Parliamentary debates: Wednesday, 13 May 2026

09:05

I present a legislative statement on the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill.

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

I move, That the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Māori Affairs Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 17 September 2026.

Rau rangatira mā o ngā hapū o te iwi o W’anganui, nau mai, haere mai ki tō tātou Pāremata. Tēnei taku mihi mahana atu ki a koutou katoa i tēnei rā whakahirahira.

[To the many leaders of the hapū of the iwi of W’anganui, welcome, welcome to our Parliament. This is my warm greeting to you all on this auspicious day.]

I wish to thank Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui for making the journey here to join us here in Wellington for this significant milestone. It was only 11 days ago that we were together on a Kaiwhaiki Pā on the banks of the Whanganui River to sign He Rau Tukutuku, the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui deed of settlement. A marvellous afternoon that was. I think of the autumn light and the poi flashing in the afternoon sun, the beautiful waiata, the haka, the speeches, and the eel afterwards in the hākari, and the wonderful conversation and laughter and tears—a wonderful day. I think, a fitting day. I want to acknowledge and extend a warm welcome to everyone who has made the journey here.

The redress arrangements in the bill are a tribute to the dedication and perseverance of your lead negotiator, Ken Mair, who I want to acknowledge today, and his negotiation team, your negotiation trust, the hapū, who worked tirelessly over the years to achieve the settlement. Many uri have carried the rākau who are no longer with us today. I acknowledge the emotions that come to the surface on a special day such as this. Naturally, people’s minds turned to those who have been part of this journey and are no longer with us today, so I want to acknowledge them. I also acknowledge the Crown team for their efforts over the years, including previous Ministers Christopher Finlayson and the Hon Andrew Little and also the chief Crown negotiator, the Hon Rick Barker, who is sitting here in the House this morning.

This first reading is a significant milestone for Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui. While the negotiations started in July 2017, ngā hapū have been seeking recognition and acknowledgement for the Crown actions for generations, with the first claim filed with the Waitangi Tribunal in 1987. The settlement is grounded in the Crown’s acknowledgement and apology for its many breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and these include its conduct during the warfare of the 1840s, the failure to complete the 1848 Whanganui Block Transaction fairly or in good faith, and the outbreak of war in Whanganui in the 1860s. The Crown acknowledges, also, the grave impact of the native land laws system on the hapū and iwi of Whanganui and the alienation of land.

We also acknowledge that the hapū of Whanganui have acted with great mana, always remaining committed to their whenua, their rangatiratanga, and their people. The Crown failed to protect their collective control and instead promoted legislation that facilitated the alienation of land and resources.

The Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill seeks to give effect to the settlement package, which provides for financial and commercial redress of $30 million and includes the transfer of forestry land, the Te Puna Hapori site, Whanganui Intermediate School, and the former Aramoho School. The settlement includes cultural revitalisation funding of $15.5 million as a platform for marae and te reo Māori revitalisation and other social and cultural aspirations yet to be determined; the return of 27 sites of cultural significance, including Moutoa Gardens Pākaitore, which will be vested as a historical reserve, and the establishment of a joint reserves board, Ngā Tutei a Maru, with the Whanganui District Council to administer sites owned by iwi and the council.

Of course, it goes without saying that no settlement can fully compensate for the loss and prejudice that the people of Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui suffered. It is something, however, that we believe the settlement lays the foundation for social, cultural, and economic benefits to help shape their people for generations to come. It will support iwi and hapū in their future endeavours and in realising their aspirations.

This is the first reading of three in the House. From here, it goes off to the Māori Affairs Committee, where the details will be considered. No doubt, there will be much more discussion before it comes back to the House for the second and its final reading; then it’s passed into law, and then it will take effect thereafter. This has been a very long-fought settlement; the wounds that it seeks to address have been carried for generations, and it’s a great privilege for me on behalf of the Crown and, as the Crown, the people of New Zealand, to be the generation that reaches this point and this settlement and this acknowledgment with its apology as we look forward to a shared future.

I consider that the bill should proceed without delay to the Māori Affairs Committee, and I commend this bill to the House.Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

09:13

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha o ngā hapū o te iwi o Whanganui kua tae mai nei ki te Whare i tēnei rā, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, huihui mai tātou katoa. Kia ora.

[Mr Speaker, thank you. To the authorities, the representatives, to the many relatives of the hapū of the iwi of Whanganui who have come to the House today, greetings and thanks to us all gathered here. Hello.]

Today is a significant day for those gathered in this House. For generations, the grievances have been carried, long before this bill even arrived at Parliament, so it’s important to mark the passage of this legislation and it’s first reading today. As the Minister has already noted, no settlement can fully restore what was taken, and no apology can erase generations of hurt, but this settlement is an acknowledgment by the Crown that it failed in its obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi and that those failures caused deep and lasting harm.

At the heart of this deed is He Rau Tukutuku—the woven strands brought together. The settlement is grounded in the principles of Toitū Te Kupu, Toitū Te Mana, Toitū Te Whenua: integrity, inherited authority, and an enduring relationship between people and whenua.

The historical account that lays in the bill on the Table makes for difficult reading. It recounts, right back, how millions of acres were stripped away from the hapū of Whanganui; how martial law was used to do this; how the Native Land Court was used to do this; and even when there were ways sought out to retain collective ownership of land, this was also undermined. The deed also records the social impact of those actions: poorer health outcomes, lower educational achievement, reduced employment opportunities, and the punishment of children for speaking te reo Māori in schools. Those experiences have shaped generations. When land is lost, it’s not just the loss of economic opportunity, it’s also of connection, security, identity, and that has a ripple effect right through.

This settlement cannot change that history, but I think it can help lay the foundations for the future. The redress package reflects that broader purpose. There is significant investment into cultural revitalisation, including the funding for te reo Māori revitalisation, marae, and governance structures to support the future aspirations of Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui. It’s important to see that those traditional place names will also be restored, restoring names such as Pūtikiwharanui-a-Tamatea-pōkai-whenua, Puketūtū, and Kākata as part of restoring the visibility of that history within the landscape itself. The settlement also creates enduring relationships between Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui and Crown agencies for education, health, housing, conservation, justice, and social development. These are wise and important relationships to continue for future generations, and it’s important to see that those are there.

There will always be people who question Treaty settlements or ask why these conversations are necessary and must continue. My answer is straightforward: a country cannot move forward honestly while ignoring the consequences of its past. The impacts of dispossession and marginalisation do not disappear simply because time has passed; they continue to shape outcomes for communities and generations later. Treaty settlements are part of confronting that history openly rather than pretending it did not happen. They are not about assigning blame to anyone, and while no settlement is perfect, these agreements remain one of the most important nation-building projects undertaken in modern New Zealand. This settlement reminds us that Te Tiriti o Waitangi was never intended to sit quietly as a historical document, disconnected from modern life; it was an agreement about relationships, authority, responsibilities, and how people would live together in this country.

Before I finish, I want to acknowledge that the Crown breached those obligations and communities suffered. The principles I’ve mentioned—Toitū Te Kupu, Toitū Te Mana, Toitū Te Whenua—speak not only to this settlement but to the kind of country we want to live in in New Zealand, all of us together. Nō reira he mihi mahana ki a koutou katoa. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[Therefore, warm greetings to all of you. Greetings and thanks to all of us.]

09:18

Tēna koutou, Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui. To extend on the reflection in this deed of settlement, which outlines the values of Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui: Toitū Te Kupu, “A relationship of innate integrity founded on both the intent of one’s word and the truth of its expression”; Toitū Te Mana, “A relationship of inherited authority founded on the recognition of iwi and hapū permanence and the shared responsibility to uphold that mana”; Toitū Te Whenua, “A relationship of sustenance found on humanity having an inalienable connection with, and responsibility to, te taiao and its health and wellbeing.” That is indeed a doctrine worthy of founding a nation, and I concur with my colleague Ginny Andersen that that is a very fine basis for the relationship that we should seek to fulfil and that we seek to make amends for through this settlement.

The harms and the evils of the Crown committed against your people are uncontested in this House today. We stand in unanimity in recognition of those harms and those evils, and we here seek to make amends for them through this settlement. It is but a token, a sliver, a fragment, of an offering that we make to your people in recognition of the harms of the Crown. You, in your generosity and your dignity and your kindness, accept that offering. Kia ora for that. We, as representatives of the Parliament and today speaking, thank you for that—thank you for that generosity.

It’s notable that your tūpuna were some of the first people who were subjected to the total immorality of the New Zealand Company in 1839—the willingness of those first settler capitalist colonisers to dishonestly deal with the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. There began a long and tawdry battle to get recognition of the land lost and the land taken, and some of your tūpuna joined in the struggle against the invasion of Aotearoa by the British in the Kīngitanga resistance in Waikato.

In this term of Government, we recognise now that those who fought in the New Zealand Wars—the first New Zealanders to defend this land from British invasion; among whom are your ancestors—we now recognise them as heroes who were standing and defending our nation as part of our Anzac recognitions. Now, those who fought in the New Zealand Wars are recognised, so we acknowledge your ancestors as well for that.

My final point is on the impact of the forbidding of the speaking of your language, te reo Māori, in schools. We are very critical of this Government not expecting schools to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi. If we would understand why it is so important, it is the simple fact that one of the primary failings of the Crown in upholding Te Tiriti was forbidding the speaking of the language in our schools. That is certainly an injustice against te iwi Māori and against your iwi, Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui. We support this bill.

09:24

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e ngā hapū o te iwi o W’anganui. Nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei Whare.

[Greetings to the hapū of the iwi of W’anganui. Welcome, welcome to this House.]

I stand to speak in this first reading, and the first reading for many of us is our first chance to actually look at what the bill contains. Reading this bill, you first start with the historical account, which is—as has been said, undisputed in this House today—an account of swindling, of war, of abuse of power, and of treating people in abominable ways from abominable people, and a lack of morality on the Crown’s part. The resulting alienation and outcomes are further expressed in the historical account, and we humbly ask for this bill, when it becomes an Act, to write into this record of a nation an apology from the Crown. But this is a first reading, and it has got many more stages to go.

The bill contains cultural redress, recognition of rohe, of whenua, of connection, and recognition of cultural rebuilding and of working together. We are, as a country, trying to continue to build a country that we can be proud of. That requires grace, that requires forgiveness, and that is what is being asked for today.

No Treaty settlement will ever completely fix the wrongs of the past, but recognising them, putting them down in every record that we can, and trying our damnedest to work together for a future that is better for the entire citizenry of New Zealand, of everybody who defended this—thank you, Steve Abel, for mentioning that—country from the first invaders, as we do now at Anzac Day, and the people who bring that pride as those invaders became part of this country and became what we are today as we open our hearts to each other and try and create a country that’s worthy of all of our tūpuna. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

09:26

E ngā kaumātua me ngā kuia o ngā hapū o te iwi o Whanganui kua tae mai ki tēnei Whare o Pāremata ki te tautoko i te kaupapa o te rangi nei, tēnā koutou katoa.

E tū ana ahau, he uri nō Te Taitokerau, ki te mihi atu ki a koutou. Ka nui aku mihi maioha ki a koutou, tēnā koutou.

Ka mihi hoki ahau ki a tātou katoa kua huihui mai nei, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[To the patriarchs and matriarchs of the hapū of the iwi of Whanganui who have come to this House of Parliament in support of the legacy of this day, greetings to you all.

I stand, a descendant of Northland, to acknowledge you. Many kind regards to you, greetings.

I acknowledge all of us who have assembled here; greetings and thanks to you, indeed, to all of us.]

I begin with greetings to the uri o Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui who have travelled to be here today to witness the first reading of the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill. We’re not just debating legislation today; what we are witnessing is the weaving together of a fragmented history. We’re here to acknowledge He Rau Tukutuku and the many strands of grievance, resilience, and hope that has brought us to this moment.

On 2 May this year—not so many days ago—Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui and the Crown signed the deed of settlement, He Rau Tukutuku, at Kaiwhaiki Pā, a settlement that acknowledges generations of grievance; it restores mana, though, and it sets a pathway forward—and it’s looking forward that is so important here today as we can draw a line in the sand and move forward. This milestone marks a new chapter in the journey of the iwi, acknowledging past injustices and paving the way for cultural, social, and economic development to follow.

For generations, Whanganui hapū have carried the impacts of land loss, marginalisation, and breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The history of this region is marked by the Crown’s failure to act in good faith during those early land transactions, most notably the 1848 Whanganui repurchase. These actions led to the unfair loss of kāinga and left the hapū virtually landless, causing immense and lasting harm to their social, cultural, and economic wellbeing. For over a century, the people of the lower and middle Whanganui have carried a very heavy burden: they’ve lived with the scars of the 19th-century old land claims, the pain of the 1848 Whanganui purchase, and the devastating impact of the Crown’s military actions. These weren’t just losses of acres. They were losses of identity, of economic mana, and the ability to care for the land as kaitiaki.

While many settlements have common themes, I’d like to highlight some of those which I find particularly impactful. Despite a lack of evidence, the Crown unjustly exiled five prisoners to Tasmania in 1846, which included Hohepa Te Umuroa, a tupuna of Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui, who died while imprisoned there. The Governor acted in bad faith, misrepresenting the prisoners’ offences and asking the authorities to treat the prisoners harshly.

Martial law in 1847: there was no sufficiently serious emergency or threat to justify extending martial law in Whanganui in March 1847, but it was still in place in April 1847 when five Whanganui youths were captured after the murder of a settler family, and they were tried by court martial. Four of those youths were then swiftly executed as an immediate example. These are just some of the losses, the mamae, from that period in time, which we should all be ashamed of.

Today is a new day as we begin a new step forward, and the redress package will include transfer of 27 sites of significance alongside statutory acknowledgements over reserves and conservation areas. The settlement goes beyond a dollar value; it’s about restoring mana, it’s about recognition and truth telling, and it’s about creating opportunity for future generations. To the people of Whanganui: the settlement cannot erase the past, nor can it fully compensate for generations of struggle, but it does signal a new dawn. As the river flows, so too must this process move forward. I commend the bill to the House.

09:31

Tēna koe e te Pīka. Ua-mai-rangi māturuturu iho noa, ka taka ngā roimata e rua o Ranginui, ka māpuna ki te whenua, ka rere kōawaawa, kawea ā-uta, kawea ā-tai, mai i te Kāhui Maunga puta atu ki Tangaroa. Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au.

Kua tae mai ngā ‘apū o W’anganui, kua tae mai He Rau Tukutuku; toitū te kupu, toitū te mana, toitū te whenua. Ōku whanaunga, tēnā koutou, ata mārie.

[Rain-from-the-sky trickles freely, two tears of Ranginui fall, they pool on the land, they flow through the valleys, carrying through from inland to the coast, from the Mountain Clan out to the sea. I am the river; the river is me.

The hapū of W’anganui have arrived, the deed of settlement has arrived; commitments honoured, mana upheld, the land endures. My relatives, greetings, good morning.]

It was the first time that I’ve arrived in the House and the House was waiting for the manuhiri. The House was waiting for Ngā Hapū o Whanganui—and koirā te āhua o te rā nei [that is the nature of this day]. That, to me, is the tohu of the start of the opening, the thriving, the pushing of the door that today represents for us as Ngā Hapū o Whanganui.

I want to mihi to the negotiators, to all their teams, and the hard work that they’ve done. I want to mihi to all the hapū and the negotiators for the Crown and hapū. I want to mihi to all our hapū, our trustees, our workers, and our kaimahi. I’ve seen, and I’m grateful as an uri for what it is that you’ve done for us. I want to mihi, especially, to their whānau—to their wives, their husbands, their mokopuna, and their tamariki, who have gone without them as they have gone and fought the fight for us with the Crown.

It is a thankless job. There is time that they give, and we are ruthless as a people. We’ve lost faith in what it is that we have to do when we negotiate with the Crown. It is the whānau who have had to wear all the knocks from the cousin who thinks they could do it better and all the knocks from those who have forgotten what it is like to believe in ourselves. It is them that miss out on time with their whānau members, and I don’t think the rest of Aotearoa know what happens behind the scenes to get here in the first place, so I mihi to them all and recognise all the sacrifices you’ve made for us.

I think the really important part is that, yes, we are survivors of muru raupatu. We have endured some of the worst prejudice, attacks, violence, and State-sponsored evils that indigenous peoples have had to wear. But that doesn’t define us, because one of the things we have never lost in all of this is our values—our values to protect each other, our values to protect our whenua, our values as taught by our awa—and that is what this moment provides to the rest of Aotearoa: the aroha, the manaaki, the forgiveness, the huge humility that our people endure and wear and give to this nation, accepting settlements that are neither equitable, neither fair, neither just, but they are hope.

Today, I stand in honour for our people who show their hope for this nation. I think Ken said it best when he said, “the Crown, both present and future, must not … diminish … Te Tiriti”. You enjoyed our manaaki; they enjoyed having you. Please do everything you can to make sure that that is honoured.

Settlements are a time for us to not only show the world our values but for us, this generation, to show and provide something for the next generations. It is never about today. We’re all responsible for developing something, and the movements in developing something two or three generations after muru raupatu are really taxing, really hard. It’s with hope that I share some of the words that I saw shared from rangatahi, and Te Ari Paraniri said it so well. She said, “Settlements create opportunities for growth, leadership, and connection to our identity. There is a pathway for better support in education, employment, and cultural development. It means our generation can continue to thrive. It gives rangatahi the leadership to uphold our tikanga and contribute to the future of our iwi, our hapū, our whānau.”

Those are the words of who we represent as a future in Aotearoa. Those are the words of hope, unity, and humility. I stand in absolute homage, not only for the work done from today’s generations, but for tomorrow’s generations. To my whanaunga: go well. Go well, go steady, go knowing that we’ve got your backs. Kia ora rā.

09:36

Thank you, Mr Speaker. E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā iwi o te motu, tēnā koutou katoa. E ngā uri o W’anganui, e ngā hapū o te awa, tēnā koutou.

[To the authorities, the representatives, the peoples of the nation, greetings to you all. To the descendants of W’anganui, to the hapū of the river, greetings.]

Just over a week ago, I stood at Kaiwhaiki Marae alongside whānau, hapū, and leaders of Ngā Hapū o te Iwi o Whanganui for the signing of He Rau Tukutuku, to be present for that moment and witness history in the making, to see generations represented, and to feel the weight of the journey that has brought everyone here.

In reflecting on that journey, I asked Ken Mair what you wanted shared in this House. He said, “We would like to acknowledge Kaumatua John Mahi of Ngāti Pamoana for his unrelenting support of this land settlement over many decades. His tireless work, wisdom, and steadfast commitment helped ensure that the Whanganui land settlement was finally completed and signed on 2 May 2026.” Ken continued, “Behind every team there are always those who spend countless hours, days, weeks, years doing the hard yards. They expect no accolades. They simply get on with the work because they believe in the kaupapa. Today we acknowledge Tracey Waitokia and Aimee Simon. Your extraordinary energy, total dedication, and unwavering commitment to the Whanganui Land Negotiation Trust will never be forgotten. You are both true leaders and this settlement carries the imprint of your hard work, your integrity, and your aroha for your people.”

I also wish to acknowledge all the negotiators, kaumatua, and representatives, some of whom are with us in the gallery, and those who have passed as well. This House recognises the decades of work, the perseverance, and the leadership that has brought this settlement to this point. This bill gives legislative effect to all of that mahi. It address and records the details of profound and longstanding breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It also records the values of Whanganui iwi, which are at the heart of the settlement and were consistently emphasised throughout negotiations. Toitū te kupu, toitū te mana, toitū te whenua—that commitments must be honoured, that mana must be upheld, and that land and health must endure.

A clear expectation was expressed at the signing that the Crown acts in good faith and recognises these important values. As your local MP, I will continue to ensure this occurs in practice. On behalf of Whanganui District Council Mayor Andrew Tripe, he asked that I share the following with this House this morning: “I offer heartfelt congratulations on the first reading of He Rau Tukutuku. This milestone reflects more than 40 years of resolve, courage, and manawanui by hapū and iwi leaders, kaiwhiriwhiri, kaumātua, and whānau. While no settlement can undo the injustices of the past, this moment honours the truth of that history and looks to the future—titiro whakamuri; kōkiri whakamua [cognisant of the past; progress towards the future]. The council looks forward to working alongside you for the wellbeing of all Whanganui.”

This settlement is not an end point. It is a platform for cultural revitalisation, for economic development, and for a stronger relationship between iwi, the Crown, and the wider Whanganui community, through which we can all grow and prosper. Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui, I acknowledge your resilience, your leadership, and your unwavering commitment to your people. It was an honour to stand with you at Kaiwhaiki. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

09:41

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e ngā hapū o Whanganui, ngā mihi ki a koutou i whakarangatira i a mātou i tēnei wā. Tēnei te mihi ki a koutou.

