Parliamentary debates: Tuesday, 16 December 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.

I seek leave to move a motion without notice to express condolences to Australia and the Jewish community over Sunday’s attack at Bondi Beach.

Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I move, That this House offer its condolences to Australia and to the Jewish community following the shocking loss of life and the casualties inflicted in the attack at Bondi Beach on Sunday, and that this House commit itself to fostering dialogue and respect between faiths because hatred, violence, and extremism should never be tolerated or condoned.

Sunday’s attack on innocent and defenceless civilians, enjoying a day out at Bondi Beach, has rocked Australia and the Jewish community worldwide. Because New Zealand shares so much in common with our trans-Tasman neighbour, we have felt the shock and grief like it is our own. A place beloved by many New Zealanders—some who visit Bondi, and others who live there—has been desecrated. It joins a growing list of places where extremism has shown its ugliest face. As we learn details of each victim, each individual, who was either celebrating Hanukkah with their community or just having a day out at the beach, the horror and the senselessness of Sunday’s acts are reinforced. We ask ourselves, “Is anyone safe anywhere?”, and we ask ourselves why the post-Holocaust vow “Never again” appears to be wilting over time.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise. People were shot dead on a beach on Sunday just for being Jewish. It would be wrong to suggest that there are no answers to this scourge. In the outpouring of shock, trauma, and grief over Sunday’s tragedy, all of us can see our common humanity. The traits and values that unite us can be, and are, greater than the differences that divide us. We must, even in our despair, never forget that. Amongst the worst of human behaviour that we saw on Sunday, there were also examples of the very best. That is the light with which together we can push away the darkness. Aptly, Hanukkah itself is a time when light shines in the darkness. There is a way for people to live side by side, each practising the faiths in which they believe, or none at all, and respecting others’ rights to do the same. That is possible and especially so in New Zealand. Ours is a multicultural country; a nation known for its courage and trying hard to address the wrongs of our past; a country whose geographical isolation means that we haven’t imported the problems that come with mass uncontrolled migration; and, perhaps, because of an abundance of resources and our two degrees of separation, we are a country that is more tolerant than some others. But we cannot simply take for granted the triumph of good over evil. It takes effort, it takes vigilance, and there is always more to do.

All of us, of every faith or of no faith, should heed Sunday’s tragedy. That is the only way that good can come out of it. The worst thing that we could do in response to Sunday’s attacks is to rhetorically ask, “What is the world coming to?” and to shake our heads or consider it an Aussie problem or accept that extremist violence is a hazard of contemporary life, while hoping that we ourselves are never ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. We have far more agency than that. For some good to come out of this terrible event, we need to commit to action, to working at a local level and as a nation to valuing and promoting tolerance and respect. The late Jewish historian and philosopher Elie Wiesel, who survived incarceration in a concentration camp, said, “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.” I believe that New Zealanders, with an ethos of fairness hard-wired into our DNA, are not indifferent to suffering, and when we see it, we need to call it. In a world that is increasingly fractured and self-centred, New Zealanders need to stand up for our shared values. In New Zealand, every person—every person—is entitled to live without fear, reprisal, or discrimination for expressing who they are, who they love, and what they believe. In this House, we need to be honest about the difference between legitimate political debate and hatred directed at people. There is a line between criticising international events or Government policy and the targeting of an entire community because of their identity or faith. That line is unambiguous. It has flashing lights, and it shouldn’t be crossed, because others may be emboldened by the words that we choose.

Anti-Semitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred in history, and it remains one of the most dangerous. It mutates, it disguises itself, but its impact is always the same: fear, exclusion, and dehumanisation. Let me be absolutely clear: anti-Semitism has no place in New Zealand—not now and not ever. Confronting anti-Semitism is not just about favouring one community over another; in fact, it’s actually about upholding the values that protect every minority and enhance all of us. New Zealand’s Jewish community is small but it has contributed, and it continues to contribute, so much to New Zealand. I want all of our Kiwi Jews hearing this today to feel safe putting their menorah out on their window tonight to celebrate their Jewishness and to share their light with all of us.

As Prime Minister and leader of the National Party, I stand in solidarity with the Jewish community, which feels shaken and vulnerable right now. I say to the community: you belong here, you are valued here, and we will protect you. I stand against anti-Semitism, and I hope all political leaders do the same because we are all responsible for building and strengthening an inclusive, diverse, and tolerant New Zealand—one in which all New Zealanders can be safe, and one in which we’re all proud to call home. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I stand today to express my deepest condolences, and those of the New Zealand Opposition, to the victims, the families, the loved ones, and to everyone across Australia, and of course to our Jewish community here and around the globe. We are all devastated by the tragic, anti-Semitic terrorist attack that took place against families gathered on Bondi Beach to celebrate Hanukkah, where 15 innocent people were killed and more were injured.

Australia is close to home for all of us. We all know people who live in Australia. We all have some connection. Bondi Beach is a place of deep connection to so many Kiwis. So many of us have spent time there. So many of us have family there. So many of us have visited there. It feels very, very close.

Australia, like New Zealand, is a place of many faiths and many cultures coming together as one, a place where everyone should be free to worship, safe from hate, and safe from harm. Unfortunately, and tragically, too often recently, this has not been the case. We’ll learn more over the coming days. It’s clear that two hateful individuals have undertaken a heinous act of terrorism. It was perpetrated against innocent people celebrating their faith.

On Sunday, families who went to the beach for what should have been a peaceful and joyful event had their lives for ever changed. This is a time of year when people should be coming together, celebrating with each other, and, instead, families are having to process pain and grief on a level that few of us could comprehend. We wrap our arms around Australia and around the Jewish community. These are dark hours, and we are surrounding you with as much aroha as we possibly can.

Terrorism and violent extremism is a global issue, but for us here in New Zealand it is, sadly, something that we have had our own recent encounters with, and the March 15 terror attacks in Christchurch are still a raw memory for many. Together, we have to stand up against violence, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all of its forms. Everyone has a role to play to ensure that there is no place for terrorism and for violent extremism.

Terrorism is designed to divide us. It is designed to turn us against each other. It is designed to create more polarisation. The terrorist attacks are nothing to do with immigration; they are terrorist attacks, and they should always be called out as exactly that. That kind of hatefulness should never be confused with any legitimate debates that are taking place around world events. They should never be blamed on anyone other than the people who did them, who are the terrorists, who must be held accountable for their actions, and they should never be excused on the basis of any other form of blame shifting. Terrorism is designed to divide us, and we should never ever buy into that.

We should find common ground. In polarised times, it is never more important for us to find common ground. As we gather together over Christmas, it’s so important that we continue to enjoy the company of people who view the world differently to us, because that’s how we avoid polarisation, and it’s how we avoid deepening division. It’s so important that we all redouble our efforts, now more than ever, and that includes all of us in politics. We all have a role to play.

I want to acknowledge the Australian first responders and the community members who stepped up so bravely. I understand that some of the first responders were from the Jewish community itself, and I particularly acknowledge them for continuing to undertake their duties with diligence at a time of such heartache, when it must have been so difficult.

I want to acknowledge the members of the community who put themselves on the line and stepped in selflessly. It’s people like these that we should be holding up in times like this.

I want to acknowledge the New Zealand Police and the work that they are doing right now to provide additional security and comfort for those in our communities who need it, and particularly our Jewish communities here in New Zealand. Thank you to them for all the work they are doing to provide safety, security, and reassurance.

I want to acknowledge the Australian Government’s joint decision across the states to take action on firearms. It is a reminder that firearms can do so much harm, and there is no room for any complacency in that regard.

I’d like to close by once again expressing our grief. To the victims, to their families, to their loved ones, to everyone in the Jewish community, and to all Australians, we stand with you.

I should have put the question that the motion be agreed to.

E te Māngi, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Two nights ago, hundreds of people gathered together on a beach in Sydney’s Bondi to celebrate Hanukkah, along with millions of others across the world. Two men with guns opened fire on those who had gathered to mark their faith, mercilessly killing 15 people. This was an act of targeted, racist, anti-Semitic terror towards the Jewish community. Murdering innocent people is terrorism.

Hanukkah carries the message of light over darkness. In this reprehensible darkness and senseless violence there was a flicker of light. Ahmed Al Ahmed tackled and disarmed one of the murderers. As Ahmed sits in a critical but stable condition in St George’s Hospital in Sydney, people over the world have seen what it means to be a light in the darkness. It means protecting innocent people from horrific violence. It means intervening in harm towards other human beings. It means risk and it means sacrifice. It means seeing the humanity in others, even those that you don’t know and don’t understand.

I don’t profess to be an expert, but I know from our communities here in Aotearoa that the practices of both Judaism and Islam share the foundational principle that saving one life is the equivalent to saving all of humanity. In the past two days, as reports of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have intensified, the world has been asked when we will see safety for persecuted communities. Our safety, like our liberation, is intertwined. This is simple. But if human history and this specific moment tells us anything, it is not easy.

Every human being deserves to live free of terror and oppression. Every human being needs water, food, shelter, and connection. Every human being deserves these human rights: those you love and those who you don’t understand, and even who you don’t like. This is what is means to be human. These rights aren’t handed out for good behaviour. We get them because we are human. These basic rights are the basis of our solidarity. This is our common ground. These are the necessary building blocks for a safer world. Real freedom does not and cannot come from the oppression of other people.

In the past two days, Rabbis for Human Rights have said—and I quote—“Hanukkah teaches us that light is not passive. It is an act of courage. In moments of fear, violence, and injustice, we are called not to retreat into silence, but to increase the light through compassion [and] solidarity, and unwavering commitment to human dignity and the sanctity of every life.”

We know what we stand against and what we unequivocally condemn. We condemn the murder of 15 innocent people—a child, parents, friends, partners, human beings—practising their faith and their values. This House must condemn all such senseless violence, but more than that, we must know what we stand for: we stand for truth and peace and love and justice.

As we grieve the loss of these innocent human beings, and we send our love to their whānau, their friends, and their communities, it is the work of us here on Earth to build that real safety. This means understanding that all of our fate on this little planet is interconnected. We need each other; more than that—we are each other. That is the light that we must carry into the darkness.

I rise in support of the Prime Minister’s motion and to acknowledge those 15 people who perished at Bondi on Sunday afternoon, their families who grieve them, those who remain in hospital trying to recover from the assault that they suffered, and Jewish communities not only in Australia but around the world who have been terrorised by this act.

As others have noted, perhaps because so many Kiwis feel a connection to Bondi, it feels like this could have happened here. I first learnt of the attack from a mother in Auckland. We were at a Christmas barbecue and she was receiving text messages from her son, who heard the shots firsthand. There are not many degrees of separation in this world.

But there’s another reason why it felt close to home for many New Zealanders. The Kiwi Jewish community has, sadly, like so many around the world in the past two years, received an intensification of hate mail, threats, and harassment since 7 October 2023. Horror and events in the Middle East have bled into anti-Semitism at home. Sadly, some politicians have allowed it to happen, and, shamefully, others have encouraged it.

Just this weekend, a sign was displayed outside the Jewish school Kadimah, on Remuera Rd in the Epsom electorate, and it said, “One-State Solution, Palestine for Everybody.” Is there anyone with the gall here who can deny the resemblance of the slogan on that sign to chanting, “Palestine must be free, from the river to the sea”?

The harassment of Jewish people here and Australia has intensified during the course of the conflicts in the Middle East. No matter your thoughts on that conflict, it is illogical to blame people of the same faith or the same race on the other side of the world for those events. In fact, it’s not just illogical; it’s bigoted.

If we are to overcome, then we must recommit ourselves to universal human rights, the idea that each person is deserving of inherent dignity. We must avoid erasing their value by merging them into faceless members of a group where each member is somehow made responsible for things that other similar people may have done, and they themselves may not even agree with, let alone have made any contribution to. We must rediscover New Zealand exceptionalism: the idea that on the edge of the map we are building a unique society based on respect for each person’s inherent dignity, each person’s right to live as they please and use their time on Earth for their benefit as they judge it, so long as they are not harming anybody else. Only when we recommit ourselves to those values will we truly be able to say that we are on the side of the light driving out the darkness. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I offer these brief reflections, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the leader of New Zealand First, about the heinous events in Bondi on Sunday night. We should not mince our words: this was an horrific and vile terrorist attack on Australia’s Jewish community. We offer our sincere condolences to all those affected, and especially those who had loved ones killed or badly injured in this barbaric attack.

Religious people should be able to gather peacefully to celebrate their faith—that is one of the hallmarks of an open, democratic, and free society—but, in Sydney, just two days ago, they were gunned down by a father and son motivated by anti-Semitism and hate. We stand in solidarity with the Jewish community in Australia, New Zealand, and around the world at this moment of deep pain. We also stand, at this very difficult time, with the Australian authorities, as they have always done with us in our moments of national tragedy.

Here in New Zealand, we cannot be complacent. We too, in the past few years, have witnessed our own incidents and examples of anti-Semitism, and we should have absolutely no tolerance at all for it. Too often in recent times, rhetoric has been used—whether “from the river to the sea” or “globalising the intifada”—that hasn’t promoted understanding or justice but, rather, praised and raised the temperature and caused division between our communities. That was wrong before, and it is wrong now.

We have always been opposed to the idea of importing far-off conflicts into New Zealand society, especially in ways that create divisions, and we remain so to today. The New Zealand Government wants peace and harmony in our community here at home, and we are prepared to defend it.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. I also rise to support the Prime Minister’s motion. We mourn with our cousins in Australia and are heartbroken by the anti-Semitic terrorist attack in Bondi. We mourn for the innocent 15 lives lost and stand in solidarity with their whānau and the Jewish community at this time of profound grief. We also send our aroha to all the people injured in this attack and all those who have been traumatised by these horrific actions. We hope all those that are affected are able to heal and make a full recovery.

That this attack occurred on the first night of Hanukkah—a celebration of hope, a celebration of resilience and light—makes this act of hatred all the more devastating. Te Pāti Māori stands with the Jewish community in mourning and remembrance, and our ongoing commitment to peace, justice, and humanity. We must also acknowledge the bravery of Ahmed Al Ahmed, who risked his life to save countless others. Let Ahmed be an example for all of us.

We cannot allow this attack to divide us further. We must hold faith to care for each other and to look after each other, no matter what our culture or religion is. Muslim people are not responsible for this attack. Immigrants are not responsible for this attack. Extreme hatred is responsible.

We must also reject the rhetoric that Jewish people are responsible for the actions in Israel. This attack was fuelled by extremist ideology that seeks to dehumanise and divide us with fear and violence. It’s the same ideology that motivated the March 15 attack in Christchurch.

We have to be brave enough to call out injustice, no matter where it is happening in the world. It is right that we are recognising the tragedy today, but we cannot be selective in recognising tragedies and the loss of human life.

Te Pāti Māori unequivocally rejects anti-Semitism and all ideologies that dehumanise and divide us with fear and violence. We tautoko the words of Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation: “As 2026 approaches, let us all recommit to hope over hatred, to combatting antisemitism and all forms of racism, to peace over war, to love over hate, and to our shared humanity to look after each other in Aotearoa.” Kia ora rā.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Members, I’ve today conveyed the empathy and sympathy of this House to my Australian counterpart in the Australian Parliament. The speeches offered in this motion I think captured well the abhorrence and the condemnation of anti-Semitic terrorism in the attack in Bondi. It expressed our closeness to the people of Australia and the sentiments that most of us would want to express.

Now, as a stand against anti-Semitism and respect for those whose lives have been taken in this attack and for those who were injured in this attack, I ask members to affirm our solidarity with the grief of the people of Australia and to affirm our shared commitment to freedom in all its expression by joining me in observing a minute’s silence.

Members stood as a mark of respect.

Thank you.

Eight petitions have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.

Petition of Graeme Axford requesting that the House establish a unitary authority for the West Coast of the South Island

petition of Tu Chapman requesting that the House order that the proposed member’s bill the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill may not be introduced

petition of Ian McLean QSO requesting that the House recommend that the Government set up a task force to respond to the global fall in fertility rates

petition of Greg Rzesniowiecki requesting that the House require the Director-General of Health to withdraw all COVID-19 injectable products and mRNA products from the market

petition of the Hon Marama Davidson requesting that the House urge the Government to abandon the Electoral Amendment Bill

petition of Renee Jens requesting that the House urge the Government to establish a bipartisan 50-year national energy strategy

petition of Erika Whittome requesting that the House urge the Minister of Education to reinstate any education workers who were fired for objecting to COVID vaccine mandates, and

petition of Erika Whittome requesting that the House urge the Minister of Health to reinstate any health workers who were fired for objecting to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Those petitions stand referred to the Petitions Committee. Ministers have delivered 11 papers for presentation.

2024-25 annual reports of:

Mana Mokopuna

the New Zealand Conservation Authority

the Queen Elizabeth the Second National Trust, and

the student loan scheme

2024-25 performance report of the Ngāi Tahu Ancillary Claims Trust

Government response to the petition of Tree of Humanity for All

2025 long-term insights briefing for the Ministry of Justice

2025-29 statement of intent, and 2025-2026 statement of performance expectation, for Invest New Zealand

the Budget Policy Statement 2025

the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update 2025

the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update 2025, Supplementary Information

Those papers are published under the authority of the House. Fourteen select committee reports have been presented.

Reports of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee on the:

review briefing on the 2023-24 annual review of the Broadcasting Standards Authority

review briefing on the 2023-24 annual review of the New Zealand Tourism Board

report of the Education and Workforce Committee on the inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders encounter online, and the roles that Government, business, and society should play in addressing those harms

report of the Health Committee on the petition of Yan Wang

reports of the Justice Committee on the:

Antisocial Road Use Legislation Amendment Bill

Legislation Amendment Bill

reports of the Petitions Committee on the:

briefing on Government responses to committee recommendations

petition of Clive School

petition of Conrad Petersen

petition of James Bond

petition of Joanne Crowle

petition of Jody Devine

reports of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee on the:

briefing on the National Infrastructure Plan, and

the Ministry of Transport long-term insights briefing 2025, Moving people in 2055.

The bills are set down for second reading. The briefings and inquiry are set down for consideration. The Clerk has been informed of the introduction of a bill.

Armed Forces Discipline Legislation Amendment Bill, introduction.

That bill is set down for first reading.

Members, I have received a letter from Chlöe Swarbrick seeking to debate, under Standing Order 399, the release of the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update. Normally, urgent debate applications must be received an hour before the House sits. The Speaker has the discretion to consider applications received after that time but before the House sits—Standing Order 399 and Speaker’s ruling 215/1.

The Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update was released at 1 p.m. and the application received shortly afterwards. I have considered it. I allowed an urgent debate on the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update in 2024, and previous Speakers have also allowed a debate in exceptional circumstances in 1990 and 2017. Such a debate is not an annual exercise. If it is to become one, the Standing Orders Committee should reflect that in its considerations, and it should become part of Standing Orders.

I note Speakers’ ruling 215/3 that it is for a member to make out a case for an urgent debate, not for the Speaker to discover one. The application does not make a particular case for setting aside the business of the House to debate this year’s Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update. The application is declined.

Following on from your references to various Standing Orders, Standing Order 391 says that there will be 12 questions. Question time is an incredibly important part of our system here in Parliament where we uphold accountability. Can you enlighten the House as to why we’ve lost one question. We’ve only got 11.

Well, it would be fairly obvious that only 11 questions were lodged with the Clerk’s office.

The Business Committee no doubt deals with these issues. Who never measured up?

Well, it is at the discretion of anyone who has an allocated question to decide whether they lodge it or not. If people have no interest in scrutinising the Government, then clearly they won’t lodge a question. It’s not for—

Ferris wheel. Ferris wheel.

Well, that is probably a very interesting observation.

to the Prime Minister

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

Yes.

Does he stand by his statement in May that “through careful economic management, we’ve turned a corner and the economy is back on track.” when the Government’s own figures show the economy has not only shrunk this year but growth is now expected to be lower than previously forecast?

Well, I think, as the member may have digested with the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU) published just shortly, certainly as commentators have said and I’ve said as well, HYEFU’s a bit more anchored in the past but there was some very good, positive economic news there. I mean, the fact that growth will be close to 3 percent, the fact that wages will be bigger than inflation, the fact that, actually, we’ve got low inflation and we’ve also got 270,000 new jobs being created—it’s pretty positive news.

If the recovery’s really coming, why has the Government just lowered its growth forecast, compared to what it was telling New Zealanders earlier just this year?

Well, in answer to the first part of the question, I want to reassure the member that growth is coming because we’ve seen Westpac card spending up, we’ve actually seen ANZ business confidence at an 11-year high, we’ve seen consumer confidence coming forward, we’ve seen growth in a lot of sectors across the economy, and we’ve got housing affordability and confidence at a 15-year high with a net 28 percent of people feeling it’s a good time to buy a house. All of those things are positive signs. There will still be challenging data for us to navigate, but it’s more positive than negative.

Well, does he stand by his claim of careful economic management when his Government is forecast to keep spending more than it earns for the next five years and, in fact, the long-term forecast suggests there’s not a surplus in sight?

That’s not correct. This is a big economy. As you saw in HYEFU, the numbers have moved from a small surplus to a small deficit. This is a Government still committed to delivering a surplus in 2028-29. But, again, I’d just say to the member, this is not someone I want to take lectures from, given $66 billion was spent during COVID, and no one knows where the hell it went; we had a tripling of our Government debt, and now we’re paying $9 billion to $10 billion in interest rate and we’ve got nothing to show for it. So the economic plan of spend more, tax more, borrow more—that’s not the way forward.

What year will the New Zealand Government books, according to the operating balance before gains and losses (OBEGAL) measure, return to surplus?

According to the operating balance before gains and losses, excluding ACC revenue and expenses measure (OBEGALx), it’s 2028-29. That’s our Government’s determination. But what you’re seeing from this Government is—

Point of order, Mr Speaker.

Just a moment. Before you take that, there is still too much barracking across the House. It’s ridiculous.

Well, Mr Speaker, everyone was very silent for my question, but the Prime Minister must have misheard it—

Well, I haven’t called you yet. A point of order—the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins.

I asked the Prime Minister about the OBEGAL measure, not the made-up OBEGALx measure; the OBEGAL measure which every Government has been measured against. I asked him when that is due to be returning to surplus.

Yeah, well, he did answer that question.

No, he didn’t.

No, no; in your opinion he didn’t answer the question. It’s not my—

He objectively didn’t—

Sorry, have you got something to say, Dr Woods?

No.

How does borrowing more every single year square with his promise to get the books back under control?

Well, again, it’s a bit rich coming from that member who borrowed $120 billion more, made this Government pay out $9 billion worth of interest payment, and even still, publicly says he want to increase tax, he wants to increase spending, and he wants to increase borrowing.

Does he stand by his claim in May that unemployment has peaked and was starting to come down, when unemployment is now forecast to continue to rise even further?

Well, the way it works is you increase Government spending by 84 percent, you take inflation up to 7.5 percent, you have 12 interest rate rises, put an economy into recession, people lose their jobs. That’s the immutable laws of economics, and that’s what this Government’s working incredibly hard to do. We’ve got a grip on wasteful spending, we’ve got inflation down to 3 percent, we’ve had nine interest rate cuts, we’ve got growth coming into this economy; I think New Zealanders can feel it. The only member in this House who actually doesn’t want to see an economic recovery is the Leader of the Opposition.

Can the Prime Minister confirm that the difficult choices his Government has taken to deliver an average of $11 billion worth of savings per annum means that both the deficit and debt are far healthier than would otherwise be the case, and that, in fact—

Is this a question or a speech?

Speech.

—the deficit would hit $25 billion this year—

Hang on. Wait a minute. It doesn’t matter. I’m the one who decides whether it’s a question or a speech; not anyone from the cross benches, or whatever it is—the Opposition benches. Nicola Willis, start your question again with a little bit of brevity in the editing.

Can the Prime Minister confirm that the significant savings delivered by his Government have reduced the size of the deficit and New Zealand’s debt beyond what would have otherwise been the case, such that, in the absence of those savings, the deficit would reach $25 billion a year, and debt would blow out to more than 50 percent?

Point of order, Mr Speaker. First of all, those are completely made-up numbers by the Minister of Finance—

No, they’re not. I’ve got the receipts.

Got the receipts.

There’s a point of order being taken, and if any people want to interrupt it, they’ll be leaving, which is probably not the right thing, because that’s the last thing the Opposition would want—so just a bit of respect all around. Start again with your point.

Well, first of all, they’re not numbers in the Government’s Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update; those are numbers that the Minister of Finance herself has made up. But second of all, it contains a number of assertions about actions of the previous Government and what the previous Government would have done if it had been re-elected, for which the current Prime Minister has absolutely no responsibility.

No, that wasn’t the nature of the question—

Speaking to the point of order, Mr Speaker.

No, hang on—I’m just about to rule on it, so just give me a minute. The point I want to make is that the question sought an opinion—all questions, ultimately, seek an opinion. Now, if there’s debatable material in that, well, that’s debatable material. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that that was, in any way, an attack on the previous Government.

Before we go any further, I’d just ask your guidance: does it help the order of the House to have the Labour leader accusing other members of making things up?

Well, possibly not, but then, what else do you say? Because there are other terms that might be used that are completely unacceptable, so I’m not going to pick up on that.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. It certainly does ask the Prime Minister for an opinion. It asks the Prime Minister for an opinion on actions that may or may not have been taken by the previous Government, had the previous Government been re-elected, and that is not something that the Prime Minister has responsibility for. He may have an opinion on it, but he does not have prime ministerial responsibility for it.

With respect, the question asked what would have been the case if the Government had not made a significant amount of savings. Now, that’s talking about the current Government, not any other Government. I think the Prime Minister might very, very briefly answer that question.

Absolutely. Look, I want to thank the Minister of Finance because she has maintained very tight operating allowances. Actually, those operating allowances have been half the size of the previous administration’s. She’s worked incredibly hard to deliver $11 billion worth of annual savings, and, of course, the benefit of that is that we can actually employ 2,100 more nurses in our healthcare system, 600 more doctors, 900 more corrections officers.

Is it cheaper or more expensive now to make a Marmite sandwich than it was at the beginning of this year?

Well, the good news is that food inflation, as that member will have seen, has fallen to 4.4 percent today. It’s the third month in a row it’s come down, and it’s a hell of a lot lower than what it was—at 12.5 percent—under that Prime Minister.

Point of order, Mr Speaker.

Yes, just wait for the House to settle itself.

I asked the Prime Minister a relatively straightforward question. He told parents across the country to go out and buy some butter, some Marmite, and bread and make a Marmite sandwich. I’ve asked him whether it’s more expensive or less expensive to do that now than when he gave parents that instruction. He hasn’t even addressed that question.

Well, I don’t think it was an instruction, but he did address it by saying that food inflation is on the fall.

Is he not aware that the price of buying a loaf of bread is up 50 percent in just the last year, the price of a Marmite sandwich is significantly more expensive than it was when he told parents to go out and buy Marmite and bread and butter and make their kids a sandwich?

Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness! I love the way that the member has got an analysis on the cost of a Marmite sandwich but, actually, couldn’t work out where $66 billion that he spent during COVID went, couldn’t even be bothered to show up to a COVID inquiry, and thought that tripling the debt was a great way to secure New Zealand’s future. As I said, food inflation’s coming down, inflation’s coming down, interest rates are coming down. The good news is we’re getting more good-news data. That’s something to be celebrated. It’s been a tough time for Kiwis. I think the member should get in behind it.

Supplementary.

The honourable—

David Seymour.

I know your name—yeah, that bloke who just stood up.

Ha! Thank you, Mr Speaker. Can the Prime Minister confirm that the Government’s Healthy School Lunches Programme is being done for half the price that it was done under the previous Government with the same return rate for the meals; and doesn’t it seem strange that Labour say they want cheaper food but when we give it to them, they don’t want that either?

Well, I just want to commend the Minister on making sure we get great value for the spend that’s going on. That is a hallmark of this Government, because not only have we halved the price of a classroom so we can double the number of classrooms going out to our kids across this country—that’s because we’re just better at managing money than that side.

The Speaker is not meant to enter into political debate and needs to be a bit careful about what’s said. But I can’t help, in this circumstance, in this Christmas season, to give a big shout-out to Coupland’s Bakeries—a great South Island institution; cheapest bread in the country by quite a long shot.

Point of order. Aren’t you supposed to set aside all personal and private interests?

I have no interest in that particular bakery other than the occasional step across the threshold.

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.

How is his year of growth going when data today shows that his economic strategy has produced the lowest growth in more than 10 years?

Well, I’d just say, as we’ve seen with the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update account, we’ve got growth close to 3 percent over the period. Most importantly, we’ve got wages growing faster than inflation. We’re certainly creating 270,000 new jobs over this period, and, at the end of the day, it’s a lot better than a wealth tax, a capital gains tax, an inheritance tax, a trust tax, a private jet tax—$88 billion worth of new taxes, and $44 billion worth of new borrowing.

