of roadside screening tests is a sensible, practical move that will enable roadside testing to detect those drugs and help remove impaired drivers from behind the wheel. It’s good to see also that there’s a five-year review period, because we know that one of the holdups, really, to getting this under way quicker is the fact that we want good, reliable technology that gives results that can stand up and be verified in the lab. We want to make sure that the technology that this legislation is relying upon is in fact in place, and we know that technology can move rapidly. So this is an area where, in five years, we may well see new technology developed that is far more refined and accurate than the existing testing system.

The way I understand the existing testing system to work is that once a positive test has been confirmed, once that goes to the lab, what it will detect is families of drugs. In terms of amphetamine, an amphetamine would show methamphetamine; it would also pick up, potentially, ADHD medication.

Also, there are other types of medication that are classified as an amphetamine that would be classified and picked up in that area. Similarly, when we have opioids as a family of drugs, tramadol is a synthetic opioid and would be picked up potentially similarly as to heroin, one being potentially legally prescribed; one being an illicit substance purchased on the black market. So I think what will be very interesting to see as these cases are picked up by this new legislation—they will proceed into our courts, and we will see instances where they’re being challenged as to whether it is an illicit drug that has been consumed or whether it is in fact a prescribed drug, and whether there are clear instructions on whether that person was able to be operating a vehicle or not once taking that particular prescription drug.

So I think this is going to have a series of effects that will run down the line and impact on how doctors are potentially prescribing and taking a lot more care about thinking whether this would turn up in a roadside drug-test, and I think it will give people a lot more consideration as to how prescription drugs are being used.

It will also impact upon those people who take medicinal cannabis, for example, with cannabidiol (CBD) and THC full-spectrum oil being used and prescribed as medicinal cannabis. People should quite clearly with tetrahydrocannabinol not be using a vehicle, but there are instances where CBD is in a low level in the system—whether that will be picked up and found as having cannabis within the system.

So all of those instances will need to be refined, and, to be quite frank, I don’t know that we know exactly how this is going to work until we get cases of police pulling people over, testing them, turning in a positive test, going to the lab, and then finding out whether the courts have ruled that is in fact a driver that’s impaired. Those are the things that we’ll need to work through as we watch how this legislation rolls out across the country.

It also means that our police will be working hard to make sure that they pick people up and hold them accountable and making sure that they’re adequately resourced to be able to carry out this work, and make sure that there’s adequate funding, also, for the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) tests and the lab tests to occur in a timely manner to make sure all of those things happen. So I think it’s only right that you’ve got a five-year review period to take a good look at how this law is operating, hoping that it’s operating in the way we intended it to.

There are many instances where we’ve heard—I know former MP Dr Nick Smith was a strong advocate. He had a constituent I’m aware of in his area who was a tragic instance that was brought up when we were in the Justice Committee of where someone’s life was lost. There are accounts where people avoid being picked up for driving under the influence of alcohol by instead consuming illicit drugs. So having a system that accurately records impairment for both alcohol and illicit substances will make our roads safer and will avoid instances where people needlessly lose their lives because of a driver impaired on our roads. So, for that reason, we think this is going in the right direction.

It will be really important that the device that we’re talking about will be required to have a concentration threshold for a qualifying drug and that the threshold would need to be at a level that differentiates it as a recent drug use as opposed to historical or accidental exposure. That’s particular from the instances and the advice I received when I was Minister of Police, for things like medicinal cannabis, which stays in the system for two weeks or longer. So if someone’s had that two weeks ago and it’s showing up in a test, it’ll be important that the device has a level of concentration threshold for a qualifying drug. For those drugs in the amphetamine family, the advice was that those can pass through the system roughly for a 72-hour period and they’re completely out of an individual’s system. So different drugs stay in the system for a longer period of time, and the drug being present within the system does not always mean that the driver was impaired at the time. So making sure that the devices that are approved are able to detect whether there is a concentration threshold qualified in there that’s necessary will be important for fairness before the law.