Ngā kaiwhiriwhiri, ki a koe hoki, e Ken, pai ki te kite i a koe e hoa. E tika ana ki te tautoko i ngā whakaaro e pā ana ki ngā kaiwhiriwhiri. Tracey, e tika hoki ki a maumahara ki a John Maihi.

Engari i tēnei wā, Ken, i pīrangi au ki te maumahara i te mahi a Tariana me Nick Tangaroa. E kore e wareware i a mātou tā rāua mahi ki te kōkiri i te kaupapa o Pākaitore, ne? E tika ana ki te maumahara i tā rāua mahi, me whakanui tā rāua mahi i ngā rā o mua.

Engari e hoa, ngā mihi ki a koe, ko koe te negotiator ināianei. He rerekē i tō mahi i ngā wā o mua, when you were the chief troublemaker. Engari tēnei te mihi ki a koe.

[Greetings to you, the hapū of Whanganui; greetings to you who have honoured us at this time. This is my acknowledgement of you.

The negotiators—to you also, Ken, it is good to see you, my friend. It is appropriate to support the consideration of the negotiators. Tracey, it is also appropriate to remember John Maihi.

However, at this time, Ken, I want to commemorate the work of Tariana and Nick Tangaroa. We will never forget their work to progress the Pākaitore initiative, right? It is appropriate to commemorate their work and celebrate their work in former times.

However, my friend, congratulations to you; you are the negotiator now. It’s different to your activities in prior times, when you were the chief troublemaker. But congratulations to you.]

It’s a huge comment, I think, on the Treaty settlement system that the biggest troublemaker, or one of the biggest troublemakers of the last generation, is now a very polished and well-to-do chief negotiator for Ngā Hapū o Whanganui. I want to congratulate Ken Mair on that. I never thought he’d make the transition, given his escapades in the past where he stopped the Te Karere programme from going on television. I’ll never forget that, Ken, and I think it’s important for our people who come here to remember the mahi of your chief negotiator, and it’s a comment on the system.

Minister Goldsmith was talking about some of that this morning, about how we can be very adversarial and then kia whakakotahi [to unite for the work] for the kaupapa. I mean this, Ken. I was thinking about Tariana and Nick, and all of them, and Pakaitore. And, oh, Tari—you were managing her all the time as well as trying to manage yourself. The fire they had in their eyes, eh, in terms of who the Government was. It didn’t matter whether it was National or Labour, we were all sell-outs. Then Tony came and joined us. But the fire in their eyes and what they went through was incredible, and where we are today is incredible. Yes, as Deb Ngarewa-Packer says, there is no equity. We all know that, settlement process—we don’t like it. You know, we can’t stand this one and that one, and then we all come down here and we do the settlement because, through the peanuts, we can see hope. We see opportunity; we see our young people, some of you who are in the audience today. There’s an opportunity that we have seen come about—best examples being Ngāi Tahu and Tainui—and I wish the same with Ngā Hapū o Whanganui.

This is such a chance and such an opportunity to remind Aotearoa of the concession that te ao Māori makes at these moments; of the concession and the commitment that we make to Aotearoatanga, or to New Zealand, where you could be still protesting and asking for a $500 million or whatever, Ken, and you and the team. You have conceded, you have compromised. What’s the answer at the end of the road? Will the Crown continue to support Ngā Hapū o Whanganui? That’s the question, Minister Goldsmith. Too often, settlements are made and then settlements are forgotten. Too often iwi are left on their own. That’s not a criticism of National; that’s a criticism of the system. It’s a criticism of the system. I saw former Minister Andrew Little, now mayor of Wellington, this morning. We talk about the problems that are in front of us.

I just want to congratulate Ngā Hapū o Whanganui, the Minister, and former Ministers who have put this together but remind ourselves that there’s still so much to do. I’ve read some of that kōrero since the signing, and I want to mihi to all of you for committing to this. But we as a Crown, as a Government—and us, obviously, as the future Government—have to put a plan in place so that our people are just not left on their own, otherwise Ken Mair will be out there protesting yet again, and we want to keep Ken at the negotiating table.

Engari he hōnore ki te tū ki mua i a koutou i tēnei wā. Tēnei te mihi ki a koutou, ōku whanaunga kua tae mai nei i tēnei wā, tēnā koutou, tēnā anō tātou katoa.

[However, it is an honour to stand before you at this time. I hereby acknowledge you, my relations who have come here at this time; greetings to you and all of us.]

09:46

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. It is an honour and a privilege to speak here to the first reading of the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill. The bill gives effect to He Rau Tukutuku, the deed of settlement between Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui and the Crown. I want to recognise the scale of the collaboration that’s taken place to get to where we are today. Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui is a collective of 17 hapū, whose rohe stretches from Pipiriki to Te Korowai o Te Awaiti and dot along the weave of Te Awa Tupua, the mighty Whanganui River, until it reaches the sea.

The unity you’ve displayed under the banner of the Whanganui Land Settlement Trust has been a great source of strength for your people. Today, here in Parliament, we gather to recognise that strength, that unity, and your commitment. Haere mai ki te Whare Pāremata.

[Welcome to Parliament House.]

It has been nearly 10 years since the Crown recognised the mandate of the Whanganui Land Settlement Trust to negotiate the settlement, but the history of this moment dwarfs a single decade. It reflects resilience, persistence, and aroha passed down through your kaumātua, your negotiators, and your whānau over many decades.

I pay tribute to the resilience and leadership of you all, and your collective willingness to progress. There are many to acknowledge and thank: Ken Mair, Rick Kingi, Des Canterbury, Tena Ruru, Erana Mohi, Hone Tamehana, George Matthews, Kahurangi Simon, Naveena McGookin, Dr Rāwiri Tinirau, Dr Te Tiwha Puketapu, Tina Rupuha Green, Turama Hawira. Your lead negotiator Ken Mair has also asked that we make special mention of the McCaw Lewis lawyers who stood behind the scenes throughout this long journey, especially now Judge Aidan Warren, Renika Siciliano and Carmen Mataira. Their expertise, guidance, and steadfast support made an important contribution to the successful negotiation of the Whanganui land settlement, Ken said. To Minister Goldsmith, thank you for the dedication and care shown throughout this process and for continuing the work of your predecessors, the Hon Andrew Little and Chris Finlayson.

Today is the day to acknowledge you all, Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui, your strength, your dignity, and your unwavering pursuit of justice. For generations, your people have carried the weight of the Crown’s actions. Today, the Crown seeks not to erase history but to recognise it, to apologise for it, and to look to a shared future. The settlement includes both financial and cultural redress as a means of restoring your mana and enabling a new era of prosperity and self-determination. It recognises your deep and enduring connection to your awa, your whenua, and your taonga tuku iko. More than redress itself, this is a foundation; it’s a platform from which you can continue to grow on your own terms, in line with your aspirations, and grounded in your tikanga.

Chair of Ngāti Apa, Pahia Turia, told me last week, “It’s great to have another one of our neighbours moving through the settlement process”. He acknowledged that it’s been a long road for Whanganui, and today is a day to celebrate and acknowledge that milestone. Elijah Pue said that the most important thing to consider is the opportunity this settlement creates for our region, and for us all.

The name of your post-settlement governance entity, He Rau Tukutuku, both represents and signifies unity, the interweaving of 17 hapū, their histories, and their values into a single cohesive agreement, just as the tukutuku panel is created by the weaving together of horizontal and vertical strands to create something meaningful and enduring—something beautiful. You knew before the Crown acknowledged it that unity is a key driver of any collective endeavour. He Rau Tukutuku reflects and celebrates this kaupapa.

To the people of Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui, thank you—thank you for your generosity in engaging with this process, for holding your mana, and for walking a path that was never easy but always principled. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

09:51

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Rapua te huarahi whānui hei ara whakapiri i ngā iwi e rua i runga i te whakaaro kotahi. Tihewa mauri ora.

E ngā whanaunga o W’anganui awa, tēnei te mihi ki a koutou i tēnei rā. Nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei Whare, te Whare Pāremata. Nō reira e mihi kau ana ki a koutou.

He mokopuna ahau a Henry Dargaville Bennett, nō reira e te whanaunga, tēnei te mihi ki a koutou i tēnei rā. Mai i te Kāhui Maunga ki Tangaroa, ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au.

[Thank you, Speaker of the House. Seek the wide path as a pathway to bring together the two peoples under a shared understanding. The breath of life.

To the relatives of the W’anganui River, I hereby acknowledge you today. Welcome, welcome to this House, the House of Parliament. Therefore, greetings to you.

I am a grandchild of Henry Dargaville Bennett, therefore, to my relative, I hereby acknowledge you today. From the Mountain Clan to the sea, I am the river; the river is me.]

Today, I want to acknowledge the many people who carried this kaupapa over decades. Treaty settlement negotiations require extraordinary patience and determination. There are kaumatua who began this journey and are no longer here to witness this debate today. There are whānau who protected kōrero, evidence, and whakapapa so that the history would not be forgotten. This House owes them recognition today as well, and I acknowledge the Whanganui Land Settlement Negotiation Trust for the work undertaken to bring this settlement to this point and first reading today. I want to acknowledge the negotiators, historians, researchers, legal teams, and community leaders who contributed to this process.

Most importantly, I want to acknowledge the uri o Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui here in te Whare Pāremata i tēnei rā. Your presence in the gallery gives this parliamentary debate real meaning. It’s the first step, where we share the history, the hurt, the pain, and the past in order to move forward as peoples of Aotearoa in this country today.

This settlement is not simply a legislative exercise; it is about our people, our whānau, the generations who carried the weight of these grievances while continuing to uphold their identity and connection to whenua. One of these strongest themes that runs through this settlement is the inseparable relationship between people and the whenua. This deed repeatedly returns to whenua, to awa, wāhi tapu, and to environmental stewardship of our taiao. That reflects a worldview where land is not treated as a commodity alone but a tupuna—an ancestor, a source of belonging, and a responsibility handed from one generation to the next for our rangatira mō āpōpō [leaders of tomorrow] to take forward on our behalf.

Treaty settlements are part of confronting the history openly, rather than pretending it did not happen. Today, we acknowledge that this settlement also creates an enduring relationship between Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui and Crown agencies across education, across hauora, across ngā kāinga, conservation and taiao, justice, and social development. Those relationships are intended to ensure that iwi are not simply consulted after decisions are made but are recognised as enduring partners with knowledge, history, and authority within their rohe. The financial and commercial redress package includes $30 million plus interest, alongside rights relating to the Crown properties, forestry land, rental proceeds, and carbon credits. It provides a platform for future economic development and intergenerational investment.

It is also important to say plainly that Treaty settlements are not compensation in any full sense of the word. No financial package can truly account for the generations of land loss to our whānau, language suppression, social dislocation, and economic marginalisation. E te whānau, I acknowledge your first reading today of this settlement, but I also note the challenging times that are before us; as we recognise the past, we have to acknowledge the present challenges that we face. Nō reira e te iwi, e te Whare, e mihi kau ana ki a koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, mauri ora ki a tātou katoa.

[Therefore, to the people, to the House, respectful greetings to you, greetings and thanks to you, health and wellbeing to us all.]

09:56

Tēnā koe e te Speaker. Te mea tuatahi, e ngā uri o W’anganui, nau mai, haramai ki tō Whare, te Whare Pāremata i tēnei ata.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. Firstly, to the descendants of W’anganui, welcome, welcome to your House, Parliament House, this morning.]

It’s a privilege to stand and take the last call in this first reading of Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill. This is just before it moves on to the next stage, which I will be privileged to be involved with, which is the select committee process. As the Māori Affairs Committee, we are privileged to be able to visit the whenua of many of the settlements that come before us at the committee itself. Just this morning, we had a mihi whakatau for a number of iwi of the Hauraki area. These journeys that the committee goes through are quite emotional journeys; we learn of the many, many wrongdoings of the Crown in the past.

I’ve always said to people, if you want to learn about the history of Aotearoa, the first place you can go to with confidence is going to Treaty settlements and looking at the acknowledgments and the history that is held within Treaty settlements themselves. It is said to be the true and accurate account of actually what happened. It was absolutely the case for myself when I read the Treaty settlement that we have before us here.

I was born and raised in South Taranaki, in the Manaia-Kapuni area, and I read with interest what has occurred. These settlements are only for a point in time, from the signing of the Treaty up until 1992, but I look at it and it brings back memories—memories of Moutoa Gardens. I see Ken up there, and I’m sure many of your other whanaunga there were part of what some might call the unrest that occurred at the gardens there some time ago. As a young person, I really didn’t truly understand what that was about, but reading your settlement here, it becomes clear to me not just what it’s about but the importance of it. I learnt about Pākaitore, your fishing kāinga, and what that meant for you. But more so the fact of what that occasion, when you were protesting, was all about; the fact that with the dealings that have been spoken about by fellow members of the debating chamber today about the wrongdoings with regards to the land acquisitions by the Crown, by the New Zealand Company and all that, of trying to fix those wrongs. It’s a learning and it’s something that should be acknowledged and it’s something that should be fixed.

When I learnt of the actions at Moutoa Gardens and particularly Ken—I met Ken, actually, personally, for the first time as a young person at the squash club and I saw him on the court there, and he was playing against my older sister, and I’m sorry to say, Ken, but I think she actually beat you on that occasion. But, what I did see was the absolute competitiveness of Ken in everything that he approached. I knew that with Ken there, with the other trustees involved in a settlement here, the Crown was going to be held to account with that. And I acknowledge that.

I acknowledge all of the people that have been involved with the settlement today and we’ve got Rick Barker here sitting in the House, but also the Ministers—the successive Ministers—we mentioned the Hon Chris Finlayson, the Hon Andrew Little, and, of course, the present Minister, the Hon Paul Goldsmith.

It takes time, these settlements, it takes a long time, but it’s good to finally have you in the gallery here to take this next step. Yes, there will be time before we get back here to the final stage of the third reading before it goes to Royal assent when it actually becomes law. I look forward to partaking in that process. I look forward to meeting you on your whenua during the select committee process and the submissions. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

There will now be a series of procedural motions and at the end of those motions, if there was the will for a waiata, that will be the time for that.

10:02

The question is, That the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill be considered by the Māori Affairs Committee.

I move, That the Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui Claims Settlement Bill be reported to the House by 17 September 2026.

10:17

I present legislative statements on the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, and the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill.

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

I move, That the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, and the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill be now read a third time.

Tihei mauri ora.Ki te mana whenua o tēnei rohe, e Te Āti Awa, tēnā koutou.E ngā rau rangatira o Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui me Ngāti Hei, tēnā koutou. Piki mai, kake mai ki Te Upoko-o-te-ika. Tēnei taku mihi atu ki a koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[The breath of life. To the territorial authority of this region, Te Āti Awa, greetings. To the many leaders of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei, greetings. Welcome, welcome to Wellington. I hereby acknowledge you, greetings and thanks to you; indeed to us all.]

Madam Speaker, it’s great to be here to speak today for this rare occurrence of three Treaty settlement bills being read for a third time together. It’s a notable occasion as it brings us a significant step closer to completing the individual settlement journeys for Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei. Their journeys have been long and, some might say, arduous, and I want to begin by acknowledging those from Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei who join us in the House this morning—many who have travelled long distances to witness this occasion.

I also want to acknowledge those who are tuning in on live stream or listening on the crystal sets back at home in the Coromandel. It was wonderful to have some time together this morning to hear from your speakers and to sing together and to have some food together. Thank you very much for the opportunity to do that. As I said this morning, to take a break from the tumult of politics and to consider some of the deeper things that we are considering through Treaty settlements and recognising the three settlements together today shows the deeply intertwined relationships of the Hauraki iwi, which have been a feature of the negotiations. These agreements will allow each groups’ bill to progress to third reading today. I just want to thank everybody for being a part of that.

I want to pay tribute to the tūpuna and kaumātua who took the first and many subsequent steps to seek justice for Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei. Their path wasn’t easy, and as I said this morning, we do acknowledge the emotions that come to the surface on a day like this when we remember those who have been part of this over many generations but also, quite recently, who are no longer with us today.

I want to thank the iwi for their unrelenting efforts and especially acknowledge the mandated negotiators: for Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu, Jill Taylor and Nicola Scott; for Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Amelia Williams and Russell Karu; and for Ngāti Hei, Peter Matai Johnson and Joe Davis.

A special mention for three people who have played a significant role in the iwi settlement, who are no longer with us. I refer to Mapuna Turner, one of the original negotiators for Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu; Kiri Karu, a trustee of the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Trust, who, sadly, passed away earlier this year; and the late Peter Tiki Johnston, the original negotiator for Ngāti Hei. Their leadership has not been forgotten, and it’s a great sadness that they are not physically with us today. All of those who shouldered the heavy mantle of representing their iwi over the last 15 years have acted honourably and reasonably in our negotiations. We’ve sat across the table at the end to get this concluded. We’ve been pragmatic, and we’ve got things done. I’m grateful for that.

I also want to acknowledge that the previous Treaty settlement Ministers—Christopher Finlayson and Andrew Little—and the many Government agencies representing the Crown. I also thank the Thames-Coromandel District Council, the Hauraki District Council, and the Waikato Regional Council. I also want to extend my thanks to the Hon Rick Barker, in the House today, and Michael Dreaver, who were chief negotiators for much of the negotiations, and also to Brian Dickey KC, the chief negotiator in the final stages, supported by the officials from Te Tari Whakatau.

Today, we recognise that the Crown severely wronged each of the iwi in the years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi. The history is set out in the Waitangi Tribunal’s 2006 Hauraki inquiry report. The historical record shows that successive generations of iwi raised these concerns and these grievances, and successive Governments failed to deal with them. Recognition of, and redress for, these grievances are long overdue. In each settlement, the Crown has acknowledged historic Treaty breaches and offered an apology, which will be permanently enshrined in our nation’s law through the legislation passed today. For all the iwi, the Crown apology acknowledges that its actions and omissions left their people, essentially, landless. It eroded tribal structures and dislocated iwi members from their pā and their kāinga. Itcaused physical and spiritual hardship that remains deeply felt today.

While there are many commonalities between the three, each iwi has a unique experience, and Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu sent men to Waikato to fight Crown forces and, as a result, suffered the confiscation of land in which they had interests in the Tauranga area. Over the next century, Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu, who lived on land surrounding Te Aroha maunga, lost most of that land largely through Crown purchasing. This included land that the Crown promised to reserve for them in 1880 when Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu entered an agreement to enable the opening of the gold field. Over time, this deprived Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu of their rangatiratanga over significant sites, including Te Aroha’s mineral springs.

Ngāti Tara Tokanui also lost land in which they had interest through the Crown’s confiscation and acquisition of Tauranga land. The Crown then used monopoly powers and advance payments to individuals to acquire collectively owned Hauraki land goldfields. In the following years, Ngāti Tara Tokanui kāinga on the banks of the Waihou River and the Ohinemuri River suffered significant pollution to their water supply after the Crown authorised the discharge of mine tailings, including cyanide-treated waste, into those waterways. The impact on the health of Ngāti Tara Tokanui was significant.

Ngāti Hei hold a unique place in New Zealand history. In November 1769, the first written account of a pōwhiri between Māori and Pākehā occurred when Captain Cook was invited to the fortified pā of Ngāti Hei paramount chief Toawaka in Whitianga. He and his crew stayed days. Despite this positive beginning, the impacts of Pākehā settlement affected Ngāti Hei even before the Treaty was signed. A Crown investigation into pre-Treaty land transactions saw Ngāti Hei lose much of their coastal whenua. From 1858, the Crown acquired significant areas of land in the Ngāi Hei rohe, without providing reserves and sometimes without consultation. This left Ngāti Hei unable to participate in the new economic opportunities and challenges emerging. These settlements, acknowledge the impact of Crown actions, provide redress that recognises the traditional cultural and spiritual association.

The Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu redress includes financial redress of $5.5 million with the right to purchase two commercial redress properties. This includes the vesting of 17 individual and joint cultural redress properties. The significant seven of the cultural vestings and significant overlay classifications are on the slopes of Te Aroha maunga, the ancestral maunga at the centre of their existence.

Ngāti Tara Tokanui redress includes $6 million in financial redress and the right to purchase and lease back to the Crown the land underlying Paeroa College; seven individual and two joint cultural redress properties, including Ngāti Koi Domain in the transfer to Ngāti Tara Tokanui.

Ngāti Hei redress includes financial redress of $8.5 million, with the ability to purchase three commercial properties, including Whenuakite Station when Ngāti Tamaterā complete their settlement. It includes also the vesting of 15 individual and two joint cultural redress properties in the foothills of Te Paeroa-o-Toi to the beaches around Whitianga.