Does the Prime Minister consider his economic strategy a failure or a success, when unemployment is projected to continue to increase through next year under his plans?

Well, this is a Government that inherited a hell of a mess from the Labour-Greens Government and, as a result, we are turning the show around. It’s been fantastic to see consumer confidence returning, consumer spending returning, great growth in tourism, really strong performance in our export markets. We’ve got a lot of positive news to celebrate; the recovery is on its way, and now the great thing is how we shape that future.

Does the Prime Minister consider his economic strategy, delivering construction sector activity at a six-year low and a loss of 16,000 jobs in just the past two years, a success or a failure?

Well, what I note this morning is that construction jobs being advertised are up, I think, over 20 percent, and that’s a good, positive move forward. I used to get asked a lot of questions by the Leader of the Opposition about construction and infrastructure, and building and construction; not so much now because, actually, as we’re bringing interest rates down, that creates opportunity for that sector.

Does the Prime Minister see the connection, at all, between his economic strategy of cuts, setting the scene for high unemployment, and tax revenue being $1.1 billion lower than forecast?

Well, again, as I’ve said, what I see is a pattern of financial discipline. This is a Government that is saving $11 billion a year over this period. It’s a Government that’s working with operating allowances half of what the previous Labour-Greens Government worked with, and it’s a Government that’s taking a very balanced approach. We’re cutting waste in the system, we’ve moved $44 billion worth of savings in our first two years, and that’s enabled us to make investments in the front line, and we’re pretty proud about that.

Does the Prime Minister consider his economic strategy, which is seeing 200 hard-working New Zealanders leave this country every single day, and the highest rates of unemployment since I was born, a failure worthy of abandoning for the good of hard-working New Zealanders?

What I’d note is that it has been good and encouraging to see that, this month, we’ve had the lowest number of New Zealanders departing New Zealand. In fact, it’s been the lowest this month than it has in any given month of the previous Labour-Greens Government.

to the Prime Minister

perhaps the Prime Minister would like to explain to the Green member, when you’ve got a contractionary monetary policy and a need to shrink the size of the State after the COVID debt, it does take quite some time for the green shoots to sprout?

He might like to explain but, you know, we’ve got a long day ahead.

It’s a very good question.

Well, make it brief.

Well, I think it’s a very good question and it’s an astute observation, but I’d just say—

Point of order. Sir, you’ve made it extremely clear to the House, for a number of weeks, now, that there is an expectation that questions are questions, not opportunities to provide opinion, and even you can phrase a question to do that. Inviting the Minister to say whatever he wants is not complicit with your guidance to this House.

Yeah, that’s right. I forgot myself for a moment, so we’ll move on to Question No. 3—Cameron Brewer.

to the Minister of Finance

What recent announcements has she made on the Budget?

Today, I released the Budget Policy Statement. At the same time, Treasury released its half-year update, which contains the latest set of economic and fiscal forecasts. The Budget Policy Statement confirmed that the operating allowance for Budget 2026—that is the amount of net new operating funding for discretionary policy initiatives—will remain at $2.4 billion a year. This is a very tight allowance. For comparison, in the 2022 Budget, under the previous Government, net new operating spending was $9.7 billion a year—four times as much as we’ve set for next year’s Budget.

What are the Government’s priorities for the Budget?

The Budget Policy Statement says that health, education, defence, and law and order will be priorities in next year’s Budget. At the same time, the Government is committed to keeping tight control of discretionary spending; that means savings and reprioritisation will be a prominent feature of the Budget, as they have been in previous years. Last year’s Budget contained savings and revenue-raising initiatives of $5.9 billion a year; this year’s Budget added savings of another $5.3 billion a year. These total savings of more than $11 billion each year mean that we have been able to invest in front-line public services and also get the books in better shape.

What do Treasury’s forecasts show?

Treasury’s forecasts show economic growth strengthening over the next year and beyond, and they show the unemployment rate falling. As the economy picks up, so does tax revenue, and, at the same time, the Government continues to take a very disciplined approach to spending. As a result, the Government’s headline operating balance measure, OBEGALx, returns to surplus, and net core Crown debt as a percentage of GDP bends from going up to going down. Both the economic outlook and the fiscal outlook are very positive.

How do the forecasts compare to those in the Budget update earlier this year?

Forecasts are revised at every update, and this is no exception. The economic recovery is now expected to be slightly slower and slightly weaker, at least initially, than was forecast in the Budget update. That means tax revenue is expected to be a little lower and expenses a little higher across the forecast period. As a result, OBEGALx is now expected to reach surplus in the 2029/30 year—although, by that stage of the forecast period, we are talking about very small differences between very large forecasts for revenue and expenses. Small changes are not the issue; what is the issue, however, is the path back to surplus. That does count, and there is a clear path in the forecasts towards returning to surplus and bending the debt curve. However, getting there cannot be taken for granted; it will require ongoing discipline and commitment to the savings our Government has delivered.

to the Minister of Finance

Does she stand by all her statements and actions?

Yes, within context.

Who is right: the Prime Minister, who said in question time today that her Government will be in surplus by the 2028-29 year, or the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update released today, that shows surplus under her measure of operating balance before gains and losses excluding ACC (OBEGALx) won’t be until the 2029-30 year?

Well, Detective Edmonds is on the job. Actually, what the half-year update shows is that, at this stage, there is forecast to be a small deficit in the 2028-29 year. However, the Prime Minister is 100 percent correct that our Government, with its fiscal discipline, is targeting a surplus in 2028-29. Getting there will require ongoing fiscal discipline.

The opening comment of that answer was not acceptable. We will continue because it’s an Opposition question, but there may be a cost further down the track.

How can she maintain any credibility as finance Minister now that she has pushed out surplus by more than three years from when she first promised it?

Because, unlike the finance Minister who preceded me, I have kept to extremely tight operating allowances—in fact, reducing operating allowances in this year’s Budget and delivering below the operating allowance that was forecast; because I, together with this team of Cabinet Ministers, have delivered $43 billion worth of average savings, which has taken discipline and difficult choices; because I remain committed to the pathway to surplus and debt reduction and the responsible economic management that requires. This distinguishes me from just about every single member on the opposite side of the House.

When she said in September 2024 that “the economy will start to grow again”, why is GDP almost unchanged since then and Treasury have revised down their forecasts?

Well, we will get the GDP update on Thursday. What market economists are saying is that they predict that growth in the third quarter of this year was between half a percent and a full percent. They also predict that growth will accelerate in this fourth quarter that we’re currently in, meaning that growth for the calendar year is up.

Why, then, does GDP in the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update show that for the 2025 fiscal year, it is at minus 0.6, but GDP during the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update was minus 0.3 percent?

Pretty simple. There’s a difference between a fiscal year and a calendar year.

Supplementary. [Interruption]

A question’s being asked.

What is she most proud of: pushing surplus out by three years, unemployment being revised upwards, or shrinking the economy by 1.1 percent in the last year?

I’m proud of the fact that our Government delivered households with children, on average, $78 additional per fortnight thanks to tax relief; that around 1.9 million households received, on average, $60 per fortnight; that around 3.5 million New Zealanders received $32 per fortnight; that while delivering this tax reduction, we delivered significant savings; that we’ve been more disciplined than the last lot; and that we can show a path to a return to surplus and debt reduction, accelerating growth, 270,000 jobs being created over the next few years, low, stable inflation, low interest rates, and an economy managed by a Government committed to addressing the underlying barriers to growth. The prescription we are following is working. We compare well with our international peers, with a steeper path back to surplus and a more prudent debt position. The biggest risk to this economy is the election of a Labour-led Government.

to the Minister of Transport

What recent milestones have been achieved in the introduction of roadside drug testing?

Yesterday, I was thrilled to announce that the new screening devices for drug-drivers have been rolled out. [Holds up screening device] They look like this. Drug-impaired drivers should expect consequences. The introduction of roadside drug-testing is a big step forward for road safety. It was great to be out with the police and the Minister of Police, Mark Mitchell. We saw the first couple of random roadside drug tests. I’m told that in Victoria, unfortunately, the first time they rolled it out, someone got a positive test. I’m pleased to say, at least, that at 2.30 p.m. on Jervois Quay, there were no initial positive tests, but it was great to see the hard-working police operationalising this new practice.

How will these tests work?

Members may—unless they’ve blotted it out of their minds, and I can understand why—remember the old COVID tests. They look very similar to the COVID tests. At the roadside, a driver swipes the device on their tongue—I won’t do it for the House, but they collect saliva from the tongue. The screening device allows police to screen the saliva for four drugs: cannabis, MDMA, methamphetamine, and cocaine. If the test is positive, a saliva sample is collected and sent to the lab for analysis, where it’s tested for 25 impairing substances. Drivers receive an infringement penalty following a positive lab test result. A driver who tests positive at the roadside is required to take a second screening test—one of these. [Holds up screening device] Two positive tests result in the driver being prohibited from driving for 12 hours, to address any immediate safety risk.

What are the consequences of driving whilst under the influence of drugs?

People who get behind the wheel on drugs put themselves and others at serious risk of death or serious injury. Around 30 percent of road deaths now involve an impairing drug. If a drug is detected, drivers face a $200 fine and 50 demerit points; two or more drugs, it’s a $400 fine and 75 demerit points. Drivers who refuse or fail to comply with the roadside drug tests are issued a $400 infringement and 75 demerit points, and are prohibited from driving for 12 hours.

to the Minister of Health

Does he stand by his statement that “I welcome Health New Zealand’s decision to offer 1,400 hospital-based roles to the 2025 end-of-year cohort of nursing graduates, which means more than 80 percent of those who pass their exams are expected to secure positions”; if not, why not?

Yes, in the context it was made. Health New Zealand has confirmed that around 1,800 graduate registered nurses will begin hospital-based roles this year, including around 1,400 positions being offered to the 2025 end-of-year cohort of nursing graduates. This means that 80 percent of those who have graduated as a registered nurse are expected to secure positions. This is all part of our Government’s focus on strengthening the front line, putting patients first, and building on the thousands of additional nurses that have been employed at Health New Zealand since 2023.

Why does he stand by that description, when less than half of year-end graduates have been offered a job in the last round?

The statement that I made was that Health New Zealand would be offering 1,400 positions to the 2025 end-of-year cohort of nursing graduates. This would mean that 80 percent of those who graduated as registered nurses are expected to secure positions, and, as the Health New Zealand PR said, those confirmations would be sent out over a period of time.

Why didn’t his statement reflect that 600 of the jobs won’t be recruited until the middle of next year, leaving many nurses languishing in a pool of the unemployed?

As with previous Advanced Choice of Employment (ACE) programmes, these roles are phased in over a period of time. That has been the practice over a period of time.

Was it misleading to imply that 1,800 jobs are enough, when the total number of graduates each year is 2,500?

As I said, 80 percent of those who have graduated will be offered roles through the ACE programme. The Government has also provided funding to primary care to assist them with incentivised payments to recruit graduate roles into primary care as well. We’ve provided funding through Budget 2025, with funding to support primary care to employ graduate nurses. I’m not sure if the member also realises, but the ACE programme is also available to other entities such as private hospitals and other organisations who also employ graduate nurses. There are other entities which also employ nurses in this country, who are also employing graduate nurses. [Interruption]

Just wait. Sorry.

Why would anyone believe his numbers when nursing grads are being offered 0.6 fulltime-equivalent (FTE) roles, to conceal the growing scandal of nurses who are unemployed?

Well, that is completely incorrect. These jobs are being offered at what is the standard rate, which is what they have been offered over a large number of years, which is a 0.8 FTE role. That is standard practice for ACE graduates for their first year into Health New Zealand. I refer the member to previous answers, I believe, to written questions which show that, I think, there may have been one nurse who may have been offered 0.6, once, because that was what worked for that nurse.

Why won’t he just offer these nurses a job? Goodness knows our health system needs them!

Well, we are offering them jobs because our health system needs them. We have already hired around 2,000 additional nurses into Health New Zealand since we came to Government. We’re employing more nurses at Health New Zealand than ever before—more doctors at Health New Zealand than ever before. We are investing in the front line more than ever before. We are delivering more than ever before. The member opposite might like to try to paint a picture, which is completely inaccurate, and the only person who doesn’t want the health system to succeed, it appears, is Dr Ayesha Verrall.

No, that’s enough. Do you have another supplementary? Does the member have another supplementary? She has one available if she wants it.

Will the Minister—[Interruption]

Questions are heard in silence, and we’ll keep on questioning until there is silence and Ministers are able to answer without the assistance of their Government colleagues.

Is it correct that nurses are being offered 0.6 fulltime-equivalent positions in the latest round of graduate recruitment?

The 1,800 roles that this question is about are being offered at 0.8.

to the Minister of Immigration

What recent announcements has she made regarding visa-waiver travel?

Recently, the Minister for Tourism and Hospitality and I announced that visitors from China and the Pacific would be able to travel from Australia to New Zealand without requiring a New Zealand visa. That enables more holidaymakers to factor New Zealand into their trips, provided they have an Australian visa. They can apply to travel here and it’s just a hop across the Tasman to see our stunning landscape and unique, world-class experiences.

How much interest has there been?

Just six weeks ago, the visa-waiver travel from Australia came into effect. Already, we’ve had a fantastic response. Since 3 November, there have been almost 26,000 requests for an NZeTA—or a New Zealand Electronic Travel Authority—and over 15,000 visitors have already travelled here. That adds to the roughly 240,000 visitors each year from China and the Pacific, providing a significant boost already. Tourism is our second-largest export, with good reason. People around the world would jump at the chance to holiday in New Zealand, and we’re committed to supporting our tourism industry and businesses around the country who are enabling significant visitor number boosts.

Why was this change enacted?

Well, it’s because this Government remains committed to growing the economy. This change will help boost the number of tourists and visitors coming into New Zealand, supporting our regions and local businesses. The change also makes it a less costly and far simpler, faster process to travel here for a short holiday. Overseas tourists remain a key driver of regional growth, and we remain fully committed to supporting our regions to thrive.

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.

Is the Citizens Advice Bureau correct in its recent report that found Government policies, including benefit sanctions, more restrictive emergency housing criteria, and cuts to community services, are exacerbating hardship across the country?

Well, I haven’t seen that report, but what I can inform the member and assure the member is that with this Government not wasting spending, getting inflation down, and getting interest rates down, it’s actually helping people.

Does he accept the Salvation Army’s findings from their homelessness briefing that increasing numbers of people in hardship are in paid work yet are still unable to afford necessities like housing, kai, bills, and healthcare?

I haven’t seen the report, but as the member would be well aware, in the previous Labour-Greens Government, we saw a 37 percent increase in homelessness despite spending a billion dollars. Homelessness is a difficult and complex issue, and that’s why I am proud of the six-point plan that the Minister for Auckland and other agencies announced recently.

What is his response—[Interruption]

Sorry—start again.

What is his response to the Zero Hunger Collective’s report that “whānau resort to Afterpay schemes for everyday expenses, such as gas and groceries, and face impossible choices around which bills or debts to ignore” and “the cuts to funding for community food organisations and budget advisory services noted in 2024 have seen front-line support agencies close once they exhausted their funding reserves”?

Sorry, what was the question?

What’s his response to the quotes?

Be brief.

I haven’t seen the report.

What does it say about his Government’s priorities when wealth at the top continues to grow while more whānau are lining up for food parcels, more rangatahi are living without shelter, and more people are without a job?

Well, on the last part of that question, we’re very proud of our progress on housing. This is a Government where you haven’t seen a 30 percent increase in house prices; you’ve seen a drop in rents. As a result, housing affordability is the best it has been in a decade. The second thing I’d say is that under the previous administration, there was a big run-up and a quadrupling of people, actually, for a social housing place, and we’ve actually moved back 5,000 people off that list already in two short years. That record of quadrupling was something not to be very proud about. We’ve got rid of emergency housing, and that means we’ve got people into proper, dry homes, and as you’ve seen, we’ve got efforts going into homelessness, with respect to Housing First places, extra money being made available for rough sleepers, and ensuring that the Ministry of Social Development exercises good discretion.

A little bit of calm to my left would be very helpful, mainly to the people who are making the interjections.

At what point will he accept that rising hardship is not a coincidence but a consequence of his Government’s decisions?

I reject that outright. This is a Government that has lowered inflation from 7.3 percent to 3 percent. It’s a Government that has lowered interest rates nine times after they were increased 12 times. It is a Government that is now putting this economy on a pathway to growth, and that puts more money into every New Zealander’s pocket, and that’s what it’s about.

to the Minister of Local Government

Does he stand by his claim that the Local Water Done Well model will mean cost increases would be more affordable for ratepayers, given councils’ final plans show nearly $9 billion more in water spending than previously forecast?

Yes, I do. Under previous long-term plans, councils were not required to ensure capital investment was sufficient, and now they are, which means capital expenditure is higher than previous long-term plans had forecast. This investment shows that councils recognise that after decades of under-investment, water projects can’t wait any longer. Making investments now is how we ensure cost increases are affordable.

How can he maintain that his water scheme improves affordability when councils’ final plans show total water investment rising by nearly $9 billion, costs that he has acknowledged rise directly from his own Government’s model?

Well, something that I think all sides of this House would agree on is that water has been under-invested in for multiple years. There isn’t a magic money tree which means water services can be properly invested in with no cost. No matter what model you adopt, there is always going to be a need for more money to be spent. I remember the days of that member’s party talking about the billions of dollars—$200 billion of investment needed—and how ironic that they are now complaining about investment needing to be made.

How does he expect ratepayers to bear costs under Local Water Done Well given that councils can only fund these higher capital costs through rates, debt, or cuts to existing services?

Well, unlike the failed Labour model of Local Water Done Well, it has the backing of councils—

No.

—and their communities, and we’ve empowered them.

Talk about your own ministry and your own responses; no one else’s. Question time is not an opportunity for political reflection; it’s for answers.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Local Water Done Well has the backing of councils and their communities, and we’ve empowered them to establish the structures that work best for them. All councils now have water service delivery plans. They have been independently assessed, and they show and give ratepayers confidence that they are more reliable in financial water services than the status quo.

Isn’t it the case that his scheme doesn’t lower costs but shifts responsibility for funding on to councils, meaning ratepayers should expect to carry those higher costs?

No, and I won’t take lectures—

Sorry, just while I’m being pedantic about it, to say “Is it not”—shouldn’t it just be “Is it the case”? We’ll do it again. We’ll do it properly.

Is it the case that his scheme doesn’t lower costs but shifts responsibility for funding on to councils, meaning ratepayers should expect to carry the higher costs?

No. Our model ensures that the water assets are and remain within local ownership and control, and that those communities have the responsibility and the support to support their councils to implement the investment required in these assets. That is a critical aspect that is going to need to continue, and we’ve set in place a model that will allow it.

When will he accept that it is his Government’s scheme that will add unavoidable pressure to the cost of living crisis that households are already struggling with right now?

Well, I’m not going to take a lecture from that member, who had reforms that were going to strip communities of their assets. That is a—

Hold on. Wait. How do you answer a question by saying you’re not going to take a lecture? It wasn’t a lecture; it’s a question, so just answer the question.

The point of the question was comparing to a status quo which doesn’t exist, so I’m simply pointing out that point.

Well, there’s your answer. Thanks very much.

to the Minister of Agriculture

What recent reports has he seen on the forecast for New Zealand’s food and fibre exports?

Today, along with Ministers Jones, Hoggard, Patterson, and Grigg, I released the Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries report, which shows that the innovation and hard work of our world-leading farmers, growers, foresters, and fishers is paying off. Today’s report shows that New Zealand’s high-quality and sustainable food and fibre exports are forecast to hit a record $62 billion by 30 June 2026, climbing to $63 billion the following year. With these results, the food and fibre sector now accounts for 83 percent of all New Zealand’s goods exports, and I’m proud of the hard-working men and women of provincial New Zealand, who are delivering world-class products to the world.

What is contributing to this growth in export revenue?

Well, the main drivers of this record $62 billion worth of exports are the meat and wool sector, forecast to reach $13.2 billion for the first time ever; horticulture forecast to reach $9.2 billion, and, in particular, kiwifruit exports will reach a record $4.3 billion worth of exports next year; forestry is expected to grow to $6.3 billion, with processed timber exports up 28 percent to $1.2 billion for the first time; and dairy exports are expected to $27.4 billion—

What about wool?

—showing that New Zealand dairy farmers are the powerhouse of the New Zealand economy. For the member interjecting, I’ll speak more slowly, meat and wool—meat and wool—are forecast to reach $13.2 billion for the first time ever. This is an outstanding result, especially viewing challenging global conditions and extreme weather that have affected farmers and growers.

What actions has this Government taken to support the growth of food and fibre exports?

We’re fixing rules so they’re not costly and so that farmers can work with them. We’re doing trade deals and we’re doing trade missions around the world—17 trade missions around the world in this term of Government so far. We’re cutting red tape through significant reforms such as the overhaul of the Resource Management Act (RMA)—the replacement of the RMA—improving freshwater farm plans, and limiting and reducing farm-to-forest conversions. The Government wants our farmers, growers, foresters, and fishers out there on the land and in the oceans, doing what they do best, which is innovating, farming, and catching fish.

What does this mean for New Zealand’s economy?

It’s very, very good news for the New Zealand economy. One in seven people work in food and fibre, and one in four Kiwi jobs depends on trade, so the success of the food and fibre sector means thriving communities, increased export revenue, a growing economy, a prosperous New Zealand, and a Government that doesn’t have to raise taxes to pay for all of the things that New Zealanders demand and deserve. Farmers’ contributions not only needs recognition but they also need celebration, because those hard-working men and women are helping to grow the economy, and, much more than that, it provides a resource and income for every single household and family in the country. Creating jobs creates livelihood, and that’s why this Government across the board—the three parties—is proud to back our farmers and growers, and we thank them for their hard work.

to the Associate Minister of Finance

What recent changes has he made regarding overseas investment?

I thank the member for his question. In recent times, the Government has made a number of changes to make it easier for New Zealanders to bring money and know-how into the country from overseas. Those changes have focused the screening of overseas investment applications on threats to national security and public order, in order that it is simpler and faster for investment to be consented. The result is that, over the last two years, we’ve gone from taking an average of 71 days to consent an overseas investment application to only 28 days.

How will these changes to the Overseas Investment Act increase investment in New Zealand?

When a business has the option of getting investors and their know-how from overseas, they’re able to offer higher-paying, more interesting jobs. I’ll just give one example. I visited two businesses in the same industry on the same afternoon. I don’t want to denigrate either of them, but the one that had had the advantage of a larger, more sophisticated company overseas investing in it had a lot more technology, slicker marketing, more know-how, and it had a product it could sell for more and pay more wages. That’s what overseas investment is really about. It’s about money and know-how so people get better-paying, more interesting jobs.

Why does New Zealand need more international investment?

It’s a shame, but our productivity growth—that is, the amount that workers are able to produce in a day of work—has lagged behind the countries we used to like comparing ourselves with. There’s a clear relationship where productivity growth has lagged as investment has lagged. That’s why it’s so critical we make it easier to get that money and know-how brought into the country, in order that New Zealanders can go to work, produce more, and take home more money, being paid more.

In addition to productivity, how does overseas investment help address low wages?

There’s an old saying that productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything. We have not rested on the progress that we have made so far. Last week, this Parliament passed an Overseas Investment Act amendment bill, which will bring a new fast track for overseas investment that does not threaten national interest or public order, that does not affect a sensitive area, such as farmland, forestry, fishing quota, or residential housing. On that fast track, we will be processing overseas investment consents in 15 days. This is a country that is serious about doing business with the world. We started at 71 days; we got it down to 28 days for a consent. We will now get it down to 15 days, with a target of 80 percent of consents being issued within five days of application. New Zealand is open to doing business with our friends around the world.

I present a legislative statement for the Planning Bill.

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

I move, That the Planning Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 26 June 2026—and, for the avoidance of doubt, that is beyond the six-month window; I’m not seeking to shorten the report back, but I think it will give the committee a bit of extra time just with the way the House schedule is looking for next year, to consider things properly and for full consideration.

I am genuinely very proud to be here, moving this first reading. It is the culmination, just before Christmas, of two years of hard work, along with many Ministers in the Government and, of course, my erstwhile under-secretary: Simon Court from the ACT Party. This has been very much a team effort across the coalition, when it comes to planning and environmental reform. We have worked together cohesively and coherently.

I think it is now understood that for 30 years or so, the Resource Management Act (RMA) has tried to do everything in one law—planning and resource management, environmental protection—and it simply hasn’t worked. The RMA is the root cause of our housing crisis. It’s made it difficult and expensive to build infrastructure and energy projects that we need, it’s tied farmers and growers up in red tape, and it has not protected the environment.

These bills that we are debating today—the Planning Bill before us right now, and the Natural Environment Bill—are the opportunity for New Zealand to unshackle itself from a failed system. We are going to, through this bill, in particular, restore the freedom for New Zealanders to shape their own future by that radical concept, to some, known as property rights.

It was interesting, I did a Morning Report interview last week, and Corin Dann, the interviewer, said, “Well, this is all interesting and very radical. Why are property rights important?” I was a bit struck dumb for a few seconds because, in a funny way, it’s so intuitively obvious why property rights are important that I was a bit taken aback. Property rights are important because they are the foundation of a market economy. It is difficult to have a proper price mechanism in the allocation of goods and resources based around price, without sound property. We’ve had experiments in the world, and economies run not on price and not on the basis of private property being a foundation stone of that economy, and, generally, they haven’t gone very well.

Name three.

Well, all of the Soviet Bloc from 1945 through to roughly 1989. In contrast, sir, countries that embraced private property and market-based economies tend to do better. Now, I didn’t intend to start my speech by echoing the great battles of the 1980s, but it seems to be that period of time, just before Christmas, in December, to recast those battles.

Anyway, this new planning system is going to radically change how we build our houses and infrastructure. I want this speech, and the speeches to come, to be an articulation of Parliament’s intent. The Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill have been designed deliberately. The Planning Bill: for planning and regulating how land is used, developed, and enjoyed, and another for protecting and enhancing the natural environment. Not every development has an environmental impact and does not need to be caught up in a natural environment regime.

The Planning Bill that’s before us now is critical to accelerating housing and infrastructure delivery. The bill introduces a significant change in what gets regulated, so more things can be done without needing a consent and allowing more people to enjoy their land. We estimate we can cut consent volumes by up to 46 percent. Now, that’s an estimate. It’s been done by officials. I’m sure the Environment Committee will want to test that work over the course of their consideration of this bill. But that itself is a radical reduction in the number of times that people need to ask permission from the local council to do things.

The shift is delivered in three ways. We’re narrowing, or proposing to narrow, the range of effects that councils can regulate So we need to focus the planning system on real impacts. Things like noise and vibration and shading—those are legitimate things that the planning system should consider. But the bill contains a list of effects that are deliberately out of scope: interior changes, apartment layouts, private views, things that do not affect others are out of scope. The need to get little council planners investigating every element of everyone’s house—they need to lay off.

The bill lists the threshold for consents. Everyday projects, like building a deck or a garage, won’t need a consent if they have no, or less than minor, effects. That is a change to the status quo.

The bill introduces the framework for standardised zones and rules. We have 1,100 different zones currently in use in New Zealand—around 1,175, I’m advised, so we can introduce greater consistency nationwide.

There are 100 plans prepared under the RMA. The bill will reduce that number to 17. Reducing the number of plans to regional combined plans, standardising content via national direction and standards will create a faster, more consistent planning process.

I do want to take a moment to explain the core structure of this bill and the Natural Environment Bill, because the architecture is what drives the system. It sets the hierarchy, locks in certainty, and ensures every part of the process aligns to faster, clearer decisions. We’ve been calling this “the funnel”. It’s a clear, deliberate hierarchy—or a funnel—that clarifies decision making from national goals, down to local actions. The structure is designed to close the door on unnecessary relitigation and provide certainty.

The new system starts with bills having a tightly defined purpose. This is quite a contrast from the RMA, which has a long and confusing purpose clause and requires everything to be looked at through a sustainable management lens. The purpose clauses in the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill aim to avoid that.

From there, the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill have clear goals that set the objectives for the system. These focus the system. If it’s not in the goals, it is not part of the new planning system. The goals do not have an inherent hierarchy within them. No goal is more important than another. The order does not indicate a hierarchy. So for the next High Court judge that considers this issue, once the bill is passed into law, there is no hierarchy. Members can see for themselves the goals of the Planning Bill. The goals we have devised are enabling and positively framed. This is done specifically and deliberately. We want people in the system to behave in that way. We’ve taken great care to ensure that each and every one is required to be in the primary legislation. I have no doubt that the select committee will kick that around, and I look forward to that.

Under the goals sits national policy direction. This particularises the goals. It’s the way for the Government to set clear expectations of councils and system users and define what must be achieved. Every goal will have accompanying national direction to particularise and explain them. With these measures in place, everyone will know exactly what is expected.