I’d just like to, in closing, acknowledge the hard work of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. I know they went out to Kenepuru and they visited the ESR. It’s always good to see select committees going out and undertaking field work to get their heads around some of the more complex areas in order for legislation to be passed in a way that we know will work as well as it is. This is a fascinating area of the law, and it’s good that we’re supporting it on both sides of the House, and I truly hope that it saves lives. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. I almost thought I’d come in to an alternative reality when the Green member was speaking earlier.

The reality is that this bill is about getting people off the roads who are driving while impaired, whether that be with legal or illegal drugs, or alcohol. Indeed, it doesn’t matter to the victim whether the drugs are legal or illegal; they just don’t want to be caught up in an accident on the road. This is a sensible piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

This is a five-minute, split call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak this evening on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. I have followed this particular piece of legislation quite closely. It was under the last Labour Government that we introduced the capacity for roadside drug-testing for the drug-testing regime, because we believe, of course, that it’s important to keep our roads as safe as possible.

It is somewhat inconsistent with other actions of this Government—and I heard from the Minister of Transport tonight that, obviously, he really encourages anything that enacts safer roads in this country. That’s probably inconsistent with the work that’s been done to change speed limits back in this country, particularly when it comes to those speed limits in and around our schools and the concerns that have been raised particularly by parents and whānau in those particular areas. So it is important to me that the Government is consistent in their road safety practices.

Under this piece of legislation, of course, we know that it’s important that when somebody is tested on roadside for impairment, they are held there at that particular time to ensure both an accurate response and outcome to that, so that our police are supported in the decisions that they make in that area to take the next round of actions, of course.

But we are disappointed, on this side of the House, tonight that the Government have not supported imposing a time limit on how long drivers can be detained on the roadside for. We did want to explore this, and, while I acknowledge the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, Andy Foster, for the work that the committee has done on this, I am disappointed that due consideration wasn’t then followed up and the Government haven’t listened to that particular issue—but particularly to that issue being raised by the Attorney-General—that it sought to have a 20-minute time frame for drivers to be detained for the initial oral fluid screening testing.

We have discussed and debated the accuracy in this sense, and I think that’s really important. I do share concerns, particularly on how legislation just like this particularly impacts Māori, Pasifika, and young people in this country. We need to ensure that the right parameters and protections are put in place to ensure that they get a fair go when they are tested at roadside, because we know the outcome of that, and we don’t want that particular group unfairly targeted in any way when they already experience particular challenges at the roadside in this sense.

Labour is supporting this particular piece of legislation tonight. It builds on the work that we started but, of course, doesn’t quite have the parameters and the safeguards in place that we had hoped for. But we think it’s important, in the name of road safety, to push forward on this, so I do, along with my colleagues, commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. As my colleague said, it was a privilege to sit on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee through most of the deliberations of this piece of legislation. I do want to highlight both to the House and to the general public that in 2023, there were 64 fatalities where the presence of drugs was detected in the driver, and a further 32 drivers were found to have both drugs and alcohol in their system whilst operating on the road. So this legislation is simply about ensuring that for New Zealanders and international visitors and anyone who drives on our roads, they can feel comfortable and safe knowing that drug drivers will not be operating vehicles and that the New Zealand Police have the enforcement and the tools they need to ensure our roads are safe for everyone and that we can reduce fatalities in this country. It is 2025. It has long been time for legislation like this to help keep our roads safe for the general public, and so I commend this bill to the House.

Right, the time has come from me to leave the Chair. The sitting will resume at 9 a.m. Good night.

to the Minister of Finance

What recent reports has she seen on the economy?

The IMF has recently been in New Zealand to conduct its annual review of our economy. Earlier this month it released its preliminary findings, and the IMF notes that inflation has been brought back to target after spending 13 consecutive quarters above the top of the target range. As a result of lower inflation, easier monetary policy will help growth pick up over the next two years. The IMF is forecasting growth in the New Zealand economy of 1.4 percent in 2025, rising to 2.7 percent next year.

What does the IMF say about fiscal policy?