Each iwi is also party to the Pare Hauraki Collective Redress Bill, which contains shared and individual redress for Hauraki iwi. The Crown remains committed to advancing that bill once the collective deed has one more signatory.

This settlement represents a commitment to reset the relationships and to start a new journey, and I heard the speeches this morning about the need to continue that conversation, and we will do that. We won’t always agree, but we will continue the conversation.

I conclude by looking to the future. The passing of these bills means that each of the iwi post-settlement governance entities has initiated, or within a year will initiate, trustee elections. Moving towards governing significant assets is an exciting phase, and I wish each iwi well as they do that. Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei, the Crown looks forward to working with you as you elect those who will represent you in the future. I commend the Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, and the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill to the House. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

10:28

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Ko te mihi tuatahi ki te Atua nāna nei ngā mea katoa. Ko te mihi tuarua ki te Whare e tū nei, tēnā koe.

Āpiti hono, tātai hono, te hunga mate ki te hunga mate. Āpiti hono, tātai hono, te hunga ora ki te hunga ora.

He mihi mahana ki a koutou, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu and Ngāti Tara Tokanui. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[Thank you to the Speaker of the House. The first greeting is to God, to whom all things belong. The second greeting is to the House that stands here; greetings.

That which is joined remains an unbroken line of descent, the deceased with the deceased. That which is joined remains an unbroken line of descent, the living with the living.

Warm greetings to you, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, and Ngāti Tara Tokanui. Greetings to you, greetings to you, greetings to us all.]

To the representatives of all iwi gathered today, a warm welcome. It was a pleasure and an honour to be invited along this morning to join you to share in your speeches and waiata, so thank you for the opportunity of doing that first thing this morning.

To the kaumātua, to the kuia, to the historians, researchers, trustees, to the negotiators, Rick Barker and Michael Dreaver, those two battle-worn negotiators, thank you for your effort in bringing the three separate settlements to this point in time—three separate pieces of legislation, which are, for the first time I can remember, being brought together in one final reading speech. I’d like to acknowledge that it was done with the agreement of all three iwi that we would have an extended third reading speech that brought all of these three separate negotiations together, but I would also like to note my personal view. We’re always told in in politics not to have a personal view, but my view is that the least we could have maybe done today is have three separate third reading speeches. You’ve come a long way, you’ve travelled a long way to be here, and the least we could do was to have three third readings for your settlements today and not have them brought together quickly. But I acknowledge that you chose to do that, and in Labour, we agreed because that was your choice.

These settlements are the result of people refusing to allow the experiences of your tūpuna to be forgotten. They are also reminders of the responsibility that this House carries when the Crown has failed to uphold its obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. No settlement can ever fully compensate confiscation of land, raupatu, destruction of economic foundations, the suppression of authority, or the grief that has passed from one generation to the next. This House has no power to undo what has happened, but settlements like these can be acknowledged by the Crown that the wrong was done, that obligations were breached, and the relationships must be rebuilt on a different foundation.

Today, we recognise three iwi with distinct histories, distinct experiences, and distinct relationships with their whenua and their waters. I’ll start with Ngāti Hei in Coromandel. Many New Zealanders know those places that are yours: Whitianga, Cooks Beach, Hāhei, the coastline surrounding Te Whanganui-a-Hei. But behind that beauty that so many New Zealanders enjoy is also the history, which maybe many New Zealanders don’t know, and I hope through this legislation more will understand the history of your area.

The historical account shows how Crown purchasing practises and the Native Land Court placed huge pressure on customary systems and the fragmentation and land loss that ensued after that that was imposed by the Crown. Like many iwi, Ngāti Hei experienced the cumulative effect of those forces that had massive impact over time. In the apology in the legislation, the Crown acknowledges that these actions breached Te Tiriti o Waitangi and caused lasting damage. Those acknowledgements are important because they place the Crown’s responsibility clearly on the record, as do our speeches in Hansard today.

The cultural redress within your settlement reflects the enduring connection in areas across your area. Those sites are not simply parcels of land; they carry memory, they carry identity, whakapapa, and also obligation, which is passed through in the next generations. What stands out strongly in your settlement is the determination of Ngāti Hei to protect and restore your relationship with the natural environment. The coastline, the harbours, the waterways of eastern Coromandel are central. They are places where generations gathered kai, maintained pā, and had a real relationship over time from one generation to the next. It’s my real hope that the provisions in that settlement strengthen that and maintain that connection for many generations to come.

I acknowledge all of those who contributed to reaching this point, particularly the negotiators and the whānau who carried the weight of the claim on their shoulders over time. The responsibility of ensuring that history of your people was properly recorded and properly recognised. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, Ngāti Hei.

Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu—this is the point where I find it a bit jarring, right. We’re just going to another iwi, but kei te pai. This settlement tells the story of an iwi whose relationship with the Crown was marked with raupatu, warfare, marginalisation, and also loss of land. We know that Crown military action across the central North Island and the long shadow of conflict cast across generations. Large areas of land around Taupō western shores were lost through Crown purchases and practises, again of the Native Land Courts, as occurred elsewhere across the country. For Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, those losses were profound because whenua was a foundation of that economic independence, which was sustenance, identity, and also the social wellbeing that came from that.

The Crown’s apology, which lays before us on the Table in legislation, acknowledges the breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and recognises that damage done through actions and admissions. Despite generations of pressure, the iwi has retained its identity, connections, and determination to seek justice through this process. The cultural redress in the settlement reflects the continuing relationship with those sites that are deeply significant. Those places hold stories of tūpuna, of conflict, and also of survival.

Treaty settlements are often discussed in financial terms, but the financial component is only a fraction of part of these agreements. What many iwi seek is strong recognition of what happened, the wrongs that were done, and the experiences that were gone through. For many whānau, this process has taken decades. Some of those who began this journey are no longer with us to see this legislation pass, but we feel their presence here today. The reality should never be lost that so many have worked over the years to bring this point in time to now.

Thirdly, with two minutes to spare, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, I would like to acknowledge you in this House today. I would like to acknowledge the historical account that is a part of your bill, that between 1865 and 1868, the Crown confiscated 290,000 acres of land around Tauranga. Ngāti Tara Tokanui interests were included in those confiscations. The Native Land Court, again, processed and accelerated that land loss. By 1875, six of the seven owners of Owharoa had sold their interests, and today, only two acres of those original holdings remain in Māori ownership.

Ngāti Tara Tokanui entered agreements that enabled gold mining within their rohe, yet those benefits, that economic activity did not flow fairly back to iwi. Rental income was applied by the Crown towards repayment of advances, and at the same time, the environmental degradation and consequences were laid with iwi. Mining waste and cyanide-treated tailings were discharged into the Waihou and Ohinemuri rivers. By 1900, Crown officials themselves acknowledged that parts of the river system were polluted and unfit for human or animal consumption.

The Crown apology in your settlement acknowledges the wrongs that were done, not only the land loss, but those environmental damages that were done; and the cultural redress package recognises the enduring connection of Ngāti Tara Tokanui to important sites, including Mimitu Pā and Te Pou o Tiki Te Aroha, and others including Ngāti Koi Domain.

This settlement is also important because it recognises the relationship between the environmental damage that it’s done and the cultural harm. When waterways are polluted, when wetlands disappear, and when traditional food sources are no longer available, that has a direct impact upon people. It affects identity, tikanga, and the relationship between people and place. That history deserves to be acknowledged honestly in this House.

In conclusion, these three separate settlements are different in their history, different in their details, but they do share common threads. Each records the damaging impact the Crown actions undermined tino rangatiratanga, alienated whenua, weakened tribal structures, and left enduring consequences for generations to come. Despite this, we are here today, and despite this, we have three separate bills in front of us that we are passing a third and final reading, and it is my genuine, heartfelt wishes that you take all of this and make it the best you can for the future generations of each of your three iwi.

He mihi mahana ki a koutou i tēnei rā. Nō reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, huihui mai tātou katoa.

[Warm regards to you today. Therefore, greetings and thanks to you, to us assembled here.]

10:39

Kia ora koutou, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Ngāti Hei. I wondered, Ginny, if the iwi agreed to hear it all at once because they’re sick of hearing the politicians talk and want to get on with it, which I’ll interpret that being the reason behind it and respect that.

I do want to give a gentle rebuke to the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations. Minister, I feel that we can do better, sometimes, than cramming in so many things in the space of a morning around iwi settlements. The pōwhiri was powerful this morning, but the Māori Affairs Committee members had to leave before the end of the pōwhiri to attend hearings of Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana. That was only a half-hour hearing, at 8.30, that we had to attend, and then we had to get back to the House for W’anganui, first reading. I think we can do better than that, Minister, and give a bit more time for each of those iwi, for us to afford the respect that we are here to show as part of reparations for the atrocities of the Crown and the evils of the Crown.

To those of you here in the gallery, the iwi represented today, I will try to run some sort of theme in the logic. Each of these settlements is unique; each of the experiences of your iwi is unique, but there are these chilling themes that run through the settlements. Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, we visited your beautiful maunga in Te Aroha and understood your gifting of the maunga to the Crown with an understanding that you would still have use of your tapu springs, the hot springs there. But by the early 20th century, Māori no longer had free access to the springs or input to the management of this tapu site. I mentioned this in the second reading, but it was a chilling experience for us to see the segregation that occurred on the flanks of Te Aroha maunga, where the actual iwi, who are mana whenua, were given a little building down the bottom of the hill where they were only allowed to use the springs, and the main part of the springs was for tauiwi. It was segregation, undeniable; an example of segregation in our history.

The Crown also regarded Māori that defended Aotearoa New Zealand from the invasion of the British and the Waikato as rebels, and Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu tūpuna were punished. Land was confiscated in the Tauranga district between 1865 and 1868. This is a familiar story, and now—and I mentioned this earlier today—we recognise that those who fought in the New Zealand Wars in defence of Aotearoa New Zealand are heroes in our history, not rebels.

What is another familiar theme is that the promise of what would be attained by iwi Māori in the relationship with settlers very rarely came to fruition. The land that was taken was exploited in ways that invariably destroyed the cultural and the economic base of iwi Māori. In the case of Ngāti Tara Tokanui, these examples are glaring as well.

There’s a theme across all three iwi of gold mining, the negative effect of gold mining. There was no income from the gold mining that occurred in Tara Tokanui’s rohe. Between 1877 and 1882, the monopoly powers claimed by the Crown meant that Māori had no option but to alienate their land to private parties if they needed to sell it. As Ginny Andersen pointed out, the discharge of the mine tailings in the Waihou and the Ōhinemuri led to cyanide poisoning of those wai—300 people needed an alternative water supply. We’re still doing this mining—can you believe it? Mining is still happening in the Hauraki District, and it still produces cyanide.

The other striking thing which we see across Hauraki is the destruction of the magnificent rākau—the incredible forests, the kahikatea wetland forests that grew massive buttress trees. The tallest trees that have ever stood in Aotearoa New Zealand were in the Hauraki District. They were cleared, they were burned, and the wetlands were drained. Here in the bill is recognised the draining of the Hauraki Plains, which were a significant source of food and other resources for Ngāti Tara Tokanui in the early 1900s, when the Crown established the Hauraki Plains drainage scheme to drain that land and develop it for farming. By the end of this whole process, in 1896, there were only 232 acres remaining as Māori freehold land. Again, the promise of the benefits of the relationship with the colonisers turned out to be ashes in the hands of the iwi.

Ngāti Hei: likewise, “The Crown acknowledges that the degradation of the environment arising from gold mining, gum digging, flax milling, commercial fishing, deforestation … associated burn-off, siltation, introduced weeds and pests, farm run-off, and other pollution has been a source of distress and grievance to Ngāti Hei. The Crown further acknowledges that this greatly harmed traditional sources of kai, and that Ngāti Hei actively protested environmental damage in their rohe.” Ngā mihi, kia ora, you who defend te taiao.

There is another phrase in the Ngāti Hei settlement which I want to finish on: “The Crown acknowledges the harm endured by many Ngāti Hei tamariki from decades of Crown policies that strongly discouraged the use of te reo Māori in schools.” The relationship between the Crown and Ngāti Hei might have been one of mutual advantage. Mutual advantage was the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The promise of Te Tiriti was mutual respect and mutual advantage. Māori welcomed the opportunity for cultural and economic exchange in a binding relationship, and their goodwill was exploited and betrayed.

The Treaty is for ever. It is not something that can ever be settled. It is more than merely a contract; it is a covenant. This is a settlement, but the relationship between the Crown and te iwi Māori is a living relationship. We must lean into that principle that there might’ve been mutual advantage, and there must be mutual advantage and mutual respect in the relationship from here onwards. That is the promise of these settlements. That is the commitment that we should be making as the Crown, Minister and colleagues of the House, because there can be no thriving in Aotearoa New Zealand if there is not justice for Māori. There can be no cohesion and no unity if we do not uphold that promise of our founding agreement, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which recognises the tino rangatiratanga of iwi Māori. We commend these three settlements to the House today. Kia ora.

10:49

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e ngā mana whenua o Hauraki rāua ko Coromandel. E ngā uri o Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, o Ngāti Tara Tokanui, me Ngāti Hei. Nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa.

[Greetings to you, the terrestrial authorities of Hauraki and Coromandel. To the descendants of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei, welcome, welcome to this House. Greetings to you all.]

A triplet of settlement bills is before the House today. The Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, and the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill represent an immensely important step in acknowledging historical injustices and restoring the relationship between the Crown and these iwi of Hauraki and eastern Coromandel. I thank you three triplets—if I can say that—for agreeing to read these bills together, as has been agreed by every party of this House. I have been able to speak on the three bills separately at previous stages, and I’m grateful to contribute to this special third reading of these three settlement bills together.

These bills represent an important moment for each of these iwi and for the Crown, which we are speaking for here in the House. They are the result of many years of work, negotiations, research, and perseverance by whānau, kaumātua, historians, negotiators, and everybody who has carried this, as we’ve heard, for generations. At the centre of these settlements is a simple truth: the Crown failed in its obligations under the Treaty. Each of these settlements have parts in there where the historical account is put down, importantly, for posterity for New Zealanders to always be able to see the apology as well as what we can make in the form of redress.

For Ngāti Tara Tokanui, the Crown itself acknowledges that its actions severely undermined the wellbeing of the iwi—severely. It eroded tribal structures and resulted in the loss of most of the ancestral lands.

For Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, whose rohe extends across the Te Aroha, the Kaimai Range, the Hauraki Plains, and the Coromandel Peninsula, this settlement recognises the enduring impact of confiscation, of swindling and Crown purchasing, and of mining activity, on the iwi and its people and the whenua.

For Ngāti Hei, whose deep connection to the eastern Coromandel and all of those beaches and heads stretches back many generations, this bill gives legislative effect to the deed of settlement first signed in 2017, and records and acknowledges apologies made by the Crown. And may I take a second to congratulate you on your involvement in the fisheries in that area at the moment.

There is no settlement which can fully compensate for the loss suffered. No financial redress can ever truly measure the damage caused by the erosion of language, identity, and economic opportunity, and the intergenerational connection that has been attacked. Settlements matter because they are an acknowledgment, an acknowledgment that the Crown failed to uphold the promises. Importantly, these bills are not just about addressing the past, they are about the future, they are about creating a platform for development, cultural revitalisation, and an opportunity for generations to come—generations of Kiwis—to live together. These settlements, which have been worked on for so long, span many generations. The work began on this journey a long time ago, and many did not get to see the conclusion, but many are represented by the uri here in the House.

It is also important to recognise that these settlements reflect the endurance and resilience of these iwi. Despite the injustices, despite land loss and marginalisation, these three iwi have retained their identity, whakapapa, tikanga, and connection to their rohe. These three bills, read together in this unique way, are part of New Zealand’s ongoing Treaty settlement process, a process that, while imperfect, remains an important mechanism for confronting our history honestly and building a strong future together. As members of this House, we have a responsibility not only to settle historic grievances but to make sure future generations inherit a country where the mistakes of the past are neither forgotten nor repeated, but, as I say, are a foundation to make our country stronger for every citizen that calls this place their home. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

10:54

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First in support of the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, as well as the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill. It is a privilege and an honour to stand here today in this House and speak to these three Treaty settlement bills. I just acknowledge the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations for bringing these bills in for a landing today in their third and final reading. He noted that it is, in fact, a notable occasion—because of those deeply intertwined relationships across this particular area, the agreement to have these three final readings read here in the House today. I’d like to send my warmest greetings and that of my leader, the Rt Hon Winston Peters, as well as Matua Shane to whānau of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, as well as the whānau of Ngāti Hei, who are here in the House today.

It’s always with some trepidation that I speak to these bills, because it is so impactful when you read the historical accounts set inside each and every Treaty settlement bill. You’d have to be a real cold fish if you didn’t get moved by what you read in the historical accounts, and so I think it’s very important for every member of Parliament to take the time to read about what has happened in our past. It is great how we can come together, as a Parliament, from all political parties and speak in unison as we move these bills forward—albeit making note that Steve Abel did give the Minister a bit of a growling. But, together in the House, we are combined in our kaupapa today.

I would like to extend my greetings to the whānau of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu who have travelled here to witness this moment. As I mentioned, it is an honour to stand before you as we move the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill in for its final reading. This is the final legislative milestone of a 15-year journey, but, actually, just that last part is 15 years, because we’re in the House today to witness the moment of justice that has been over a century in the making. The history we acknowledge today is one of profound loss. Through the Crown’s historical actions, unjust land laws, and the confiscation of land, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu were rendered virtually landless. That was not just a loss of soil but a severing of a physical connection to the maunga Te Aroha and also their ancestral identity.

A financial redress package of $5.5 million—the Ngāti Tumutumu Trust will have the resources now to invest in its people, but, as we know, the heart of any settlement actually isn’t just about the pūtea, it’s about the return of the land. The heart of that settlement lies in the land. During the select committee stage, submissions underscored that while financial redress is, of course, necessary, it’s the return of the land that causes the healing, so I wish, for all of those in your iwi, that that healing process has begun.

This bill gives effect to the return of 17 sites of immense cultural significance. We also acknowledge the commercial redress, including the land at Te Aroha College, ensuring that iwi have a stake in the infrastructure of their own rohe. While this bill marks the final legal resolution of these historical claims, submitters during the select committee stage also noted that it is a beginning. It’s a new way forward for the people of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu.

I now turn to the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill. I’d just like to make a note that, while we’re reading these bills together—there is a saying in my whānau “Same, same but different”—I want to speak individually to each of these because of the differences. While there is some collective historical grievance, what I feel is important for me to do is to speak individually to these bills.

Ngāti Tara Tokanui, today we are also acknowledging a significant milestone for you. The passage of this Treaty claims settlement bill is not just a legislative formality, it is a profound act of recognition, a very long overdue apology, and a commitment to a shared future. Once again, your historical reading and the account in this bill makes for, actually, very sombre reading. It details a history where the Crown’s actions and its failures to act—just as importantly—had a devastating impact on the people of Ngāti Tara Tokanui. To whānau of Ngāti Tara Tokanui, this settlement cannot undo the decades of struggle, nor can it replace the tūpuna who did not live to see this day.

However, it does offer a new beginning; it’s a new way forward where the mamae of the past can be acknowledged but not embedded into the very DNA of the generations to come. No settlement—and we all in this House can acknowledge that—will ever fully compensate for the magnitude of loss. This package, though, does provide a foundation for the future. There’s a $6 million redress package that will provide a foundation for economic self-determination, and also the vesting of seven sites of cultural significance, including the Ngāti Koi Domain—stewardship of ancestral lands finally returned to their rightful kaitiaki.

I’d like to speak now to Ngāti Hei and their claims settlement bill in its third and final reading, also today marking the culmination of a journey that has spanned generations. It’s a day of profound significance, not just for Ngāti Hei but for all of New Zealand. I want to acknowledge the negotiators, the kaumātua, and the whānau of Ngāti Hei, who have worked tirelessly for decades to reach this point. Many who began this journey are no longer with us, but their spirit and their dedication are woven into the fabric of this settlement. Your perseverance has ensured that the voices of your ancestors have been heard and that the rights of your mokopuna are being secured. As we gather in this House to finalise this settlement, we acknowledge a history of resilience, a struggle for justice, and a commitment to a shared future.

This bill, based on the deed of settlement signed in 2017, represents our collective effort to address these historical wrongs. It’s not a complete remedy for the past, however—no legislation could ever truly undo the pain of loss—but it is a vital step towards reconciliation and restorative justice. The historical record is clear: Ngāti Hei suffered the loss of their ancestral lands, the erosion of their traditional authority, and the marginalisation of their culture and identity. These were not just historical events; they were deep wounds that have impacted the social, economic, and spiritual wellbeing of Ngāti Hei for over a century.