Beneath national policy direction are national standards. They set out how national policy direction should be implemented through the combined plans, how councils develop the plans, and what people can do when doing certain activities. National standards must implement national policy direction.

Below that are regional spatial plans, which are within regional combined plans. They play a key role in the system. They’re the place where strategic trade-offs are made about how land and natural resources are used. Regional spatial plans have to implement national standards.

There’ll be a land-use chapter under this bill, and a natural environment chapter, which is in the Natural Environment Bill. These govern local actions and rules. Here is the critical point: land-use and natural environment chapters must implement regional spatial plans and national standards.

Each instrument is built on the one above it. This is not guidance; it’s a legal requirement. And then there are consents under the Planning Bill, and permits under the Natural Environment Bill.

The impact of the funnel means that the consenting authority cannot refer back up to or relitigate any direction made in the instruments that sit higher up in the system. When decision makers act under the bill, they begin by looking at the instrument directly relevant to the issue at hand, only looking upward in the hierarchy if there’s something missing, unclear, or in conflict. This ensures that every decision follows the hierarchy, with each layer reinforcing the next with clarity and consistency from top to bottom. This is a decisive shift from the past, ensuring that every decision is anchored in clear enforceable direction from the top down.

It does mean greater responsibility on the Government for robust and effective national instruments. That has not been in place under the RMA—or certainly not over the last 20 years, in particular. We will be doing that through the new system.

I’m going to let my colleague Simon Court, and others to follow, talk about other areas of the bill. These are substantive changes. I’m looking forward to the consideration by the committee.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Unlike the Minister, I only have five minutes, so I will not undertake a treatise of where property rights have or have not worked with market economies, but will note that property rights do not deal with the issue of common resources such as air, water, and biodiversity. I’ll leave that there.

Now, of course, it was very disappointing to hear, last Tuesday, the Prime Minister say that this was the first Government to address resource management. Of course, the last Government, the Labour Government, repealed the Resource Management Act (RMA), and this Government brought it back two years ago when this Government repealed the Spatial Planning Act and the Natural and Built Environment Act. They were two Acts. The rationale for that was that the spatial plans might be able to, at some point, link in with infrastructure funding, so they could be in a separate Act to the rest of the Act, which was a replacement for the Resource Management Act.

What this Government has done has split the Resource Management Act in two, one looking at the functions, really, of a regional council—and we’ll get to that bill shortly—and one looking more at the functions of a district council, being the Planning Bill. Now, I would say that this is unnecessary and oversimplifies an idea that development does not impact the environment and that you can neatly put the environment to one side. However, we will have that discussion in select committee.

I do want to note that this emphasis on private property rights and regulatory takings is very troubling to the Labour Party. We are troubled that it will have a chilling effect because councils will be required to compensate for protections in the Planning Act on heritage and landscape, and that will result in there being no protections.

We also note, and it is very frustrating, that there are many similarities with the legislation. This Government could have spent perhaps a month or so reviewing what we did to make some changes. But instead, they repealed it, have amended the RMA time and time again to enable more pollution and stop councils from doing their jobs, and have then come up with a new Planning Bill that will not be passed until some time late next year.

I’m also very disappointed in the differences between this legislation and Labour’s legislation about the role of mana whenua. It is a great diminishment between our legislation and their legislation, but I also suspect—and this is something that we’ll be asking at select committee—that it is a diminishment even from the Resource Management Act into this legislation, which is taking us in totally the wrong direction.

But I will now turn to many similarities in terms of the importance of spatial plans; the importance of moving a lot of the GDP in the system away from consent, by consent decisions up into the plans and into the national direction; the efficiencies that can be gained from not considering urban amenity. These are things that we also did. Having one plan—you can argue about the chapters and things in the plans—per region and keeping it at that regional scale with the councils working together: these are all the similarities; having stronger compliance, monetary enforcement: these are good things as well. So there is a lot that this Government has replicated in these plans, but, obviously, with some very important differences—differences that we will discuss at the select committee.

Talking of the select committee, it’s going to the Environment Committee. That is good, and I very much hope that the Government members will enable a longer time for submissions, given that this is going over the Christmas break. Our legislation, also similar timing, and there was 11 weeks given, I believe, for submissions. I encourage them to do that, and also to look at the bills together to enable people to not necessarily have to identify which bill they are submitting on.

I think it would be very good, also, to have the Ministry for the Environment’s briefing in the public session as well, because resource management law is difficult. We, the Labour Party, are the grown-ups in the room over this and so we will be supporting sending this to select committee.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As a qualified urban planner, I would be the first to acknowledge that our urban planning rules have been the source of many of the challenges that we face today, and I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to find opportunities to get better urban planning rules.

While the Resource Management Act (RMA) has been a bogeyman, I would say it wasn’t necessarily the RMA that was the problem. It was the lack of national direction that was always meant to be brought in under the RMA, and then it was the detail of the rules in many of the plans, that caused many of the problems. For example, separating out land uses, requiring minimum parking requirements—a whole series of intersecting rules that stopped us from developing high-quality density done well; as we did, really, up until the 1960s and 1970s.

So, definitely, changing our approach to urban planning is a huge opportunity to get more sustainable, affordable cities, which is what we need to respond to both climate change but also have healthier, happier people; a more productive economy; and lower transport costs right across the country. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, to deliver these things. We also need changes in Government investment in infrastructure and probably much more public house building, as well, whether that’s at a local government or central government level.

It’s a very interesting, long bill. I agree with the previous speaker, Rachel Brooking, that a lot of the good parts of this Planning Bill do retain some of the changes the previous Government brought in that were repealed when this Government came in—like the Spatial Planning Act comes back, in a form, in this bill. I do congratulate the Minister on having a full select committee process—we’re looking forward to that, to teasing out all of the detail—and for keeping us briefed, to some extent, on the progress on this new system. There’s a lot to like in the new system, and I see a lot of potential to get better outcomes.

None the less, it is, at this point, difficult for us to support the bill, and it primarily comes down to some of the goals laid out in clause 11, which I’m sure the Minister will understand. I completely understand why the coalition Government has framed goals in this particular way, but I think it does miss the mark. A subgoal to “create well-functioning urban and rural areas”—that sounds really good, but there’s no definition of what that means. A lot of that will come down to the specifics of—

To national direction.

Well, when we see the national direction laid out, then that will be something that, maybe, we can support.

Probably our biggest hang-ups from the Greens—and no one will be surprised about this—has to do with clauses 11(1)(b) and 11(1)(d), and the lack of hierarchy in these; and, also, as the previous speaker, my colleague Rachel Brooking, pointed out, the much more restricted recognition of mana whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitangi—which, no doubt, would be a condition from some of the coalition partners. For the Greens, it’s fundamental to our future as a country that we recognise Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the kaitiaki role of tangata whenua, and that’s something that should be reflected in our approach to planning.

Secondly, I think the goal of the Planning Bill has to be developing sustainable, healthy cities and towns, and that would be a much better goal, I think, than enabling competitive urban land markets. It is true that the way that we approach housing and land, at the moment, is a very commodified approach, but I think that’s not how it has to be. We do want to enable more homes within existing urban areas, which will mean more affordable housing, more affordable transport, and will reduce cost for people in many, many ways—across public health, air quality, climate change; there’s so many win-wins of that approach. But describing it as “competitive urban land markets”, to me, is too narrow and doesn’t recognise that we’re more than just an economy. Like, the point of the economy is to support humans to live good lives, and in harmony with our natural environment, because we’re actually part of it; we need nature to survive and thrive.

It is with great pleasure that I stand today to read the Planning Bill for the first time. This is a single, fit for purpose law, unapologetically focused on preparing and facilitating growth and development. I want to acknowledge my ministerial colleague the Hon Chris Bishop. We’ve worked together exceptionally well, it’s been a pleasure, and New Zealand will look back on this time and say, “Wasn’t that coalition Government great?”

This bill champions that continued human development that has seen generation after generation growing up with greater opportunity than their parents, and it recognises that property rights must be the anchor for this. For decades, the Resource Management Act (RMA) stood in the way of that progress. It’s made it harder to build homes and even harder to deliver the infrastructure to make those homes livable. Roads, water supply, electricity, renewable energy—every major and minor project has faced uncertainty, unnecessary delay, and eye-watering costs.

The Planning Bill is an important step in ending that zero-sum RMA game that says, “You can have either development or the environment, but not both.” A separate bill—the Natural Environment Bill—will complete the overhaul of the RMA’s failed sustainable-management approach, which mushed development and environment together for no discernible environmental outcomes.

We are clear about what functions a planning bill must deliver and with property rights as the starting point. Minister Bishop has articulated the goals, which begin with ensuring that people are free to use their land and on the basis that they don’t impinge on that right of others to use their land. The goals extend to critical functions like ensuring we have readily available land and infrastructure to enable cities and regions to grow.

The limited scope of the goals is the entry to the funnel that Minister Bishop spoke to, intentionally narrowing the scope of the planning system. This sets parameters for national policy direction, the national standards that will further define and streamline that direction, the fewer combined plans that will apply that direction in each region, and any limited residual function that consenting still plays in this much more enabling system. These core elements sit alongside a range of carefully designed provisions, which together recognise not just the need for a legislative overhaul but a fundamental culture shift to restore Kiwis’ property rights and the number eight wire mentality we used to celebrate.

We have raised the bar for what effects are considered material. We’ve reduced the ability for people to inject themselves into your business and to resist that outrageous Government intrusion on private property rights that we’ve seen under the RMA. We’ve raised the bar for notification of consents, as well, and ensured only those in the relevant regional district can submit. This prevents any Tom, Dick, and Harry from completely different regions weighing in on your application. Notification should be reserved for those only materially affected.

We do recognise the important role of communities, including Māori, in shaping their spaces, but we’ve intentionally provided for more robust opportunities for engagement earlier in the system, including through the plan-making process.

Culture change also requires ending the RMA’s absurd bespoke planning processes and the requiring of consents for common activities that we know how to do well. Instead, we will codify best practice and we’ll trust builders, farmers, and infrastructure operators to meet that standard, subject to compliance monitoring and enforcement, and culture change certainly means ending unjustified limits on the use of private property.

Regulatory relief will mean that for some controls over private property—things like outstanding natural landscapes and significant historic heritage—councils will have to provide relief to affected property owners where those restrictions are significant. If they can’t justify the relief, they can’t impose the controls, because if the public-good case is not strong enough to convince ratepayers that it warrants relief, then it can hardly warrant the costs that the private property owner would be forced to bear.

A new planning tribunal will drive further accountability in the culture shift by, essentially, putting a referee on the field for private property owners for the first time. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Planning Bill. This is a great day today, as we put the new framework in for resource management in New Zealand.

New Zealand First campaigned in the 2023 election on getting resource management a better system in place. We know that the Resource Management Act, for a number of years—actually, over decades, now—has been broken. It has been plaguing New Zealand with bureaucratic complexity and excessive litigation, and has only hindered development. So, today, putting in this system and getting it under way is changing the way resource management will be dealt with.

What we do need through the select committee is, as the Minister has described, a really good process for submissions. We’re really glad to hear that the submission process will be longer in order to hear the views—especially from councils and people that use the resource management system—and to refine anything in this bill as we go forward.

The thing that I really want to say is that we do need an enduring system, going forward. We can’t be swapping and changing. We need, in this House, to get behind this bill, and go into the next election and give people in New Zealand certainty. We want to give certainty to our businesses and to our community so we can lift productivity in this country.

What we have seen in this bill is that there are no great surprises. We have signalled through the Ministers that it was set around property rights, and that has come through in the bill, but also it’s top-down decision-making. It’s about giving consistency. We do not want to see ad hoc plans across this country. We’ve had too much ad hoc planning, whereas we want to have some consistency so that we know if we go from one district to another, we’ve got consistency in the rules.

We are also having the national instruments that will become a fundamental part of this bill. They will come in at the end of 2026, and in 2027, and we’re having national standards. Again, across the country, it won’t matter whether you’re at the bottom of the South or at the top or the North, because you’ll know what those national standards are. They will not be different across the country.

We’ll have those standardised plans with standardised zones so that we know what development will go where, and one thing that was a real bugbear from my time of being a hearings commissioner was all the different activity classes that there were. We used to have a thing called a non-complying activity. As a decision maker, you would have to go through this gateway test and, all of a sudden, for something that almost seemed to be prohibited, you could go through a gateway test and then be able to actually try to find a way to get that consent through. This is streamlining the classes, either making things more permitted or, if they’re going through a system, making them complying activities so that you can get things through the system quicker.

Also, another bugbear, especially for the New Zealand First Party, if you look in the coastal area, has been around amenity and landscape when we’re talking about things like aquaculture. You’ve got the Marlborough Sounds where we’ve got about 60 percent of the marine farms, and you could get hung up by some bach owner in Christchurch saying, “It’s the amenity of this. We can’t put this marine farm in this bay.”, whereas the marine farmers and the community there want to see the farms develop, but because of this silly thing around amenity, it was always subjective. It was always subjective by some people that were well-paid landscape architects and who were saying that you could not do it. That’s gone.

We’re really pleased to see that this bill will enable economic growth and infrastructure development, but what I’m proud to stand in this House and say is that this is about creating jobs, it’s about creating investment, and it’s about increasing productivity. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Te Pāti Māori is not opposed to development; in fact, it’s really important. A lot of our communities need warm homes, they need safe roads, and they need resilient infrastructure. The problem that we are having with this is why development consistently comes from this Government at the cost of Te Tiriti, mana whenua, community voices, and environmental integrity. I think those are some of the questions that we pose at this stage of the bill.

Again, we cannot understand why it is that those who are building houses and are, in fact, really committed to the economic development of Aotearoa—i.e., iwi, hapū and mana whenua—are constantly relegated or sidelined in the Government’s thinking when it comes to the bills and the amendments and the way that they see things going forward. It’s not so much about what will be built; it comes down to who will decide. It does seem, again, consistently, that this Government doesn’t see a role for iwi or hapū or mana whenua. When we look at what it is that they’ve proposed in clause 11 and where they see the participation of iwi, the vagueness—we talk about giving certainty through legislation, but, actually, this gives uncertainty to not only the way that Te Tiriti is seen but also the way that iwi are seen by this Government, in any role of development. We take exception to that.

Clause 9 is saying that there’s going to be a two-year appeal, which creates uncertainty for iwi and hapū. There’s the exclusion of statutory acknowledgment—the way that it provides uncertainty to existing settlements, which have taken generations to confirm and to be enacted. There’s actually some really great partnerships that are going out in a local sense. The selling or the marketing of this bill—being able to reset and make life easier for everyday New Zealanders—seems to exclude Māori. There are concerns with the centralisation of power. That’s not been something that’s worked for a lot of our local communities very well at all. In fact, it gives out quite broad ministerial powers to set the national instruments, to override councils, to appoint members to spatial plan committees, and to intervene directly in plan making. We cannot see how that heightens the relationships for our local and regional decision makers and, certainly, the communities. These, in fact, reduce public participation. I get the whole concept of providing jobs and development for us as a nation, but, again, that shouldn’t be at the cost of those who are materially affected. There seems to be a watering down of not only the Tiriti but where this Government sees communities, particularly those who are going to be adversely affected.

One of the things that we’ve been really concerned about is this development versus protection. It says that the bill will balance housing, infrastructure, the environment, and Māori interests, but there’s actually no clear rule of hierarchy of where Te Tiriti sits in this. From, certainly, the iwi’s perspective, Te Tiriti comes first, and it is, in fact, what Governments have agreed to in the settlements and the relationships that they have with them. Again, this vagueness of why Māori rights are being watered down is concerning, and the Government’s continued this theme with how it sees that these amendments or this bill is going to work and is going to be able to work better. It just, really, means that there’ll be more time spent in courts and spent doing things that are counter-productive to developing the economy of Aotearoa.

Environmental and heritage protections—we’ve seen some of that effect management really narrowed—concernedly narrowed down. This whole Treaty transition where we see that Treaty settlements are going to be negotiated or rearranged within a two-year period: what happens if that doesn’t land the way that the iwi who have settled expected it to? What is the Government providing for certainty? Are they going to be opening up so much more for the complex settlements, and what are they risking to everyone in New Zealand when we have to see some of those opened up?

We’re not pleased with some of the changes. We have been pleased with the fact that the Minister did engage with us and has actually agreed to extend this and make sure that the public have a really good say about this bill. But, certainly, at this stage, we don’t support the first reading. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I rise with great excitement today to support the largest Resource Management Act (RMA) reform we’ve seen in the past 30 years, and this is an exciting day for New Zealand. I said the largest reform because this is about saying yes to infrastructure, yes to housing development, and yes to renewable energy—and yes to actually getting things done and getting the wheels moving in our economy, creating jobs and opportunity.

We all know that the RMA system is broken. As we’ve heard from many members across the House already in this first reading debate, it’s been holding our country back. And, look, I would like to congratulate and acknowledge our Minister responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop, for taking the bold move to deliver these two bills to the House today.

This new planning system will save ratepayers and taxpayers an estimated $13.3 billion by regulating only what is necessary, and it will reduce the number of consents by up to 46 percent. This reform supports getting things built faster and more efficiently. It’ll cut red tape and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy. For too long, people have been tangled in red tape and paperwork, waiting months and months, or even years, for a consent. I have many examples in Hawke’s Bay, my electorate: housing developments taking years to consent; renewable energy projects taking up to two decades to get a consent—a recent wind farm that we opened in my region taking 18 years to consent. It’s frustrating and, put quite simply, it is not good enough.

Under the new system, we’re making consenting faster and simpler. We’re removing unnecessary hurdles so our communities can move forward. No more wasting time and money. It will mean we can get on and build houses—those houses that we so desperately need. The old RMA has caused endless delays, waiting, filling out forms—long processes costing millions and millions of dollars. Our new system will speed up the processes so more homes can get built quicker and cheaper.

The same goes for infrastructure: roads, bridges—we’ll get them built faster. These projects need to happen. Farmers and growers will be enabled to grow and innovate. We’re backing our primary sector and letting them get on with what they do best, and that is grow the best produce in the world. Just today, we saw horticulture exports forecast to hit another record high of $9.2 billion. Our horticulture sector can only flourish if we enable our growers to do what they do best. Reducing red tape for our growers and farmers is critical to their success and enabling them to create jobs and opportunities for our regions across New Zealand. RMA reform is the key to unleashing productivity in our primary industries.

Renewable energy is another area where the old rules make it too hard. As I’ve already touched on, wind farms and solar farms take far too long to be approved. We’re making sure clean energy projects can get off the ground faster, helping us meet our climate goals. This bill will give certainty and confidence, with clearer consultation requirements, standardised rules, and faster conflict resolution through a new low-cost planning tribunal.

This will also give more confidence to invest in New Zealand. Planning rules will get a whole lot simpler. As we’ve already heard from the Minister, right now, New Zealand has more than 1,100 different zones, each with its own set of rules. This is a maze for anyone to try and navigate through to get something built.

Look, this is an exciting day for New Zealand, where we are seeing this significant RMA reform. National is ending the culture of “no” and creating a culture of “yes”. It’s time to release the brakes. Let’s get the wheels moving and deliver the growth, housing, and environmental improvements that New Zealand deserves—fixing the basics and building the future.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. If anybody listening would like to see an example of the shamelessness and the arrogance of this Government, all they need to do is listen to the speeches that have been on display today, and the last one from Catherine Wedd is a prime example. That member is a breathing, walking, talking point; she has not met a key message that has come from the National Party head office and failed to repeat it in this House, and that speech was a classic example. It started out with a misleading statement that the Prime Minister said earlier this week, that “No Government has tackled the RMA”; we could see exactly the same from Jamie Arbuckle’s contribution, who said, “We shouldn’t have to put up with this stop-start attitude.”; and, of course, Simon Court, who was rather upfront in the praise of not only himself but also this Government: “Isn’t this coalition Government great?” he said, before he left to go and high-five the mirror.

What this Government has done today is attempted to paint themselves as heroes. Not one of them has mentioned an indisputable fact: that they were the ones that brought us back to the Resource Management Act (RMA). Everybody agreed that the RMA was out of date; everybody agreed that it was not fit for purpose, and the last Parliament moved away from the RMA. We repealed the RMA, we reformed it, and they were the ones that took us back. They took us back to the RMA that was not fit for purpose and that did not serve our communities, and then they turned around and said, “We need a bipartisan approach.” What a colossal waste of time these last two years have been. While Simon Court might be congratulating himself and saying that he’s great, I’ll tell you who won’t think he’s great or that this Government is great: anyone who would have been able to build a house under the reformed RMA brought in by the last Parliament but, because this Government brought us back to RMA, haven’t been able to; anyone who works in local government who finally felt like they could get things done in their communities, only to have the handbrake pulled up—the very thing that Jamie Arbuckle pleaded this Parliament not to do.

This Government put the handbrake on planning laws in this country, stopping housing developments, stopping infrastructure, stopping massive, important builds in every community in the country. The question has to be posed: why? There was no logical reason for them to pull the rug out from under the new planning system in this country—other than to put their name on something that the previous Government did. Two years of wasted time. What they could have done was do the work in Opposition so that when they came into Government, this bill on this day wouldn’t have been needed. They could have made the amendments required, and we could’ve got on with it. Two years of wasted growth—two years of wasted progress in this country because of their vanity and their decision to play politics so that it was Chris Bishop’s name on the bill instead of David Parker’s. I think that is regrettable. That is a decision that they made that has held up this country. We are finally here today when we didn’t need to be.

As my colleague Rachel Brooking has pointed out, we are supporting this bill, but what we pleaded with this Government to do was to not get rid of the new planning system. If they felt the need to change it, amend it—don’t scrap it, don’t start from scratch, don’t waste two years. But they were too arrogant. They wanted their moment, and they’ve held this country up for two years as a result.

The local government sector and the construction sector—who, incidentally, have been screaming out for work and has lost 20,000 jobs in the last two years because of decisions made by this Government—would have benefitted from an amended bill, if the Government had felt it was necessary, because then we would have had actual progress over two years. But they haven’t benefitted. That is a lack of progress. The infrastructure sector has been screaming out for certainty as well. Everyone that wants to do things in this country has been pleading, on both sides of this House, for certainty. Why? Because when this Government came in, they cancelled things, they scrapped things, and they did things not for logical reasons but for political reasons, and the planning system is the perfect example of that. We didn’t need this to be this way; they could have avoided all of this. We didn’t need to come here today, on the second to last day of Parliament for the year, to debate this bill. They could have sorted it, and they chose not to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This mic—oh, there we go. It is a great day, today. It’s great to see that we’ve got support around the House for the Resource Management Act (RMA), because there’s no doubt about it that the RMA has been a dog’s breakfast, and it’s been a dog’s breakfast for a very long time. It’s probably been one of the single biggest barriers to doing anything in this country. That’s whether you want to build a house or a road, put up a commercial building, put a dam in—do any of that.

Speaking of buildings, as Chris Bishop has said—there we go, the speaker has just turned on. As Minister Bishop has said, your front doorway is actually your own business; it is nobody’s business where you put it, what colour it is, and what shape it is.

To Catherine Wedd, who was talking about the Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries report—I’ve actually brought it in, Catherine. If we want more of this in this country: $62 billion in export revenue from our food and fibre sector; 12.5 percent of, or almost one in seven, New Zealanders working in the sector; 15 percent of our GDP—if we want to double our export value within 10 years, we need to sort out the RMA. It’s as simple as that, because it has been a mess, and I, like a whole lot of other people, will be very, very happy to see it put firmly in the dog tucker pen.

In terms of the streamlined process, there will be a streamlined process, which is the Planning Tribunal. That is, it will narrow the scope of effects—I’d better have a look at my right notes, sorry, Madam Speaker. There will be a faster, more cost-effective way of resolving certain lower-level disputes between system users and councils, and that’s got to be a good thing.

We’ve also had instances where the Environment Court has, effectively, been weaponised by people up and down the length of this country, with the previous regime, and we’ve had some groups that have refused to participate in the planning process. Literally, they have said, “Oh, don’t worry, you can just do what you do. If we don’t like it, we’ll see you in the Environment Court.”, and we have spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for certain consents—and, in some cases, millions of dollars—to then go into that process.

There are also consent applicants who put in an application and then they’ll get 30 pages of RFIs, or requests for further information, with seven or 10 days to respond, and if they don’t—and it’s almost impossible to do—they just head straight off to a notified hearing, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry up and down the length of the country can put in their two cents’ worth, even though it’s got nothing to do with them. To that point, that is going to be narrowed down as well. The new system will only allow people who are materially affected to participate in the consenting process and it will raise the threshold for all notifications to focus on adverse effects that are more than minor, and that has to be a good thing.

Catherine Wedd has touched on the costs. We have spent billions and billions of dollars in this country to do anything. That is borne—it’s the trickle-down effect—by either the taxpayer or the ratepayer, and the buck has always stopped with them. This planned bill is going to—and it’s modelled, so it will not be 100 percent accurate—save ratepayers and taxpayers $13.3 billion by regulating only what is necessary. It’s modelled to reduce consent numbers by between 15,000 and 22,000 per year, as well, and it’ll unlock housing, speed up critical infrastructure—that is, jobs. That’s jobs, and that’s what we desperately need.

My last comment would be that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to try and get this right.

No, it’s not—it’s really not.

Well, it is, and we do need to get it right. I would urge people to have their say. If you’ve got a consent or you think you need a consent for something under the current regime, think about whether, under the new system, it’s better or the same, and even if it’s better, it doesn’t mean to say we can’t make it better again. Please submit on the bill. I commend it.

Kia orana, Madam Speaker. It’s really interesting because here, this afternoon, listening to Government members talk about this bill—and, I guess, it’s a bit of a first of the double, really, of these two bills—anyone would think that this was not a Government that repealed, within the first 100 days, a legislative approach that was basically delivering on all of the things that they themselves have articulated, within 100 days. I mean, we’re sitting here listening to the Minister saying that this is an opportunity for the unshackling of itself. Yet he is part of a Government that, within the first 100 days, basically threw out the Resource Management Act (RMA) reform that the previous Government had instituted and put in place.

We hear from other Government members, such as Jamie Arbuckle, who says that what’s really important here is certainty, but the last two years, since the Government within their first 100 days threw out the legislative reform, have actually not provided certainty for many sectors, local government amongst that. We’ve heard from Catherine Wedd, who talked about the fact that the RMA system is broken. Why, then, did they, within the first 100 days, throw out legislation that would indicate a different direction?

We’ve heard from others that this will see roads being built. Well, with the track record in terms of roads of national significance, I don’t think the RMA is going to help them there. I think it’s more about the money, which seems to be growing by the day. Then we hear from Mike Butterick who says that the RMA is the biggest single barrier to building anything in this country. Yet, within the first 100 days, they turf out, with no alternative plan, a legislative package that would seek to make changes that now they have suddenly come around to and seen the light. We did something and now this is the Government who sat on their hands for the last two years and have done absolutely nothing.

We’ve heard from the Minister that it is his intention that this goes to select committee for an extended period. Now, we will see about that because when we look at the Environment Committee, there’s a bit of a track record there where, despite what this House says in terms of instructions as to when report-backs will be delivered, that committee seems to, by a Government majority, go against all of this House. While the Minister has indicated that it’ll go through to 26 June next year, I do hope that perhaps some members on the Government backbenches are happy to follow through on that because it is important that the community do have their say.

There are a number of changes within this first bill, and one of them does sort of raise some concerns—but as my colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking has indicated, we will be supporting this bill through to select committee—but the select committee, hopefully, will tease out a number of the issues, and it is important that we do have the opportunity to hear from folks.

I want to just focus on the local government sector for a moment because one of the concerning aspects that I think does need to be teased out is in the area of heritage and landscape matters, where councils may be required, as a result of what is included within the instruments, to head down a compensation pathway. As we know, this is a Government that loves to put the boot into local government whenever they seem to be down, and this is a Government that is very happy to do that. Councils don’t have a lot of discretionary income, and so when we look at how those compensation options might exist, whether they be rates relief, whether they be land swaps, whether they be development rights that might fall in favour of one party or the other, whether they be basic cash payments or grants, at the end of the day that comes down to what capacity and appetite, I guess, councils have to be able to deliver on that. There is a real risk here that this would serve as a fairly strong disincentive for councils to either put in or put out or put on the table or take off the table particular considerations when it comes to heritage and when it comes to landscape.

I do hope that the select committee is open to hearing the views that will be expressed, because I’m pretty sure they will be expressed. I also hope that the Minister is going to follow through with his colleagues to ensure that this does receive a fulsome and wholesome form of consideration when it goes to select committee, because the community has waited for two years for this Government to come up with a plan, and it’s important that the Government hears from them.

It really is a privilege to stand today on this bill. This truly is a remarkable opportunity for a once-in-a-generation change to change the landscape of the Resource Management Act (RMA). Can I acknowledge some of the previous speakers. Rachel Brooking and Tangi Utikere, I thought your comments were fair and we welcome your support to take this to select committee. I thought Kieran McAnulty’s comments were aggressive and inappropriate. The reason why we didn’t accept Labour’s RMA reform was because we couldn’t put lipstick on a pig, frankly, and so we had to get rid of it.