The IMF says that the Government’s fiscal strategy “appropriately affirms its commitment to the necessary medium-term consolidation to support fiscal sustainability and rebuild fiscal buffers, emphasising prudent debt levels and strict spending controls.” It says the fiscal strategy should include tax reforms, including to the corporate tax regime. The IMF also highlights the growing cost of superannuation and says that changes to KiwiSaver could help achieve greater private retirement savings.

What does the IMF say about other policy areas?

The IMF makes a special mention of housing, which is a priority area for the Government. It says that bold reforms are needed to free up land supply, incentivise efficient land use, and ensure adequate financing of local infrastructure. And it specifically references the Government’s Going for Housing Growth programme. The IMF also highlights ongoing policy work to amend and eventually replace the Resource Management Act.

What does the IMF say about productivity growth?

The IMF says that productivity growth requires a comprehensive approach. It mentions refreshing competition settings, reducing the restrictiveness of the foreign direct investment regime to attract capital, accelerating capital markets development, encouraging innovation, and establishing a stable, long-term pipeline of projects coupled with the prudent use of public-private partnerships (PPPs). The Government has work under way in all these areas. And I would note that the IMF is clear on its approach to PPPs—unlike some people I could mention.

to the Prime Minister

Does he stand by all his Government’s statements and actions?

Yes.

Does he stand by his statement, “We are very proud of what we’ve done on emergency housing, and it’s been a really good outcome.”; if so, are more or fewer people homeless now compared to when he became Prime Minister?

What I can say is that from the data we’ve seen, we’ve actually seen that households that have been in emergency housing have dropped from, I think, 3,141 when we came to power down to 591. Most excitingly, we’ve taken 2,000 children out of living in motels and put them in proper homes. I think the member would, in the spirit of bipartisanship, want to say that that was a good thing.

Is he very proud of the fact that the Christchurch City Mission has reported an increase of almost 60 people living on the street in just one single month, including an eight-week-old baby living in a tent?

Well, we have more work to do on homelessness, but what I am proud about is a Government that, starting on 1 April, put a very active management policy in place to take a number of households out of motels—that was a shameful legacy from previous Minister Woods and the Labour Government, and I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made. In a short period of time, we’ve got results and put 2,000 kids into proper houses.

Does he see any relationship between the fact that there are 690 fewer households in Auckland in emergency accommodation now than when he became Prime Minister, whilst the number of people sleeping rough in cars, on the streets, or in parks in the city has increased to 653?

Well, I would just say to that member that his Government’s legacy on housing was abysmal: a 50 percent increase in homeownership, $170 per week increase in rental property, a fourfold increase in the social housing wait-list to over 25,000 households, and thousands of people living in motels when they shouldn’t have been there. This Government is dealing with housing. We have taken 2,000 kids out of motel rooms, and you should care about that, and you should be proud about that.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. Whilst I do indeed care about all of the issues that the Prime Minister has just catalogued in his list of complaints, it didn’t actually address the question, which was whether he sees a relationship between the fact that they booted 690 people out of emergency accommodation in Auckland, whilst there are now 653 people living rough on the streets.

Well, let me just make it very clear: while there is the sort of barrage going on that there was during the answer to that question, it’s hard for me to make a determination like that. But I will—

Further point of order, Mr Speaker.

No, no, well, I haven’t finished, so you can’t take a point of order—give a man a chance to breathe! I will ask the Prime Minister if he would like to address the question as it was asked.

As I said, I am very proud that we have actually moved families out of motel accommodation and emergency housing, and 80 percent of those families have gone straight into proper housing. That is really important. For the other 20 percent, we are actually available to help with any housing assistance that is needed. But I am proud, because that was a shameful, shameful result from a Labour Government.

Does he see any relationship between the fact that there are 351 fewer households in Wellington in emergency accommodation now, compared to when he became Prime Minister, while the number of people rough sleeping in cars, on the streets, or in parks in the city has increased to 464?