The redress provided in this bill, both cultural and financial, is a testament to the endurance of Ngāti Hei. The vesting of culturally significant sites, the statutory acknowledgments, and the financial resources are more than just legal transfers; they are tools for the future. They provide a foundation for Ngāti Hei to revitalise their culture, strengthen their communities, and pursue their own economic aspirations on their own terms.

In closing, let us honour the past, celebrate this milestone, and look forward with hope to the future that Ngāti Hei will build. I commend the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill, the Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, and the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill to the House.

11:03

Tōia Tainui tapotu ki te moana. Mā wai e tō? Mā tātou e tō. Mā Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu e tō, mā Ngāti Hei e tō, mā Tara Tokanui e tō.

Nau mai ki tō koutou Whare i tēnei rangi. Nau mai ki te Whare Pāremata. Nā koutou tēnei rangi, waihoki ngā ruruhi koroheke, ō koutou mate i whakawhārikihia i te ata tonu nei ki te āta kōwhiri.

Nā koutou, Te Āti Awa, te reo pōwhiri ki a mātou o waka, waihoki o Hauraki whānui i tēnei ata. Nei rā te reo mihi.Tainui

Kua ara ake ahau i te papa o te whenua, kua kite ahau i ngā whetū e tū takitahi ana: Ko Matariki te kairūri, ko Atutahi kei te taumata o te Mangōroa. Kei tō tātou Arikinui, Kuīni Nga wai hono i te po, koe e whakakanohi i a tātou ki Ingarangi i tēnei wā tonu ki ngā kāhui ariki o reira. Rire rire hau, pai mārire. Pai mārire.

Ko te whakahirahiratanga o tēnei rangi, koinei ngā kerēme, ētehi o ngā kerēme whakamutunga o te waka o . Kātahi anō, i ngā tau tata nei, i whakanui i te 30 tau o mātou, ngā uri o te raupatu, i roto i ngā kerēme raupatu.Tainui

Nā reira tangihia rā ngā mate, tangihia rā ngā mate, kawea mai ki konei ki te Whare o te raiona, ki te Kāwanatanga me ngā uri o te raupatu. Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka.

[Haul the Tainui all the way down to the sea. Who will haul her? We will haul her. Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu will haul, Ngāti Hei will haul, Tara Tokanui will haul.

Welcome to your House today. Welcome to the Parliament House. Today is yours, and, also, the elder ladies and gentlemen—your deceased, who were arrayed this very morning.

It was yours, Te Āti Awa, the voice of welcome to us of the Tainui confederation, and also of wider Hauraki this morning. Here is the voice of thanks.

I arose from the bed of the earth; I have seen the stars standing alone. Matariki is the one who serenades in farewell, and Atutahi is at the zenith of the Milky Way. To our great monarch, Queen Nga wai hono i te po, you who represents us in England at this very moment among the royal families of that place: peace and goodwill be upon us. Goodwill be upon us.

The significance of today is that these are the claims, some of the final claims of the Tainui confederation. It has only been in recent years that we celebrated the 30-year anniversary of ours, the descendants of confiscation, in the context of confiscation claims.

Therefore, grieve for the deceased, grieve for the departed, and bring them here to this House of the lion, to the Government and the descendants of the confiscation. Thank you, Mr Speaker.]

Settlement bills often arrive in this House wrapped in language of closure and resolution. But let us be honest: in this House today, there is no settlement that can truly compensate for what was taken from our people. No settlement can restore generations lost to land alienation. No financial quantum can fully heal the mamae of displacement from ancestral whenua. No Crown apology can undo the erosion of mana motuhake, the disruption of whakapapa relationships, or the intergenerational harm inflicted through decades of Crown breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Across all three of these settlements, we see the same patterns repeated: the erosion of whenua, the undermining of tribal authority; the disruption of mātauranga Māori, and the passing down of tikanga between generations. These are not simply historical grievances locked away in the past; these impacts continue to be lived realities for our people today.

For the iwi of Hauraki especially, these histories are deeply connected to whenua and wai. For Ngāti Tara Tokanui, the Crown’s pursuit of extraction came at enormous costs to the people and to the environment. The Waihou and Ohinemuri—the very pepeha that we try to protect today in even the fast-track legislation bills—carry the burden of mining, pollution, and environmental erosion, while the iwi carried the burden of loss.

For Māori, environmental destruction is never simply environmental destruction. When the wai is harmed, the people are harmed. When the whenua is stripped and exploited, something within the identity of the people is also impacted, because our relationship to the whenua and wai is not symbolic; it is ancestral.

For Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Te Aroha from the summit of the maunga to the Waihou River is a wāhi tapu. An early name for the maunga is Puke Kakariki Kaitahi, the place where the kākā parrots flocked to feed. This is symbolic of the abundance of food and resources the maunga supplied, Te Tatau ki Hauraki whanui, the doorway to Hauraki widespread. The mountain has two names, one for each of its two peaks: Te Aroha ki ta and Te Aroha a tai, meaning “love for the land” and “love for the sea”, the names originating in Hawaiki.

The hot springs at Te Aroha, because they flow from the heart of the maunga, are also part of the mountain, symbolising the giving, caring nature of the maunga and the ancestors of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu. The environmental damage done to your sacred maunga as a result of mining has eroded your capacity to fulfil your kaitiaki responsibilities and created deep mamae.

For Ngāti Hei, the relationship to Te Tai Tamahine, to Tikapa Moana, and to Te Whanganui a Hei remains central to who they are as a people. Those places are not tourist destinations. They are not commercial brands. They are ancestral landscapes layered with whakapapa, tikanga, wāhi tapu [genealogy, traditional practices, sacred sites], and memory. When ancestral names are restored through settlements like this, something powerful occurs. The ancestor returns visibly to the landscapes; the stories return; the people return; and public memory begins to shift. Te manawanui o ngā iwi [the resoluteness of the people]: despite everything that was taken—despite every Crown breach, despite generations of marginalisation and dispossession—our people endured. That is the story sitting beneath each of these bills: the endurance of iwi who never relinquished their identity, who never surrendered their obligations as kaitiaki, and who maintained ahi kā, whakapapa reo, tikanga [the home fires of authority, genealogy, language, traditional practices], and connection.

I te rangi nei ka whakamaumaharatia ngā whakareanga kua tae mai i mua i a koutou.

[Today, we commemorate the generations that came here prior to you.]

A lot of people die for settlements to get across the line. Recently, at the pōwhiri this morning, I talked about some of our own stalwarts who championed the Waikato-Tainui settlement, such as Shane Solomon. Many of the iwi here today have brought in their loved ones who never got to see this day.

E whakamānawa ana, e maumahara ana i ō koutou mate.

[We honour and commemorate your deceased.]

Those who petitioned, those who travelled, those who sat through hearings, those who documented histories, those who relived painful stories over and over again simply so the truth would finally be placed on the record of this nation—because the settlement process itself asks a great deal of our people; it requires whānau to revisit histories of trauma in order to seek justice. It requires us to be confrontational with each other. That is a hard part. Sometimes not the Crown part but with ourselves as hapū, and it’s those mamae where it’s divide and conquer strategies. That emotional labour must be acknowledged in this House today. Kāore anō kia oti ngā mahi.

[The job is not yet finished.]

While we support these settlements wholeheartedly, we also say clearly that settlements are not an endpoint of justice. They do not extinguish Crown obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Te Tiriti is not confined to historical settlements processes—Te Tiriti is a living document.

Hei tirohanga whakamua [as we look to the future], today we acknowledge the pain that made these settlements necessary, but we also acknowledge the strength, the resilience, and the vision of the iwi themselves.

Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, nā koutou tēnei rā. Whakanuia tō koutou rā i tēnei rangi ki tēnei papa o te Whare Pāremata.

[Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, today is yours. Celebrate your day today on the floor of Parliament House.]

To your tūpuna who carried these grievances before you, and to your mokopuna who will inherit the outcomes of your perseverance, may these settlements support the rebuilding of your aspirations.

Māku anō tōku nei whare e hanga. E kore tēnei whakaoranga e huri ki tua o āku mokopuna. Anei ko ngā tongikura a Kīngi Tāwhiao ki a mātou.

[I will erect my own house. This struggle for restoration will not go beyond my grandchildren. These are the royal statements of King Tawhiao to us.]

May they strengthen the connection of your future generations to whenua, wai, and moana, and may they contribute towards a future where the mana of iwi is restored. Me te mea anō hoki kāore anō kia oti ngā kerēme katoa o Hauraki.

[Furthermore, not all of the Hauraki claims have been completed.]

I look forward to the day where we see Ngāti Pāoa, ngā hapū maha o Hauraki whānui kua tae mai ki roto nei, ki te Whare Pāremata [the many hapū of wider Hauraki come here inside the House of Parliament]. Nō reira tūrou Hawaiki, rire rire hau, pai mārire.

11:12

Tēnei ka mihi atu ki runga i ngā āhuatanga i whai wāhi ai koutou ki te haramai ki tēnei o ngā Pāremata. Ko tēnei haerenga ehara i te haerenga māmā, ehara i te haerenga ngāwari, engari he haerenga mokopuna, he haerenga rangatira nō reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora mai tātou katoa.

Tēnei o Te Taitokerau, o Hokianga, o Te Rārawa, Ngāpuhi, o Te Tairāwhiti hoki, o Ngāti Porou, o Waikato Tainui, o Ngāti Tahinga e mihi kau ana ki a koutou. Kia ora rā.

[I hereby acknowledge you, in the context that you have had the opportunity to come to this particular Parliament. This journey is not an easy journey, nor is it a simple journey, but a journey for your grandchildren, a noble journey, and, therefore, greetings and congratulations to you, hello to us all.

This is one from Northland, Hokianga, Te Rārawa, Ngapuhi, the East Coast also, Ngāti Porou, Waikato Tainui, and of Ngāti Tahinga that acknowledges you. Hello, there.]

I last had the honour of speaking to a Treaty claims settlement bill back in 2024. Today, we had a last minute and late notice opportunity for an extra 10 minutes for us to be able to acknowledge this incredible day and achievement for Ngāti Rāhui Tumutumu, for Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and for Ngāti Hei. It’s an opportunity that we wouldn’t normally have had. And yes, it was late notice, but we decided to take the opportunity. That is why I find myself here with the privilege of being able to speak, to acknowledge your mahi, your mokopuna, your tūpuna, your whakapapa, your maunga, your awa, your mahi.

The reason why it has been some years since I have spoken on Treaty claims settlement bills is because I am proud that we have now got more of us. It doesn’t just depend on me to be able to uphold Te Tiriti as Te Pāti Kākāriki, not the least my colleague Steve Abel, our tangata Tiriti spokesperson, and Hūhana Lyndon, our Māori affairs and Māori development leader, and you will hear from all of us today. If we can, please, similar to these bills, take all of our speeches together as well, because there is absolutely no way that any one of our speeches can do the full justice, to squashing three. I understand that with your generosity you have agreed also to having these bills taken together and you want to get on with the mahi. I respect and honour that. I, therefore, am going to do my best to acknowledge each of you all in your own rights while remembering that you also have intergenerational connections, stories, and relationships.

OK, so I actually decided that I would try and use my short time that I had to prepare to acknowledge the actual bills and to focus on the injustices, because Aotearoa, all of our generations need to fully understand just how generous—just how generous—our iwi and hapū always have been when it comes to settling claims, and understand that these claims and the settlements and the redress in them, as all of our colleagues have said, go absolutely no way to the actual injustice, but provide an important platform, an important point for continuing the mahi mokopuna work that you all are doing.

Earlier in the readings today, I did happen to hear an actual mokopuna singing their tangi out to the House. I say, nau mai, tangi mai, Whakatau mai, mokopuna [welcome, welcome; grieve and welcome, child]. This is your Parliament and you belong here, and so does your tangi.

I’m going to start—OK, got my papers in the order that they’re in. I’m going to start with the Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill. My colleague is having a chuckle because we’ve just got to go with it. I want to highlight that some of the injustices that Ngāti Hei have faced are about the loss of much of their coastal whenua in some, I suppose, quite shady and unclear trades that were happening around the 1830s. Then we had Crown purchasing. This happened throughout settlements, and certainly across these settlements, where the Crown processes of acquiring land, of stealing land, of buying land were often done in a way to pit other iwi and hapū against each other. The Crown purchased Ahuahu from other Hauraki iwi without evidence that Ngāti Hei were actually consulted on that purchase. There was permanent whenua alienation from Ngāti Hei.

I think I’ll go back to quickly mention the history of extractive industry in Ngāti Hei rohe, including kauri logging, kauri gum digging, and the damage that that did to their precious whakapapa environment and the impacts and the grievance that holds.

Continuing to particular public works agreements. I want to acknowledge my colleague Hūhana Lyndon again for continuing to hold a public works member’s bill that would just say no—no more land alienation for the little bit of land that Māori have left through public works acquisition. That is a whakapapa that continued from Catherine Delahunty actually, and that I was also proud to hold and push. Public works acquisition injustice also for Ngāti Hei, which had many impacts, including the separation of Ngāti Hei—being left virtually landless, the socio-economic deprivation, the discouragement of te reo. Discouragement is a word, I suppose—it was violent. The discouragement of te reo across our generations was, in fact, a violent discouragement.

With that injustice, then, there is redress. There is some financial and commercial redress. There is some returning of sites of cultural significance to Ngāti Hei, and there are agreements and protocols to have an actual relationship and working properly together.

We know—I’m going to say this after every single iwi, hapū—it’s good, it’s positive. I know you will do the best with it, Ngāti Hei. And we know it’s generous for Ngāti Hei to enable the Crown to have this type of redress, in this case. Kia kaha koutou. Ngā mihi aroha ki a koutou. Kei konei a Ngāti Tara, kei konei koutou o Ngāti Tara.

[Be strong. Loving greetings to you. Ngāti Tara is here; you are here, Ngāti Tara.]

I want to again talk about the injustices for Ngāti Tara—looking at the clock. The goldfields at Ohinemuri. The accumulated debts through having to try and chase up the injustices, which then led to owners being forced to sell off land. Ngāti Tara Tokanui did not receive any income from gold mining in their rohe. There were the further Crown purchases, the further Crown alienation, and the discharging of mine tailings into the Waihou and Ōhinemuri rivers—tūpuna awa.

There was the disregard for the whakapapa of Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and the wetlands—the wetland areas of the Hauraki Plains. There was drainage to develop it into farmland, and, once again, public works acquisition in relation to the drainage scheme, where, again, it has left a tiny bit of freehold land today.

Ngāti Tara Tokanui, I acknowledge the years of work, and the generations of the people who, as with all of these claims, are no longer here to celebrate their mahi and the mahi to come for future generations. Kei konei koutou, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu. Kei konei koutou, kia ora mai.

[You are here, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu. You are here; hello, there.]

I wanted to acknowledge the Crown-initiated war in the Waikato, with armed forces crossing the Mangatāwhiri stream, and the confiscation punishment that was often an injustice from the Crown for anyone standing up for their whenua, for their hapū and iwi, or for their mokopuna. I want to acknowledge that deeds were supposed to provide for reserves and those reserves were not provided for. I want to acknowledge the Crown purchasing and the ongoing, shady receipts of payment, and, once again, the land gifted by iwi to the Crown in order for them to have ongoing rights to the springs, but, actually, those ongoing rights, which were supposed to be part of the deal, no longer remain today. Once again, it was an injustice.

Your hard mahi done by your people and your generations is now arriving at the announcement and the starting point from today, but overall, e te iwi, once again, we face a grown-up conversation, I would hope, about the place of te ao Māori and iwi and hapū across our country. What can happen when we call for accountability is that, in actual fact, we see iwi and hapū generosity once again, but we also see iwi and hapū working hard to uphold the integrity of te taiao—our living systems—and uphold the living conditions, social justice, and economic justice, for we are wanting to see not just Māori do well but all of our communities across Aotearoa do well.

I want to acknowledge that working together with the Crown, instead of the Crown working over the top of our communities, actually leads to benefits for all of us, and in today’s celebrations and the joyous recognition of the work that you have done and the travel that you have committed to, I acknowledge you all. It was a privilege to be able to come back to this House to speak to all of your settlement claims today. Nō reira, tēnā koutou katoa. Kia ora.

11:22

I want to join with others from across the House in welcoming representatives to this place, to this Parliament—to the people’s House—who have travelled a long way today to be here for what, in some aspects, is a conclusion. In reality, it’s not actually a conclusion—more of a beginning than an ending—but it is a marker along the way for three iwi that have three different pathways to being here in this place today. They are three different iwi with their own histories, their own burdens, their own challenges, their own debate, and their own internal anguish that has gone on over the years to get us to this point today, and so how did we get here and where are we going?

Well, earlier this morning at the pōwhiri, I had an opportunity, thanks to the gracious endeavours of my colleague Tama Potaka, to speak briefly at the pōwhiri, and I was reflecting on the broader picture of what the Treaty settlements mean and how they came to be. I reminded those folk at the pōwhiri this morning that late last year, I had attended the funeral of Jim Bolger, the former Prime Minister, and it was Jim Bolger who, along with Doug Graham and others, embarked upon this process without really knowing quite what it would do, how it would be formed, what shape it would take, or how it would be manifested. But they were, with their colleagues, sometimes under intense scrutiny, criticism, and challenge from within their own ranks, but they were determined to embark upon a process to do what Jim Bolger said was the right thing—to do the right thing—and they were brave.

So how have we ended up here, all these years later, debating in this House the third readings of three important pieces of legislation that are relevant to three iwi in the area that I have the honour and privilege to represent in this Parliament? It is the area across the Coromandel and the Hauraki, through to Te Aroha, and down into the Bay of Plenty. They are important, beautiful parts of the country, but they are not without their challenges, and as we mark today the constitutional, the legal, and the parliamentary process that we are finishing here, I’m very conscious of what is yet to come.

It was at Wharekaho in November 1769, as the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations said earlier in his presentation, that James Cook had the first pōwhiri with Ngāti Hei. That was in and of itself remarkable because on a personal note, that’s where my great-grandparents came to live, at Kūaotunu, which is just a beach or two around from Wharekaho. Those members of my extended family are still resident there, my roots are still there, and that shared land, that shared whenua, is very much part of my personal story and family, as well as it is for the iwi of Ngāti Hei.

We have a journey to gather and to traverse together from that first contact in November 1769 to today, to the vision and the hope and the aspiration that was thought through by Jim Bolger and his colleagues back in the day. After hours, days, months, and years of negotiation, of meetings, and of interminable hours spent to get to this point, we have arrived today, and I want to congratulate you and those who have gone before and who are not with us today on that input of dedication and commitment to do the right thing—to do the right thing.

Now, does it mean for one minute that everything is going to be sweet and dandy tomorrow? Does it mean that everything is going to be sweetness and light? Does it mean that every issue will be resolved and that there will be nirvana across the rohe? Probably not, but it’s a step along the way. It’s a step along the way for three important iwi who are, I think, going to use this process to move forward, not just for themselves and not just for us who are here today in this place and our generation, but for the future of the generations that we are privileged to guide a pathway for. My hope and aspiration is that as long as I have an opportunity to be a representative in this place, I and my colleagues will continue to walk that pathway with people who want to engage positively not only for the future of their own iwi and their own whānau, but also for the future of our nation and its collective wellbeing.

Later today, when we have completed this process and we’ve had the vote—and it will be happening, you’ll be pleased to know, mercifully soon—we will then have a document. There will be three separate bills that will go to the Governor-General. The Governor-General will, on behalf of King Charles III, complete the Crown’s obligations in terms of this process—this legislative, parliamentary, legal process—and it’s that relationship with the Crown that is important and it should not be forgotten today. The Minister and the Crown have apologised. That is of itself significant and worthy of a starting point for future discussions, because there are many issues that remain unresolved. There are many debates still yet to be had. There are many, many issues that we must collectively unite to find.

Others have traversed the specific detail of each part of the redress and the compensation: the financial, the cultural, and the land. I’m not going to traverse that again, but I do want to commend these three pieces of legislation to the House, and I wish those of you who have travelled here today well. Thank you for making the time and taking the effort, and thank you for your sincerity and commitment to this process. Kia ora. Travel well.

11:30

Ki a koutou, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui me Ngāti Hei, tēnei te mihi ki a koutou i whakarangatira i a mātou i tēnei wā. He hōnore nui ki te mihi ki a koutou, e mōhio ahau he rā nunui, he rā whakahirahira mō tātou katoa. Tēnei te mihi ki a koutou.

Ahakoa he rerekē tēnei tikanga, ngā pire e toru, ko te mea nui kei konei. Koinā te mea nui i tēnei wā. Ahakoa e whakaekehia ana te Māori i ia wiki e tēnei Kāwanatanga, ahakoa he whakaparahako i ia wiki e tēnei Kāwanatanga, i te iti rawa, kei te whakanui tonu rātou i ēnei whakataunga.