This Government has been very busy in the last few years. So, firstly, the first order of the day was to repeal that. The second order of the day was to bring in a hybrid solution, which was the fast-track amendment process which we’ve been working on and even tweaking over the last few weeks. It’s been great to hear that that has actually been working very well and we’re seeing projects now locked in and away.

But it’s taken two years to pull this together. I acknowledge the work of Minister Chris Bishop and under-secretary Simon Court because it is a very robust change. It is changing the landscape of how we do things in New Zealand. If we look at productivity of New Zealand—and productivity is the key word that all Governments of all stripes continuously refer to—since the late 1980s or, arguably, the early 1990s, our productivity rate hasn’t changed much. If you correlate that to 1991 when the RMA was introduced, it would be no surprise to see that that was also a correlation to the RMA.

I do have to say, on the backdrop of today’s RMA announcements, it’s important we look at the holistic change that this Government’s doing. We had to tidy up housing and Kāinga Ora and reset some of that. We had to tidy up some of the New Zealand Transport Agency. We’ve introduced roads of national significance. We’ve introduced Invest New Zealand and some of those things. The work of Minister Chris Penk around the building and construction industry—we’ve enabled more building materials into the country. We’ve enabled proportionate liability, so councils aren’t the last man standing, so we’re resetting the disincentives why councils were so risk-averse. This week, we’ll be introducing the seismic recalibration where it’s just literally sent a chilling effect on the building industry and it’s going to enable Auckland to go and grow.

All these things taken together really create a holistic change around the whole RMA settings, and it really, really is something to behold. We’ve heard about the current 1,100-odd zones; under this bill, spatial planning will be mandatory for each region and must be developed collaboratively by all local authorities within the region through a spatial plan committee. So whilst we’re resetting the macro level at a Government level, we’re also still enhancing a degree of localism as local bodies will work through those trade-offs, as we’ve heard about.

Consenting: under this bill, activity classifications will be simplified into four categories—permitted, restricted discretionary, discretionary, and prohibited activities—and each activity will be subject to clear and distinct information, which is really important so there’s transparency around this. In terms of designations, the designation process is intended to enable effective infrastructure provisions, reduce the cost and complexity of the designation process, and enable designations and infrastructure provision to be aligned with spatial planning.

Again, I refer to last week when we put through the first reading of the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Amendment Bill. Only two projects throughout New Zealand had been able to use the infrastructure funding and financing, even though parties of both sides of this House had sought to enable it. That will enable much more development and will enable development entities to use off - balance sheet funding and financing tools to unlock infrastructure. Combined with these RMA settings, it’s going to be something to behold.

As we’ve heard through Mike Butterick and Catherine Wedd, an estimated $13.3 billion of savings—we’re going to reduce consents by up to 15,000 to 22,000 per year. We’re going to unlock more housing, with standardised zoning rules and 30-year regional spatial plans that ensure land and infrastructure for growth. We’re using the regional council’s footprint. We’re going to have 17 regionalised zones.

We’re building on what works. We’re changing what doesn’t. We’re going to back farmers and growers. We’re giving investors and developers greater clarity. The future is bright. Today is the beginning of New Zealand’s future economy growing. New Zealand is back on track, and New Zealand is back on the map. I commend the bill.

The question is, That the Planning Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

I move, That the Planning Bill be reported to the House by 26 June 2026.

I present a legislative statement on the Natural Environment Bill.

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

I move, That the Natural Environment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider this bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 26 June 2026.

This bill ushers in a new era for environmental management in New Zealand. As I said in my remarks on the previous bill, the Resource Management Act (RMA) has tried to do everything under one law: planning, environment, resource management, and city and district plans. It hasn’t delivered the prosperity that we were promised back in the early 1990s, and it has failed the environment. To take one simple metric: almost half of New Zealand’s total river length was not suitable for swimming between 2016 and 2020 due to unsafe infection risk. To take another example: in 2021, 68 percent of indigenous freshwater-dependent bird species were threatened with extinction or were at risk of becoming threatened. Many of these species are found nowhere else in the world—that was in 2021. Historical land-use decisions have left communities unnecessarily exposed to natural hazards, making the financial impact of disasters even worse. Cyclone Gabrielle caused $9 billion to $14.5 billion in damage to physical assets.

So we are introducing two clear, focused pieces of legislation: the Planning Bill, which the House has just voted on, and the Natural Environment Bill. The two bills work hand in hand, and the purpose of the bill that we’re talking about is to establish a framework for the use, protection, and enhancement of the natural environment. These bills are the country’s opportunity to break free from a system that has shackled us with complexity, duplication, red tape and uncertainty, and confused accountability and decision making, and we are intending to fundamentally change how environmental decisions are made.

The Natural Environment Bill follows a deliberate hierarchy, and I don’t want to re-canvass what was talked about during the last debate. But the funnel that I talked about in the Planning Bill channels decision making from national goals down to local actions, and we intend the same to work when it comes to the environment. The new system starts with clear goals that focus the system at the top and are then refined through the layers. If I could just make one comment in relation to the last debate, it was a little bit, I’ve got to say, disappointing to hear the Greens say that they liked much of what was in the bill but that they had an issue with the wording of the goals and the hierarchy of the goals. Well, fair enough; nothing’s perfect.

We’re up for the debate around the wording of the goals and exactly how they manifest in practice, and that seems, to me, to be precisely the sort of issue that you should get into in detail at the select committee. Despite Julie Anne Genter saying that she thought much of what was in the Planning Bill was really good—and I suspect that she’d say the same about the Natural Environment Bill—they voted against it anyway, which I think says it all, really, which is that the Greens are ultimately the party of protest, not a responsible party of Government.

It’s really pleasing to see the Labour Party recognise, despite a bit of heat and light in the last debate—and, I suspect, in this one too—that this is a big step forward. It picks up on some of what’s been developed in the past, it changes it a little bit—or it changes it quite a lot, actually—and it is a big step forward for the country. I won’t go through the goals of the Natural Environment Bill, because members can read them for themselves, but it is about natural resources within environmental limits, and that is really important.

In terms of environmental limits, New Zealanders rightfully share pride in our pristine environment, and we have a joint belief collectively, as a country, in protecting our environment for our children and our children’s children, but the RMA has not allowed for the development of our resources within environmental limits. That will change under this bill. Central and local government decision makers will be required to set binding environmental limits, informed by data and community aspirations.

National limits will protect human health, guided by Ministry of Health standards, and regional entities—which are currently regional councils, but it may change—will set ecosystem limits for fresh water, coastal water, land, soils, and indigenous biodiversity, using methods set out in national standards. The Minister can specify minimum levels for ecosystem health limits. There may be circumstances where a council and community consider it appropriate to set less stringent limits than those set by the Minister, and this will be possible in the new system.

The limits will be legally binding and linked to specific areas through natural environmental plans, with resource use capped or managed through action plans. Exceptions will exist for critical infrastructure, and even then, plans must show how limits will be restored over time if they are exceeded. Clear, science-based limits give certainty about what activities are likely to be approved in order to ensure that conversations happen early and incentivise efficient resource use. I do think this will lead to innovation and the reduction of environmental harm, and it will help manage cumulative environmental effects. There will be protection for indigenous biodiversity.

Regional policy statements and plans under the current system often duplicate national direction and add unnecessary complexity. We are scrapping that duplication and replacing it with a single natural environmental plan in every combined regional plan. This plan will implement nationally set environmental limits for human health, and regional entities will be required to set limits for ecosystem health using the methodology, as I say, set out in national standards. The intention of the bill is to permit or allow more use of the natural environment, within limits. The new system is about bringing common sense back into planning decision making. A key part of this is proportionate regulation.

The National Environment Bill requires decision makers to take a proportionate regulatory approach. There are procedural principles to embed good practice and set clear expectations in the new system. Voluntary and farmer-led tools will be used wherever possible, with stronger rules used only when needed. The tools include voluntary action and catchment groups, when resources are not under pressure, and freshwater farm plans, flexible and farmer-led, helping farmers to identify environmental risks on their farm and then plan practical actions to manage these.

One of the things I find most frustrating about the debate between town and country, and rural and urban is that it’s our farmers who are often the environment’s best friends. It’s in their interests to look after the environment, and some of the disdain directed at rural and urban New Zealand and some of the rhetoric about environmental vandalism and environmental damage is, frankly, facile, misleading, wrong, and deeply counter-productive. It’s absolutely true that it is in farmers’ and growers’ best interests to make sure we have a natural environment that we can all be proud of.

This bill establishes a framework to allow voluntary action catchment groups, who do a great job already within the confines of the current system, and more proportionate and flexible approaches at a local level. It allows for action plans, led by councils, for getting back within environmental limits when they’ve been breached. It allows for land-use controls which place restrictions on some activities, for example, vegetation clearance, diffuse discharges, or earthworks.

One issue that I know the select committee is going to want to get into is allocation. Under the RMA, the taking or use of natural resources such as water, coastal space, and discharge capacity is allocated through a combination of permitted activities and consents. Basically, we use a “first in, first served” model. They’re allocated in the order they’re received, and existing consent holders seeking replacement consents have priority over new applicants. I think it would be fair to say that this is a method of allocation, but it is a method that I think is increasingly recognised as inefficient and inequitable when resources are scarce, which is not always the case. But when they are scarce, it is not always the best allocation mechanism.

The Natural Environment Bill initially retains the RMA’s allocation approach, but it also allows for new allocation approaches such as market-based approaches and comparative consenting to be enabled through national instruments. This would be a big change for New Zealand—and I want to flag that right up front—and it is not Government policy right now to do that. But I think it is worth having the debate about those instruments and about those allocation mechanisms, and I’m sure that the select committee will get into it.

That would be a big change for New Zealand and there would be consequences from that, but it is, I think, tolerably clear that the status quo could be better. Making that change is not Government policy, but it does allow the option and the flexibility in this bill for that system to be turned on.

So not the status quo?

Well, it’s not the status quo, but if the bill passes, it will become the status quo, and it will allow a discussion and a debate about those issues.

In closing, I wish to acknowledge the hard work of my Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Simon Court, in relation to these bills. I also just want to take a couple of seconds in the closing of the second of these two very important bills for New Zealand’s future to acknowledge the hard work of the Ministry for the Environment team and, indeed, the cross-agency team who have worked on these bills at great pressure over the last two years. They have been first-class performers for New Zealand, and they are first-class public servants and first-class New Zealanders. So thank you to the Ministry for the Environment team and, indeed, the whole of the Public Service for helping us get to this point. Thank you.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I will echo what the Minister responsible for RMA Reform just said about the very hard-working public servants involved in the creation of this bill—and, of course, the legislation before it, as well—and many of those people are the same people.

I also want to touch on what the Minister was saying about an environment, and how the Resource Management Act has not done well for our environment. I’m pleased to hear him say that, because I’ve heard the Prime Minister talk about these reforms only in growth turns. If you just say “Yes, yes, yes, yes” to everything, there is a consequence. If you say yes to lots of sediment runoff, then your rivers are going to be polluted and run off into the coastal environment and there will be no fish. These are obvious consequences that we can see, so I was pleased that the Minister was talking about the importance of our taiao.

However, I am worried. I have many worries about this bill that, like the other bill, we do want to take to the select committee and interrogate. I note the Minister’s last remarks about allocation systems; again, something we looked at last time as well. The regulatory takings provisions also apply to biodiversity protections. That is of grave concern to the Labour Party because, of course, we face a biodiversity emergency; not just a climate change one, and, of course, the two are very interlinked. We need to be doing the best that we can to not only maintain our biodiversity—and there is talk in these bills of offsetting—but to improve our biodiversity. This bill does seem to lack ambition in this area of biodiversity. I note that the Minister said, “Well, if the goals aren’t right, then that’s something that the select committee will look at.” That’s certainly something that we are interested in, that is increasing the ambition for our biodiversity.

I’m also concerned about some ability to avoid bottom lines where they’re not met. The point of bottom lines is that you have to meet them. Of course, where those bottom lines are set is of foremost importance. Those processes are out of this primary legislation and will be done through secondary instruments, so we do need to make sure that we have the settings right. I’m not sure that they are right in these bills, particularly as they relate to environmental bottom lines being set at a regional level and there being no national environmental bottom lines; that the national bottom lines relate to human health is another issue.

I want to, again, talk about this relationship between this bill and the other bill. I really think there is some thinking—and it was reflected in some of the Minister’s comments there about the rural and urban settings and communities—that you can just neatly separate our environment from our urban cities which, of course, include the environment in them. You cannot do that, and we see that. When you have an urban development in a city, without adequate protections for earthworks, and if there is going to be a flood, what happens to the dirt that’s sitting there, that’s going to run into the drains and then run into the coast; that is an issue to do with river quality, if it goes into the stream and then it goes into the coast. But it is also an issue to do with urban environments and building more houses that all of us want here. So we do need these two pieces of legislation talking to each other, and it would be better if they were in the one Act.

I’m also very concerned that we have not seen in these bills much talk about the importance of green spaces in the urban environment. We’re saying that you can do whatever you like on your property and we’re not looking at urban amenity, but green spaces do a lot of heavy lifting around stormwater runoff. We know, with climate change, that we’re going to get more and more rain. So it’s important that we have the mechanisms for those green spaces to (1) be required and (2) be paid for. This is a big issue. Also, I’m disappointed that these bills do not deal with climate pollution. I think that they could.

In my final seconds, I am disappointed that these bills lack ambition for improving our environment, but I do want people to submit on them and to demonstrate the changes that will enable us to stop the pollution that prevents us from swimming in rivers, from eating our mahana kai, and having safe drinking water.

On behalf of Te Rōpū Kākāriki, I stand on behalf of our team as we consider this new legislation, the Natural Environment Bill. Now, we want to acknowledge Minister Bishop’s efforts to keep us updated, and the briefings received from officials—acknowledging, also, it’s pleasing to see that water conservation orders are being kept. We acknowledge, also, the reduction in the number of plans as being good progress, and the greater reliance on the national direction is good. But it’s just a matter of where we’re going with the national direction, of course.

As Te Rōpū Kākāriki, we are a party for Te Tiri, for te taiao, and for te ora o te tangata [the health of people], and we acknowledge that the Resource Management Act (RMA) has not been effective in protecting te taiao. But, you know, we’ve been in the RMA for the last two years because of the repeals, and now we’re back here. As tangata whenua, Te Rōpū Kākāriki can see that Te Tiriti provisions are not strong enough, and reducing the role of iwi Māori in this space is not good. Iwi Māori have been engaging for decades in the RMA, and as marae, as hapū and iwi, we are very used to that system, and saw many layers and many examples of input from iwi Māori and hau kāinga on this bill.

In this bill, it recognises the Crown’s responsibility to Te Tiriti, but it’s actually weaker than the original RMA. It doesn’t go far enough, and, in fact, it’s relegating us as tangata whenua to consultation only. Now, it says that this legislation—we’ve heard that the legislation is there to provide a clearer role for tangata whenua within the new legislation. But that’s not true, really, because we don’t even have a broad Te Tiriti clause from which we can provide our responses as tangata whenua in this space. We can clearly see that there is a lack of decision-making input that iwi Māori have, moving forward.

Now, this legislation is no different to the fast track, where we’ve seen a hierarchy of Māori: those with Crown mandates; those with settlements; those that have statutory recognition; those with iwi, hapū, environmental management plans. That actually skips the opportunity to provide an inclusive way where iwi Māori—as hau kāinga, whānau, hapū, marae, iwi—can input into the legislation. That’s a part of the weariness that we have in what is being provided for iwi Māori moving forward.

Mana whakahono ā rohe have been a space; we’ve seen a lot of mana whakahono ā rohe come through. In this legislation, it provides space for the existing agreements to be maintained and those that have been initiated previously, but we note there will be no new mana whakahono ā rohe agreements unless it’s via a Treaty settlement. That’s limiting, again; creating a hierarchy of Māori and how Māori enter this space for the regulation in taiao matters. In this new piece of legislation, many fish-hooks—many fish-hooks and barriers will arise for iwi Māori. As they come into the submission process, we invite the voice of impacted whānau, hapū, iwi, and marae to provide voice to these very, very real issues that they’ve experienced over the years. This could be an improvement, if we had strengthened space for us to have shared decision-making, shared input, and that all tangata whenua voices are included. That is not guaranteed in what is being provided.

We have some worries in terms of our environmental bottom lines, and when we think about the regulatory relief or the form of compensation to come that prioritises te hunga whai rawa—those who are the property owners—we get worried for councils, because, as they look to establish rules, whether it’s for indigenous biodiversity, significant natural areas, or sites of significance to Māori, they’re going to have to make payments of compensation. Who has the deep pūkoro to pay for this compensation? And a big question that we have when it comes to the cap on rates that councils will have moving forward: mā wai e utu ēnei nama hei ngā tau e tū mai nei? [who will pay these bills in the coming years?] So there’s heaps to do and there’s plenty of concerns, and we object. Kia ora.

The Resource Management Act (RMA) has had its vice grip on New Zealand for far too long. Its integrated management approach fostered the falsehood that protecting the environment means resisting and delaying the necessary and inevitable growth. This Natural Environment Bill instead recognises the need for targeted legislation to protect the environment, not by resisting growth but, instead, setting clear rules so that growth occurs within environmental limits.

Intentionally focused on quite different matters, there are core consistencies with the Planning Bill, however, that reflect the common need for a paradigm shift away from the culture of “can’ts” to a “culture of “can-dos”. Each bill has clear goals that set the objectives for the bill. These focus the system, and funnel limits that flow down through the rest of the system—through national policy direction, through standards, environmental limits, natural environment plans—and then, where still needed, although much reduced, the need for permits.

Public involvement will be front-loaded into higher-level processes and on important matters such as plan making and limit setting. This means the new permitting process will no longer have to reconcile either reckons or blessings from every Tom, Dick, and Harriet who aren’t materially affected and don’t live in the district or region.

We also recognise that communities must have flexibility when expressing their priorities and values about the environment that are important to their region. That is why the limit-setting process accommodates communities’ social and economic aspirations, as well as their aspirations for the environment, because stewardship is strongest when it recognises human needs, not when it denies them.

The no net loss goal for biodiversity recognises opportunities to drive better biodiversity outcomes through offsetting in places where offsetting investments, biodiversity investments, are more impactful—quite a contrast to the common RMA demand to protect things in place. It’s a high-cost, low-benefit outcome which has not improved the environment.

This RMA rigidity is something that our farmers have felt more broadly, with regulations on their farms, than any other sector. They’ve often faced costly, disproportionate, and duplicative controls. For this reason, we’ve focused on a graduated approach to interventions on people’s farms, so the Government is only regulating what is necessary. This recognises the great work and the outcomes that our farmers frequently produce through their freshwater farm plans, through voluntary action on farm, and through the catchment groups that make wonderful efforts in their communities.

As with the Planning Bill, when it does come to imposing land-use controls on farms, regulatory relief will play an important part in the culture shift we demand. Under the RMA, we’ve seen property rights trampled by councils imposing significant natural areas with a colouring-in pen on people’s private property. While biodiversity protection is a valid cause, it is for the public good, none the less, and this practice has, under the RMA, had indiscriminate and disproportionate effects on private property owners. The bill’s regulatory relief mechanism for biodiversity controls on private land ensures we have a mechanism that protects biodiversity where it matters, and where a public good is such that councils can justify to their ratepayers the cost of the relief to the affected landowners.

Then we have the low-cost planning tribunal. This is intended to combat any legacy RMA inertia, because people need a referee on the field to police things like disproportionate demands for consents, unfettered information requests, and insufficient regulatory relief—all of which have been rife under the RMA, and which must end in the system we’re replacing it with.

Finally, sitting atop all of this are the procedural principles that will drive the discipline that has been so lacking in our planning system, with proportionality being of particular importance to drive the culture shift.

The Natural Environment Bill shows how we can protect our environment in a balanced, proportionate, and rational way. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to offer New Zealand First’s full-hearted support for this Natural Environment Bill. Today, we do start the process of unshackling our primary sector and the rural communities that depend on them. In case anyone is under any doubt in this House how important that is, the SOPI report—the Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries—this morning, 83 percent—Grant McCallum’s holding it up—of New Zealand’s merchandise export, some $62 billion. It does not get bigger than that for New Zealand.

We have to have a planning system that is fit for purpose, and the Resource Management Act was not that. It may have been, at one point—and a well-meaning document and well-intended—but it has metastasised into a planning behemoth, a labyrinth of complex rules and interpretations; some hundred plans across the country. It’s been the biggest issue, actually, when we’re out and about, talking to farmers, the absolute frustration; absolutely perplexed as to how they were going to get through this system. Tens of thousands of dollars; years, in some cases; spurious disputes and complaints holding up processes.

David Clark was quite outspoken about this. He was brave enough to come out and put his actual situation into the media, to show the general public what it was. Many of us know David, and many of us have been on his farm. He is probably one of the best, if not the best, arable farmer in Canterbury, unable to get through a system. Paradoxically, the only way it probably could have got through under the old system, or the current system before we made our changes the other day to rollover the—in a preliminary manner, the only way it could have got through was converting to dairy.

So the rules had completely broken; tens of thousands of dollars, a lot of duplication of administration, enormous frustration. There was impingement on property rights, and significant natural areas (SNAs) had been referenced where councils, even if they didn’t want to, had to come on and identify areas that may or may not be SNAs, and that land could, essentially, be confiscated. Farmers were not in a position to argue about that. If it’s an SNA, it’s an SNA. Some of them looked like just a little bit of scrub and manuka, but, nevertheless, if they’re an SNA—and this legislation would allow us to compensate. I think the select committee needs to look at that. I’ve heard the Opposition look at it, where those thresholds are. We don’t want to get into a point where we can be extorted as Government, either in the heritage or in the biodiversity space, but there is some room to move there, where if you have had a property right taken, that you might be compensated by no rates, for example, on that particular block of land.

The new rules set in natural directions; they’re much clearer. There are still regional plans that will sit under that; 17 regional plans where there is a degree of flexibility, and there needs to be. Again, in Canterbury, we had the ridiculous situation where the natural water coming out of the bush in the hills was at a higher level than the current national bottom lines. It was completely unattainable. That was just dispiriting to those farmers and landowners who really did want to maintain their environment but were in an impossible situation. So there is some flexibility there; there is a planning tribunal for a triage.

Of course, we know there’s so much good work going on in our catchment groups, the QEII Trust, and farmers will have freshwater farm plans. There are certainly still checks and balances there and they will be auditable.

The one thing I did want to flag, too, New Zealand First has caution around the market base for the market allocation system. That has been, frankly, a disaster in places like the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, and parts of America. The select committee will have to look at that very, very carefully. I know, within the farming sector, that’s also pretty controversial, and the select committee will get a range of views on that. I think we need to be really cautious that we’re not going down a Milton Friedman path that doesn’t actually work in practice.

But New Zealand First is absolutely delighted to support this bill. Thank you.

I think, when we have legislation come to the House, it’s really important that we test on those who it most affects how it’s going to land, if it’s going to land at all. Certainly, hearing from Tainui, this bill is a flop, and when we have someone as esteemed and illustrious as Tainui who have said, “Actually, we’re so upset by it, we’re going to go to court.”, it does caution on what the Government’s agenda is really going to be. The bill has been sold to the nation as a reset, like a clean break from the Resource Management Act, but, in fact, it may be for some—it’s a modern system that’s going to protect some—but for Māori, for iwi, for hapū, for mana whenua, for grassroots communities, the real question is: who’s going to hold the power and who bears the risk? Certainly, that’s some of the questions that we’ve been hearing.

What the Natural and Built Environment Bill is really doing, at the heart, is centralising control. It replaces local decision making with a funnel that starts at—guess where!—Wellington, and we’ve got Ministers that are setting national limits. National policy direction is shaped by these Ministers. Regional plans are locked into decisions for 30-plus years. There’s all sorts of things that really alert iwi. When we’ve got that kind of, I guess, narrative coming out and we’re going to be in a situation where we don’t get to challenge bad projects and things, and the bar has all been messed up, it is really concerning that a bill of this nature is adversely affecting iwi who are being seen as the economic solution for this nation, who lead with great partnerships, and who have shown goodwill and great relationships with many a Government, including reaching out to this one here. Where we’ve got vague language where Māori rights are being tweaked, again, as I said earlier, the uncertainty that’s at risk here, it’s really hard to understand who’s going to—well, it’s really easy, to be honest—benefit from this and who’s not.

The bill includes a whole lot of environmental limits, but, again, we emphasise to our whānau out there that those limits are being determined by Ministers, and while Ministers can override councils and intervene in plans, environmental protection then becomes worryingly political. For many iwi, whānau, hapū, and mana whenua, we know what happens when politics start to interfere in the values of looking after our environment, because environment, for Māori, is not something that stands alone; it’s something that we’re intrinsically related to and connected to.

It is concerning enough for us to be able to caution our whānau out there to be ready to submit and to make sure that we have a really clear understanding about this bill. It has watered down really critical language, such as it talks a lot about Māori “participation”. Participation is not the same as partnership as intended in the settlements. What it also does is provide uncertainty for those iwi who have yet to settle, and an assumption that their rights only exist when settlement happens is actually badly incorrect.

So we are concerned about the way that this bill opens the door to first in, first served, and Treaty rights are not explicitly protected. Again, we risk seeing our taonga turned into commodities for the sake of jobs and economic development. When we’re in those situations, we’re actually outbidding short-term gain for w’akapapa long-term pain. I think what the bill has failed to do is recognise Māori proprietary rights in freshwater geothermal resources that leave longstanding Māori iwi mana whenua claims unresolved.

Yes, the bill introduces all sorts of changes that could be celebrated by this Government, but it doesn’t do anything to respect the Treaty relationship that the Government is obligated to. We don’t oppose reform, but we oppose reform that re-centralises power and weakens Māori authority and sidelines communities. A system that claims to protect environment while limiting community voice is never a model that should be celebrated by any Government. It’s not transformational; it’s actually managerial.

Our message to our whānau is to stay alert, to stay engaged, and do not be silenced by the complexity of the bills before you. We look forward to seeing this come into the House for the second reading, the select committee, and we oppose it as it is.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real privilege to take a call on one of the two most important pieces of legislation this Government will pass. R-M-A—rarely have three letters come to mean so much to so many and created such anxiety in our society. Everybody is affected by it, hence the importance of getting it right.

If the Planning Bill is about enabling things to get done, the Natural Environment Bill is about making sure we do them responsibly. For too long, environmental protection was bundled up with land-use rules in a way that created confusion and inconsistency. Communities were left unsure what standards applied, and we needed steady, practical direction, with no wild swings that hurt farmers or the environment.

In fact, I will take you back to my maiden speech, where I highlighted that, in the 2017 election, it was a tough time to be a farmer. Farmers became the punching bags of the campaign. We were threatened with water tax, were blamed for all the water-quality issues in the country, and were continuously used as a pincushion by the left. Farmers’ concerns were so strong that it led to me organising a protest in Morrinsville. The stress and worry that flowed through the rural communities at the time reminded me of the mid-1980s and the Rogernomics regime, when it was in full swing and we were called a sunset industry. That’s rather ironic when, today, we pick up the Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries report to see how important it is for our country.

All these experiences have taught me that while change is inevitable, it is the job of leaders to take people with them during periods of change, and it’s also important to work on a cross-parliamentary consensus for long-term issues like water quality. As farmers, all we ask for is a clear direction of travel that is achievable while maintaining a profitable business. Having the pendulum swing wildly every time there is a change of Government is not good for anyone, and it’s certainly not good for the environment.

The bill, using national policy direction, will set clear, binding limits for air, water, land and soils, and indigenous biodiversity, with national standards that councils can apply consistently. Decisions must stay within these limits using proportionate, risk-based planning. It simplifies permits and lifts the threshold for notification so that participation focuses on those materially affected. The outcome is much more certainty. Farmers, agriculture operators, and developers can plan with confidence inside clear limits. Councils will spend less time relitigating and more time monitoring outcomes and enforcing rules. We have the option of a national regulator to ensure compliance is consistent across the country.

It really feels appropriate at this point to go back to a meeting I attended recently at the Lagmhor Westerfield War Memorial Hall in mid-Canterbury with a whole lot of farming families. These were just farming families, intergenerational families that have been working the land for many, many years. Here they were, all concerned about their future. Why? Because they were faced with huge cost to try and get a consent to do what they’d always been doing, and doing it well. It got to the point—and it was highlighted, as has been mentioned previously, by David Clark and his family. He had got to the point where they were struggling to get through a process for a consent that would only be for a few years, and what was that going to mean? It got to the point where David was even thinking of saying to his boys, “Don’t bother going farming.” Well, we need strong farming families in this country, and we don’t want to lose them.