We have continued work to do on homelessness, but the answer of carrying on with the policies of the past and not putting 2,000 kids into proper homes—instead, raising them in motels—is unacceptable to our Government. So to move from 3,100 households in motel accommodation under the member’s last Government to where we sit today, with 591 households in motels and 2,000 kids moved out of them to proper houses and homes, with community housing providers and Kāinga Ora houses because of our active management of the individual cases, I’m incredibly proud about. Is there more work to do? Absolutely, but I am proud of what we achieved in a short period of time versus six years of a Government that purported to care about housing.

Could the Prime Minister describe how difficult it was for the new Government to deal with the crisis in infrastructure, education, health, and—dare I say it—housing, when what we were confronted with was 133,000 net immigration brought in by the previous Government?

Well, my point very clearly is that Labour’s biggest public policy failure was in housing, whether you’re buying a house, renting a house, on a social house wait-list, or in emergency housing—they failed on all four counts. Our Government cares about people; we want them in proper homes, and that’s why we’ve done the work to methodically go through household by household, get into the data, and actively manage cross-agency and get these families and kids into proper houses.

Which of the following is he most proud of: a family of six living in a Portacom, a 75-year-old grandfather sleeping on a slide, full-time workers and students living in their cars, or the hundreds of additional people living rough on the streets because his Government decided that that was preferable to them living in emergency accommodation?

I completely disrespect the characterisation of that question. I am not taking any lectures from that member or the Labour Party about housing. You had six years to fix it. You had three years with an absolute majority and you did a poor, poor job. That’s the reality of it. The Labour Party used to care about housing and people getting into housing, but you didn’t care about it in your six years and you didn’t deliver results. I know it’s bad and you’ve probably got regrets about it, but you did a poor job.

Point of order, Mr Speaker—point of order.

A point of order, the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins. Could I just say for the member, the barrage going on is not at all helping in both the order and form of the House and leaves me with a great difficulty in assessing whether a question is answered or addressed.

Point of order. Every single one of my questions has been about the actions of this Government and the consequences of them. Every one of the answers has been about the Prime Minister’s alleged views on the previous Government. I’d point out that every single one of the families moved out of emergency accommodation into State housing was only possible because we built record numbers of new State houses. But he’s not actually addressing the track record of his own Government. The reason that you’ll get a heightened response from members on this side of the House is that the Prime Minister seems far more interested in talking about the last Government than his own Government, which has resulted in hundreds of additional people living rough on the streets.

Well, that’s a very interesting point of order, with a number of facts put before the House in that. Can I say that the Prime Minister’s statements today are not alleged, because he’s making them and we’re all hearing them. The second thing is that it is appropriate—and I’ve said this before, because former Speakers have asserted this—for a Government to refer to situations that they inherit when they come into Government. It’s not appropriate to attack. I haven’t heard attack. I think, with regards to the claim that the Prime Minister is not accounting for his Government, I’ve heard him cite numerous things that his Government is doing. Point of order?

A supplementary question.

A supplementary—the Rt Hon Winston Peters.

How were the four needy groups outlined by Mr Hipkins in his last question assisted by trying to find housing, accommodation, emergency housing, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure for the 133,000 net that the previous Government brought in that we inherited? [Interruption]

No, hang on—hang on. We haven’t even had the start of an answer and we’ve got people under way. Show a little bit of basic courtesy.

I agree with the member. We inherited an infrastructure crisis—we’re working our way through it. But my frustration is this is not an issue to politicise—this is not an issue to politicise. We are getting families out of motels into proper houses—that is the reality of it. Eighty percent of those families in households are now in proper homes and houses. You can politicise it, but you shouldn’t be doing that.

Why did his Government remove the requirement for the Ministry of Social Development to consider whether declining an emergency housing application would risk someone’s life, welfare, or cause serious hardship?

I am proud of the work that our teams have done in a cross-agency way to make sure that we are clear that the people that have access to emergency housing can get it. I am also proud of the fact that, actually, if anyone needs any help, there are housing support and subsidies available to support them, and our Government remains open to support those that have left emergency housing but haven’t reached out to ask for our help—