Koinā te mea nui, pea, i tēnei wā. E tika kia whakakotahi mō te kaupapa, ahakoa tino hōhā, tino riri te ao Māori i tēnei Kāwanatanga i tēnei wā. Koinei te mea nui i tēnei wā.

Nō reira tēnei te mihi ki a koutou, tātou katoa i tae mai nei ki te tautoko, ki te whakanui i tēnei kaupapa.

[To you, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Hei, I hereby acknowledge you who have honoured us at this time. It is a great honour to greet you, I know that this is a big day—a significant day for all of you. I hereby acknowledge you.

Despite this unusual arrangement—the three bills—the main thing is that we’re here. That is the main thing at this time. Despite Māori being assaulted every week by this Government, despite the discrimination every week by this Government, though it may be small, they are still celebrating this settlement.

That is the important thing, perhaps, at this time. It is appropriate to unite for the work, despite the irritation and the real anger of Māori society towards this Government at this time. This is the most important thing at this time.

Therefore, I hereby acknowledge you, all of us who have come here to support and to celebrate this work.]

Good to see everyone here and hear the challenges this morning at our pōwhiri. I was thinking back to when Ngāi Te Rangi came down here and we actually were very, very close to a bit of a whawhai on the forecourt out here, such were the emotions of our people. It was a reminder—I’ll never forget that day, when Andrew Little was the Minister, and we were challenged as a Government in terms of our handling of the kaupapa, in terms of, obviously, tribes of Hauraki. Jan Tinetti was there, she was a Minister at the time, and out there giving tautoko to the kaupapa, and MPs from all sides. It was a reminder, as it was a reminder this morning, of how difficult this process is—incredibly, incredibly complex, so many compromises, so many concessions. On that day, I was wondering—and I’m serious, I thought we were close to violence on the forecourt.

Yep. Yep.

Violence on the forecourt, hey Marama? It would have been terrible, but it was that close. I put myself in the other side’s—I can understand that. I’m not condoning violence, but that’s what our process does to us. I’ve been having good kōrero with the negotiator over here, Rick Barker—he’s an old friend and former Labour Party Minister—as we were going through it. I mean, how do you navigate your way through things? It was interesting when Jim Bolger and Doug Graham were going through stuff, and Rick was explaining you’ve had the overlapping claims, you had the interlapping claims, and then the best way through that, Doug Graham and Jim Bolger were saying, was that we must have a collective. I’m not sure if that was the best way, but here we are today.

Then you have to traverse your way through a system, so you have Tamati Kruger, who’s not exactly the favourite of Tūhoe, is he? But, I mean, brilliant man, Tamati, brilliant man. He tries to help Ministers like Minister Goldsmith and formerly Minister Finlayson and Minister Little, and in many ways within the system you have to choose between winners and losers and people who miss out. I was going over it with Rick, and then Tamati talks about how you have to break things down in the different areas in terms of who has the mana. He says, first of all, you have areas where iwi are dominant; secondly, you have areas where iwi have influence; and then, thirdly, you have areas where iwi have interests. If that helps the people, I’m not sure—it certainly helped Tamati, anyway, didn’t it? He’s working his way in terms of Tūhoe, obviously.

This is the complicated system and process we have, but I was listening to our man Koro over there—kei konei tonu a Koro? [Is Koro still here?] Ā, kia ora e hoa, pai tō kōrero i tēnei ata. E tika ana ki te wero atu ki a mātou, e tika ana. E mihi ana ki a koe, e hoa.

[Yes, hello, my friend. You spoke well this morning. It is right to challenge us—it is right. I acknowledge you, my friend.]

We had challenges this morning to—we have to come and kōrero e pā ana ki ngā piki me ngā heke [discuss the ups and downs]. Because, as has been said 100 times by members in this House, the system is almost against our people, but our people find a way through it—putting iwi against iwi, hapū against hapū, whanaunga against whanaunga, and never, never more exemplified than that day we had out on the forecourt.

It’s a tribute to former Ministers and this Minister—and I don’t mind to give him congratulations even though he’s not been particularly good on other kaupapa, as you all know, and even though he wants to get rid of Treaty references and hammering our reo and he’s generally confused about a lot of kaupapa Māori at the moment. But apart from that, he’s done a good job with this kaupapa and I want to mihi to him today. I want to mihi to our people because we find our way through even though we’re dealing with the Government, we come together i tēnei wā kia tutuki ngā moemoeā me ngā hiahia me ngā tūmanako, eh—koinā te mea nui i tēnei wā [at this time to realise the dreams and desires and hopes, eh—that’s the most important thing at this time]. We’re able to put the current issues aside where we want to deal to this Government and kia whakakotahi for the kaupapa i tēnei wā [to unite for the work at this time].

Congratulations to all the whānau, all the hapū, and all the iwi who’ve come today. I won’t go through all the intricacies of it because that’s already been traversed, but I just think that it’s—when I think back on the history and I think of what the Ministers have had to work through, and people like our negotiators, Rick over here, Rick Barker, and Mike Dreaver, who might still be here—it really is a tribute to this country that we’re able to find resolution even though we can be angry at each other. We can be furious in terms of history, we’ve got all the hapū, iwi stuff, we’ve got the change of Governments, but it’s a tribute to our people and to this country that we’re able to get there in the end.

As Marama Davidson said, the country owes Māori—we are owed in terms of the way we’ve compromised and the way we’ve said, “Well, yes, we’ll take the pittance, we’ll subsidise the country, we’ll do a Treaty settlement process”. I don’t know what it is at, Minister Goldsmith, maybe it’s $1.5 billion, maybe $2 billion now—not too bad an amount when you consider the concessions from iwi all around the country. That’s how desperate we are in terms of getting on with things, and so the challenges remain for our Hauraki collective and the different hapū, different iwi, to find a way to utilise the pūtea—which does not at all compensate for the loss, but find a way to fulfil all the dreams, the hopes, the aspirations within the system that we have now.

I always look forward to that. I am so pleased that you’ve been able to whakakotahi for this. Hauraki iwi, of course, has a challenge because, again, we know that there’s the huge iwi who get all the kudos, who get all the support, who get all the publicity—that’s Tainui and Ngāi Tahu and probably Ngāti Whātua. But it’s iwi like the three groups we’ve talked about today who have to make their mark now, so I wish you well. I wish you well and congratulate you and I also thank you, Koro and others, for the challenges laid down today—rightful challenges that we in Labour will look forward to taking up.

Nō reira he hōnore nui ki te kōrero ki a koutou. Tēnā koutou, tēnā anō tātou katoa.

[Therefore, it is a great honour to speak to you. Greetings to you, and again to all of us.]

11:40

Ki a Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, ki a Ngāti Tara Tokanui, ki a Ngāti Hei, tēnā koutou. Nōku te tino maringanui ki te tū ki tō koutou tirohanga, ā, ka whakanui i tō koutou haerenga, tō koutou manawanui ki tēnei rā.

He maha ngā whāinga o te tukanga o te kerēme. Akenepea ko te whāinga tuatahi ko te whakapūāwai o te reo Māori puta noa i te motu nei. Nā reira ka kōrero au i te reo Māori anake i tēnei ata. Manawanui mai.

Huri ōku whakaaro ki te mihi whakatau i tēnei ata, inā koa ki te kōrero e pā ana ki tō kaikōrero tuarua. I pēnei, kei konā te kōrero, kei konei te hōhā, te raruraru. Kei runga te kōrero, kei raro te hōhā. Ā, i a au e whakarongo ana ki a ia, i huri ōku whakaaro ki tēnei Whare, ā, ka whakaaro koirā te āhua o tēnei Whare, ne? Tēnei te hōhā, tēnei te wāhi o te raruraru, ā, ki a koutou, koirā te wāhi o te āta kōrero, te āta whakaaro, te āta whakarongo.

Nā reira, tuatahi e mihi ana ki ngā kaiwhiriwhiri kua whiriwhiri i tēnei kerēme. Ahakoa te uauatanga o te tukanga, ehara i te tukanga hapa-kore, heoi he tukanga pai, he tukanga tūmanako.

Ahakoa tērā uauatanga, te pierenuku, akenepea, o tērā tukanga, kua kōkiri ki tēnei wā, ki tēnei whakanuitanga, ki tēnei mutunga.

Ka huri ōku whakaaro hoki ki tō kaikōrero tuatahi, ā, tāna mea mai, “kāore au e kume i te kōrero”. And pai tērā ki a au. Waihoki kāore e roa taku kōrero ki a koutou i tēnei ata.

Tuarua, ki te tukanga, he aha ngā whāinga o tēnei momo tukanga, and ki ōku whakaaro e toru ngā otinga, e toru ngā hua. Ko te tuatahi, whakaaetia te hītori. Nā reira kaua tātou e wareware te hītori. Koirā te mea tuatahi.Tuarua, ko te whakapāha. Ko te mutunga kē mai a te Kāwanatanga ki a koutou mō te hara o ngā tau kua hipa.Tuatoru, ko te whakahokinga o te whenua me ngā pūtea kia tautoko ai i tō koutou whakarauora o tō koutou hapori.

Tē taea e mātou, e te Kāwanatanga, te whakarauora ngā hapori. Tē taea. Kāore tērā i te haepapa, kāore tērā i te āheinga o tērā momo rangapū.Koirā te mana o ia hapori, ā, nō reira ko te tino whāinga o tēnei tukanga kia tautoko i te whakarauora o tō koutou hapori.

Mai rā anō tō koutou mana kia whakahaere i tō koutou wāhi, heoi mā te awenga o ngā hapa a te Karauna ki a koutou, kua whakaiti tō raukaha. Nō reira, ki a au, ki a mātou katoa, ko te tino tūmanako o tēnei tukanga kia whakapapa, kia whakanui i tō koutou raukaha, tō koutou āheinga, kia whakamōmonatia ai te ora o tō koutou hapori.

Nā reira, tēnā anō koutou mō te haere mai ki tēnei rā, ki tēnei wāhi. Kua kitea ngā whakaahua o ō koutou tupuna kua mate i te pononga o tēnei haerenga roa. Tēnei whakanuitanga, tēnei whakatau, ko te wawata i wawatatia e rātou.Nā reira, ka tuku i te pire nei ki te Whare.

[To Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, to Ngāti Tara Tokanui, to Ngāti Hei: greetings to you. It is my good fortune to stand in your view, and to celebrate your journey and your perseverance today.

There are many objectives of the claims process. Perhaps the first objective is the flourishing of the Māori language all across this country. Therefore, I will speak only the Māori language this morning. Your forbearance, please.

My thoughts turn to the formal welcome this morning, particularly the speech from your second speaker. It went like this: “There is discussion, there is irritation and trouble. Discussion is valuable, and trouble is undesirable.” As I was listening to him, my thoughts turned to this House, and I thought that such is the nature of this House, right? Here there is irritation, this is a place of trouble, and to you, this is the place of careful discussion, careful consideration, and thoughtful attention.

Therefore, first I would like to acknowledge the negotiators who have negotiated this claim. Despite the difficulties of the process—and it is not a process without problems—it is a good process, and a hopeful process. Despite those difficulties—the calamity, perhaps, of that process—it has progressed at this time to this celebration, to this conclusion.

My thoughts also turn to your first speaker, who said, “I will not drag out the speeches.”—and that seems good to me. Therefore, my speech to you this morning will also not be a long one.

Second, to the process: what are the objectives of this type of process? In my opinion, there are three results, three outcomes. First, history is acknowledged. Therefore, we must not forget the history. That is the first thing. Second is the apology; the epitome of Government to you for the sin of past years. Third is the return of land and funds to support your revitalisation of your community.

We, the Government, cannot revitalise the communities. It cannot be done. That is not the responsibility nor the ability of that type of organisation. That is the remit of each community, and, therefore, the primary objective of this process is to support the revitalisation of your community.

Your authority to manage your own places is long established; however, through the power of the Crown’s mistakes with respect to you, your capacity has been diminished. Therefore, to me, to all of us, the true hope of this process is to empower and celebrate your capacity, your capability, and to expand the wellbeing of your community.

Therefore, I thank you again for coming today to this place. The portraits of your ancestors who passed throughout the duration of this long journey are seen. This celebration, this settlement, is the dream that they dreamed. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.]

11:46

Tēnā koe e te Speaker, tēnā anō tātou katoa. Tēnā koutou e ngā uri o Tara, koutou o Ngāti Tara Tokanui. E mihi ana ki ngā rangatira o ngā iwi o tērā rautau, Tūwhakaea, Matarehua, Tiki Te Aroha, Te Whakamaro Maioro.

Koutou o Hei me Tia, ngā tamaiti a Atua Matua, nau mai rā. Ngā uri o Moehau maunga, te ahi kā o Hauraki, tēnei rā te mihi atu ki a koutou.

Mai i Onemana ki te tonga, ki Whakapaua ki te raki, me ngā motu o Tīkapa Moana, nau mai rā.

Te Aroha te maunga, Waihou te awa, Tīkapa Moana te moana, Tumutumu te marae, Te Ruinga te tangata. Tēnā koutou, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu.

E mihi atu ana ki a koutou ki runga i ngā tū whaiāhua o te wā, otirā i tēnei, te pānuitanga whakamutunga mō ā koutou kerēme Tiriti te take.

Me taku unu i taku hē mō taku korenga i te pōwhiri i tēnei ata. E māuiui ana ahau engari e tika ana me puta mai ahau ki te tautoko i a koutou ki te whakawaha i te reo tautoko o te Rōpū Kākāriki ki mua i tō koutou aroaro, e ngā whanaunga o Hauraki. Tēnei rā te uri o Ngāti Whanaunga e mihi atu ana ki a koutou. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora tātou katoa.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker, greetings to us all. Greetings to you, the descendants of Tara, those of you from Ngāti Tara Tokanui. I acknowledge the iwi leaders of the last century, Tūwhakaea, Matarehua, Tiki Te Aroha, and Te Whakamaro Maioro.

Those of you of Hei and Tia, the children of Atua Matua, welcome. The descendants of Moehau mountain, the home people of Hauraki, I hereby acknowledge you.

From Onemana in the south, to Whakapaua in the north, and the islands of the Hauraki Gulf, welcome.

Te Aroha is the ancestral mountain, Waihou is the river, Tīkapa Moana is the marine waterway, Tumutumu is the marae, and Te Ruinga is the noble leader. Greetings to you, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu.

I acknowledge you all with regard to the current considerations, indeed, in this, the final reading for your Treaty claim.

I also apologise for my absence during the formal welcome this morning. I was sick, but it is appropriate for me to come to support you to convey the voice of support of the Green Party before you, my relations from Hauraki. This descendant of Ngāti Whanaunga hereby congratulates you. Greetings, thanks and congratulations to you, and to all of us.]

It is a humble pleasure to stand before this House with words of tautoko, alongside colleagues of all sides who come before, humbly, the people of Hauraki as they roll out. They’re rolling out to see this final reading of legislation long overdue. I am also mindful that our people have had to endure generations of harm, generations of landlessness, of dislocation and loss, and then had to endure a 7 o’clock pōwhiri this morning.

Nā wai i teka e tika ana tērā, kia puta koutou i te whitu karaka i te ata mō tētahi pōwhiri? Āi e mara. Nō reira e mihi ana ki tō koutou kaha, tō koutou kaha me te whakaiti ki te whakaae ki tētahi pōwhiri i te whitu karaka i te ata.

[Who said that is appropriate, that you come out at 7 o’clock in the morning for a formal welcome? Geez, man. Therefore, I acknowledge your strength, your strength and humility to agree to a formal welcome at 7 o’clock in the morning.]

But here we are, and I won’t take long, i te mea he roa rawa tā koutou noho ki konei []. But e tika ana me mihi atu ki a koutou, ngā tūpuna, ngā kaumātua, ngā kaikerēme, rātou i pīkau i ēnei o ngā kerēme ki tēnei wā tonu. Me te pakeke haere, te pakeke o te wehetanga o te iwi, te tohe tātou i a tātou, anō ngā tohe ki te Kāwanatanga kia tika ā ratou mahi. Ko ahau tētahi o ērā e totohe tonu ana ki te Kāwanatanga i roto i aku hapū, anō hei mema Pāremata. Nō reira tū kaha koutou, tū kaha koutou. Tērā pea he tīmatanga tēnei mō koutou, mō tātou, mō ngā hiahia me ngā wawata o te iwi. because you have been sitting here for a long time

[But it’s appropriate to acknowledge you, the ancestors, the elders, the claimants; those who carried these particular claims to this point. And the growing difficulty, the challenge of division of the people, the fighting amongst ourselves, and fighting the Government to do the right thing.]

E tātou mā, of course I’ve got an issue with these Treaty settlements, because our people are so gracious in accepting the 1 to 2 cents in the dollar for the immense loss for the people of Hauraki. When you read the settlement and you understand there is, what, some 2 to 3 percent of whenua left in the hands of our Hauraki people, the three iwi that come before us today are humble. You are very gracious and patient with the House that had taken so long to come to our side of the bridge.

You know that arawhiti? It’s the Māori that always have to hīkoi across the bridge, engari ināianei ka āhua haere mai te Kāwanatanga ki tēnei taha, kōrero ai ki te Māori[but now the Government has kind of come across to this side, to speak to Māori]. Nō reira ki roto i ēnei momo whakataunga, tihei mauri ora. Tihei mauri ora mō tō koutou kaha. Tihei mauri ora ki tēnei Whare te tae mai ki te tautoko i ēnei o ngā kaikerēme, ngā iwi e putaputa mai ana i ia marama.

[So, within these types of settlements, hallelujah. Hallelujah for your strength. Hallelujah to this House that has come to support these particular claimants, the people that come out every month.]

You are one of a number of iwi that are coming before us right now and you know that the journey can be a decade, it can be 30 years to get to this point. We commemorate those who worked hard but we also look to the future. The future is in your hands, with the settlement redress of a dollar, of relationship agreements, of some assets, whenua, what you may have that comes back to you for mana whakahaere. It’s a start and I think it opens the door, but again, as colleagues have already shared in this House around the building of that bridge and the connection and the desire for the ongoing enduring relationship, the relationship that can span across generations and see honourable kāwanatanga meet mana ki te mana with you as hapū, iwi, marae, iwi kāinga, ahi kā.

For Hauraki has lost so much, and for you as Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Hei, I thank you for your patience and your grace in coming to the House for this, the final reading, but may this be the piriti. May this be the bridge of connecting generations within our own tribes and protecting our whanaungatanga and inter-tribal relationships too. Through the building of your capacity, your capability, and what you might receive, there are opportunities for mahi tahi, for together we are stronger.

For our mokopuna it is the āpōpō—and I see mokopuna in the room and we’ve heard mokopuna in the House. It is an exciting time to be Māori, to be from Hauraki. As a mokopuna raised in the north but with deep connection to Hauraki through Ngāti Whanaunga and my tupuna Ripeka Titiparu, who moe-ed into our whānau in Ngāti Hine, we come home often and spend time and really have to reflect on the battles of the past. It was through battle, the hononga that brought us together as tribes but also the enduring connection to place. Whilst you may only retain at this time some 2 to 3 percent of whenua, it is your enduring ahi kā, the way that you have been on the whenua, pou te whenua, tiaki i te taiao, tohe ki te Kāwanatanga, tohe ki te kaunihera hoki []—don’t forget about the kaunihera. Ko koutou tērā.embed the land, protect the environment, struggle against the Government, struggle against the council, too [That is you.]

While we are celebrating a win today, it is the āpōpō that we look forward to and the strengthening of the bridge and the relationship with Crown and those tari kāwanatanga that you will have these relationship agreements with moving forward—the way with which you are receiving assets, resources, whenua, and some financial, commercial redress as a start. And, of course, acknowledging our trustees, those that have to do the mahi to pīkau the aspirations of the people. It’s not an easy task. Sometimes you need a stab-proof vest, eh, when you’re going into the hui. Do you survive the AGM? It’s torturous sometimes—a bit torturous like some of our kauwhau today, too, you know, because you’re waiting for the mahi to get done. I’m just so happy that we are here as a united House to tautoko this occasion and know that this is an opportunity for growth, for potential, for a strong taiao, for a strong mokopuna, our future generation. Kia tōpū te reo, kia tautau tonu i te ahi kā, ko koutou tērā e noho nei, e pakari nei ki runga i tō koutou, ō tātou whenua. Nō reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora tātou katoa.

[So that the language is consolidated, and the burning fires are stoked, that is who you are, seated here, strong upon your—indeed, our—lands. Therefore, greetings and thanks to you, to all of us.]