The transition will be practical. National rules will apply early, consents are extended to avoid churn, and councils will work to timely, proportionate, cost-effective principles. By 2029, the full system will be in place. This bill is about balance, protecting what matters while enabling prosperity. For Northland, that means healthy rivers and coasts, confidence for agriculture and farming, and rules that make sense on the ground. Certainty, consistency, and less stress—that’s what people are asking for.

As deputy chair of the Environment Committee, I’m looking forward to hearing from sectors and individuals as they make submissions on this bill, and I encourage them to do so. Your insights will help us get this right, so the system works for communities, for business, and for the environment. I commend the bill to the House.

The member mentioned his maiden speech; you’re allowed to read your maiden speech.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. We’re considering, this afternoon, two bills that, as the Minister responsible for RMA Reform himself has said, largely go hand in hand, given the crossover between the two—you can’t have one without the other. There are many legitimate considerations that the select committee will need to turn its mind to as part of considering this bill. A couple of them have been touched on by my colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking, particularly around the biodiversity efforts, which really cannot be compromised, when we look at the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, where the flora—and, within that, the fauna is a pretty special part of who we are. So I hope, alongside the urban amenities stuff, that is something that the select committee does turn its mind to.

I want to step back a bit and again reiterate the lack of active progress that the Government have been prepared to take over the last two-year window. There were moves afoot to address the concerns that the Government have indicated, but yet again, for the last two years, they’ve done nothing but sit on their hands and complain about the Resource Management Act and simply cancel, in the first hundred days, what was an answer to that.

Just last week, we were, in this House, considering through all stages a piece of legislation that really did indicate that the Government were certainly not prepared. The duration of consents being extended—that’s what that bill was last week. Again, why did Minister Bishop and the Government not foreshadow that this was going to be an issue? Why did they have to displace these two bills in favour of that one when they knew that this was certainly in the mix? They’ve had two years to be thinking about this, and it’s disappointing that hasn’t actually come out the way that perhaps it should have.

There’s been a wee bit of conversation from the Minister already today about the need for an extended select committee process. I am pleased to hear that the Hon Mark Patterson also concedes that there are issues around the compensation element that councils or the local government sector would be required to consider. I do hope that—well, I’m certain that the select committee will hear from a number of submitters in that particular space, because the stark reality is this: we are in a situation and we are heading in a direction where the current Government are basically making it very, very difficult for local government, as a sector, to be able to seriously consider things like compensation; where is the line? What does that practically mean for someone who is an applicant who, under this particular regime, would be required to be compensated, through the whole range of the different scope of options there? I’m pleased that New Zealand First have indicated that, really, the Government and others need to turn their mind to this through the select committee process. There needs to be an understanding as to where the threshold lies. We look forward to hearing a little bit more in that particular space.

One of the things that hasn’t been sort of touched on in any great depth is that the level of involvement of mana whenua, but also consideration of wāhi tapu and other sites of cultural significance. These are important things that I’m sure will be part of the select committee’s deliberations. But, again, I do hope that the select committee has an open mind when it comes to considering those sorts of things.

The second leg of the double, in terms of this bill, really does have quite an active role for regional councils, and there is quite an element of uncertainty there, given the recent announcements by the Government as to what the future for regional councils will actually mean. While the Minister and others have, for example, talked about allocation rights and what particular role that might play, regional councils do actually have a role, in terms of what’s drafted here, around the allocation of natural resources. Now, yes, that would lead to not a consent but a permit, I understand; it’s a bit of a change in language there. But I do think it’s important that the sort of direction that the Government have signalled for regional councils, and the future thereof, is a consideration that the select committee is able to think about. Because if we have a bill that’s talking around the role of regional councils—that, under this Government, may not exist in the future; that’s where they want it to head—I think there needs to be a level of agility around the considerations in that particular space.

So there are a number of factors in this bill; there were a number of factors in the previous bill. Again, my concluding comments are that I hope that the select committee is open to considering all the views so that we get a good piece of legislation on both bills.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a real privilege to be able to speak on the Natural Environment Bill. This bill, along with the one that we’ve just discussed, the Planning Bill, sets up the framework for absolute change in how we develop in this country.

As has been mentioned by others, the Resource Management Act (RMA) has been a real handbrake on development and change, and just an incredible imposition on private land use. Nothing more really highlighted this than talking with one of my constituents about the problems and the process that he is going through in trying to build a little cottage on his land. It’s not something that anybody else could even see, but his consent was going to be declined because of an intermittent waterway that the regional council thought was going to be a problem. Well, that intermittent waterway was a ditch that he had dug 20 years ago. This is the kind of thing that is also a problem for other farmers in Canterbury, where ditches, in particular, have been identified as intermittent waterways by Environment Canterbury. That’s been a particular problem when people have been trying to renew consents for farming.

It actually blew my mind to hear that farmers needed to reconsent and reapply for a consent, in some cases, every seven years to do something that their family have been doing for a nearly a hundred years. It actually has cost our farming sector hundreds and thousands, if not millions, of dollars to reapply for these consents. It has been a complete embuggerance.

Now, in Banks Peninsula, we are very conservation-minded. We have some unique indigenous wildlife by flora and fauna. It was really the collective actions of landowners—farmers, in particular—that came together to form the Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust over 30 years ago, which has led to some remarkable resurgence and recloaking of the Banks Peninsula area in indigenous flora, in particular, and that had absolutely nothing to do with the RMA. It had everything to do with the energy, will, and, frankly, the investment of the farmers and landowners.

I celebrate this change. I believe that the environmental limits that will be set within the framework of this bill will be sensible, and also with the emphasis particularly on human health and the public health effects, this will be an evidence-based and scientifically based framework that will enable the development and building of infrastructure and buildings that we want to see, including, of course, the development of renewable energy that we want to see in this country. At the same time, it is protecting the real things that need to be protected, rather than things like the visual amenity of people driving through the Mackenzie Country, which has prevented some of the potential development of solar farms in the Mackenzie Country. These are the sort of things that the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill will enable, and they will prevent those ridiculous things from happening.

These two pieces of legislation that we’re discussing this afternoon are landmark and completely transformative pieces of legislation. I’m sure that the Environment Committee will have a huge range of feedback from communities, from iwi, and from everybody involved in this, and I believe that they will take this seriously and work very collegially together to come up with a wonderful report from the chair sitting in front of me. It will be, I’m sure, a very great piece of work from that committee. So I commend the bill to the House.

Just before I call the next speaker, did the member use the word “embuggerance”? I love—it’s great to increase our vocabulary. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s been slightly frustrating sitting on this side of the House and listening to speeches from members opposite echoing the Prime Minister and Catherine Wedd, the chair of the Environment Committee, who keep saying that no Government has tackled the Resource Management Act (RMA), when it’s clearly not the case.

I want to actually echo a little bit some of the points that my colleague the Hon Kieran McAnulty made in his contribution to the previous bill, actually, where he was absolutely right. This is a pure vanity project by this Government because members have stood up one after the other and talked about how bad the RMA is, how terrible it is for farmers, and how terrible it is when it comes to development and progress.

The thing is that no one is disagreeing with that. When Labour was in Government, we felt the same way, that the RMA was holding us back as a country when it comes to both development and ensuring better environmental protections. That’s really what led to the two bills that became pieces of legislation, the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act, that Labour put in place. David Parker worked for six years to finesse the details around that legislation that would have cut approval times for housing and infrastructure to be built. It condensed over 100 different regional plans down to just 16 plans. And what did we have? The minute the National Party took office, the Government decided to repeal those two Acts and go back to the RMA that members today have been waxing lyrical about how bad it is.

We need to just take a moment to appreciate that this Government that is talking about how bad the RMA was and how they’re the first Government to tackle the RMA was the very Government that repealed the legislation that would have progressed this nation, and took us back to the RMA. It’s just so that they can now put in their first statement of the Natural Environment Bill that this bill will replace the Resource Management Act 1991, conveniently forgetting that step in the middle where there were two bills.

Then one member from the benches opposite decided to counter some of the arguments made on this side of the House. Ryan Hamilton decided to say that the reason that they repealed those two bills was because they couldn’t put lipstick on a pig. That was basically saying that those two Acts—the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act—were fundamentally flawed; that is what that means. Then you would think that this Government, having repealed those two Acts that Ministers and the Ministry for the Environment worked on for six whole years, would replace it with legislation that was fundamentally different from the two Acts that they repealed. Is that the case? Not really, because the two bills that we have and are debating in this House are not fundamentally different. They’ve got a whole bunch of bits that were in the two other pieces of legislation that Labour developed. Really, the key differences would be the emphasis on property rights, perhaps the goals set out in the national direction, and the purpose statements.

In the time that I have left, I thought I’d take a little bit of a view of what people are saying about these two bills. One is that the implications of splitting these two bills in the way that this Government has done kind of says that they feel that development doesn’t have an impact on the natural environment, that you can put these two things in two separate boxes and treat them differently, but that’s not the case.

Forest & Bird says that too. Splitting land-use planning from environmental management could lead to duplicated processes, complex cross-references, and more litigation as councils and communities try to reconcile the two Acts with potentially conflicting purposes. That comes to the crux of this whole exercise. What we will want to see at the Environment Committee while we hear from submitters is how we will work to ensure that we progress development on one end, sure, but that legislation also protects environmental purposes and biodiversity, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for that. Hopefully the submission period won’t be truncated by the chair again.

The Resource Management Act (RMA) has been around for near on 35 years now. Consent processes play a central role in regulating how land, air, the coastal environment, and our fresh water is used. While it was originally designed to balance development with environmental protection, the system has long been criticised as being complex, costly, and inefficient.

Here we go again.

Just what has been said before. As a result, successive Governments have sought to reform and make it more effective, but improvements have been marginal at best, if not elusive. One of the most significant challenges the current system has is its complexity. Obtaining a consent often requires expert reports, legal advice, and consultation with multiple stakeholders, often leading to sometimes very high cost. This poses difficulties, particularly to small developers, community groups, and individuals who lack the resources to navigate the process. Alongside cost, time delays is another recurring issue. Consents can take months, often years, to secure, and uncertainty around approval timelines can discourage an investment and hold up projects, often with loss of job opportunities. Inefficient consent processes adversely impact all New Zealanders.

Another problem lies in the inconsistency of decision making. Different councils interpret and apply the RMA in different ways, meaning that similar projects may face very different requirements depending on which region. This undermines confidence in the fairness of the system and contributes to inefficiency. Alongside is the strong emphasis on public participation which, while valuable for democracy, often creates further delays. Submissions and appeals can be used strategically by competitors and lobby groups which, at times, shifts the process away from the intended focus of genuine environmental concerns.

Providing opportunities for genuine concerns about proposals to be aired and heard is an important part of our democracy. We must also recognise that mana whenua have a special kaitiakitanga relationship with our environment, one that is within the Treaty of Waitangi. However, we must look to more timely, collaborative, and effective ways of incorporating diverse views and getting decisions made with less adversarial and sometimes cynical behaviours where time-delaying tactics are used to frustrate proposals contrary to the broader public interests. New Zealand is littered, unfortunately, with these examples.

Underlying all these problems is the ongoing tension between development and environmental protection. Some critics argue that the consent process makes it too easy for environmentally harmful projects to go ahead, while others contend that it blocks much-needed housing, infrastructure, and primary industry activities which are at the heart of our economy. This lack of clarity has fuelled calls for fundamental reform for quite some time.

In response, major changes are proposed with these two bills that we have before us today, and we are reading the first reading of the Natural and Built Environment Bill here now. Together, these aim to simplify the system with far less consents required, provide more consistency across regions, and ensure stronger environmental safeguards.

In conclusion, the resource consent process in New Zealand has long struggled with complexity, with delays, and even with decision making creating barriers for both development and environmental protection. However, the reforms currently being implemented signal a major shift towards a system that is more efficient, consistent, and resilient in the face of environmental challenges.

Inevitably, trade-offs and compromises in public policy decisions are needing to be made, but if resource consent decisions are made through better processes, then we can achieve our aim of a first-class economy and a world-class environment. I commend the bill to the House.

That member could probably benefit from reading a little less of his speech as well, just for the future.

The question is, That the Natural Environment Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

I move, That the Natural Environment Bill be reported to the House by 26 June 2026.

I present a legislative statement on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

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

I move, That the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee to consider the bill.

Competition matters for consumers, for businesses, and for the strength of our overall economy. When markets are working well, prices are fair, innovation thrives, and consumers have real choice.

Now, the current regime has served us well for many decades, but it is no longer fit for purpose. Some processes have become slow and costly, even for the conduct that is clearly in the public interest. Enforcement tools can be blunt, leaving markets damaged long after a breach. Furthermore, our merger rules do not currently respond to patterns of consolidation that can quietly erode competition over a period of time. When competition is weakened, New Zealanders end up paying the price.

This bill addressed those issues. It modernises the Commerce Act to ensure that our competition law keeps pace with today’s economy. It introduces five key reforms, a statutory notification regime for certain collaborative conduct, and a new class exemption power. It introduces strengthened merger oversight. It introduces a new court remedy, corrective action orders, to restore competition after a breach has occurred. Updated confidentiality protections, including a time-limited restriction on disclosure under the Official Information Act is included, and a clearer objective test for predatory pricing, as well. I’m going to go through those five in a little more detail.

First, the supporting of beneficial collaboration. The bill makes it easier for businesses to collaborate so that it benefits consumers. This could be, for instance, where small businesses negotiate together for better terms, or distributors work jointly to improve supply chains. Under the current law, even simple arrangements can require lengthy and expensive authorisations. This bill introduces a statutory notification regime that means firms can notify the Commerce Commission and proceed, unless the commission objects within 45 working days. The existing collaborative activity clearance process has been streamlined and will provide, now, a more straightforward process. The commission also gains a class exemption power for low-risk conduct. As secondary legislation, that will be subject to parliamentary oversight.

The second feature updates merger oversight. The bill contains provisions to improve oversight of business acquisitions. This prevents concentration of market power that significantly lessens competition and disadvantages consumers. The bill clarifies the test for a substantial lessening of competition—including creating, strengthening, or entrenching market powers—and we can better then capture killer acquisitions that remove emerging competitors before they can challenge big incumbents.

The bill also allows the commission to consider the cumulative effect of a series of smaller deals over a three-year period, addressing so-called creeping acquisitions that quietly consolidate market power. New targeted powers will enable the commission to pause a transaction for up to 40 working days and to call in a proposed merger for review where there are reasonable grounds for concern. These powers protect competition while the commission assesses the transaction being undertaken. The commission can then require the parties to keep assets separate and safeguard the businesses during the suspension period, rather than having to seek urgent court orders. It ensures that potentially harmful mergers can be examined before businesses are combined or operations are actually merged, reducing the risk of irreversible harm to competition.

The bill also introduces clear statutory time frames for merger reviews: 140 working days for clearances, and 160 days for authorisations. This gives businesses greater certainty and ensures the Commerce Commission has the time it needs for considering complex cases.

Further, the bill allows the commission to accept behavioural undertakings to enable a merger to proceed, in addition to structural remedies. This is a significant improvement that helps ensure benefits of mergers can be realised while also addressing competition concerns. In some cases, requiring a divestment of part of the business may not be practical or, indeed, proportionate. But conduct-based commitments around access, pricing, or non-discrimination can effectively address competition concerns. So, in this bill, we’re giving the commission flexibility to tailor solutions to the realities of modern markets, and including digital sectors where access to data or interoperability can be critical.

The third aspect of the bill focuses on corrective action orders. The bill adds a flexible new remedy: corrective action orders. If a company breaches the Act, the High Court will be able to require steps to remedy the effects of the breach, such as, for instance, providing access on fair terms or removing barriers that harm rivals. This is particularly relevant in the digital market space where dominant platforms can use their position to restrict access or impose unfair conditions.

The fourth feature of the bill addresses confidentiality protections. The bill improves confidentiality protections, with effective enforcement, depending upon opening communication with the Commerce Commission. Currently, some parties refuse to provide information because they fear that that information, in turn, could be released under the Official Information Act potentially to competitors or to customers. The bill addresses this by providing a time restriction on the commission publishing or disclosing confidential information supplied to them in confidence. These protections are modelled on frameworks already used for other financial regulators, such as the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Fifthly, predatory pricing. The bill tackles predatory pricing. That’s a tactic used by powerful firms to drive new competitors out of the market. This practice reduces competition over the longer term, leading ultimately to higher prices, less choice, and lower quality for consumers. The bill will set a clear objective test so that the sustained, below-cost pricing by a firm with a substantial market power is treated as misuse of market power. Short-term promotions and genuine discounts remain, of course, outside the scope of this prohibition.

What next steps? Well, the bill reflects extensive consultation that has already occurred, public submissions having been received earlier this year, and the Commerce Commission has, of course, been closely involved in preparation of the bill. The confidentiality provisions were consulted on extensively with the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Ombudsman to ensure transparency and proportionality. Advice on consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act has been provided to the Attorney-General, and will be available to the House.

The select committee process will allow a detailed scrutiny, and this is an opportunity to test how the bill will operate in practice and ensure it actually achieves the objectives without creating any unintended consequences. Public input will be vital. Finally, I encourage businesses, consumers, and practitioners to have their say on this important new piece of legislation.

As I said at the beginning, competition is important for businesses, consumers, and our economy. It’s the cornerstone of a fair and dynamic economy. This bill ensures our law will be fit for purpose, supporting collaboration where it helps, stopping consolidation where it harms, and giving the commission tools it needs to act swiftly and effectively.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for a chance to speak on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This is a good bill, and there is much to be very enthusiastic about the way the Commerce Commission and the Minister have engaged, and what will be an important set of reforms from this Government. It builds on the work of the commission over many years and the changes that were brought in in 2022 to one of the major and most used parts of the Commerce Act—the misuse of market power provisions at section 36, which Labour began its reforms of then, when the former Minister, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb, was in charge.

This is an important continuation of that work—and worth just stepping through exactly what this means, because this is legislation that is on the side of the consumers. It’s on the side of the small-business owners. It’s on the side of those people in Aotearoa’s economy who are paying too much when we compare the deals that they are getting at the checkout or the deals on their energy bills compared to, say, our cousins over the Ditch in Australia or in other market economies that have been able to maintain more openness and have not become as highly concentrated as ours.

There’s been findings over many years of the Commerce Commission highlighting just how mergers and acquisitions in our market have affected the prices that we are paying—findings like, in the grocery sector, of the duopoly making more than $1 million in excess profits per day that New Zealanders cannot stomach and will not continue to stomach. It’s right that both major parties are lined up here today saying enough’s enough, and we have to tool up the Commerce Commission to deal with this across party lines and for the long term—because it’s not only those prices that consumers pay today; it’s also our productivity in the long term, which is hurting because of this.

Parties all around the world of red and blue stripes are interested in these issues now, because when people go to the checkout and they are paying more and more every week, or when people get their power bills and it’s winter time and they are paying more than they did the year before and the year before and the year before, it’s not only those large companies that they start to lose faith in; it’s the people who are elected who set the rules which govern them. It’s their democracy and it’s their institutions, and those things are fundamental to people’s faith in an economy which is open and fair. They need to believe that they can get ahead and that they can get a fair deal and that the rules govern them in the same way as the big guys. In New Zealand, we cannot say that’s the case.

That is why this is an incredibly important bill. I’m going to tell you a couple of the things that I think are very, very good, and I want the Minister to hear that we are nothing but enthusiastic about them. In fact, he should go hundies—go as hard as he can—on those things. Then there are a few things which we have a genuine disagreement over, and I look forward to submissions on those issues.

One thing that I really welcome from him and thank him for his leadership on, and the Minister before him, Andrew Bayly, is private equity roll-ups or mergers—killer mergers and mergers by stealth, where the end result is that you have one large player in the market gobbling up all the wee little regional players, and all of a sudden they’ve got a market share that is the size of a large market player. They didn’t go through any market clearances for that. That was a result of market dynamics over a period of 10 years. This affects our healthcare system. Overseas, it affects pharmaceuticals. Overseas, it affects chemists and people’s access to the fundamental basics that they need to live a dignified life—and so we should care about those things, as politicians.

This does not go as far as Australia’s reforms. The federal Minister Andrew Leigh has set out a playbook that we could adopt in New Zealand, and I will be asking not only officials but the Minister himself why we haven’t adopted some of those stronger measures that we’re seeing being adopted now in Australia to complement already stronger State-level provisions around resisting that kind of private equity roll-up, which has a stranglehold on many of our regional economic centres, where people are paying too much for the basics.

I’ll also be asking some questions around the predatory pricing regime. The Minister knows I have an issue with this. He’s picked the only pricing intervention where it’ll be illegal under National to put prices down. Last time I checked, consumers quite enjoyed the market impact of a third player coming into the market and prices plummeting for a period where that third player got established. It’s important that our commerce law doesn’t unnecessarily raise the moats that duopolies and monopolies have created around themselves in the New Zealand market. We’ll be asking questions about that.

I’ll also be asking him questions, particularly around his choices for the collaboration and notification regimes. My colleague Helen White has done some work on just how dangerous collaboration can be when firms team up to argue with workers and set conditions around wages and other factors like that. We’ll have a lot to say at the select committee.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. We too are supporting the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. There are quite a few things to like in this bill. I agree with the previous speakers that there’s also a range of components that we look to scrutinise and receive public feedback on during the select committee stage.

The previous speaker, Arena Williams, funnily enough, touched on one of the areas that I think we would really welcome public submissions and further evaluation on, which is in relation to the elements around enabling greater collaboration. Those are found in clause 19 of the bill, and those ones I think are particularly important for me. I know some other MPs have worked with groups like Fired Up Stilettos, and I mention that group—a collective of adult entertainment workers—because they were specifically quoted in the regulatory impact statement (RIS) of this bill.

If you’ll allow me to read a little, knowing your comments on the previous bill, on page 16 of the RIS, the RIS talks about how the current framework also affects smaller groups seeking to coordinate for practical reasons rather than to reduce competition. This is where Fired Up Stilettos, a group that I’ve been closely working with, was quoted: “They sought to work together to negotiate more transparent and consistent terms with the venue. While their conduct likely breached the Commerce Act’s prohibition on cartel behaviour, the collaboration was not aimed at distorting the market or excluding rivals, but rather improving transparency and predictability in their working arrangements.” Then they noted, in the RIS, that authorisation was technically available, but there was a steep cost that they would meet—almost $40,000—in the application fee.

I think this is a really important part where public submissions will allow us to identify whether the changes do as intended. We have seen how we’ve got contractors who are often in precarious working conditions trying to band together, but their behaviour would be deemed as cartel. But the previous speaker noted that there are also downfalls to how these settings could be put in place.

The other components of this bill that we want to also scrutinise are in relation to the Official Information Act exemptions. I think those deserve a bit of additional scrutiny, particularly around preventing information being released for a period of 10 years. That does seem like quite a lengthy amount of time and we do look forward to submitters challenging or justifying those components of the bill. I think the argument that would often be made is around the commercially sensitive information and smaller players do often find themselves at a disadvantage in terms of the use of the Official Information Act and the uses of it, but there’s also the important component of making sure the public can also access some of this information and that there’s a level of accountability around it.

If I go back to the collaboration component, in the analysis on this bill, it’s interesting that there’s also public sector agencies being noted around it, and I think this also deserves a bit of additional scrutiny. For example, one of the agencies that was noted was ACC collaborating with other health agencies on commissioning contracting and whether these could end up being deemed as cartel behaviour. I think that’s going to be another interesting part for us to adequately debate.

I agree with the previous speakers around the predatory pricing components of the bill, because I think what we do not want to see—and I echo the sentiments—is preventing a third player entering, for example, the supermarket market and having low prices and that being seen as predatory pricing. If anything, I think what we need to really encapsulate what happens afterwards is better tools to prevent price gouging. That’s what we don’t want to see: effectively, having a third player entering the market, having lower prices, and then, effectively, lifting those prices up to a level that consumers will find out of reach as a way to simply just enter the market. I think that’s going to be important.

Again, we really welcome submissions on this issue because this bill is quite a substantive bill. It’s got quite a few causes and a few moving pieces. Without public submission, it’ll make it harder for legislators to rely on simply official advice to make a good judgment of whether we can continue supporting this bill. But for now, the Green Party welcomes the Minister’s work in this area and we look forward to engaging with the select committee.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of the ACT Party to support the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The core purpose of this bill is to bring fairness for both consumers and for businesses. We believe that it is the role of the Government to ensure that our markets are healthy and our markets are operating in a way that is promoting competition because if there is competition in the market, then consumers gain, because if there is competition, then, obviously, all the players in the market will do their best to innovate to provide best value for their product.

We also know that the cost of living is a big issue. We have been working really hard to tackle the cost of living. Tackling the cost of living cannot be resolved by just working on one solution; it needs a multi-pronged approach. This is one of the approaches where we know that, indirectly, it will have an impact on the cost of living as well.

We know that there can be some powerful or some influential players in the market, those who might have the interest of just taking over the whole market, to dominate the whole market. In that situation, what will happen is they will be taking away the opportunity from small businesses to offer what they can offer and also the opportunity for new entrants because they will know that there is one dominant player and they won’t bother coming into the market. We want to see that new entrants should be able to come in as well, offer what they have to offer, and it should be based on merit rather than based on dominance in the market.

We know that when companies advertise their products or bring any product into the marketplace, as I said before, of course they advertise; they can use other tactics as well. There could be some ways of differentiating their products to promote to customers. There can be other ways, just like maybe working on packaging and things, but predatory pricing, as we heard before from the Minister in charge of the bill, the Hon Scott Simpson, can be an issue and that’s what we want to make sure doesn’t happen and that the Commerce Commission gets the tools, the powers, to tackle this kind of behaviour, if it exists and if it is identified.

The second issue I want to talk about is mergers. Yes, the big mergers, when they happen, they become quite obvious—we all know about them—but when mergers happen in small steps, if there are series of small takeovers, sometimes they are not that obvious. The Commerce Commission needs more powers to deal with those kinds of mergers because currently we know there is a gap. It can go to the extent where the damage happens to the extent where it cannot be reversed. We want to see that the Commerce Commission gets the instruments to intervene within the specified time period in the bill, to ensure that those kind of mergers can be stopped.

Now, we also know that not all collaborative business activity is anti-competitive. There are some things that do not obstruct competition. Those kind of things should be allowed to happen without much interference from any regulation, Government body, or independent Crown entity. That’s why we are saying that, at the moment, some collaborative activity where it requires authentication from the Commerce Commission can be a time-consuming exercise and can be an expensive exercise as well. In that case, we can lower the requirement of the process for businesses by reducing it to strategy notification so that it can happen faster and the cost on businesses is also lower. So it’s about bringing that balance in our markets and making sure that businesses are able to operate in a fair manner, and also that consumers are getting the deals they deserve to get in a fair and healthy market. We want to see that the Commerce Commission is bringing that balanced approach and the gaps that have been identified are being addressed through this bill.

Finally, one thing that I want to highlight, and this is about the protection mechanisms for whistleblowers. I’ve heard from members before that it could be commercially sensitive information. Yes, it could be commercially sensitive information when it comes to the Official Information Act because, in this bill, what it does is it creates an exemption from the Official Information Act 1982 for confidential information supplied to the commission, aligning with frameworks used by the Reserve Bank and the Financial Markets Authority, but then, for whistleblowers, we also know that they also fear retaliation. So that kind of protection will ensure transparency and trust in the system. That’s why I think it is a really good clause in this bill. I look forward to seeing what submitters will say in the select committee process for this bill. Thank you.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the meal break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m.

The House is resumed. When we broke for the dinner break, we were on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill and we’re at call No. 5—Dr David Wilson.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I’m pleased I’ve got my five minutes. We thought we had enough time before, but dinner called. I will try and get through this.

Free markets, as many of us know, have a tendency to move towards monopoly and oligopoly, left unattended. This is why we need regulation, why we need balance, and why we need fairness.

Oh my God! The voice of reason.

We can’t have that, can we! Very good. All right. Now, I think all our guys on this side are going to agree with us on this bill, so I’ll just keep going, shall I?

We need to protect consumers and small businesses. We need to do this through competition, but we also need to empower the Commerce Commission to put these rules and regulations into force. We need action on this stuff. We are a small trading nation at the bottom of the world. We also have a small domestic market. This, unfortunately, leaves us prone to market dominance. Just think: building duopoly, banks oligopoly, supermarket duopoly, energy and electricity. There’s too much control in the power of corporates, and we need this balance, so we are very pleased with this bill.

We also need to collaborate as we are a small trading nation. It’s very, very important for us to figure out how we can gain expertise and how we can work together to compete with the rest of the world. But there is a difference between collaborative advantage and cartels that collude. We don’t want that either. You can see there’s balance and reason, and we need good authority and regulation to balance these things for us. We’ll also address the predatory pricing that kills competitors or new entrants. My friend from the Green Party started to talk about price gouging, but I can tell you, if we have a whole lot of predatory pricing, that actually leads to price gouging, so we’ve got to be very careful there as well.

Speaking of mergers and acquisitions, I remember one of the previous Ministers talked about the fact that if we had this legislation a decade ago, maybe we might have stopped the National Bank being gobbled up by ANZ, but that one’s already happened. We can’t turn that back. We can’t turn that clock back. Barriers to entry, supply contracts, vertical integration that captures a market, cartel behaviour, and protective licensing—all of these things are getting in front of consumers getting a fair deal, and we’ve got to address it.

Lastly, I’d just like to speak a little bit about the fact that this bill also puts in place protection for whistle-blowers. That’s actually really important. This shifts the balance of power for someone that is seeing something happening that’s not right within an organisation and then going against that organisation. This power to the Commerce Commission enables those people to honestly front up to what’s going on in terms of monopolistic behaviour and the like. This bill upholds what we all want in an economy: fair business practices that promote healthy competition, support for small businesses without overburdening them with regulation, and to ensure that the Commerce Commission has the powers it needs to protect New Zealanders. We commend this bill to the House, and I look forward to addressing it in select committee. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill, the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, is an excellent bill, as demonstrated by such support around the House. I look forward to seeing it coming through the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee. I commend the bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you. I’m standing slightly sooner than I thought, because that previous offering was so short, but I am standing to take a call on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I am standing to support the bill, but, unlike the other member, Dr Vanessa Weenink, who could support it in a very succinct 10 to 15 seconds, I’ll take a little longer to explain not only why I’m supporting it but also some of the reservations that we have on this side of the House about some of the things in this bill—because, right now, New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living, and they’re also struggling with a Government who promised to fix it and who have, instead, made it worse. We see this just today in the results that have come through that show us that housing costs are going up, power bills are going up, and food prices are going up.

Don’t be negative. Be positive.

And there are calls from the other side of the House to be positive, when the only positivity they are delivering New Zealanders at Christmas is positive increases to the price of the basic staples that are required that make up the cost of living. Under this Government, it continues to climb.

Remember 12.3 percent under Labour?

Another member on that side of the House proclaims loudly about the prices of things. Well, I’ll give you the prices of things: milk is up 16 percent, and bread 53 percent. As colleagues in the House pointed out today—

What part?

If the members expect the member who’s speaking to stick to the bill, you keep feeding him with interjections, which keeps requiring him to respond if he wishes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for making it so clear why I have not yet been able to get to the substantive content of the bill, which I really did want to address in my speech tonight. And so, despite the constant interjections from the other side of the House, who obviously want me to take the full five minutes, I will be able to move towards some of what this bill sets out to do—conscious of the limited time I now have left to do that, I’ll do my best to get through it.

Because there are so many objections.

There are so many objections, as the colleague on my left has just pointed out—there have been so many objections.

And now that stops, so the member can come back to the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I fully intend to—I fully intend to, halfway through the time allowed. Terrible.

What this legislation does is it strengthens systems, tools, and institutional capability. It does not directly lower the prices of those items that I spoke about at the beginning of this offering, and which are obviously a sore point for the other side of the House. It does not lower grocery prices. It does not lower fuel prices. It does not lower bank fees. As we know, the other side of the House’s solution to bank fees is to simply spread them out across everywhere so that people don’t notice what they’re being charged. It does not lower building supply costs. It does not prohibit excessive pricing or mandate structural separation in concentrated markets.

There are a lot of things this bill does not do. And the week before Christmas—this is the week before Christmas—New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living. Christopher Luxon promised to address the cost of living, but, instead, he has become, the week before Christmas, the bad Santa that delivers this bill—which does something, but nowhere near enough to address the very, very real challenges that New Zealanders face.

Now, some of the cautions that we have from this side of the House around this bill are around the new predatory pricing provision. We know that predatory pricing is unusual in competition law, because it is the only pricing intervention where the law restricts prices from going down rather than up. At a time when all New Zealanders would like to see the cost of living going down, we’re talking about a predatory pricing provision that, in fact, explicitly prohibits that from happening. That means it always carries a risk of chilling legitimate price competition, particularly where firms are discounting aggressively to win customers rather than to exclude rivals.

In the very limited remaining time that I have—and, really, I’m just regretful of how many interjections prohibited me from addressing some of my other concerns about this bill further—all I would say is that New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living as we head towards Christmas. That Government promised to fix it, and, instead, they’re making it worse.

Well, that was a good general debate speech from one “Mr Grinch”. But back to the bill—this Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill—that we’re here for. Can I just say that competition isn’t an end in itself; competition is all about lower prices. Adam Smith said it best in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, “The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken,”. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā rawa atu koe, e te Māngai o te Whare. Heoi anō rā, tēnā tātou katoa i tēnei pō. E tū ana awau ki te tautoko i tēnei pire, te Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

Heoi anō rā, i mua i taku kauhau, tēnei te mihi ki tērā o tātou. E te pāpā, e Taina Ngārimu kua wehe atu ki te pō, tēnei te mihi aroha ki a koe. Ko koe tētahi e hāpai ana i ā mātou tikanga, tō mātou reo, me te haka hoki. Nō reira e te pāpā, haere, haere, haere rawa atu ki te pō, e kore koe e warewaretia. Tēnei te tangi aroha ki te whānau.

[Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Indeed, greetings to us all this evening. I stand in support of this bill, the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

However, before my speech, I hereby acknowledge one of us in particular: Uncle Taina Ngārimu, who has departed into the darkness. I hereby compassionately acknowledge you. You are one who upholds our traditional practices, our language, and traditional performing arts, also. Therefore, uncle, pass on, pass into the night; you will not be forgotten. I hereby grieve with the family.]

Kia ora.

Thank you for the indulgence of the House, Madam Speaker. Before we get started on that side, remember we are supporting this bill. [Interruption] I should just prepare two paragraphs, and you guys can say the rest of the speech.

Minister Scott Simpson noted that where there is less competition, consumers pay the price. That is the true story of rural life. If this bill is going to bring down prices for consumers, bring it on. In hindsight, we were doing all right in the Waipū Valley when I was a kid. We had the Waipū Farmers, which sold your stores, your gas, tools, and haberdashery—for those of you who know what this is; there’s a few. And then we had the dairy—the Tikitiki dairy—which was run by the Kururangis, and that’s where you got your other extra groceries, fish and chips, and your mixed lollies.

Post office.

We had a post office—yes, we did—which doubled as a bit of a florist, but for bigger shops you travelled the 20-something-odd kilometres in either direction to Te Araroa or what was then known as the Hikurangi food market.

For Tangaere family shops, you went to Gisborne, to Pak ’N Save, because there was competition. We were a huge family, and, yes, there were better prices because you could choose Pak ’N Save, you could choose Woolworths, or you could choose Four Square. That did still, however, mean a full tank of gas.

The pinch of higher prices is nothing new for small, rural places, as some of my colleagues in the House tonight can attest to. While Labour supports this bill, I think there needs to be far more consideration into how this has any material impact on rural areas. Bringing another big player into the supermarket game, for example, will have little effect on our most isolated whānau, unless, of course, you’re considering building a Woolworths in Tikitiki.

On that note, I want to acknowledge the many businesses who do run stores and other companies in small, rural areas, often for generations, and often in communities where sustaining one business is hard enough, let alone sustaining many. I think this is an opportunity to talk about other opportunities other than reinforcing my statement that a lot more thought has to be put into how this is going to have a material impact on small communities like the many scattered through Ikaroa-Rāwhiti.

One is to consider another view of what competition might look like. I appreciate the acknowledgment of Māori being the first traders in Aotearoa and what that looked like. I spoke to someone from Wairarapa today, and they talked about how, back in their day, the currency was the eel. You know, we’ve all got our wind—what’s our energy? What’s our venison? What’s our milk? I think an opportunity we could be talking about is to grow those rural communities. How do we make it easier for the big businesses or even the smaller businesses to stock what comes from that community? You should be able to go to Tahu restaurant in Gisborne and get steak from Tairāwhiti, not from Australia. That’s the opportunity that we can grow on with this bill. I once again want to thank the House for indulging me in farewelling our wonderful taonga, Taina Ngarimu, and we do commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a privilege to be able to rise on the first reading of this bill to promote increased competition. I want to acknowledge other parties around the House for their support of this, as well. We all know that increased competition leads to better outcomes for New Zealanders. It increases productivity and innovation and leads to a number of other benefits. This bill makes a number of key changes around stopping unfair practices; clearer merger rules; a stronger and better-structured Commerce Commission, meaning faster and more transparent decisions; a streamlined approvals process; and allowing businesses to take voluntary undertakings to limit market power as part of merger applications. Other members have touched upon other aspects of this bill, but I just wanted to highlight those key aspects and say that I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be considered by the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.

Thank you. I present a legislative statement on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill.

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

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to consider the bill.

The earthquake-prone buildings system aims to prevent loss of life, and injuries, by requiring earthquake-prone buildings—or EPBs—to be identified and remediated within set time frames. However, the system has failed to target the nation’s resources, both public and private funds, to target the most truly high-risk buildings, with over 8,000 buildings caught up in the regime since its inception in 2017. However well intended those changes were at the time, following, of course, the tragedy that was the earthquakes in Canterbury, with significant loss of life, nevertheless it’s appropriate for us to observe in 2025 that the rules have placed significant costs on to building owners and communities.

Before I proceed further with a bit of the detail of the bill, by way of its explanation at the first reading, I do want to acknowledge a very pleasing level of bipartisanship within this House. Obviously, I don’t prejudge what the other parties will say, but certainly up until this point we’ve had really good dialogue with interested parties, by which I mean political parties in central government, but also local government has been a really important partner in changes. Indeed, the idea of reforming the system, and certainly to have legislated a pause in the enforcement of the current regime, actually came from local government first of all—so, as territorial authorities and as the regulator but also, of course, oftentimes its owners of many of these buildings throughout New Zealand, both the large cities and rural, regional communities, alike, I do want to acknowledge their work and their partnership, along with the expert review panel with a broad range of interests, stakeholders, experts, and affected parties such as owners.

The Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill will refine the existing earthquake-prone building provisions in the Building Act 2004. This bill replaces what is known as Subpart 6A, currently, in Part 2, and it updates relevant and related parts of the Act, making consequential changes to the regulations to ensure a more consistent and effective system. These amendments support the Government’s wider goals of improving regulatory quality and helping to deliver more affordable housing to Kiwis in the case of residential-type structures.

I will now outline the key changes contained in the bill, which cover four areas: (1) refocusing the EPB system on high-risk buildings in medium- and high-risk zones; (2) removing the use of earthquake ratings, the current percentage New Building Standard—or NBS—system, and detailed engineering assessments; (3) reducing barriers to remediation; and (4) providing more flexibility for building owners.

In terms of that first category, Madam Speaker, which is to focus the EPB system on high-risk buildings in medium- and high-risk zones, I’ll point out, as you would expect from that description, that we’re narrowing the scope of the system. Only two types of buildings will remain within the system, and that’s buildings designed before 1976 that are three storeys or higher and are built from heavy materials like concrete, and unreinforced masonry buildings, such as those made of brick. These are the buildings most likely to cause harm in an earthquake and they must be in medium- or high-risk seismic zones, and, of course, “high risk” and “medium”, for that matter, are relative terms, but of course there are many dangers to the built environment in the hazard-exposed nation in which we live.

The “identify at any time” pathway, as it’s known, is also being narrowed because, currently, too many buildings have been identified as EPBs using this avenue or pathway, but there will still be an ability to capture buildings akin to the CTV Building in Christchurch. Obviously, we’re familiar with the tragic consequences of a collapse of a building that would not necessarily be captured by the rules in the traditional way. These are newer, heavy material buildings—those designed after 1976, but completed before 2027—that pose a high risk. These can be designated as earthquake-prone only with the approval of the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Buildings of this type that have already been designated as earthquake-prone will retain that status.

The bill also updates the seismic hazard zones. Coastal Otago, including Dunedin and Stewart Island, will become a medium seismic zone, updating our understanding of the current scientific reality regarding our seismic risk. But existing remediation deadlines and identified, identify—identification time frames will not change. I’m updating my time frame to complete that sentence, Madam Speaker! Meanwhile, buildings in lower-risk areas—again, emphasising that’s a relative term—such as Auckland, Northland, and Chatham Islands will no longer be considered earthquake-prone from the day of Royal assent. These areas are farther from plate boundaries or major faults, and the faults that do exist often move very slowly or haven’t ruptured in a long time, making strong earthquakes much less likely to occur. I’ve heard Auckland’s volcanic field mentioned by some stakeholders, but studies do show that the rate of seismicity there is still low compared to other volcanic regions in New Zealand.

Other out-of-scope buildings that are not the required or specified building types will be identified by territorial authorities, with help from MBIE, and removed from the system from 1 July 2027. For buildings that remain earthquake-prone, on the other hand, territorial authorities—basically, your councils—will determine their required remediation measures in accordance with the updated EPB methodology, issue updated EPB notices, and keep the register up to date.

Finally, we’re tightening the definition of “priority buildings”. From now on, only those that could fall on to a busy street, or block a strategic transport route, will qualify. Buildings that were previously priority simply because of their use, such as hospitals or fire stations, will lose that status, and their deadlines will be updated accordingly. These changes mean clearer rules and a stronger focus on the buildings that matter most for public safety.

Moving now to the second category—removing the earthquake ratings and detailed engineering assessments—we’ll also be changing how we assess earthquake-prone buildings to make the process more streamlined. We’re removing earthquake ratings—commonly known as the percentage of New Building Standard, or NBS—and detailed seismic assessment. The process for identifying new EPBs will be simpler and, therefore, less expensive, with either an engineering evaluation or evidence and information to be provided by the building owner. This approach also disincentivises repeated seismic assessments in search of a different, more favourable NBS percentage rating. Once the territorial authority has the necessary information, it will decide whether the building is earthquake-prone, determine any remediation requirements, issue an updated EPB notice, and update the register. These changes mean faster decisions, less complexity, and a stronger focus on public safety.

Moving now to reducing barriers to remediation. We’re introducing a tiered approach to remediation measures. Requirements will range from risk notification only, through to targeted retrofits for heavy construction buildings, to façade securing, or full retrofits for unreinforced masonry buildings—again, think brick buildings. For smaller unreinforced masonry buildings, those of one or two storeys outside urban centres, no remediation will be required and they won’t need to display an EPB notice, either. However, they must undergo façade securing if they wish to have their EPB status removed.

Moving now, finally, to the subject of flexibility for building owners, we’re introducing more flexibility in terms of deadlines. Owners can apply for extensions of up to 15 years, even if their original deadline had already expired before commencement. Territorial authorities must have regard to factors like ownership of structure, the type of remediation required, steps already taken, and whether the building is a priority building. Conditions can be imposed to manage risk, and failure to comply with those conditions could mean that the extension is revoked.

This bill is also making it easier to get a consent for seismic work and helping to reduce the cost of that work. The royal commission of inquiry into the Canterbury earthquakes, as referenced previously, recommended that the Building Act be amended to enable building consents to be issued for strengthening works, without requiring compliance with disability access and facilities provisions as nearly as is reasonably practicable. If the work relates to only the necessary seismic work, authorities must allow it without requiring full compliance with fire safety or accessibility provisions, provided that the building remains at least as compliant as it was before. Similarly, if a building changes its use, it will need to meet only its earthquake-prone remediation measure, not a higher requirement. These changes mean more practicable and cost-effective solutions, more time to comply, and fewer barriers for owners committed to making their buildings safer and thereby saving lives.

In summary, because of the significance and interest in this bill, I am looking forward to a full six-month select committee process. The measures in this bill will reduce the number of the current EPBs by around 55 percent and ensure that the remaining buildings require more cost-effective remediation. By prioritising highest-risk buildings and adopting more efficient approaches, remediation will be able to be completed faster than under the previous regime. Overall, then, these changes are expected to deliver around $8.2 billion worth of savings to the economy—and the community, more importantly—and will ensure that the most dangerous buildings can be strengthened to protect New Zealanders. Accordingly, and with due appreciation for the cooperation around the House already seen in relation to this legislation, I commend it to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to take this short call on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill. This is one bill that Labour will support and is really interested to follow through very carefully in the submissions at the select committee room because we know just how this will affect many people’s lives very deeply. A number of the stakeholders will be financially impacted by this, either because they are owners of commercial buildings or because they are owners of apartments and homes that are affected by either the old rules or the new. We are also interested in hearing from councils about how these rules will impact regionally, and I’ll raise some of those concerns about regional rules specifically with the House later, but I just want to explain for the House this decision that Labour wants to support an effective and efficient regime for improving the situation that we have currently. A useful earthquake-prone buildings regime would mean that there was an incentive for buildings to be remediated quickly and to the highest possible standards that building owners can afford, and that is not necessarily what’s happening now.

The risk remains the same to New Zealand and we have to be comfortable that the only sorts of rules that will work here and the only sorts of rules that will be ethical to impose on people are those which can be followed and that the financial cost makes sense for people to comply with. The rules, as they currently are, which were set by the National Government in 2014, do not adequately do that, because there are buildings right now on main streets and towns and cities in New Zealand that are not used and still pose a risk not only to the lives of people around them but to buildings that they are next to. If we don’t have a regime that supports the remediation of those and the redevelopment of those, then we don’t have a regime that works for everyone and works for the communities who have to deal with those buildings.

That’s why this is something that we hope to work through carefully because we want that stronger, fairer, and more risk-based earthquake-prone building system. Focusing the regulation on the buildings and regions that present genuine life safety risk is sensible, and that is something that everyone in this House can agree with: that we must have a regime where we can pick the most risky things that have been identified and have kept up with not only our understanding of the building sites but the seismic risk around the country, and that we are correctly identifying the things which need to go first. If there’s something that we have learnt since 2014, it’s that the things which are causing the most risk to people are not necessarily the things that are being remediated first.

In those areas like Christchurch, which have been able to sort of go first and take these issues really seriously, that has been incredibly useful for the region and really good for the region. Some other regions have lagged behind that and we need to fix that issue in terms of sequencing the timing for this remediation.

The current system has also created costs for some owners and councils that haven’t been brought out in the actual risk. This is a positive step to reduce those burdens while still addressing those high-risk structures that we all know we need to deal with because the underlying risk doesn’t go away.

One thing that we will be listening very carefully to in the select committee submissions on this is the Government’s decision to fully remove Auckland from the regime. This is something that it is no surprise to the Minister that I disagree with and no surprise to the mayor that I disagree with it. Auckland is the country’s largest city and the highest population exposure and, therefore, has critical economic infrastructure that is impacted by this. Seismic risk is low, but we have built our largest city on an active volcanic field. There was a major eruption 700 years ago, compared to the last major earthquake, which was 70,000 years ago. When we have major volcanic eruptions, buildings move. People’s lives are in danger because of the buildings and the standards.

I’m not proposing that we need to deal with every possible risk to buildings in this bill, but this was a proxy for dealing with some of those risks presented by the earth literally moving under foot, and engineering standards not being able to keep up with that. If we don’t have seismic risks to stand in for those risks, then what do we have? It’s up to the Government to make sure that we have the appropriate kind of regulation which deals with that underlying risk, which does not go away because our regulations no longer deal with it.

We support the more proportionate remediation rules. That’s a given. We need to listen to the science around how this will affect our cities. This is a useful position for many of those regions who will go through it. We look forward to working alongside the Government to make sure that we’ve got the rules and settings right for this.

Madam Speaker, thank you. I stand on behalf of the Green Party to take this call. We will be supporting this bill to the select committee stage.

Having been raised in Christchurch, we always believed that Wellington was going to be the city that was going to be hit by an earthquake, and obviously we had the September 2010 earthquake and there was no loss of life or buildings that collapsed. Following that, there was a series of stickers that were placed on buildings that some did find confusing, and also people were encouraged to go back into the CBD. Then the 22 February earthquake hit and obviously we saw the resulting collapse of buildings and the tragic loss of 185 lives. Following that, over 1,000 buildings were demolished in the CBD, including a large percentage of our heritage buildings. Having, myself, worked on the ground at the Earthquake Commission, including being inside the CBD cordon in Christchurch, I’m fully aware of the destruction an earthquake can have and the impact on a city for many years afterwards.

Coming to Wellington post-earthquake, just looking up actually created a bit of fear. However, I no longer look up and the fear is gone, and I guess it concerns me slightly that as time does progress, we start to relax. While this bill does make some very sensible amendments to the Act and it is really important that we focus on the high-risk buildings in the medium- to high-risk seismic zones, I really hope that we don’t look back in hindsight, in the future, and regret the relaxing of some of these regulations.

In Christchurch, we did lose a lot of heritage; however, it was actually thanks a lot to some of the grants that the Christchurch City Council made that we were able to stop a lot more from being demolished. So it does concern me that under this Government, with a rates cap and with councils having been told to stick to what this Government believe is core business, councils will struggle to help save heritage buildings into the future as we look to strengthen many around this country.

I think one of the things that I do find rather concerning, I guess, in this bill is the ability to grant extensions of up to 15 years. We all know that the alpine fault is overdue and that time delayed is a risk. I don’t know if it’s worth risking people’s lives on. While we need to work through this through the select committee stage, I really hope that we look at this and we make sure that the priorities are put in place to ensure that those that are the most high risk, that will create loss of life if there is a severe earthquake, are prioritised and do not get extensions that will take up to 15 years.

We do have concerns about the removal of the provisions for fire escape and disability access. However, we do understand that the provision does add cost and therefore does slow down the strengthening of buildings, and we want to work through this issue during the select committee stage to work out actually what is that extra cost and time that is created from the inclusion of the fire escape and disability access provisions.

It is very interesting, when you do look at that provision that, on one hand, we want to ensure that we do provide buildings that are accessible, that you can escape, but then we want to ensure that they’re also strengthened in a timely manner. It also does not make sense that just because the building needs to have that earthquake strengthening done, they have to fulfil those obligations where buildings that do not and still don’t have those provisions do not have to meet those provisions. There’s obviously an issue within our current system that is allowing a lot of buildings not to fulfil the right type of fire egress and disability access that we should expect from buildings today.

So the Green Party will support this bill to the select committee, but we believe there’s a lot of work to do to make it currently better than what it is. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill, and what a journey it has been. Madam Speaker, if I can take you back to the tragic events in Canterbury 15 years ago, it is understandable that members of this House would want to pass a law to protect people and to say that never again will we see that kind of tragic destruction. I stood here in 2016 and watched members of this House pass such a law, but I was the only person to vote against it, 119 to one, with the reason being that I had read the evidence.

I read that it predicted that we might save three lives in Auckland over 10,000 years, or at least that’s the best statistics that they could come up with. It was as though the lunatics had taken over the asylum. It was clear that the earthquake-strengthening laws of 2016 would devastate communities, would devastate individuals, and would devastate the New Zealand economy for no benefits whatsoever, and, sadly, it is exactly that that has come to pass. Billions of dollars have been spent strengthening buildings, provincial streets have been empty as buildings were deemed earthquake-prone and could not be used, and people have been personally devastated.

There was a story I shared recently of a constituent who visited me and who insisted on reading out a letter from top to bottom, with tears in her eyes as she did it, explaining that she’d lost her livelihood and her life-savings while in her early 70s because when her body corporate decided to do some routine maintenance on her apartment—which she’d saved up for her life to own freehold—she was told that they had to do earthquake strengthening, and the cost of that ate up all of her savings.

There hasn’t been just personal destruction; there has also been destruction at a national level, with all those billions of dollars. These changes today will save $9 billion, and there are a few things we can learn about it. The first thing is that we must be proportional in our response, even when things are emotional and even when things are difficult. This House has the power to impose costs on New Zealand that are devastating. We only need to look at the evidence. Wayne Brown, our mayor in Auckland—a city that will now be exempt from these earthquake rules—says that there hasn’t been an earthquake in New Zealand for 200,000 years—

Auckland.

—in Auckland—and, by the looks of it, Wayne Brown would know if there hadn’t been an earthquake for 200,000 years!

There have been fewer than 500 people lost to earthquakes in the history of our country, and yet we lose that many people to heart disease every single month. When bad things happen, we must respond in proportion. We must do proper cost-benefit analysis and we must understand the imposition that we’re putting on people and their property before we can make rules that can be so devastating.

None the less, after nine years of waste and of people being devastated and having their houses and life-savings run down, Chris Penk and this coalition Government have returned to exactly the things that we need: cost-benefit analysis, proportionality, and common sense. Auckland and Northland are out, we will no longer have the new building standard that has been so complicated and expensive to calculate, and the focus will be on unreinforced masonry buildings and concrete buildings designed before 1976 that are more than three storeys high and are in earthquake-prone zones—i.e., not the top of the country, where a third of us live.

These are the kinds of sensible changes that I said that we should have made nine years ago. It is a tragedy that we did not do that, but the only thing we can do today is restore common sense. As I look across the House at Duncan Webb and see him wailing and raving, he leaves this House having achieved so little, and to see his frustration—

The member’s time has expired.

Look, this legislation is long awaited. It’s also been well consulted on—and, actually, that’s not the norm in this place. It’s really good, actually, that we do have a piece of legislation where the previous piece of legislation was, effectively, put on hold for a while to say, “Hey, we’re going to consult on this new piece of legislation, or the wrap-around around that, and then come up with a bill.” That’s actually a really good way of doing business, and we should do that much more often.

The focus of this bill is about risk to life. I’ll just pick up the points that were made about the New Building Standard—the NBS—which has been a bit of a bane of both property owners but also councils, because it seemed to be so arbitrary. I think there really was a loss of confidence in the NBS standard. I mean, you could have a building that, one day, was 85 percent of the New Building Standard, and the next day, somebody else did an assessment and it’s suddenly down to 15 percent, and you went from being “I’m absolutely fine; the market loves it.”, to “People want to get out of my building, and I’ve got to strengthen it at great cost.” That didn’t give people any confidence whatsoever.

The other thing was around the insurance industry. Now, the insurance industry was quite clear: they said that you could do all the strengthening you like to save lives, but if it doesn’t make sure the building’s not going to be damaged, it doesn’t give you any benefit whatsoever. I can remember, in this city, a brand-new building—a base-isolated building—and the developers of that building, who are probably one of the best developers in the country, saying that the insurance companies gave them absolutely no credit whatsoever for building a building of that standard. The insurance price was still the same, so it didn’t give them any benefit whatsoever.

This bill is about removing some of the lower-risk areas. Wayne Brown’s already been mentioned—he’ll be pleased that Auckland is excluded, as well as Northland and the Chatham Islands. Removing some of the smaller centres: I see that the number there is 10,000 a population. I think there might be some submissions for some places. I think Feilding, for example, which is a population of 17,500—I can remember the Manawatū District Council being most distressed about the cost of having to fix those buildings, because it’s a community that just cannot afford to do it.

There might be some arguments about what a “small centre” represents, but removing some of the small centres—also, removing lower-risk buildings. I mean, the idea that you can have an earthquake-prone wooden building of a single storey and you have to go and strengthen that seems, to me, to be slightly nuts. It is focusing, now, on the most high-risk buildings, and that’s the sensible way to go.

But, having said all that, changing the rules—as we’ve already heard from, I think, Arena Williams—does not change the risk. The risk is a real risk, whatever level it might be. Regardless of what rules we make, the risk remains. The question is about: what is the acceptable risk? We’ve already heard the argument that says that we haven’t had a death in Auckland from an earthquake for 70,000 years-plus—and there weren’t any people there at that point, anyway. But the question is: what is an acceptable risk? Is low risk acceptable risk? We accept risks all across our lives in all sorts of different areas. Is the cost of fixing these things in some places an acceptable cost? What this bill is proposing—it says, actually, no, it’s not, and some of those costs of fixing those risks—and the risk is real, but the risk may be low, and if the cost is too high, then perhaps we shouldn’t be incurring the cost.

We’ve heard the comments around the Canterbury earthquakes, which is obviously a huge tragedy for people—also a huge amount of damage done to the city itself. Wellington’s always taken earthquake strengthening very seriously, because we’ve expected to have a major quake in this place. How you model how many people will die in a quake like that, I have no idea, because we’re guessing. That’s the reality; we will be guessing. You think about that, and you look at the National Emergency Management Agency numbers that we’ve been given—I think the Wellington Fault has a 5 percent chance of going the next 50 years; the AF8, the Alpine Fault, has a 75 percent chance of going in that period of time. You think about what the risks might be in different parts of the country and respond to those risks.

Just to finish off, there are huge costs in the existing regime, and I wanted to reflect the comments that the Hon David Seymour said. I’ve dealt quite a lot over the years with Inner-City Wellington, which represents inner-city businesses and residents in Wellington. The stories are about people literally trapped in houses that they cannot strengthen. The cost of strengthening those buildings is as much as the value of the house in the first place. In other words, effectively they are left with something that is worthless, but they can’t get out of it, and that is absolutely tragic.