11:55

Tēnā koe e te Māngai. Ki ngā uri o ngā iwi e toru, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Nau mai, haramai ki tō Whare, tō Whare Pāremata.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. To the descendants of the three iwi, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, Ngāti Hei, and Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, greetings and thanks to you all. Welcome, welcome to your House, to the House of Parliament.]

Welcome to you all. It’s a pleasure for me to stand in this third reading, the last part of what the Minister described as a bit of an arduous task, the Treaty settlement itself. I acknowledge all those that have been involved with this in all degrees—obviously, the people of the negotiating teams from the three iwi but also our Crown representatives in the negotiations and members of Te Tari Whakatau, etc., that actually has got this to where it is today.

I personally currently play a part in the Māori Affairs Committee, and I did have the wonderful occasion of visiting Te Aroha and being wonderfully hosted there by Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on the committee for the other two settlements that we’re actually talking about today, but I also want to join Steve Abel’s comments earlier on—my apologies for not being able to stay for the full mihi whakatau this morning. I would have liked to have heard the further speeches, but as Steve said, we actually had another settlement that we had a hearing for back here that we had to return for to do that in itself. I welcome you here for this very, very important occasion.

I want to talk about the wrongdoings. We had another settlement that we had a first reading from this morning, Ngā Hapū o Te Iwi o Whanganui, and it wouldn’t surprise you that there are similar traits throughout all settlements, particularly with land loss and the significant land loss—we’re not just talking about small parts—to the point where it’s repeated in the historical accounts that iwi are left virtually landless. Opportunity is taken away from you when you lose your access to whenua, and as a result, many of your people have to move away for work and to survive in that.

What you have today is trying to turn that back around. Although you all have ahi kā, the fact is that many of your people—and if I look at the number of people that are registered with each of your iwi, many are not ahi kā any more, and for very good reasons. That is the injustice that has been imposed on Māori that has caused that to actually happen.

I look back at the many travesties and my head shakes. It’s almost like how could that ever be what the Crown of the day did? I think of the opportunity that was lost and the anger that that must bring and the huge disappointment that that must be on all Māori when it comes to looking at the challenges that exist today. A lot of the work we do down here in Wellington is trying to get better outcomes for all New Zealanders, but particularly for Māori, because of the results of the wrongdoings of the Crown in the past. It’s absolutely appropriate that this is recognised. I’ve always said that if you want to understand the history of our country, your first visit should be the historical accounts, the acknowledgments that are within Treaty settlements. If you read your Treaty settlements—if your kids, your tamariki of your schools in your rohe were taught the history here, that is a great basis of understanding where things are today; why there are challenging conversations today; why there is anger at the Crown that remains today. It’s because of this history here.

We talk about teaching our tamariki Te Tiriti o Waitangi; that’s important, but I tell you, I’d almost say that all the adults of a place need to be taught this history as well. A lot of our neighbours and our community of locals, they look at the anger that’s actually expressed, and they think, “What’s that all about?” Well, read these settlements, and you’ll get an understanding of what this is all about. We have people, individuals who are not too many generations from us today, who we’re talking about here—people who have lost their lives over time because of the wrongdoings of the Crown—in Treaty settlements.

History is important. Without understanding your history—without understanding your past—how can you appreciate where you are today and move forward as a community? I thank you for, as many other speakers have said, making the compromise of what Treaty settlements are—the huge compromise; Hūhana Lyndon said the 1 or 2 percent of what it’s worth; well, in fact, it’s probably a lot less than that, to tell the truth. The fact is that Māori make compromises with every Treaty settlement with the purpose of trying to move forward, to rebuild—and I say “rebuild” because you have been deconstructed. We have been deconstructed so much because of the wrongdoings of the Crown.

This process that we’re running now is just a moment in time, but what’s so important is how we take this acknowledgment, this apology, this recompense, this cultural redress—everything that’s within settlements—and use that positively to move forward as a people and to be able to contribute to a wonderful nation that Aotearoa can actually be.

I look forward to this getting Royal assent, but it is just the beginning—it is just the beginning of the new phase of where we’re going to. It needs to be recognised, it needs to be acknowledged, but now it also places a very important part on the Crown once this gets Royal assent. The commitments that are written in here—the Crown needs to make sure that it does not fail again into the future. That is one of the very important subjects that the Māori Affairs Committee looks at annually. We measure the Crown’s performance against settlements that we’re not just going back to where we’ve been, and that we’re fixing the wrongs of the past, not creating new wrongs.

I look forward to the new beginning; I look forward to you all prospering with what these settlements provide you. The monetary recompense is a pittance, really, but we need something for you to start off with, and I hope you do well with what this opportunity presents. With that, I feel privileged; I think every time anybody in this House is speaking on a Treaty settlement, we write ourselves into the Hansard of this place here. We become part of the history of what this is, and it’s actually a privilege, I think, for us to be able to partake in that. I’m very happy to commend these bills to the House on this third reading, and I wish all of you all the very best. Kia ora.

12:04

Thank you, Madam Speaker. E Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, kia ora, ngā mihi nui ki a koutou.

As my colleague across the House David MacLeod just said, it is very much my honour to be able to stand here and speak on your settlement bills in the third reading today. We remember today and farewell the tūpuna who have paved the way, protected mana, and held fast to the cause. To those here today and watching from afar at this moment, we honour your communities’ perseverance, your faith, and strength in pursuing justice and truth. Despite the long journey, this stage has been reached, and what an exciting day it is—but it has been a long journey.

I want to start by acknowledging my colleague Willie Jackson’s speech about the time that we stood out on the forecourt quite a number of years ago. It was really disconcerting. It was such a traumatic moment for us all—for you, and for us. That was a moment that actually started well over 150 years ago when rights were taken away from you. The pathway and the determinations of the Crown at that time caused that traumatic experience that we witnessed those few years ago.

I’m excited that we are at this point; I’m excited for you that we have reached a resolution and that you’re at a new beginning right now. People will say that this is the end of the process, and, as I’ve just heard from across the House, this is actually the new beginning. We get to the end of one process, and we get to the start of a new beginning. The new beginning, as we’ve heard, is about an apology; it’s about a monetary figure; it’s about land being given back to you; but it never will make up for that hurt and that mamae that you have suffered for so many years. Some of you have suffered, and your tūpuna have suffered, and suffered, and suffered. It gives us the opportunity to make sure that your mokopuna, your tamariki, going forward, won’t suffer any more. This is the opportunity for the Crown to say that enough is enough, and from this day, we move forward together in that new beginning.

Can I also say that the Crown has also been on that journey. It is a journey, again, on which I have heard, “How could this happen? How could the Crown have done what they did?” That is horrific when we see it, and it is not acceptable, but the Crown has been on a journey to get where we are today for this acknowledgment. We’ve heard about some of the players that have been there over time, and my colleagues around the House have mentioned previous Ministers and previous Prime Ministers. I also want to take this opportunity in the third reading speech here today to acknowledge some of the main players that actually started that process. One was Matiu Rata, who established the Waitangi Tribunal, and which he said himself would settle the deeply felt and longstanding grievances of the Māori people over the Treaty, which they regard as the foundation of their rights. That was a kind of start and a point in time that the Crown stood up and changed.

Someone who was also a personal hero of mine in the work that he did was Geoffrey Palmer, in 1985, leading the work where Parliament granted the Waitangi Tribunal retrospective powers to hear grievance dating back to 1840. I just wanted to make sure that those two people were acknowledged here, because it was part of the journey that we have been on as a Crown, so that we can acknowledge the hurt and the pain that you have been through, what has brought you here today, and what has got us to this point of this new beginning.

Like the previous speaker, I had the absolute honour of being on the Māori Affairs Committee, albeit for a short time. It was only about nine months that I was on that committee for, but I remember saying, in the second reading of the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, that I believe that every member of this House should spend time on that committee. It’s about that understanding of history, and we heard again from the previous speaker how important history is. That’s why I’m such a passionate advocate for the now wiped Aotearoa New Zealand’s history curriculum. I’m absolutely passionate that we tell history from all perspectives. Your history has been silenced for so long, and that’s something that today rectifies, but we need to rectify that long into the future.

That visit that I had that particular day to Te Aroha and where we sat listening to the submissions that were being put forward on that particular bill was such a moment of change for me. It had such an impact on me that I went away from that day thinking we have to do better. We have to make sure that we take these moments where we’re working together in partnership and do better going forward so that, again, tamariki, mokopuna, and future generations will never have to share that same pain that you and your tūpuna have been through for so many generations.

I’ll never forget having that moment of clarity around what had been taken from iwi, how they had been treated in the journey, the promises that had been made, and the many broken promises that had occurred. Again, this is something that every member of this Parliament, and future members of this Parliament, needs to experience to understand how we can strengthen Māori’s hopes and ambitions. I shouldn’t say it quite like that. It’s about you telling us your hopes and ambitions and what can we do to support you. That’s what today is about, the new beginning around you taking control of the next stage of this journey, because it is about that next stage and it’s about you having control over where you want to go with your hopes and ambitions for today’s generation and future generations as well. Again, today doesn’t make up for that hurt. Today will never make up for that hurt, but it goes some way for you to start the next chapter for you and your people going forward. It’s a new chapter of a partnership that we can walk alongside, or behind, and support where you want to be for your future as a people.

I too want to say that it is, again, as I started, the greatest honour to be able to stand and support your part of the history of where you are going today. I don’t take that lightly. It is something that I will forever be grateful for and see, when I finally leave this place, as being the highlight of my career, being able to stand here and support that. Even though I spent a very short part of that time on select committee, it meant the absolute world to me. It makes me think, what can I do now going forward to help future iwi like yourselves? Enjoy today. I hope that it is a true celebration for you. I hope that you feel the joy that we have for you. I really sincerely want to look forward to seeing where you take your hopes and your aspirations in the future. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa. Kia ora.

12:14

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s also my quiet pleasure to stand up and add my kōrero in support of this bill where we’ve combined the settlements of three bills, the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill, and Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill. I’d like to start by also bestowing a warm welcome to everyone that’s in the gallery today, and I thank you immensely for showing us, once again, how milestones like this are so important. We all know that travelling around is extra difficult these days with what’s going on overseas affecting us here, so thank you very much for being here today, all of you guests in the gallery.

I really love how our beautiful and young Hana-Rawhiti said that with moments like this, the public memory begins to shift. That really resonated, as I listened to Hana-Rawhiti’s speech, because it’s true. I don’t whakapapa to any Māori iwi, I whakapapa to Lebanon, but I can continuously and consistently learn about the grievances that our Māori brothers and sisters have endured in our past. It’s really quite a contradiction, and I think I’ve mentioned this before, that Aotearoa New Zealand is so beautiful—we have such beautiful landscapes, a lot of beauty—and yet there’s such, in some ways, an ugly history.

As Minister Goldsmith said in his speech, the Crown recognises and acknowledges the severe wrongs, because the wrongs were severe. Yes, we’ve placed these three third readings in one third reading because, as Willie Jackson said, this is how desperate we are to get along with things. We are. We’re desperate for our guests and your whānau to get along with things.

I’d like to acknowledge the words that were mentioned this morning by Matua Koro. Although I’m not fluent in the reo and I didn’t understand everything that was said in the kōrero, I do feel that my heart understood the undercurrent. I thank you, Mr Koro, for sharing what you did, and I thank you for the challenges that you put to us because they were from your heart. One thing I know is that our Ministers listened, and my heart listened as well.

I too was not involved in the beginning of the processes for Ngāti Hei and Ngāti Tara Tokanui settlement bills, but the common thread is the severe loss of land in three of these settlements.

When I think of Ngāti Hei, in my first trip to New Zealand—because I was born in Australia to Lebanese parents—my beautiful husband took me to the Coromandel Coast, and I remember as we were driving there, he said to me, this coast is considered one of the most beautiful in the world. When I arrived there, yes, my heart broke with happiness with how beautiful your coastline is. I’m really glad. I’m very pleased that part of the cultural redress is that the key redress includes the vesting of Te Puia Hot Water Beach Domain, and the recognition arrangements over Cathedral Cove and Cuvier Island Nature Reserve are also part of that redress.

With respect to Ngāti Tara Tokanui, one of the 12 iwi and hapū with customary interests in the wider Hauraki area, again, there was major land confiscation and unfair dealings, and there’s little evidence to show that Ngāti Tara Tokanui actually signed sale agreements. Sometimes when we wonder why there is so little trust between some of our Māori and Government agencies. I guess history like this can make people stop wondering and understand more.

We were really pleased and very blessed to go to the whenua of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, and I mentioned this in my last speech—I loved it. Thank you very much. We were around the mountain of love, and we absolutely felt the love. In closing, I do wish all of the iwi well. I know that you put your mokopuna at the forefront of your minds when you’re going forward with these settlements. I hope, to a small extent, that at least some of the burden can be lifted, and I know you’ll make your ancestors proud. I commend this bill to the House.

12:19

Thank you. I’m honoured to rise to speak to the third reading of the Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu Claims Settlement Bill, Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill, and Ngāti Tara Tokanui Claims Settlement Bill. Nau mai, haere mai ki Pāremata.

I would like to start by acknowledging the iwi, the hapū, and the whānau who have come to the House today for this very important occasion, and commend you on your mahi and getting these bills to the third and final reading here in Parliament. I wish you all the very best for the future. Once this settlement is concluded, I hope that your whānau and hapū flourish, and that this settlement gives opportunity to all of your tamariki and mokopuna.

I sit on the Māori Affairs Committee, so it’s a real honour and privilege to be able to contribute to this process, to hear from iwi about the wrongs done, and to see that Crown apology written into legislation. Every settlement we pass in this House is a significant milestone for Aotearoa New Zealand and our journey in truly recognising Te Tiriti o Waitangi. What we do here is such a small part; it is the iwi, the hapū, the whānau who do the real mahi working with the Crown to get the bill into legislation, accepting a settlement, and then working to ensure that that settlement provides opportunity for whānau while protecting your whenua.

Earlier in the year, as part of the Māori Affairs Committee, we had the opportunity to go and visit some iwis who have had their settlements concluded. Some of them were concluded in the last few years. Some of them were 20 years old. It was a really interesting kaupapa, because we were able to learn about what the iwi we did post-settlement: what they put the money into, what they did with their whenua, what they did as part of the redress. That’s a fascinating journey, and I hope, in years to come, that I can hear what it is that your iwis do in the future with this settlement.

It was a really huge privilege to attend the whakatau this morning and hear from you and celebrate this milestone with all three iwi. To hear your kōrero from the kaikōrero this morning was a real privilege. One of the important whakaaro that came out of it for me was the presence of ancestors, of tūpuna—that this settlement, as well as acknowledging the hurt, the apology, and the journey, really acknowledges those who have gone before. I think you articulated it much better than I, but I’ll give it a go: the whānau that endured that suffering, the loss of their tikanga, reo, and whenua—that sacrificed so much; the real honour is them today. It was incredible to see their photos there at the mihi whakatau and to see them in the gallery today.

Some of your kōrero today sends a strong message to the Government about the importance of honouring Te Tiriti, and I commend you for that. Settling a Treaty bill is one thing, but truly honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi is another, and we must go further. Frankly, right now, I don’t think we’re heading in the right direction. I’d love to see a true partnership with Māori; I don’t think we’re there yet. In order to achieve that full partnership, we must ensure that our tamariki and our rangatahi have the knowledge and history of Aotearoa New Zealand and the hurt that was caused. I hope that as part of your settlement, you’re able to share that kōrero and that journey with your mokopuna tamariki.

Through this settlement, the Crown seeks to atone for the injustices done and rebuild a relationship based on trust and honourable Treaty partnership. Other speakers have spoken to it never being enough, and I tautoko that: it’s never enough, but it’s a start. As I mentioned, I really look forward to seeing where you go with this and what opportunities you take for reconnection of your people to their whenua, tikanga, and reo so that the mokopuna of your iwi feel connected to their whenua, their awa, their tikanga, and te reo Māori.

It is with great pleasure that I commend all three of these bills to the House. Nō reira nei rā te mihi ki a koutou katoa. Kia ū, kia māia, kia manawanui. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[Therefore, I present my greetings to you all. Be steadfast, be courageous, be resilient. Greetings and thanks to you all.]

12:25

Tēnā rawa atu koe, e te Māngai o te Whare.

Ehara i te mea nō nāianei te aroha

Nō ngā tūpuna i tuku iho, i tuku iho

[Love is not a thing of the present alone

It was passed down by the ancestors]

Nā reira ki a koutou, ngā uri tuku iho o Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, tēnā rawa atu koutou katoa.

Tēnei hoki te mihi atu ki a rātou mā e kawea nei i roto i ngā whakaahua, rātou i tae whakaahua mai, rātou i tae o roto o te whare o mahara, i roto i ō koutou ngākau, i roto hoki i ō koutou tūmanako.

Huri noa ki a tātou, tihei mauri ora. Tēnei te mihi atu ki a koutou katoa i tae mai i runga i te rau o te aroha.

[Therefore, to you, the descendants of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Hei, and Ngāti Tara Tokanui, many greetings to you all.

We also extend our greetings to those whose images are displayed here—those present in these photographs, and those held within the house of memory, within your hearts, and within your hopes.

Turning to all of us here—the breath of life. We extend our greetings to everyone who has arrived here, borne on the leaves of love.]

Although I don’t sit on the Māori Affairs Committee, it is indeed my pleasure to be here and take what will be the last contribution of this House in the third hearing of your bills.

Tēnei te mihi nui atu i a koutou i tae mai i runga i te rau aroha, i runga hoki i te hūmārie. Koutou i tae kotahi mai, ahakoa i tae mai koutou katoa i runga i tōu ake mana motuhake.

Kua tae mai koutou hei kanohi mō rātou mā kua wehe atu, kua tae mai koutou ki te kawe i ngā tūmanako o rātou kāre anō kia whānau mai ki tēnei ao. Ahakoa he ngāwari noa iho te waiata i tīmatatia nei e au, he waiata e kawe nei i tērā āhuatanga e tino whakapono ai tātou, te iwi Māori, arā te aroha.

Nā reira ahakoa ngā taumahatanga i pēhi nei i runga i ō koutou tīpuna, i tangohia ō koutou whenua, ō koutou moana, i tae mai koutou i runga i te aroha mō rātou mā; i runga i te aroha mō ō koutou whānau; i runga i te aroha mō ō koutou maunga, moana, awa, whenua; i runga i te aroha mō tō koutou whenua, o Aotearoa.

Nā reira tēnei te mihi atu ki a koutou i tae mai i runga i te rau aroha kia neke ai tātou katoa o Aotearoa ki mua. Tēnei te mihi atu.

[I hereby greet you who have come here with compassion, and, also, in humility—those of you who arrived together, even though you all come under your own particular authority.

You have come as representatives for those who have passed on, you have come to bring the hopes of those who have yet to be born into this world. Despite the simple song that I began with, it is a song that conveys that particular thing that we, the Māori people, all very much believe in; that is, love.

Therefore, despite the difficulties that impacted your ancestors, that resulted in the taking of your land and your ocean assets, you came with love for those who have passed; with love for your families; with love for your mountains, oceans, rivers, and lands; and with love for your nation, Aotearoa.

Therefore, I hereby greet you who have come here with compassion so that all of us in Aotearoa may progress. Thank you.]

Earlier in the House, we heard Winston Peters talk about the peanuts that are received from these settlements—

Winston Peters?

Oh, sorry, Winston—no, I don’t think he said that! Willie Jackson. Easy mistake—easy mistake, whānau. We’ll leave them to decide who was either praised or insulted by that mistake.

Brothers in arms. New coalition—new coalition.

Future coalition, Tama Potaka reckons! Let’s not start rumours. Let’s stick to you guys, whānau.

He talked about—actually, I’ll quote him: through peanuts from these settlements, we see hope. That is true: although it’s been acknowledged across this House that the compensation received doesn’t even go near compensating for the wrongs that were done, there is hope.

I want to talk about the hope that Māori brings to this country that can sometimes be forgotten and refer to the amazing Māori economy, which is now worth $126 billion—$66 billion made-up by Māori business and employers, 14 by trusts and incorporations, and 19 by self-employed Māori. Our entrepreneurial nature has been there mai rā anō [ever since], and while this doesn’t go anywhere near compensating you for the wrongs done throughout generations, I look forward to hearing amazing reports of the contribution you make to this Māori economy as we move forward, because, let me tell you, the world is ready to do business with us all. Tēnei te mihi atu ki a koutou.

[I hereby acknowledge you.]

Heoi anō rā ko taku kōrero ki a tātou [however, what I would say to us all]—it’s awesome to hear the contributions, the reo, the empathy, but how do we carry that on outside these walls? We must champion everything that’s being said across this House, not just in the way we write legislation moving forward but as we move through our communities in Aotearoa. Attitudes towards settlements and attitudes towards the contribution that our whānau, hapū, and iwi make as good kaitiaki, as good partners, must be carried beyond the legislation we write to our attitudes in our communities.

Heoi anō rā, hei whakakapi, tēnei te mihi anō ki a koutou, ngā uri o Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Tara Tokanui. Tēnei te mihi atu ki a koutou katoa mō tō hūmārie, mō tō aroha nui ki tēnei whenua o tātou.

[However, to conclude, I hereby acknowledge you, the descendants of Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu, Ngāti Hei, and Ngāti Tara Tokanui. I hereby acknowledge you all for your humility, and your great love for this land of ours.]

I understand there will be a waiata.

Waiata—“Aakau o te Aroha (Ko Hauraki te Whenua)”

Members, the House stands adjourned until 2 p.m.

The House adjourned at 12.34 p.m. (Wednesday)

to the Prime Minister

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

14:02

on behalf of the Prime Minister: Yes, particularly many practical policies that have had a lot of benefit for Māori. For example, the Government has reformed the Residential Tenancies Act and taxation around residential property, which has seen lower rents. We’ve also seen a higher portion of homes being sold to first-home buyers. With Māori housing statistics being below the New Zealand average, this is something that disproportionately benefits Māori. In education, we have seen a dramatic increase of standards thanks to our Minister of Education introducing the science of learning, which has seen the number of young students at or above the standard for reading and writing nearly double in only two years. Then there are charter schools, which are being embraced by iwi Māori up and down the motu.

What aid and assistance, if any, has been given to Everlee Wihongi, who has been detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for over a month without any charges?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) are very aware of Miss Wihongi’s situation. They are engaged with the American authorities and will continue to work with them to ascertain all of the facts and present the New Zealand Government’s view. I don’t think it would be helpful for me to say in the House any more than that.

What is his response to Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters when he made false accusations about Everlee Wihongi, blaming her for being detained, and will the Prime Minister require him to correct the record?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, I don’t believe the member is in a position to know that the accusations are false. If he does, the right thing to do would be to talk with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, because it sounds as though he may have information that would be helpful to Miss Wihongi, rather than grandstanding in the House about it.

Will he strongly condemn Everlee’s treatment by ICE when her whānau have stated that she has been shackled for hours, waiting in hot weather, being deprived of food, sleeping on the ground, and not being able to shower?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, as I’ve said earlier, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade are in contact with the American authorities. They seek to establish the facts, and they will present New Zealand’s position in line with our values as a country. Those complaints are best presented to the Minister of Foreign Affairs so that MFAT can use them in order to best serve her as a New Zealand citizen. I don’t believe that it is useful to try and politicise the issue, which is obviously very sensitive for her.

What penalties can the Government impose on the United States if they continue to abuse New Zealand citizens and other immigrants in ICE detention centres?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, we don’t generally think of ourselves as penalising other countries. None the less, where we believe there has been a breach of our understandings between countries, we ensure that we are doing the best to represent New Zealand’s position on the world stage, behind closed doors and openly, and I think our Minister of Foreign Affairs has had a good couple of years of doing that, after we were nearly invisible on the world stage under his predecessor.

Will he commit to doing everything in his power to—[Interruption]

Just a minute. No talking at all while someone is asking a question.

Will he commit to doing everything in his power to ensure that Everlee Wihongi and all New Zealand citizens detained by ICE are treated humanely and released as soon as possible?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, that is exactly what the New Zealand Government is doing through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This is the answer I gave to my first question, and my advice to the member, if he wants it, would be to try to vary his questions in relation to the answers he has received. He might find out more.

14:06 · to the Minister of Finance

What reports has she seen on New Zealand’s fiscal position?

Today, the Prime Minister announced that the new net operating package in Budget 2026 will be $2.1 billion, which is less than the $2.4 billion allowance set last December. The operating allowance is the amount of net new operating funding, on average, per annum that the Government intends to spend on policy initiatives in the Budget. Previous Governments have announced an allowance, then used it as a springboard to ramp up Budget spending even higher. This Government, on the other hand, considers the operating allowance to be a ceiling, not a floor, and has committed to keeping new Budget spending below it. We did so in Budget 2024, in Budget 2025, and we will do so again in Budget 2026.

How is the Government delivering a tighter operating package?

Operating packages are a net concept. Spending increases are offset by savings and revenue initiatives within a single envelope, so Budget 2026 will continue to invest in front-line public services, such as health, education, and law and order, but it will also identify savings across Government and reprioritise those savings to higher-value areas. That approach has been a feature of previous Budgets and will again be a feature of Budget 2026. There is an alternative. The alternative would be to fund essential new spending through higher taxes or more borrowing. That would weaken the economy, increase Government debt, and leave New Zealand more exposed to international shocks.

How has the international environment shaped the Government’s fiscal position?

The international environment has undoubtedly become more volatile. Ongoing political tensions, supply chain disruptions, and energy shocks have increased uncertainty and dampened global growth, but that reality strengthens, not weakens, the case for fiscal discipline. In April, the International Monetary Fund warned Governments not to take their eye off the ball at this time and to continue to pursue credible medium-term fiscal consolidation to rebuild essential fiscal buffers. That fiscal consolidation is sorely needed, because, here at home, the Government’s books have been in deficit since 2020 and debt has grown as a share of GDP, from below 20 percent to above 40 percent.

What is the Government’s fiscal strategy?

The Government’s strategy is to achieve fiscal consolidation over the medium term through ongoing spending restraint. In particular, the Government’s specific targets are to reduce core Crown expenses towards 30 percent of GDP; they are to return the headline operating measure, OBEGALx—the operating balance before gains and losses, excluding ACC revenue and expenses—to surplus by the 2028-2029 fiscal year; and they are to put net core Crown debt as a percentage of GDP on a downward path towards 40 percent. Having an operating package of only $2.1 billion is a significant contribution to each of these targets, and the Budget will show exactly what progress is being made in meeting them.

14:10 · to the Prime Minister

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

on behalf of the Prime Minister: Yes, exactly, I do—and particularly the Government’s announcement today that we will be keeping to a new operating allowance of $2.1 billion. The Government making careful use of taxpayers’ money and gradually driving down the proportion of the economy that’s consumed by Government leaves New Zealanders in a stronger position to weather the storms of trade wars and actual wars that have affected us in the last two years. The alternative is a Government that has a long history of blowing out the credit card, leaving New Zealanders with very few options except for high inflation and high interest rates—and now they’re not even doing that; they’re just producing lame TikTok videos.

Does he agree with Winston Peters that his own Government is attempting to “write a Budget out of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund because of their failed economic policies”?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, the Government is not attempting to write a Budget out of the Superannuation Fund because the Government Budget is not changing superannuation policy, as is agreed between our parties. This is the difference: three parties work together—

Ha, ha!

—and produce not just careful use of taxpayer money but actually manage to save more than we initially thought we could. The Labour Party laughs at this, because for them it’s all about the game. For us, it’s about New Zealanders’ lives affected by inflation and interest rates from too many turkeys spending too much of their money. On this side, we take careful use of taxpayer money and balancing the Budget without new taxes very seriously, and he ought to, too.

Why did the third-ranked Minister in his own Government tell the New Zealand public just this morning that the Government was going to be raiding the New Zealand Superannuation Fund in order to prop up its Budget?

I can only guess that he was alluding to future policy positions that parties might take. It’s a good question for the Labour Party: show us the money. How are they going to pay for the pay equity and the superannuation and the fees-free, and all those cheques that they’re writing out that their body can’t cash?

Will the Government be drawing down on the Superannuation Fund in this year’s Budget?

No.

Will the Government guarantee that it will not be using, in this year’s Budget, any funds from the New Zealand Superannuation Fund for anything other than their legislated purpose?

I can absolutely confirm that the Government will follow the law, and the reason for that is very important. You see, we had a Government that didn’t follow the law; they took $30 million to buy out Ihumātao and created a steaming pile of that member knows just what that this Government is still trying to fix after they misappropriated funds and didn’t follow the law.

What was Winston Peters referring to when he said that the Government was going to be attempting to write its Budget out of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund?

I think we’re having either a communication or a memory problem here. As I said earlier, I can only guess that he is referring to positions that parties might take in the future, and one of the parties I like him referring to is the many positions that the Labour Party takes on its fiscal management.

If he thinks the Minister of Foreign Affairs has a memory problem, and Nicola Willis thinks the Minister of Foreign Affairs is very confused, why should New Zealanders believe that he’s a fit person to be a Minister?

As I wasn’t referring to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, you see the member asking the question may have, himself, forgotten that I’ve answered his question only seconds earlier.

If the Minister of Foreign Affairs, in his own Government, thinks that the Government’s economic policies are failing, why should New Zealanders think any differently, given that under his leadership the economy has shrunk, more New Zealanders have lost their jobs—

No, just the question.

—the cost of living has gotten worse—

Just the question.

—inflation’s going up, and mortgage interest rates are going back up again as well? [Interruption]

You might just like to put that question again without all the suppositions at the end, which are outside the parameters for asking questions.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I welcome your newfound stickleness for the Standing Orders and the Speakers’ rulings.

Thank you for that.

If that is going to apply to the questions, why doesn’t it apply to the answers that are being delivered?

It does apply to the answers and I have—

So how is it in order—

No hang on, not a good day to have an argument. So, ask the question again.

If his own Minister of Foreign Affairs thinks that his Government are pursuing failed economic policies that have seen the economy shrink, unemployment increase, interest rates going back up, inflation going back up, and more New Zealanders losing their jobs, why should New Zealanders think any differently?

Oh, Mr Speaker, they’re spicy today. First of all, mortgage rates going back up: now, that’s an interesting concept isn’t it? Because they can only go back up to the place they were when he was in Government, so what he’s conceding is that they have come down dramatically for Kiwis under this Government, as has inflation, which peaked at 7.3 percent. We’ve got it down to 5.3 percent, and even unemployment has just gone down slightly in the last quarter. So there are many, many reasons why people might trust in the economic management of this Government; three parties united behind a careful, fiscally responsible Budget that gives New Zealanders a much better future than they would have if “Mr Marmite Sandwich”, with his TikTok memes, was in charge of the company credit card again.

14:17 · 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?]

on behalf of the Prime Minister: Yes, and I’d particularly like to highlight the Hon Andrew Hoggard’s recent announcement that the Government will be endorsing a marketplace for environmental good deeds mainly done on farms. If you plant trees or save wetlands, there’ll actually be a marketplace where you can be funded by those good people in the community and in business who would like to pay for those kinds of things to happen somewhere in the country, because they care about the environment. It’s a very good example of a practical approach from practical people, ensuring that all of us can be better environmental custodians. I highlight this because the Green Party aren’t always focused—

No, no, that’s enough. That’s enough.

Does he accept that the Government’s forecasted deficit is now smaller because of the large profits paid out in dividends, made by Government - majority owned power companies?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, it is certainly true that the ownership of State-owned enterprises—sometimes, but not always—delivers dividends that improve the Government’s financial position. However, I have seen suggestions that would ensure that that almost never happens. I have seen suggestions that energy companies should somehow limit the price of the energy that they sell to the rate of inflation. Now, let’s just think about how that works for a moment: the price they sell it at is set in a uniform auction at the price of the highest bidder in the electricity market every half an hour. In order for them to limit the price they sell energy, every single participant in the electricity market in New Zealand would need to collude and breach the Commerce Act to achieve that. Now, the reason I say this is that I happen to be Parliament’s only electrical engineer and I know a little bit about it. On the other hand, there are people that listen to their focus groups and decide—

No, no, that’s good. Just shorten up the answers a little bit.

Does the acting Prime Minister understand the difference between wholesale and retail power markets?

Thank you for that invitation. Yes, I do. You see, the thing is there are actually three costs. There’s your energy cost, there’s your lines cost, and there is your retail cost. The thing about retail is that you are beholden to the price of the energy that you buy. If the suggestion is that somehow retailers should charge nothing or perhaps even pay people to take electricity by selling it for less than they can buy it on the wholesale market, well, that’s a very interesting bit of bumper-sticker politics, but I don’t think it’s going to work. What I’d say to the member is that electricity markets are very delicate things, not best designed by a focus group.

Is it fair that shareholders, including the Government, are collecting near record dividends from power companies while 200,000 New Zealanders cannot afford to heat their homes?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, the question is not whether it’s fair but what can be done about it, and what is being done about it to improve everyone’s situation is a record level of investment in generation, the highest since the 1970s and 1980s under Think Big, but it’s being done without a cent of taxpayer money. Now, the one thing that could really bugger that up is if someone came in and put price controls on the electricity market and made sure that nobody wanted to invest, just like the member helped do with the oil and gas market.

Do Government-owned or Government - majority owned gentailers have the power to reduce their prices immediately or not?

It is a bit of a theme—I give answers and then they ask questions that I’ve already answered. In order for one participant in an energy market to reduce the price, they would have to collude with every other market participant to bring the energy price down. Now, that is, first of all, illegal, and, second of all, it would be a total, I guess, destruction of the electricity market as New Zealand generators have known it for the last 30 years. I guess they could start selling it for a smaller margin or less than the wholesale energy price, and all the retail arms could go broke and any other retailer could go broke, and we’d have no other competition, but this is a perfect example—

Explaining is losing.

Who was that who said, “Explaining is losing.”? I actually think we do need to explain to New Zealanders sometimes what we know and how these things work rather than going into a focus group and selling bumper-sticker politics in something as complex as an electricity market.

Has he seen the evidence and analysis that the partial privatisation of our power companies in 2012, just by overwhelming public opposition, has contributed to far higher power prices than would have otherwise been the case?

That evidence brings up a certain contradiction in the member’s line of questioning. You see, she started out claiming that the reason power prices are high is that the Government is such a rapacious claimer of dividends boosting its bottom line that Government ownership pushes up power prices. Now she’s saying that fact that half of them are not owned by the Government also pushes up power prices, and this is the problem, Chlöe Swarbrick, when you run all your policy based on focus groups, sound bites, slogans, and bumper stickers.

We can’t afford focus groups like you can.

It’s all good. We’ll have question No.—

I wonder why that is.

Just a moment, Mr Bishop.

14:24 · to the Minister of Finance

Fạiȧkse‘ea, Mr Speaker. Does she stand by all her statements and actions?

In context, yes. I particularly stand by my statements that under the Budgets I deliver, operating allowances will be a ceiling, not a floor.

How many times has Treasury revised down its growth forecasts since she became the Minister of Finance?

I would have to check, as has been traversed in this House. In particular, the Treasury has acknowledged that the assumptions it made in the pre-election fiscal update were wildly too optimistic and led to significant changes in its forecast outlook, which has changed the projections under this Government.

Does she intend to use funding from the New Zealand Superannuation Fund for anything outside its current purpose while she is Minister of Finance?

Well, I hope to be the Minister of Finance for many Governments yet to come. In the term of this Government, for the Budgets for which I am responsible, the answer to that question is no.

Can she rule out selling all or part of Kiwibank while she is the Minister of Finance?

Again, I am responsible, as the Minister of Finance in this Government, for the policies in this term, and we will not be doing that in this term.

Does she agree with the Rt Hon Winston Peters’ characterisation of her spending and Budget decisions that they are “all coming home to roost now, and here we are, five months, six months ago before an election, and all the birds are coming home”?

I think that the member, as is often her habit, is mischaracterising the Minister of Foreign Affairs and trade. This is a habit she has; she often likes to take my quotations out of—

Good—just enough.

—context, too. I have traversed carefully the comments by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and have spoken with him about this subject. The reflection that he shares is that, actually, successive Governments have, in his view, had to make spending decisions based on a lack of economic growth, and on that, I am agreed. We are a Government that has inherited a train wreck from the last lot, and we are now having to respond to that.

Does she agree with David Seymour that all three coalition parties are united on economic policies, or the Rt Hon Winston Peters, who has said that her Government has pursued “failed economic policies”?

Again, I think the member takes quotations out of context, and I agree that it is a significant achievement that the three parties of this Government—the National Party, the ACT Party, and the New Zealand First Party—in a time of global turmoil, with finances under strain and with a fuel crisis, have pulled together an excellent Budget that we agree to, which is delivering our commitments within a smaller operating allowance than we forecast, allowing us to return the books to a better balance sooner.

14:28 · to the Minister responsible for RMA Reform

What announcements has he made on national direction under the Resource Management Act 1991?

It was great to announce last week that the Government has made changes to the National Environmental Standards for Marine Aquaculture, which will remove unnecessary complexity and cost for aquaculture operators. These changes support marine farmers to refine their operations within existing footprints, trial new approaches, and adopt better practices, and they provide councils with a clearer national direction about how certain activities should be assessed. These updates are another step in making the resource management system more workable and proportionate while protecting our marine environment.

Why are these changes needed, and why are they so important?

Previous consenting processes for aquaculture were costly, complex, and disproportionate, especially for minor changes. It is worth noting, as the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries has noted on so many occasions, that the potential for growth in aquaculture is huge. It already employs more than 3,000 people, it generates over $650 million in exports annually, and we do have a Government target of $3 billion in annual revenue that was set out in the aquaculture development plan led by Minister Jones last year. These national environmental standards come into effect on 4 June and apply to new activities, and we’re making decisions on marine aquaculture consents.

What other changes to national direction has he progressed?

National direction does the heavy lifting in our planning system in terms of what is allowed and where it is allowed, but it has been neglected by previous Governments. This Government has made the largest suite of changes to national direction in New Zealand history. We’ve removed barriers to infrastructure, we’ve made it easier to build granny flats and support housing, we’ve removed unworkable rules for the primary sector, and we’re streamlining consenting for renewable energy. Just last week, new rules for consenting electric vehicle chargers came into force, setting clear national rules to make it easier and quicker to get chargers in the ground—and there is more to come.

How do these changes relate to the Government’s work to replace the Resource Management Act 1991?

Well, some may wonder why the Government’s making changes under the existing Resource Management Act (RMA), and there are a couple of reasons. The first is to unclog the system that exists right now and provide quick wins for people out there trying to do things in the real economy. The second point is that this is part of the transition to the wholesale replacement of the RMA with a new regime—a much more liberal planning regime—under the Planning and Natural Environment Bills. Many of the changes—in fact, almost all of the changes we’ve made over the last two years—will carry through into the new system. Whether it’s aquaculture, electric vehicles, farming, mining, quarrying, infrastructure, renewable energy, granny flats, or housing, those changes will carry through into the new, much more permissive, and much more sensible system.

14:31

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I would like to make a statement in clarification of an earlier statement I made in the House.

You’re seeking leave?

I’m seeking leave.

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

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The member Barbara Edmonds asked questions about contributions to the New Zealand Super Fund. As is already on the record, as with the Budget delivered by the last Government in 2019, our Government in last year’s Budget ensured that some of the annual contributions required under the Act to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund were invested in the Elevate NZ Venture Fund. As I say, that was not a new approach: $240 million was diverted by the last Government from the New Zealand Super Fund contributions to the NZ Venture Investment Fund. I want to also point out that Elevate is administered by the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation under a second mandate in the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Act, supporting the early development of our capital markets.

14:32 · 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?]

on behalf of the Prime Minister: Yes, and I’d particularly like to draw attention to the work of our Minister of Health in improving immunisation rates for under-twos. It’s, in many ways, a sad story. In 2017, 93 percent of under-twos were having their immunisations, but by 2022 that had fallen to only 75 percent. Since this Government has returned to power, that rate has begun increasing. It is now 83 percent of under-twos immunised, and our goal is by the end of the decade to reach 95 percent. There are people who talk endlessly about how they care for their tamariki, but how could anyone who thinks that leave them unvaccinated and vulnerable to Third World diseases?

Does he agree with the characterisation that conservation redress is negotiated in good faith and as a mechanism for iwi to uphold their ancestral obligations to the whenua land that Māori have been alienated from due to the actions and inactions of the Crown?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, on the face of it, that seems a very reasonable statement.

Has his Government resolved all settlement issues relating to the Conservation Amendment Bill?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, the legislation is yet to go through a full passage in the House. It will no doubt be open to submissions and it is quite possible that some members of the public will draw to the Parliament’s attention some sort of incompatibility between Treaty settlements—which are wide, and there are many of them—and the operation of the Conservation Act after it has been amended. However, I have great faith in our Minister of Conservation, who has very carefully examined these matters, and, I think, we can proudly say that that bill is in a very good place as it enters the parliamentary process.

Is he aware that the Minister of Conservation was advised by his officials to pause the reforms by 18 to 24 months because “there would be more time for good faith engagement with the PSGEs to test and refine proposals to amend settlements. Pausing the reforms would likely be received well by PSGEs and may serve to enhance the Māori-Crown relationship.”?