There’s also the issue they raise about retrospectivity. The current model says that if somebody goes and reassesses or you change the rules, suddenly my building, which yesterday you said was fine, no longer is. Usually, we would say that’s retrospective, and that’s, effectively, what those people have been exposed to.

Just to finish off, what this also does is it will make the strengthening process less expensive. It will remove the requirement for disability access of fire codes to be triggered by that process. I do have a couple of quick questions to finish with. Can councils rely on existing assessments? That’s an expensive process to go through—many have done that. Can councils rely on existing consultations on priority routes? Again, some of them have done that. And the issue of extensions. I will finish there. I look forward to considering the bill at select committee.

This is a good bill that makes pragmatic changes to the legislation. This bill makes sure that the risk is proportional to the actual, real risk for earthquakes across this country. It’s going to make a huge difference for cities like Auckland, producing billions of dollars’ worth of savings. I look forward to hearing about this bill in select committee from submitters. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to be able to take a call on this bill, which is a very tricky bill, I have to say. The reason I’m taking a call on this bill is because I am Labour’s emergency management spokesperson. However, this is not an emergency management bill; it’s coming from a very different perspective, and it’s looking at how we assess risk and the very difficult decisions that we make in this House, as legislators, around what type of risk is acceptable for our people. I do think this is very tricky. Like my colleague Arena Williams said, we will support this bill to select committee, but I don’t think that means that there aren’t outstanding questions in relation to this bill.

I echo the comments of my colleague in the Greens who mentioned looking back at this day and these decisions that we make in retrospect. I think that that responsibility should fall heavily on all of us in this House. The decisions that we make today around changing these requirements may or may not have impacts on the lives of others in the future. It may impact on people losing their lives or their livelihoods. These are tough—very tough—choices and I think the debate today has not perhaps reflected the gravity of that as much as it could have.

I think the statement that David Seymour made was regretful. I think it is very, very difficult to speak to those who have lived through things like the Canterbury earthquakes, like my colleague Dr Duncan Webb, who have fought for people who have suffered the terrible life-changing consequences of the natural disasters which New Zealand is susceptible to, and to make comments around the fact that those perspectives are not valid. They are valid and we must take into account the seismic history of our country and the potential risks for the future.

There is no choice which is no risk. Every choice we make in relation to these particular standards has a risk associated with it. But there is one certainty when we look at seismic activity in New Zealand, one certainty that we can be absolutely 100 percent sure of when we look at the history of our country, when we look at the science, when we look at the evidence, and that is that New Zealand will have significant seismic events in the future. That is absolutely a 100 percent certain. When we look at changing these particular rules, we must do so knowing that the optimism bias that many of us have as humans, which is such a magical thing about humanity, must be balanced with the clear evidence that the reason we have this amazing geography in New Zealand—we have these beautiful high mountains and hills and lakes, and everything that we see around us that we love so much about New Zealand—is because of the fact that we are living in a country which is filled with fault lines. We can sometimes predict where those fault lines might activate, and sometimes we’re right about that and sometimes we’re wrong.

It’s probably a bit of a longer introduction than I was expecting to make in this short five-minute call, but I do think it’s important that in this House we recognise the gravity of our decisions in relation to these very, very important tasks. I think, you know, the Minister has had a very tough task with this. I certainly think there can be improvements made at select committee. I think that the situation in Auckland is very tricky, but I don’t think the decision that he has come to is correct in the sense that excluding it entirely is, from my view, problematic. The reason I say that is because, although we don’t have—as far as we know—the fault lines that other places in New Zealand have, we do obviously have a volcanic field. We know that there’s a 10 percent chance of a volcano or some activity in the volcanic field in the next 50 years, which is a relatively short period of time. That comes along with ground deformation. Now, that is not shaking in the normal sense, but it is something which has an impact on the structures that we build upon. These are important decisions.

I’m not a member of the select committee that this bill is being sent to, but I encourage all colleagues that are on it to try and make this bill the best bill it can possibly be because this is something that we will have to live with in years to come. I hope that all of us take the necessary efforts to make sure that the decisions we make in this House and the select committee are ones we can live with long term, not just for our children but for our children’s children and our children’s children’s children, because that is the reality of these types of bills.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Speaking on the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill is an emotional thing for me. On the day of the 22 February earthquake, I stood in the PGC building, clutching a vial of ketamine and a makeshift saw, ready to climb into that building to amputate a limb from one of the survivors if I needed to. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that, but I stood there, surrounded by other first responders, as the building shook with aftershocks, looking at the twisted metal and hunks of concrete that are for ever etched in my memory.

There are people in this House who experienced those earthquakes as well, and I just want to acknowledge the families and all of those who were affected and impacted, which is thousands of people in Christchurch, and let them know and let them be assured that this bill is not about reducing safety; it’s actually about improving safety. There is no safety if nobody does any of the remediation because it’s not practical. That’s what we’re addressing with this bill, and we will take every opportunity to hear from everyone, and this bill will come back to this House in a better shape. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thank Vanessa Weenink for that thoughtful speech, and it was a lot more thoughtful than some of the other speeches we’ve heard tonight. I do want to comment on the heartlessness of David Seymour’s speech. He used words such as “devastation” and “terrible things” when he was talking about repair costs, and he’s talking about devastation in a House where we have a number of people, like Vanessa Weenink and myself, who were in Christchurch on that fateful day.

We are supporting this because we agree that earthquake regulations do need another look and they can be improved. I’m always up for that, but let’s be clear: when you walk into a building or when you walk past a building, you should be able to walk out of it or past it alive. That didn’t happen in a whole lot of buildings in Christchurch.

I am concerned about the three-storey-plus rule for buildings designed after 1976, because we know that the CTV building was designed in 1984. I’ve read the papers. I know that territorial authorities can identify buildings designed afterwards, but why would that have happened in this case? Why would that risk have been identified? That was the building where 115 people died, which quite probably would not have been captured by this regime. If we’re going to change these rules—and we clearly are—we need to work out how we can make sure not that a territorial authority can capture that but that they will capture that.

Let’s also be clear about one thing: I take the point that an unrepaired building is not an improvement in safety, and that was Vanessa Weenink’s main point, I think. There are two negative consequences of this—two costs—in terms of the regulatory impact statement (RIS): one is one that perhaps David Seymour will understand, and that is that when an earthquake comes, the losses will be much greater because of these lower standards. That’s what they are—they are lower standards—and, in fact, it gives a number: the avoided losses will be reduced by $105 billion. That is the increased costs when the inevitable earthquake comes.

But that’s not the most important thing; the most important thing, which no one yet has actually said out loud, is that more people will die, and there’s a number. It’s not a cardinal number, but there’s a figure. This is a 30 percent increase in the dangerousness of buildings, and that’s set out at paragraph 146 of the RIS. I stand to be corrected, but does that mean that there will be 30 percent more dead people? Well, we need to know that, but what we do know is there will be more dead people, and we can’t avoid that consequence.

So when David Seymour stands up and speaks of the devastation of an earthquake repair bill for a homeowner, I get it. But we had friends and families in those buildings and the devastation of a family whose parent doesn’t come home is a different thing again. So let us exercise great caution.

I appreciate the Minister for Building and Construction’s speech—I listened to it—and I know that this is going to get a full process through the select committee. The RIS didn’t meet the quality standards because all options weren’t consulted on—which I was surprised to see, to be perfectly honest, because the Minister is usually so diligent—but let us make sure that we turn over every stone. I get that everything is a balance, but let’s not have this mantra of risk-based regulation, which really is code for deregulating things so that we don’t have to spend as much money, in the name of efficiency and at the cost of lives.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m incredibly pleased to stand up here and speak in support of this bill. I also acknowledge our very diligent Minister Chris Penk for all his good work. In the Wairarapa electorate, which includes Tararua and Central Hawke’s Bay, the current rules were literally destroying our towns, one stickered building at a time, one after another. We had complete inertia. Our towns were falling into a state of literally go nowhere, cannot make a decision. This bill will provide clarity and confidence while balancing the risk. Just an example of the impact for some of our towns, and these are projected potential savings: Carterton was $14 million; Dannevirke, $67 million; Eketāhuna, $3 million; Featherston, $2 million; Greytown, $1 million; Martinborough, $7 million; Masterton, $80 million; Pahīatua, $29 million; Waipawa, $10 million; Waipukurau, $15 million; Woodville, a town of 1,600 or 1,700 people, $22 million—$250 million savings potential over 229 buildings. I commend this bill.

The question is, That the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on this, the third reading of the Electoral Amendment Bill. Of course, before I begin, I would like to present a legislative statement to the House.

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

Madam Speaker, apologies. I got so enthusiastic about making this third reading speech I neglected to present the legislative statement.

That’s all right. We’re all back sorted now. Thank you.

Of course, as we traversed last week, in a late night at Parliament, this bill is a bill to make sure that our electoral laws are modern and fit for purpose.

You actually move the third reading as well, after you’ve read the legislative statement. You may have—sorry if I’ve missed it, but I’m just checking.

Apologies, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Electoral Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Carry on. Thank you.

And third time’s a charm for my speech. This bill aims to make sure that our electoral rules are modern and fit for purpose. Our election laws have a long history—and I’m sure my colleagues in front of me are very enthusiastic to listen to this speech—which means that they can sometimes become outdated. While the core principles guiding elections endure, the “how” of their delivery needs to adapt, over time, to keep up with changing trends, new challenges, and new technologies. It’s important that these are continuously reviewed, and we review the settings to check that they are working well and to act when they are not.

The changes in this bill are intended to support timely and efficient elections to uphold integrity in our election rules. A key focus of this bill is, of course, timeliness. Over the past few elections, we have seen a dramatic increase in later enrolments and in special votes. These pressures to the system mean it is taking longer and longer and longer to complete the official vote count. It used to take two weeks; now it takes three. If we don’t make changes, it will take even longer in the future.

This bill makes several changes to respond to these trends, including closing enrolment 13 days before election day and enabling automatic enrolment updates, something that has been called for by many, many submitters for many years.

These changes generally seek to reduce the number of enrolment transactions and special votes and to allow post-election processes to begin earlier where possible. The earlier enrolment deadline will reduce immediate pressures on the vote count by allowing special vote processing to begin right after election day. This change is necessary to meet the current time frames for the vote count. Automatic enrolment updates will use Government data to update address details on the electoral rolls when an elector has moved. This policy will be implemented over the next few electoral cycles, and over time it should result in more enrolment details being kept up to date between elections, resulting in fewer enrolment transactions during the election period, fewer special votes, and faster completion of our electoral process.

Another significant proposal in this bill is to ban sentenced prisoners from voting. Following a recommendation from the Justice Committee for prisoners sentenced to fewer than three years, it will only apply for crimes committed after commencement. When people show disregard for the law, then there should be consequences for that disregard, including the temporary loss of the right to vote and influence those laws, as endorsed, of course, by the previous Government, who also prevented prisoners from voting.

People are only sentenced to prison in New Zealand for serious, and often multiple, offending. This Government believes those offenders need to be held to account for their actions in order to uphold public confidence in our justice and our electoral systems. Once prisoners have served their time, they will be able to enrol to vote again.

In the committee of the whole House stage, we amended the settings in the bill for people convicted or suspected of a criminal offence who are detained in a hospital or secure facility instead of prison under mental health grounds. The bill now retains the current settings in the Electoral Act last passed by the previous Government, where people in these circumstances are only disqualified after being detained for three years or more. On reflection, we consider these settings should be retained instead of broadening the eligibility.

This bill will help to improve the integrity of our elections and improve public trust in our elections by making sure the rules are clear. For example, the bill makes it an offence to provide free food, drink, or entertainment near voting places. This change will resolve the confusion which currently exists around the current treating offence by making it crystal clear that you can’t give someone food or drink as they are going to vote. Free give-aways have no place near the ballot box if they could lead to improper influence of voters.

Some other changes in the bill include formalising a 12-day advanced voting period to ensure voters have access to this widely used way of voting; removing outdated and costly requirements to send enrolment notifications by post; allowing more flexibility around the contact details that can be included on promoter statements in response to security and safety concerns, something that I would hope that all members across the House could get in behind; and changing the deadline for parties to register to the start of the regulated period to make registration processes more efficient and to provide greater certainty to voters about which parties are eligible to contest the election.

This is a substantial bill containing more than 30 different policy proposals. I want to acknowledge the work involved in getting it through to this stage, particularly the Justice Committee’s contribution, both through the formulation of this bill and, of course, its excellent inquiry into the 2023 election, which was undertaken later last year, and the members of the Justice Committee who, as a whole, worked very diligently on that inquiry. I want to also acknowledge the members of the public who submitted both on the bill and the inquiry, which has led to the formulation of those more than 30 policy conclusions.

This bill will support a more efficient and timely vote count, a more cost-effective and modern way of communicating with voters, more certainty around advance voting, more clarity around election rules regarding free food and drink, and a more streamlined and fit for purpose electoral administration. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. The Government should be ashamed of this bill. They should be ashamed of this bill, because what it does is it makes it harder for New Zealanders to vote, pure and simple. That’s the truth. The process to be able to enrol and vote in the next election will be made harder by this legislation we’re debating right now. Even more to the point, a lot of this passed through under urgency, and it is even more reprehensible that a bill that takes away people’s right to vote is being passed under such haste. Democracy is being undermined by this bill. At a time in the world where we want more people’s voices, we want more engagement, we want more of the world to be having a part in democracy, this Government takes it upon themselves to make voting even harder for a whole lot of New Zealanders.

It is really concerning that this bill is, probably, I think, one of the worst that this Government has passed in their time. They’ve done a lot. They’ve scrapped pay equity—33 pay equity claims gone—but the right to vote is fundamental. It’s right up there with some of the worst things this Government has done. Number two on my list is the Treaty principles bill; so bad that National wouldn’t even sign up to it, but they still took the country through division up and down the country, and caused division and anger in our country. I think this one here, by making it harder for people to vote, is right up there with that one, as well.

Number three, I’ll put the Regulatory Standards Bill. This one is so bad that National’s going to repeal it. That’s how bad it is—the Government’s going to repeal the legislation it passed. But I still think that stopping people from enrolling to be able to vote in the early voting period is such a fundamental right that it’s worse than the Regulatory Standards Bill. On the same day this Government disestablished the Māori Health Authority, they repealed smoke-free legislation. That was a big day; I remember that day. I think, actually, the damage done on that one—comparable to this one, as well.

Then we’ve got repealing fair pay agreements in a cost of living crisis, when Kiwis can’t afford with their wages to pay for food and rent, for shoes, for Christmas presents. This Government repealed the ability for getting fair pay—but here, taking away the ability for people to vote once they’ve enrolled in that early voting period, is going to be a big impact.

We know that there’s close to 100,000 New Zealanders who, in the last election, bowled up to be able to enrol and vote in that period. The point has been made, which I think is incredibly important: the whole premise of that first speech we heard was that, somehow, timeliness was more important than democracy; that, somehow, we’ve all been held up by the fact that people want to vote and we have to address this alarming problem that so many people want to vote, and this is the answer to that. We heard from the Electoral Commission in select committee that it will not make a lick of difference. The changes present in this bill will make no difference in the time to count those votes. The Electoral Commission themselves did not recommend the option adopted by this Government. So this is not even going to make a difference.

I think it’s important that we note that the people who are impacted the most by this change—the people who are going to be impacted the most by not being able to enrol and vote in that early voting period—will be some of the people who have been directly impacted by this Government’s policies—those people who have lost a job; those people who have had to shift and move in with someone else because they can’t afford their rent; those people who are so focused on the day, the here and now, being able to feed their kids, being able to get some shoes on their feet, to pay for a bus, to pay for petrol—all those day-to-day pressures; those are the things that people are going to be focused on instead of filling out their forms. For that, they get called a drop-kick. People in New Zealand who are struggling to be able to put food on their table, and this Government calls them drop-kicks for not being able to enrol 13 days before voting. The fact that that happens means they can’t vote in the upcoming election.

I think this begs the question: why is this Government taking the action it is today? Why is it, if we’ve heard from the Electoral Commission that this will make no real difference in speeding up the vote count—what is the purpose of this legislation today? My concern is that it’s because it tilts the playing field in their favour. We know that it is those people who have lost their jobs, who have had big changes to their lives from the bad decisions of this Government—they’re the ones least likely to vote for this Government. They are the ones that will be taking action to vote out the bad decisions and the sad choices that this Government has taken. It is for that reason, we think, that this measure is being taken to prevent those people from exercising their democratic right to vote out a Government that is heartless and is only serving those who are like themselves and not the rest of New Zealand.

I think it’s also important to note that this is actually an underhand piece of work. It is screwing the scrum in terms of tilting that in the favour of the Government, and it is absolutely undermining that fundamental right of being able to get out and vote. We should—we should—have a Government here in New Zealand that says, “We’re going to do everything we can to make it easier for people to vote. We like democracy. We like the fact that people vote. We’re not into a small group of people who are making decisions on behalf of everyone else that favour those in power and entrenching their power. We actually want to open it up and make sure it’s able to be accessible for everyone.” But, no, that’s not what we have today; we have someone who’s saying, “Unless you can get your paperwork in order two weeks before the election date, you’re a drop-kick and you can’t vote.” That’s exactly what this Government has said, word for word.

The impact this has is going to have an impact for years to come—years to come—because, out of the information that we’ve looked through over this and some of the research in terms of voting behaviour, the number one factor, what keeps people voting, what keeps people engaged in our democratic process, is that if they vote in their first election, they are most likely to keep voting for the rest of their lives. For an 18-year-old who has turned 18 and hasn’t filled out their paperwork and hasn’t got the memo from whoever sent it in the post—if that person has not received the information and doesn’t know that they need all of that to be in place before they turn up to vote, their very first experience of voting in New Zealand will be being told by an official at a voting booth that they’re not eligible to vote. That is a real concern for undermining the legitimacy of our democracy. A Government that is taking action that makes it harder for first-time voters in the next election to be able to get out and have their say—what message does that send to our people? What message does that send to the world of what New Zealand stands for? We have a small group of people making decisions that tilts the favour into their side, and that is not fair for those people who have suffered at the hands of this Government.

I think that we should be engaging in a programme where we look at greater options for encouraging people to vote. We should be putting it not only in our schools but encouraging people to do all of those things and making it as easy as possible. Even if it did take one, two, or three days longer, how does that compare to the amount of time negotiating a coalition agreement? The Government’s quite happy to take a couple of weeks in there to negotiate, but isn’t prepared to give people a couple of more days to be able to vote in that early voting period. This is a real concern, and we know, for a fact, that there are nearly 134,000 in the last election that changed electoral districts during that same time frame. That amounts, in total, to over 200,000 New Zealanders—231,000 New Zealanders who may be impacted by this change. That’s about 8 percent of the voting population.

I think it is absolutely obscene, the fact that this Government tries to say that it is achieving “a more efficient system”, “a more time-factored-in approach.” “We’re all going to be much better off by having a time-efficient process.”, when the reality is that the truth of what this bill does is it makes it harder for New Zealanders to get out and vote. I think this is probably the worst piece of legislation that this sad Government has passed, taking power out of the hands of the very people that have the ability to vote. A fundamental part of our democracy is being compromised today by this wrong piece of legislation.

I rise to speak in the third reading of this appalling piece of legislation. This bill could affect the next election in less than 12 months. I say the sooner the better. If voting didn’t matter, then there wouldn’t be so many people trying to influence it; if voting didn’t matter, we wouldn’t have some shadowy figures trying to influence elections from America to Aotearoa; and if voting didn’t matter, perhaps this coalition Government would not be rolling back the franchise, reducing the ease and simplicity of voting when people have got used to being able to change their details at the last minute.

Who is this democracy for, or who is this economy for, and are they related? With the increasing employment that we have seen in the most recent fact sheet, unemployment is going up—still up; there doesn’t seem to be a corner in this roundabout; 5.3 percent on average. Māori unemployment up to 10.5 percent; youth not in employment, education, or training, at a whopping 13.8 percent. The economy isn’t working for these people. It might be working for the 1 percent, but these people are eligible voters who probably won’t be voting for the other side of the House.

Justice officials said that closing enrolments ahead of advance voting would result in lower turnout and reduce confidence in the electoral system. Electoral law experts are questioning why the changes need to stretch to the whole advance voting period. I want to quote from the Human Rights Commission: “The right to vote is a foundational right under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” It is a “cornerstone of democratic participation” and “the Bill proposes significant limitations on the right to vote.” How you can cast a vote, on behalf of the Attorney-General, the Hon Judith Collins, who said that this breached the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in four different ways, I don’t know.

Just in case you hadn’t realised, the Green Party strongly opposes this bill. We think you are taking voting away from the unemployed, away from prisoners, away from people who are transient, and advantaging those who are wealthy and sorted and don’t move from emergency housing, to cars, to council housing, to other places as often.

The Electoral Commission, as the previous speaker said, advised that the earlier deadline will not necessarily enable a quicker vote count for the 2026 general election. I note that the Minister—I think at the second reading—talked about how much worse it might be in 2029 or 2032 or further ahead. But one of the few good things that this bill does is that it allows automatic enrolment updates. So why don’t we just breeze through 2026 and watch for those updates improving the timeliness of the special vote count afterwards? That would be one answer. You could extend the period after which there needs to be a decision by the Governor-General on what would constitute the new Government. You can make it five days longer, or 10 days longer. If you actually look at other countries that have a more mature MMP system, sometimes their coalition discussions do take a little longer. That might not meet the managerial ambitions of this Government, but it would be perfectly reasonable from a democratic point of view.

I want to touch on a couple of other things. We also tried through the select committee and then the committee stage here in the House to make some changes. First of all, there were several recommendations from the Independent Electoral Review. One is very solid: that 17- and 18-year- olds ought to be able to vote. It was agreed by the Supreme Court of New Zealand that it is age discrimination not to allow them to vote. The clear evidence shows that if people vote in that 16- and 17-year-old age group, they are more likely to continue to vote. We heard that from Scotland in clear evidence, so we wanted to change that. We also wanted to change and make an exception for providing food and drink at a marae. Manaakitanga has been going longer than the Westminster voting style. We think it’s unreasonable. Nobody’s saying, “Oh, you can only get a sausage roll or you can only get some hummus or you can only get some very healthy food if you vote for the Greens or Te Pāti Māori or National.” or anything; they’re just saying, “Come, be part of the day, be appreciated for actually taking your democratic right.” So we tried to change that.

Then, the last thing that we tried to change was the disclosure: the $6,000 secret donation. To the wealthy and sorted, $6,000 might not seem a lot, but $6,000 is a lot of money to the average New Zealander. We think that the disclosure regime should be reduced significantly. We proposed $1,000, but, frankly, I’d be happy with a $200 disclosure. Why are people scared of putting their mouth where their money is—to turn it around?

We also wanted to limit who can make donations so that it is corporations that are not able to make donations. If you actually look at companies, particularly but not only extractive companies, and unions—sometimes they say they’re unions and I would doubt it; sometimes they’re real unions—why don’t we just limit the donations to real human voters? I feel like I should be doing a capture thing: when you do your vote, when you do your donation, should you be filling in that capture thing where you say which picture is a bus or which picture is a bicycle, just to prove you are a real human being? I think that democracy is best served by making sure that more people can vote, that prisoners do not suffer double jeopardy, that transient people are not discriminated against, and that people are not bought by large, undisclosed donations. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to speak in the third reading of the Electoral Amendment Bill. Can I just start by saying, please, members, go and actually google what “double jeopardy” is, because that term was misused in the House tonight and it was misused a number of times in the select committee. Please don’t use a term if you’re not sure what it means—it’s probably better you don’t.

What I wanted to say tonight is that, on this side of the House, we actually have a positive vision for New Zealand. We actually want to lift up New Zealanders. We want to educate them. We want to deliver them high-paying jobs. What we also believe is that they’re capable of enrolling to elect. It is a legal requirement—let me repeat that: it’s a legal requirement to be enrolled once you turn 18 years of age. No one’s rights are being removed. No one’s rights are being taken away. All we are doing is clarifying that you need to be enrolled 13 days before the election, which should already be done if you have turned 18 years of age.

Again, you can go to the select committee report, read what some of the issues were, but if you look at page 10, it talks very clearly about why the Electoral Commission is telling us that it takes 10 times—let me repeat that: 10 times—longer to process a special vote. They then go on to say about population increases, the number of special votes that are projected, saying that we could end up with 1 million special votes.

We are actually restoring integrity to our electoral system and making sure that people can have confidence that people are eligible to vote, they’re enrolled to vote, and the vote count can be done in a timely manner. I’m very much looking forward to these changes being put in place. We can reinforce to New Zealanders their legal obligation to be enrolled when they’re 18, and let’s get on with these sensible changes. I commend the bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of this legislation. This bill arises from years of debate about how to keep our electoral system fair, transparent, and more trusted. What this bill does is it strengthens the rules around enrolment—and I’ll come back to that in a moment—but also around donations and advertising. During the second reading debate, I particularly referred to the situation at the Manurewa Marae, which this bill directly addresses, which is to say we cannot have people treating—providing food, drink, whatever—within a few metres of a voting booth, because that is something which undermines the integrity of the voting system, because it suggests that people’s votes can be influenced or bought by the treating. That’s why we don’t allow for that and that is why this bill makes a change to that particular situation.

We were lectured in the early part of this debate by the Hon Ginny Andersen, who talked about disenfranchising people, and it didn’t seem to matter to her how long it takes to get a result. We’ve heard from Todd Stephenson just now, we’re on track, by projection, in the next two elections, to get to 1 million special votes, which take more than 10 times the length of time to process. What that means is that increasingly we will not be in a position, if we don’t make changes, to get a result not only on election night but possibly for a long time thereafter. That is not about making sure that New Zealanders can wake up and say “Actually, we know who our Government is.”, following an election. That is something that is a really important outcome of any election.

We also heard a lot from Ginny Andersen about disenfranchising people. I think the number she said was 134,000 people would move house in sort of the two-week period before an election. Well, if you take that on the basis of taking that across a year, that equates to nearly 3.5 million New Zealanders would move house in a year. Now, I know that some of her maths is a bit sketchy at times, but that does seem a very, very far-fetched assertion.

What she said is we’re disenfranchising people. Well, actually, no; if you look at the Electoral Commission’s website, you can enrol or register to enrol at 17. It says, “If you’re 17, you can fill out an enrolment form now, and on your 18th birthday, we’ll automatically enrol you and you’ll still be ready to vote.” So how hard, for somebody who is 17, is it to be able to say “I’m going to register to vote a year out from election and then they’ll automatically put me on there and then I can vote.”? That’s fine.

Oh, and there’s the other thing about all these people who aren’t on the electoral roll. Actually, the other thing the Electoral Commission says is if you’re eligible, you must enrol. In other words, those people have, effectively, broken the law by not enrolling for that period of time because they are over 18. So we’ve got 17-year-olds who can vote when they become 18—they’re covered—and all the over-18s are also covered so I think that the comments which have been made about disenfranchising a lot of people, you really have to question.

I think that this is simply a good piece of legislation. It’s about trying to make sure that we get a decent election result at the end of the election process, not weeks and weeks thereafter, and it gives people some confidence in the electoral system. I commend this bill to the House.

In my maiden speech, I talked about my kuia from Ngāti Pūkeko called Marian McKay, and she sat outside the steps of Parliament, petitioning the Premier to return our confiscated lands. She lost her life due to the pneumonia that she got—you’ll see how this connects in a minute, Madam Speaker. She lost her life waiting to meet with the Premier because, at the time, women did not have the vote. This was her way of participating in democracy. Her obituary said, “Mrs Stewart’s end may be said to have been hastened by the relentless cruelty and injustice of the Government to herself and her family.” Her death warns my people of the consequences of limiting participation in democracy. Her illness and death came about not just because she was a woman who died 14 years before women had the vote but because she was also Māori. Denying a person the opportunity to shape the rules that govern their lives is oppression. Denying a person the ability to participate in choosing who their leaders are sows the seeds for dissent. Voter suppression is not always explicit, but this bill is not just voter suppression; it is a threat to our democracy.

For the first general elections in Aotearoa, there was blatant Māori voter suppression, and this bill harks back to that era. For the first general elections, large rural areas where Māori lived were not included in the electorates. There were polling places only in Pākehā settlements, and only Māori who held individual land titles were allowed to participate, despite the fact that Māori owned land collectively. In the first election, 100 Māori voted out of more than 5,000 eligible electors. That’s because Māori could not vote, not because the constitution at the time explicitly barred Māori from voting but because the constitution made no space for our people and our way of life—exactly what this bill does. When they did, eventually, let us vote, they used it as a tool—a tool or maybe a weapon—to assimilate us into Pākehā culture. The reason why we didn’t have the vote was because English colonists said that Māori were not civilised enough to exercise such an important responsibility.

It wasn’t just Māori who were disenfranchised from our democracy but it was women too. The reason I bring up this whakapapa is because there are threads in this bill that relate back to suppression of large groups in our society, whether that be Māori or whether that be women. Women were meant to stay home and look after the kids while leaving politics to the men. Women were told that political involvement would “unsex” women and destroy their lovableness. The right to vote is something that we have fought hard for, both women and Māori, and it is something that we should never ever take for granted. The right to vote is not something that was won overnight. It was not something that was simply given to us. It is something that we had to take for ourselves. Therefore, we in this House, have an obligation to fight for those who will be disenfranchised by this bill.

Now, I want to talk about voting as a human right, because this bill reinstates a blanket ban for people in prison from voting. This quote says, “If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights, then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.” Besides the point that a blanket ban totally contradicts the principles of rehabilitation and reintegration, which is what our correctional system supposes it’s about, it also sets up a responsibility framework in order to vote. The thing about human rights is that you aren’t rewarded human rights based on good behaviour; you have human rights by virtue of being a human being. It becomes extremely dangerous when you have a person, in this case Paul Goldsmith, who is the arbiter of who is and isn’t allowed access to their human rights.

The first thing I learnt about human rights in university is that they are universal, they are indivisible, and they are interdependent on each other. You can’t pick and choose which human rights some people have and some people don’t. We all have them because we are all the same thing: human beings. You can’t weaken any human right without expecting there to be a flow-on weakening effect on other human rights. A right is not what someone gives you; it is something that nobody can take away from you. In other countries around the world, people will be shot for going to the ballot box, and here we are, today, where we should be enhancing people’s participation and making voting more accessible, yet we are denying 58,000-plus people, including rangatahi Māori, from voting, and that is a shame on this House.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou. E te Whare, e tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori i te pō nei, me taku kaha whakahē i tēnei pire nā runga anō i te mea he wahine ahau, he tangata whenua ahau, waihoki he rangatahi hoki, me te mea anō ērā āhuatanga e toru, koirā te ngako o tōku taenga mai ki konei, ki tēnei Whare. Koirā te ōrokohanga o taku taenga mai ki tēnei Whare ki te tū hei mema pōti mō Hauraki-Waikato.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker; indeed, greetings to us all in the House. I stand to give voice to the comments on behalf of the Māori Party tonight, and in strong opposition to this bill due to the fact that I am a woman, I am a person of this land, and, furthermore, I am a young person—and those three things, they are the core of my attendance here in this House. That is the providence of my arrival to this House to stand as the elected member for Hauraki-Waikato.]

That is what me and Tamatha represent in this House, young Māori wāhine, who—for ourselves and who we represent—are, unfortunately, kept out of these democracy processes. We represent our constituents, that I’ve had engagements with across the motu, who—I guess those stories that I wouldn’t want to share in here, but stories of “If you two are in here, I feel like I have a voice in this Parliament.”, and making sure that they still have accessibility to voting.

Essentially, this bill makes it harder for rangatahi, for wāhine, for people who feel like they don’t feel a part of these democracy system processes. This bill shuts down enrolment and updates 13 days before election day, right when many people finally engage, finally get organised, and finally make time. We already know who that hits. In the 2023 general election, the Electoral Commission reported official turnout was 78.2 percent. Turnout for voters of Māori descent across general and Māori rolls was 70.3 percent, and turnout for voters on the Māori roll was 68 percent. Those are not lazy voters; those are voters navigating structural barriers, poverty, unstable housing, shift work, caregiving, digital exclusion, and systems that were never designed around Māori realities.

The kicker is the Government is using backlog from special votes as its excuse, yet the reason special votes were high in 2023 is because over 230,000 people enrolled or changed details during that election period. That’s not a problem to punish; that’s democracy in action. We have seen a huge turnover, especially young voters under 40—70 percent of the Māori population is under 40—who actually changed to the Māori roll. Even the Attorney-General warned that 100,000 or more people could be directly or indirectly disenfranchised by these changes.

Just as Tamatha was talking about her kuia coming to bring a petition here to Parliament, so also did my kuia Hana Te Hemara in the te reo Māori petition in 1972. It comes as huge responsibility to make sure that we represent those who are voiceless outside of this House, and who we represent to make sure those barriers are not in place for them, and making sure that they are able to participate in our democracy. When I’m talking about women, when I’m talking about young people, and when I’m talking about Māori, Pasifika, Asian, this is a bill that directly affects them.

When I also think of young people left out, the Electoral Commission found that for 18- to 24-year-olds in 2023, turnout was 74.2 percent, and turnout for 18- to 24-year-old voters of Māori descent was 70.3 percent. Spare us the stereotypes about rangatahi not caring; they do care when we invite them in and when they see themselves in these spaces. So there’s going to be more of me and Tamathas, come 2026.

Māori are already underserved by the system. Wāhine fought to be recognised in the system, and rangatahi are told to care about the future but denied a say in it. The choice in front of the House is that democracy is not a—

The member’s time has expired.

It is a pleasure to speak on this bill in the third reading. I want to say something too: it’s very important, these changes we are making to restore integrity to the voting process. People of this country vote for a Government, not a three-week-plus holding pattern. Actually, they vote for the change they want to see, and the longer we take, the slower it is for them to see that. This is very important. We heard a lot around the House about people saying, “We need the chance, we need the chance.” If you know that you have to enrol before the two-week cut-off, you will do it. Give people an inch, they’ll take a mile. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. If you had a responsible Government, the very last thing they would change would be restricting the voting right. They would take every other opportunity to rectify a situation using every other methodology because they would know that that’s where they get their legitimacy. But this seems to be a Government that feels that it is not accountable to people.

Well, we see them and the people of New Zealand see them. They are fooling nobody. They’re fooling nobody because they can stand in this House and say what they will, but we have advice from the Electoral Commission on paper—that the people of New Zealand can read and that I’ll walk through today—that shows that they had other options which could have rectified the problem. They didn’t choose to see those other options through; they chose this. They chose; they are choosing to limit the vote. It is not the only thing available for them to rectify this problem.

One more time, let’s go through the problem statement. The issue here doesn’t relate to the 2026 election. The problem, as outlined to us on the committee, is that when we get to 2032, we will have 1 million special votes. But the important thing to know is we’ll have 1 million special votes if we do nothing, and that will be too hard to count within that time frame. The problem statement for the Government was: how do we either limit the number of specials or count the vote more quickly or do both of those things and still protect the right to vote? The big question is: is there any way they could do that by 2032 without making the changes that they’re proposing in terms of restricting the time that people get to register?

Clearly it is the case that there are other options. That was put to us by the Electoral Commission. We’re debating it in this House, but it was put to us very clearly that we could make those two changes. We received a letter from the Electoral Commission on 16 October that is worth a read for members of the public. They set out three scenarios. The first was that we do nothing at all. The second is that we make the changes the Government proposed. The third was that we make every other change that’s proposed in this bill except for that change of restricting the right to register.

If we did nothing at all, we’d have a million specials. If we did everything in the bill, by 2032 we’d have 727,000 specials. Now, here’s the telling comparator; the third scenario: if we did the other things they advised us to do within the bill, except for restricting the right to register, we would have 740,000 specials by 2032. Those numbers are very similar—727,000 versus 740,000. In other words, that’s 13,000 votes’ difference in terms of specials.

The point that the Electoral Commission were making is that once you see and embed these changes, the number of specials will drop. You just need to give it the time to do that. Again, this is a choice. This is a choice, and the members of the Justice Committee especially know this. Appalling that you stood and spoke to this today. You knew we had a choice—you know we had a choice. We were advised that we have a choice and yet you’re making the decision to restrict the vote, and that is the pure and simple truth.

Let me quote from the Electoral Commission themselves. They said at paragraph 24 of the letter of 16 October: “Initiatives like automatic enrolment update will ensure over time that more voters are enrolled by writ day. The Commission also received funding this year to develop a business case to modernise election delivery, including new technologies that may be able to reduce the period for the official count in future elections, including technologies such as live roll mark-off, but they cannot be implemented for 2026. These require a business case in early 2027 … New election technologies, if funded, could start from 2029 and be scaled up in 2032.”

They list other measures that are included in this bill. They list measures that are not yet included in legislation that could get us to the target without impacting the period of registration. If there’s a problem for the 2023 election—which Government members might argue—the simple temporary fix is to change the period of the writ temporarily. We’ve done it before. We’ve changed it from 50 to 60 days. You could up it by three to five days for a short period until the technology caught up. There is a fix around this that was given to us, but this is a Government who has chosen not to take it. I said in the committee stage that any person in this room—there are many who’ve been managers—any manager who was given this advice would say there is a fix here that doesn’t need to touch the right to vote, and they would take that on its own.

Now, the bizarre thing in this case is not only is there a fix that doesn’t touch on the right to vote but it’s the least best financial option the Government have chosen as well. The Electoral Commission are about to pour a lot of money into setting up a system and telling people that their vote is about to be harder in terms of registering to vote. We will rectify that. We will restore the vote. It is a waste of money. It’s also a waste of money because people are going to bring legal challenges to defend their vote. The Electoral Commission themselves said that they are making the system more robust at the tail end because it’s going to be harder to work out which are valid votes and which aren’t. Guess what! Litigation results because of that.

The other piece of litigation—and I call this the “boomerang bill” because we will see it back in the House. The Attorney-General has already given us the bones of a Supreme Court decision on this. We will see this back in the House, but not until Crown Law has spent an awful lot of public time and money defending this case in the court. This is the most financially irresponsible thing I have seen this term, and to the Government: this is not going away—it’s a boomerang bill. This is front and centre for every voter next year. This is front and centre for us for several years now. This will come back and back and back.

You have also created a state in New Zealand’s democracy where there will be confusion at the voting booth—confusion at the voting booth. This role might feel very political to you, but it’s also a governance role—it’s also a governance role. You have a responsibility to democracy to ensure that you are not confusing people on voting day.

This Government should be extremely ashamed. I called on our New Zealand First colleagues last time to cross the floor and vote in accordance with their morals. It’s because, in 2019-20, they voted with us to make the change so that people could vote on election day. I wanted to quote the words of Ron Mark, who spoke at the third reading. He said, “We will continue to support measures that enhance the opportunity for people to exercise their democratic right. We will support measures that enhance participation on election day.” It’s not too late. New Zealand First: cross the floor; vote in line with your values.

In my final minute, I want to go back to what I see are the headlines that are around the corner for New Zealand as we see this bill passed—if New Zealand First doesn’t cross the floor. There are headlines like “Anger across the country as mass numbers of specials are deemed invalid”; “Lawyers engaged as angry voters seek to hold their franchise”; “Greatest number of excluded votes are for individuals who would have been first-time voters”; “Women offenders, unfairly disenfranchised, eligible for home detention but no facilities available”; “The curse of the dormant roll drop-off”; “Professionals angry and shocked they lost the right to vote in 2026”; and, finally, from perhaps Transparency International in the future, “New Zealand rankings plummet in response to voting debacle”. You should be absolutely ashamed.

Before I call the next speaker, I’d just like to remind everybody in the House not to bring the Speaker into your debates or your heckling across the House.

Let’s face it. Let’s be honest with each other: the reason why Labour and the Greens are so angry and so livid is because we’re putting victims first once again and taking away the privilege from people who have committed common assaults, committed injury with intent to injure, and committed assault with an intent—we are taking from them the privilege of voting. I’m proud to commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. I’m not angry. I’m not sure what my hoa over there is talking about.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. E tū ana awau ki te whakahē i tēnei pire, arā Electoral Amendment Bill mā te Pāti Reipa, arā mā Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Madame Chair.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand to oppose this bill, i.e., the Electoral Amendment Bill, on behalf of the Labour Party, that is, on behalf of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti.]

Apparently, this bill aims to improve the timeliness, efficiency, integrity, and resilience of the electoral system. What of the timeliness, efficiency, integrity, and resilience of our voters? I want to acknowledge the speakers from this side of the House, who, I think, have made very measured and reasonable arguments and contributions tonight, withholding any negative emotions.

As I’ve acknowledged, we’ve heard good arguments on this side, so I thought I’d just cut to the chase about what I see on the ground in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti. We’ve heard that Māori participation is already low, and the members opposite know that they are the people who will be most highly impacted by this. Why, instead of enhancing and encouraging participation, would they be knowingly putting up a barrier to that participation?

The answer can only be one thing: mataku—fear. I’ve heard an argument from across the floor saying that if people want to get organised and they know they’ve got 14 days to enrol, they’ll do it. They will get organised and they’ll do it. And guess what! The whānau across Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and Aotearoa are so hōhā with the moumou of time legislation coming from that side of the House that, in spite of these efforts, they will.

One of the aunties sent me a message not too long ago. She said that our whānau are hōhā with all this legislation, as I’ve just said. They feel disenfranchised. There was once a time when whānau used to vote by household, and we need to go back to those days. To all the whānau out there feeing disenfranchised and feeling hōhā, you do have some power. Talk to your whānau. We will rise above this, and, as my esteemed colleague Vanushi Walters said, this will come back before this House because this is unjust. This is not here to fulfil the aims that this Government purports that it will. It will not.

Then, when you’re hearing the kind of gains we’re going to make from this, we’re quibbling over days. We’re wasting the time of this House and we’re wasting the money of taxpayers to save a couple of days. We are also putting barriers in front of people who already experience voter apathy in this country. We’re putting another barrier in front of them at a cost to them—to themselves. Taxpayers are paying for the privilege of depriving themselves ease of access to their democratic right of voting.

They’re avoiding something.

Thank you. As I said, voter apathy is absolutely real. The process is hard enough. Accessibility is hard enough. For the people throughout Ikaroa-Rāwhiti I can speak for, the environment is often quite sterile. Often, getting enrolled and showing up to vote is already quite an achievement for a lot of our whānau, so I really don’t understand why we’re doing this at a time where our whānau are struggling to buy the bread and Marmite with which the Prime Minister recommends they should so easily be making their sandwiches for lunch. These are the real issues Aotearoa is dealing with, but instead of empowering them to make sure they are part of naming the next Government of this country, this Government keeps on hacking away at the morale and the rights of this country.

So, once again, whānau, me rēhita, me pōti [you must enrol, you must vote] and make sure this is a one-term Government. I do not commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you. I’m pleased to be able to stand and contribute to this debate. I would like to come from a different angle, and that is that the vote in a democracy is so valuable and so important and so unique compared to many other countries around the world where people may not be able to vote or could not vote or their votes might not be counted. In New Zealand, their votes are counted; people’s votes are counted.

I go across the country trying to tell people the value of their vote, that that unique democracy that we live in, in New Zealand, values the vote of people. The object of that is to let them understand that their vote will be counted and it matters and does affect what happens after an election. But that uniqueness, that value of the vote, comes with a very special responsibility, and people have to exercise that responsibility.

What is happening with this amendment bill, by making advance voting 12 days and putting a limit to enrolment is just an example of putting personal responsibility to the vote and the value of the vote in a democracy such as New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s interesting to hear Rima Nakhle’s speech, wasn’t it? She talked a lot about privilege; she repeated the word “privilege” about six or seven times, possibly more. Do you know why? Because that’s all they know about on that side of the House: that is the party of privilege, and this bill shows that.

For the first time in living memory, we are going to retreat the franchise. Here we stand on the precipice of a Jim Crow - style law, making it harder for people to vote. I was interested to hear the speeches of all of our wāhine Māori here tonight, because they spoke to something: they spoke to how hard it is to vote. You know what? This bill actually speaks to a lot more than just the franchise; it speaks to how the National Party, in particular, approaches questions of equity generally.

Because you know what? They sit over there on their privileged bench, and they say, “If people can’t get their admin right, they don’t deserve to have the privilege of voting.” They sit on their high horse, and they pretend that everyone’s got it as good as them. Well, as we heard from a number of speakers tonight, not everyone has their lives entirely in order. Some people are juggling three jobs to make ends meet, and it’s not real easy to get to the enrolment form; it’s not top of the mind. Top of the mind is getting home in time to feed the kids, you know, and the fact of the matter is that despite what those people think, not everyone’s thinking about them all of the time. Not everyone’s thinking about whether they’re going to vote red or blue or green or any other colour. They’re far too busy caring for a sick child.

You know what? Maybe they only realise a couple of days out. They see the billboards out and they go, “Oh, crikey, is there an election on? I want to vote.” It’s all here in black and white. The Attorney-General’s report is one of the best documents that the Opposition could have written because it sets it out there how many people are affected: up to 200,000 people are affected. Do you know what? The parties on this side of the House want to come to people to help them, to make it as easy as possible to participate, to make it as easy as possible for healthcare to come to them, for education to come to them, and for democracy to come to them.

But over on that side, what do they say? “If you want democracy, come to us. If you want democracy, do it our way. We are not going to make accommodations for your busy lives, for your illness or your disability, for your language barriers.” No. They simply say, “If you can’t get your lives in order 13 days before the election, you’re a drop-kick.” On that privileged side of the House: “We don’t think you should be entitled to vote.”

For the first time I can remember, we are, in a significant way, making it harder for people to vote. The Attorney-General, in this document, said who this will affect most significantly: Māori, Pasifika, and Asians, because they’re the people who struggle most in engaging with Government generally, and that Government doesn’t care. They are making a choice.

Vanushi Walters gave an outstanding speech. She went through it in a detail that was comprehensive; that it doesn’t make any difference. I will make this prediction: the vote count this election will be not one iota faster than the last election, even though you’re making this change, even though you are taking away the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of people who won’t manage to enrol 13 days before. That is truly shameful.

But you know what? We’re no fools over here; we know you’ve thought about it. We know that this is intentional. We know that you think that these people won’t be voting for your Government anyway. That’s right. This is gerrymandering. I’ll call it out; I’ll call it for what it is: you are suppressing the vote. You are making it harder for people to vote—harder for the people who won’t vote for you—and it is absolutely shameful. Oh, I take your point, Madam Speaker. It is that Government that is making it harder for people to vote who won’t vote for them, and it is absolutely shameful—

You’re talking New Zealanders down. You’re talking the country down—disgusting.

Look, the justification for it—and the member who is barracking there was in the select committee when the direct question was put to the Electoral Commission: how much faster will the vote be this time round? None—none, not a day. The proof in the pudding, we’ll be here to see.

As Vanushi Walters so clearly expressed, sure, there might be a longer counting period in another electoral term, but there’s two things to say about that. First of all, this is the most injurious step to seek to mitigate that, and the least effective. It doesn’t even work. We totally support automatic enrolment. Yes, that’s a good idea, has been a good idea for a long time, but the Electoral Commission can’t get it in place for this election. That will be felt when it really counts: at the next election.

Of course, the other thing is this: if you did all of those other things but not cut off people’s right to vote, you’d actually address 95 percent of the problem. Let’s remember what this is for. All of this so-called necessity is for a few fewer days in counting the vote. What was the biggest delay in forming a Government after the last election, other than the fact that we didn’t win? It was actually coalition negotiations. We knew the rough shape of the Government. There was no impediment to the parties talking about what kind of arrangements that they might make. The Electoral Commission took a few extra days to give it out in black and white and in absolute numbers. But the real delay was trying to string their coalition of chaos together, and to be perfectly honest, they probably needed a few more weeks to get a decent coalition agreement or two in place as well.

But at the end of the day, what we have here is a Government, a po-faced Government, that sits there and takes the votes away; not from everybody but from ordinary people, from people who the leader of the ACT Party called drop-kicks, and people like me who sometimes forget to get their warrant; people who, sometimes, perhaps, don’t pay their bills exactly on time; people who can’t keep on top of everything all the time; people who aren’t as self-obsessed with themselves and with politics as they are.

If we want to have a country which is cohesive and where everyone feels listened to, we need to have a country where people feel they have a stake in the democracy. I can tell you what would be a most alienating experience: to turn up to a polling booth and come and want to have your say in the Government and be told you didn’t fill out a form on time. What kind of Kafkaesque world is that, when we say it’s a democracy but “I’m sorry, you didn’t fill out a form on time, so you can’t have a say on who governs you and what your future is.”?

I say this to the Government: stop telling ordinary New Zealanders, “Come to us; fit in with our expectations of how you are entitled to a benefit or to participate in Government.” Why don’t you take a moment and cross the bridge—te arawhiti—to the other side. Go to the people. Don’t expect them to come to you. Let’s build a democracy not just for your people but for all people. That’s not what this bill does.

Well, we’ve heard a lot of crocodile tears about the electoral changes that this bill introduces and the fact that we’re requiring people to be enrolled 13 days before the election. This, according to Duncan Webb and everybody else, is near the end of the world. I will just remind people who are tuning in that, in Australia, you need to be enrolled 26 days before the election, and the world hasn’t come to an end.

Compulsory voting.

In the UK, it’s about 13 days. They say, “Oh, that’s because enrolment is compulsory.” Enrolment is compulsory in New Zealand as well.

When the previous Government changed the rules and allowed same-day electoral enrolment, the advice from the officials back in 2020 was that that is going to lead to a longer vote count. Lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened. We went from two weeks to three weeks, and the advice that I had was that if we did nothing it would be four weeks before we knew it. New Zealanders need to get an outcome, so what we’re doing is we’re fixing the basics and we’re giving people a year to get themselves enrolled. We’re very confident that they will be able to do that because we have no doubt that the Electoral Commission, which has a big budget and has a big focus—it is their focus to get as many people enrolled by writ day, and, therefore, we can have a fast and efficient count and get on with the next Government. I’d reject any of the suggestions that when Labour changes the electoral rules, everything’s fine, but when National changes them, it’s terrible, because that is a misrepresentation of what’s going on. On that basis, I commend this bill to our House.

I seek leave to present a legislative statement on the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill.

Leave has been sought for that course of action. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This Government’s about fixing the basics and building the future, and one of the most basic things in the justice system is ensuring that we can get timeliness and access to justice so that people can get on with their lives, they can get their disputes fixed, and they can make some progress and restore themselves; get on with it. Under the previous Government, of course, time delays in the courts just dragged on and on, and people were waiting longer and longer, and so we’ve got a big focus on turning that around.

There’s many, many things that we’re doing to achieve that, but one of them is what this bill does. This bill will be in its final reading. The point of this one is it makes changes to the Senior Courts Act, the Criminal Procedure Act, and the Coroners Act to improve timeliness for New Zealand courts by maximising judicial resources. In particular, it increases the number of High Court judges that may be appointed, because, ultimately, the population is growing and we need to ensure that we have enough judges—senior judges—to get the job done. That’s what this does, because we need to change the law to do it.

Why are we doing it? Because if we look at the three things that we’re trying to achieve in the justice sector in general: we want to reduce the number of victims of crime; that’s what it’s all about—fewer victims of crime—and the good news is we’re making good progress on that. Secondly, we want to have fewer repeat recidivist youth offenders. We’ll reduce that by 15 percent, and we’re already ahead of target. There’s still a lot of work to do, but making good progress. The third area that I’m focused on is to speed up the process of the court so people can get on with their lives and get access to justice in a timely fashion, and that one is much more complicated.

Lots of issues to work our way through, but this bill strikes a blow by bringing in some extra High Court judges to the system and maximising existing judicial resources. It will also minimise the number of proceedings that abuse the process of the courts, reduce duplication at the pre-trial stage, ensure appeals are heard at the most appropriate level, and enable certain coronial inquiries to be closed where appropriate. All these changes will free up judicial time and get the whole system working more efficiently. On this basis, I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We have a lot of bills come through this House. A lot of bills come through in urgency. In fact, I don’t think many bills come through this House these days that aren’t in urgency. Every so often, there is a bill that is passed through the House and is thrown slightly off its natural pathway. This is one of those bills. Normally, if it’s a Government bill, it’s going to follow a logical path. There’ll be some excellent speeches made—you’ve just heard one from my colleague Duncan Webb about the previous bill—but, ultimately, the numbers count, and the bill will go through. However, this bill has had a slightly different pathway through here. We should have been here with the third reading of this bill about a month ago. Funnily enough, after three days of urgency, there was a slight hiccup on the other side. The Leader of the House called it a snafu—I won’t mention what that actually means in the House, but there may have actually been another explanation. It might have actually been the Opposition backbenchers seeing a bit of daylight.

Tell me what a snafu is.

Backbenchers, not front-benchers, Mr Brown. There’s no light on the front bench opposite; I can tell you that now.

Anyway, as this bill casts its way through, we ended up having to bring it back here. Again, in the dead of night, funnily enough, after four days of urgency, on the second Friday night before Christmas, when every self-respecting journo will be in a bar somewhere, certainly not sitting watching television, it was recommitted to the House. All of a sudden, that offending little part of the bill that had seen the number of judges go to a sensible number, a number that was meaningful, and a number that was more reflective of the real crime rate in New Zealand, not the one that we do see here—

Do judges cause crime?

Mr Brown, did you just make a comment? Have a look at the murder rate, have a look at the manslaughter rate, and have a look at the attempted murder rate, because you can’t hide the bodies. You can do all sorts of other things with crime statistics, you can do all sorts of things with health statistics, but you can’t hide the bodies any more than you can hide the number of foreclosures of businesses. In fact, the bodies of businesses are lying around, again, making for a lot more work in the High Court.

What would have been sensible would have been to have a range of judges so that when you do get the spikes—anyone reading the paper over the last weekend would have seen how many homicides there were over the weekend. I believe there are about four or five homicides over the weekend. As those homicides, those serious crimes, work their way through the system, it’s going to put considerable pressure on every stage of the system and certainly the number of judges. The number started out at the number of judges going from 55 to 57. It hasn’t been done, actually, for some years. In fact, if we went back to the last time it was done and applied the population to it, we would actually be going to 69 judges, not the mere two. However, the Minister put an Amendment Paper in. He may have seen a little bit of sense because he took it from 55 through to 60. However, as it transpired, the Attorney-General said, “Well, I’m only going to give you one more of them. That’s just simply to cover for retirements and illnesses. Several of our High Court judges are suffering from illness at the moment and are not available for the bench. I certainly never intended for it to go to 60. I certainly never intended for it to go anywhere near the number that is required.”

Anyway, in the dead of night, the bill was recommitted, and, of course, we went back to 60, with the intention of only putting one forward. That’s a real shame. As I’ve just pointed out, once we look at not only the population but also the crimes, we need—another really important statistic is the average length of a trial. It used to be—and I’ll just say, there’s nothing worse than someone saying, “in my day”—that when we took a homicide or a serious case to court, relatively speaking, it was a relatively simple process. We’d have fingerprints. Generally, we would have a confession. We were able to interview for more lengthy periods of time in those days. Now, of course, you’ve got your DNA. The first thing you do is you go for the telephones. Well, of course, by the time you pull a telephone apart and get all the numbers, you are also likely to have, if it’s a serious crime, an electronic phase where we could be listening. All these things mean the trials go on for a heck of a lot longer.

Now, Madam Speaker, you know what it’s like to sit in that Chair for four days when there’s a considerable amount of work being done. Imagine sitting there for 17 days, which is the average length of trials now. That’s why we actually do need more judges. That’s why it would have been a very good idea, an inspiring idea, if the backbenchers had stuck with their guns, stuck with their inspiration, and actually stuck with voting for my amendment. However, it didn’t happen. We’re back here now, again—funny enough—in the dead of night—at least it’s not Wednesday night. At least it’s a night when all the journos are next door doing whatever they do on the night of the journalist drinks. However, it is what it is. Like many of these bills, we will be back here. We’ll be back here when we suddenly realise that two makes no difference, that two is not enough, and that we’re going to require more judges as we get more of our crimes coming through the system.

Now, there are some other aspects to this bill. I might say Labour is actually supporting this bill—other than that particular section. Some of it does make sense, particularly around the coroner’s court. At the moment, there’s a considerable backlog of coroner’s cases. At the moment, it takes 637 days to dispose of the average case, and the average time for disposing of inquiry cases is 957 days. Well, yes, we’ve got to do something to back that up because that’s nearly three years. It means that when there’s been a death, the family really can’t move on.

I know that often when even police officers are involved in deaths—I’d say, get used to this—the coroner will not report on this for four years. It’ll be four years before you’ll be able to put this behind you. That’s the same for any families that suffer from deaths. There’s got to be a finalising. You can’t really move on till, finally, you’ve got this final court case waiting. I know that in the coroner’s court, every death, particularly for suspicious deaths, all have to be opened. The coroner will keep that open. What this provision allows is that, when new evidence arises that wasn’t available at the time the case was opened, it’s now possible to actually close the case off. There are some good restrictions in there: the family have got to be notified, and they’ve got the opportunity to make some sort of appeal if they would like to do so. There’s some good backup in there. It’s a good part of this bill.

There are some sensible parts of this bill, but going back to the real point of this bill, the real part of it was to make sure that the Senior Courts Act increased the number of High Court judges. I am aware that late at night, as we are—this is the third time late at night we’ve been doing this bill. I suspect we’ll be back here doing a very similar bill, increasing the number of High Court judges, within probably about two years. It’s just a shame that we didn’t put a range in there so we could save Parliament the time and effort that we’re having to go through now. I’ll commend this bill to the House.

The member is correct. It is late at night, and with that, the debate is interrupted, and we will set it down for resumption next sitting day.