On behalf of the Prime Minister, it is certainly true that members of the public service frequently advise that there should be more delays, more consultation and, frankly, more navel gazing. But this Government believes that we are elected with the authority to achieve better policy for New Zealanders, and the right place to test that is at an election. The former Minister might be interested to know that you don’t have to just do what unelected bureaucrats say; you can take your responsibility and take initiative.

Did he see a proposal at Cabinet, as recommended by the Department of Conservation, to seek a decision on providing co-approval and co-development roles for post-settlement governance entities in the new conservation system?

Well, on behalf of the Prime Minister, I would need to revise all of the material that has come before Cabinet on that matter to be sure if such a proposal was mentioned in any of the papers. But I think what is very clear is that this Government believes that New Zealanders, while there are things that make us different—and we should celebrate many of them—at our heart are New Zealand citizens and human beings with the same rights and duties to access all of the opportunity that this great country has to offer.

Can the Prime Minister please confirm that the amendments set out in the proposed bill better clarify how section 4—the Treaty principles reference in the Conservation Act—will be interpreted for area planning and concession decision making, reducing immense frustrations amongst iwi, business—

No, no. You can ask him a question; you can’t tell him what the answer is. So we’ll leave that.

I didn’t hear the answer.

Read the Hansard; you’ll love it.

14:37 · to the Minister of Education

What recent announcement has the Government made about school property redevelopment projects?

Last week, the Government announced $56.6 million in redevelopment funding, delivering projects at six schools across New Zealand. This is part of the Government’s funding increase of $880 million into school property maintenance through Budgets 2024 and 2025 to start to clear the backlog of projects that have been languishing in the pipeline for years. It’s a significant investment into school maintenance, and we understand the importance of maintaining the assets that you have. This investment will give confidence to schools that we are prioritising maintenance that’s been deferred for years, giving families confidence that their children will be learning in warm, safe, dry classrooms.

Which schools are benefiting from this investment?

The investment will deliver 52 new and replacement classrooms at Kerikeri High School, Pinehill School, Hutt Intermediate, Natone Park School, Ashburton Intermediate School, and Māruawai College. This investment will replace ageing infrastructure and address long-standing condition issues at these schools, and construction is expected to begin within the next six months.

What is the Government doing to improve delivery of school property projects?

Our approach to school property is clear: deliver more classrooms more efficiently. Through the use of off-site manufactured builds and repeatable classroom designs, we’ve delivered 583 classrooms in 2024—31 percent more than 2023—delivering classrooms to many schools that have been waiting for some time. We’re also establishing the New Zealand School Property Agency to further improve infrastructure delivery and to drive even better value for money, and we’re funding and delivering the classrooms that our teachers and students deserve.

What feedback has she received on this announcement?

The Māruawai College principal said to the Otago Daily Times, “Minister Stanford rang me, she’s been taking a big interest in the development. I think this is a sign they’ve committed to modernising our school and once they’ve done this one, I think they’re committed to knocking down the rest. We’re absolutely thrilled. It’s a relief in so many ways.” The principal of Kerikeri High School told The Northern Advocate that the upgrade was long overdue and marked a significant step forward for the school.

14:39 · to the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs

Does he agree with Cameron Brewer’s statement about the Government’s supermarket policy, “it’s working”; if so, has increased competition brought prices down?

14:40

I always agree with the perpetually youthful Cameron Brewer, particularly that we are starting to see encouraging signs that reforms are improving grocery competition and are working. I’d like to thank Nicola Willis for the great work she is doing. This Government has moved quickly to reduce barriers to entry into the grocery sector, including creating an express lane for new supermarkets and strengthening penalties for misleading or deceptive pricing. Grocery prices are influenced by a range of factors, including global commodity prices, transport costs, energy prices, weather events, and wider inflation pressures. This Government is increasing competitive pressure across a range of sectors.

Yeah, good. Tighten it up a bit.

Will the Minister equip the Commerce Commission to improve competition law in response to a new report that describes that sector as one with little to no competition?

This Government is beefing up the Commerce Commission, as we will see with the Commerce Commission reforms. The member may point to that report, but everything she points to is everything that we are attacking, as far as financial services, as far as the energy sector, as far as the telecommunications sector. We are doing a lot, lot more than that Government did, which sat on its hands for six years and food inflation increased by over 12 percent in the year to March 2023.

Answers need to be confined to the question, otherwise there will be penalties for the Government side.

Is he scrapping his own Government’s big competition law change on pricing to ban predatory pricing?

We are focused on competition. We are focused on improving the competition settings across the supermarket sector, across the financial services sector, across the insurance sector, across the telecommunications and energy sector. We are the Government that is, for the first time in a long time, focused on competition, because we know that, with better competition settings, consumers benefit.

Is predatory pricing fine, and should consumers just accept it?

If this member was so interested in all these issues, they would not have sat on their hands for six years.

No, no—you can’t use a question like that to attack the questioner. Answer the question.

We are focused on predatory pricing, for sure. We are focused on fixing the Fair Trading Act, which is being introduced into the House, as you said, at 2 o’clock today: more penalties for those that are trading unfairly. We are squarely focused on all of these issues, more so than any Government ever before.

Has he funded and equipped the Commerce Commission to investigate the role that supermarket buyer power and own-brand labelling played in the closure of Wattie’s operations and the loss of local food production?

As I said before, with our Commerce Commission reforms, the Commerce Commission is being beefed up—is being beefed up—and any powers from the Grocery Commissioner, who is there till 2028, will be transferred over to the Commerce Commission, with a square focus on all the things that she has talked about today. We are focused solely on improving competition settings, and across a range of sectors. Again, I commend the good work that the Hon Nicola Willis has done in the grocery space and will continue to do.

No wonder Luxon thought he was an usher!

Will he advocate for New Zealand consumers, who are paying record prices—

No, just a moment. Nobody else speaks when someone is asking a question.

Will he advocate for New Zealand consumers, who are paying record prices for basic food while local manufacturers get priced out of existence?

Of course we will continue to advocate for those who are paying too high prices. That’s why this Government is singularly focused. That is why this Government is not like the other one, which saw, in the year to March 2023, food prices—there we go, Ms Williams—increased by over 12 percent in the year to March 2023. In the year to March 2026, food prices increased by 3.4 percent. It’s a much better improvement than that Government, when they sat on their hands.

Question No. 10—

Melissa Lee did better than that!

Listen, when I call a question, you stop talking.

You’re dead right.

That’s good. Do you want to make that more official, or you’re just saying you apologise and I take it, is how it works?

I’ll apologise over a drink.

14:45 · to the Minister for Resources

What reports, if any, has he seen on critical minerals?

I have seen reports that the country now realises that it is far wealthier than it initially thought it was. Critical minerals have now risen in value, and with the change to the Conservation Act it will be possible for investors and prospectors and explorers to gain easier access because of the development potential pertaining to critical minerals hidden in the Department of Conservation estate. I have just finished a meeting with Assistant Secretary Michael DeSombre explaining how the American critical minerals strategy—

Oh, right! Big—[Interruption] America.

—can work here in New Zealand.

Why do we need critical minerals?

Sadly, there are some parts of the country, and members from Taranaki, who do not understand the vital importance of vanadium and other such ingredients. From time to time, the matua must excuse the words that come from Luddites. Virtually every modern accoutrement has critical minerals involved, whether it is computers, whether it is phones, whether it is other ordinary essentials. New Zealand must contribute to supply lines and make its contribution as an OECD nation. With characteristic humility, the Minister for Resources will lead that effort.

How can the development of critical minerals support our economy?

There are various troublemakers—people spreading misinformation that the critical minerals sector does not represent economic opportunity. Nothing could be further from the truth. There will always be guardrails and various critters; they will be addressed in an appropriate way, whether it’s a gold mine, the development of antimony, or various properties associated with the iron sands or the mineral sands. It’s important that the $1.4 billion sector be enabled to grow, whether it’s through the fast-track legislation—and I accept—

Which have failed—which you failed.

—that in some areas—

You failed in seabed mining.

—the growth in intellect and the growth in intelligence will take a lot longer, and I fear that the longest period of time it will take will be around Ngāti Ruanui and Taranaki.

So insecure, just because you lost in seabed mining. That little iwi took you on and won.

Why should we develop critical minerals in New Zealand?

It could very well be that critical minerals are needed for hearing aids, and I rather fear that hearing aids are needed for the member from Western Māori sitting to my right.

No, no—there’s no need to make those comments.

Mr Speaker, I’m just talking about rare properties—

You’re obsessed with us.

—minerals—

Because you lost—

—critical contributors to the capacity of the member of Parliament—

You lost to little ol’ Taranaki iwi.

—to stop talking like a wounded hen—

That’s enough—

—and listen to the matua.

That’s enough. We’ll move now to question No. 11, David MacLeod.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. My question is to the Minister of—[Interruption]

We know who’s losing. You guys are goners.

Just a moment.

Haere rā! Haere rā!

Question time interrupted.

14:49

Yeah, haere rā, indeed—off you go.

Thank you. No one else will be speaking except for David MacLeod, who will now ask question No. 11.

to the Minister of Mental Health

What mental health support has the Minister recently announced to support businesses to improve productivity in the workplace?

The Government’s mental health plan is delivering faster access to support, more front-line workers, and a better crisis response. Today, I launched the new Business Mental Health Toolkit, which will support businesses to improve productivity in the workplace through better mental health. The tool kit is free and provides confidential mental health support, delivered in a way that works best for both employers and employees. That’s why we’ve worked with businesses to develop the free tool kit, aimed at medium- and small-sized businesses to help reduce barriers to faster mental health support.

What evidence shows that by improving mental health in the workplace, productivity can increase?

Poor mental health in the workplace can lead to decreased productivity and high absenteeism rates. Research shows that by improving mental health in the workplace, productivity can increase by around 6 percent to 10 percent. There is strong economic evidence for investing in better mental health in the workplace, with returns of around $5 for every $1 invested into initiatives such as employee assistance programmes. That’s why today I have launched a business mental health tool kit that delivers free and confidential mental health support in a way that works best for the workplace.

What real-time support does the business mental health tool kit provide?

For some workplaces, costs can be a barrier to accessing workplace support. The tool kit connects people to free, real-time, confidential support in a way that works for both employers and employees. People can download the Groov app for practical advice, call or text 1737 for free support with a trained counsellor 24/7, or book a time to see someone in person at Access & Choice mental health services.

What feedback has he seen on the launch of the business mental health tool kit?

Business Central and the Wellington Chamber of Commerce welcome the release of the business mental health tool kit, saying, “Often we find SMEs do not have easy access to timely mental health services or at an affordable cost. We are pleased that the Government has released this new tool, which will make these services more accessible.”, while Carly on LinkedIn said, “Cheers to more support for hard-working employees so that they can keep showing up as their best selves.” The business mental health tool kit is just another way the Government is supporting New Zealanders to get faster access to mental health support.

14:52 · to the Minister for Tertiary Education

Does she stand by her statement, “Obviously, when unemployment goes up, NEET numbers go up”; if so, why?

Yes. Young Kiwis who are not in employment, education, or training (NEET) are often more affected during periods of higher unemployment and economic uncertainty. That is why this Government is focused on rebuilding the economy, creating opportunities through education and training, and strengthening pathways from school into further education and work. Our focus is on ensuring that more young New Zealanders are equipped with the skills and the support they need to succeed.

Is she aware that nearly 100,000 young people are not engaged in education, employment, or training, and why has she done nothing about it?

We have done a great deal about engaging young NEETs, and, sadly, there have been a number of young people who have left school with low or no qualifications. That member might want to look at the NCEA issues that caused that. This Government has put in place extra Youth Guarantee places, an extra 175 places this year, to a total of 8,400 young people who participated in Youth Guarantee schemes over 2025; Apprenticeship Boost, which subsidises employers—over $25 million was spent on Apprenticeship Boost through Vote Social Development. Of course, the redesign of the vocational education and training system was to ensure that we restored regional leadership decision-making into the regions and led to better industry connections.

Good. That’ll do.

Are an additional 175 Youth Guarantee places going to even touch the sides when there are an additional 100,000 young people not engaged in education, training, or employment since last year?

Well, as I said before, the inaction of the previous Government in the compulsory education system—

No, no, no. Stop. Start the answer again.

There are more young people in the system who have left school with low or no qualifications due to not achieving well in the compulsory system in previous years, and, therefore, we are having to address catch-ups for those young students. We put an extra 175 places in for this year. The member will have to wait to see what we do in future Budgets.

Does she accept that by cutting the Apprenticeship Boost, she is responsible for the number of apprentices dropping by the thousands?

Well, of course the previous Government didn’t budget—

No, no. Sorry. In their answers, Ministers can comment on circumstances that they are having to deal with. They can’t start an answer with an accusation against a previous arrangement.

We funded Apprenticeship Boost when a fiscal cliff had been left for that initiative. In fact, we rescued Apprenticeship Boost so that we could continue to subsidise employers for eligible apprentices.

Does nearly 100,000 young people not engaged in education, employment, or training show that she is failing to help young people into work-based learning, polytechnic training, or university?

No, it shows that we are having to deal with an economy that was left in a mess so that we are having to grow the economy, keep inflation and interest rates down, reduce wasteful spending, and show discipline around Government spending to ensure that industries and businesses have the confidence to be able to employ young people.

Will she commit to helping universities and polytechnics so they can provide for increased enrolment demand, or will she continue to make them bear the financial brunt of her inaction?

Well, the member will have to wait to see at Budget time.

That concludes oral questions. We’ll take a few minutes for those who do need to leave the House to do so quickly and quietly. Yeah—quickly and quietly means no discussions on the way and no talking while you’re leaving.

14:58

I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business.

In six months, New Zealanders will go to the polls, and there is one question that is going to be front of mind for Kiwis when they decide who should lead this country after the election. It’s a simple question: are they better off now than they were three years ago? Are the bills easier to pay than they were three years ago? Is it easier to go to the supermarket and pay the bill than it was three years ago? Is it easier to fill up the car than it was three years ago? Is it easier to pay the power bill than it was three years ago? Is it easier to pay the rent than it was three years ago? The answer to those questions for most people is no.

The Government members over there say the answer to those questions was yes. That shows how out of touch they are with New Zealanders. Nicola Willis piping up there and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.”, shows that she has no idea the pain that New Zealand households have been feeling because of the bad decisions of this Government.

This year’s Budget is the Government’s last chance to show New Zealanders that they have a plan that extends beyond just a slogan, that they have more to offer New Zealand than just blame and excuses, that they actually feel the pain that New Zealanders are experiencing, and that they’re going to offer them some relief that might make life a bit more comfortable for New Zealand families.

So far, 2½ years into Government, all they’ve got is blame and excuses. We’ve had tax cuts for tobacco companies and tax cuts for landlords while New Zealanders find that the going gets tougher. Those who are working two jobs shouldn’t need to go to a food bank to put food on the table. Superannuitants shouldn’t be queuing up at food banks in order to put food on the table. I challenge members opposite to visit a local foodbank, because they will be told that that is exactly what is happening.

Across the country, Kiwis are struggling and this Government is in total denial about the state of the household economy in New Zealand. They are busy telling New Zealanders that there are green shoots, that we’ve turned the corner, when everything keeps getting harder and harder for New Zealand families. New Zealanders work harder and harder and yet they can’t make ends meet. More and more Kiwis, tens of thousands of Kiwis lose their jobs, and what do they get from this Government? A message from Nicola Willis—they just shouldn’t take it personally. There’s not much more to take personally than losing your job, and this Government is completely out of touch. Hard work is not enough for families to get ahead, and this Government have no answers for them.

As I travel around the country, everybody’s telling me that they’re disappointed in this Government. They voted for this Government on the basis that they said they were going to fix things. They said they were going to get the economy back on track.

Since then, they’ve shrunk the economy. They said they were going to get Kiwis back to work; more Kiwis lost their jobs. They said they were going to fix the cost of living; the cost of living has gotten worse. Everything this Government touches and fixes gets worse, and New Zealanders have had enough of it.

I’ll tell you what New Zealanders are also saying around the country—or not saying, more to the point—not one New Zealander is saying, “My life would be better if Nicola Willis just attacked Winston Peters a little bit more; if Shane Jones just attacked migrants a little bit more; if David Seymour just attacked the media a little bit more.” This is a Government focused on attacking other people, including fighting amongst themselves, rather than actually fixing the challenges that face New Zealanders.

This Government has an opportunity, in this year’s Budget, to actually show New Zealanders that there is reason to be hopeful, and yet nothing they’re doing so far suggests that they’re going to rise to that challenge. Nothing suggests that they are going to protect the public services that New Zealanders rely on every day. Nothing that they have been saying suggests that they’re going to provide some relief to New Zealanders. All they are doing is promising to make life harder for New Zealanders because that is what they have spent the last 2½ years doing. New Zealanders have heard the excuses, they’ve heard the infighting, they’ve heard the blame.

Three years on, they want to know that this Government is actually going to do something that makes their lives better. They are still waiting. On 7 November, they won’t have to wait anymore because they’ll be able to vote this Government out and vote for a Government that will actually take the concerns they’ve got seriously.

15:03

New Zealanders are working hard, they’re paying the bills, they’re keeping their heads down. They’re not asking for that kind of political theatre we’ve heard from the Leader of the Opposition, TikToks from the Greens, and press conferences announcing some latest focus group. That’s why ACT, in Government, is taking the same practical approach that Kiwi families are taking, because families are feeling pressure at the checkout, they’re seeing it in their household bills, energy bills, in the weekly petrol spend.

What is ACT doing in Government? Well, more supermarket competition to make sure that there is downward pressure on grocery prices; fewer barriers to rooftop solar, as announced by David Seymour recently, so households can lower their power bills; and more overseas building products allowed into New Zealand so builders and first-home buyers get the benefits of world-class products and world-class competition. Practical school transport rules for rural families, so if there’s a school bus going past your farm gate with an empty seat, your son and daughter can get on so you don’t have to make a separate trip to school. That’s practical ACT policy; thanks, Minister Andrew Hoggard, for suggesting that. Of course, making it easier for pharmacists to prescribe more medicines for common ailments—ACT has already brought back pseudoephedrines so New Zealanders can keep soldiering on, and there’s much more to come.

This is not just theory; it’s butter, petrol, lower rent, and the weekly shop being more affordable. When it comes to cutting the kind of red tape that has hung up New Zealand for years, the Resource Management Act is the worst example of it, because building a retaining wall, putting a granny flat on your property for your mum or a family member to live on, or even building a new home or a farm shed should not become a full legal project demanding multiple consultants and huge bills. This Government’s target, through the replacement of the Resource Management Act with the Planning and the Natural Environment Acts, as they will become, is to reduce the number of consents needed by Kiwis by 40 percent. What does that mean? Well, it means more houses being built—more cheaply, more quickly—getting the infrastructure we need and the energy we need delivered much faster. It means farmers, builders, and homeowners spending less time on paperwork. It also means, when it comes to basic services like water, electricity, and groceries, we have more competition and lower prices over time.

I just want to touch on energy security, because anyone who has filled up the truck, the ute, or the family car at the gas station has been feeling what that extra price means. There are some things that New Zealand has no control over, like foreign conflicts, things happening far over the horizon, but there are some things we do have control over. That’s why ACT has been proud to support the liquefied natural gas projects so we have gas security to underpin wholesale energy prices in the future and make sure they’re affordable, keeping industries and jobs here in New Zealand. We’ve made sure that New Zealand has enough diesel storage onshore, instead of the previous Government hosing out money to consumers and households during COVID, basically running up an ATM account, a credit card bill, for future taxpayers to pay, which led to huge interest rates and massive cost inflation in our economy. What this Government is doing, and why ACT is proud to be a part of it, is we’re focusing on practical solutions like fuel security, keeping inflation down, and making sure that Kiwis have choices in the future.

I just want to touch on something we heard this week: the Greens’ energy announcement. Now, I can see my colleague Lan Pham over there grinning wildly, because she has been proud to block roads, block mines, say how much she hates gas, blocking vital infrastructure and then acting surprised when prices go up. You can’t run a modern economy on vibes, hashtags, and a charging cable plugged into a wishful-thinking plug. You actually have to have policy that works to deliver energy. That is why ACT, in Government, has been proud to lead the development of the national policy statement for infrastructure. For the first time, the Resource Management Act actually says infrastructure is important; likewise, with the national policy statements for renewable energy and electricity networks. If we can make the pipe bigger, if we can deliver more supply, that means New Zealanders have more abundance when it comes to energy and everything else—more affordable choices. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

15:08

It’s easy to stand up in Parliament, as Chris Hipkins just did, and has done for 2½ years, and say, “Things are expensive. Things aren’t getting better. Life is hard.” That is true. It’s true for many people. It’s easy to say that; it’s harder to acknowledge why that is the case, and also, frankly, take some responsibility for why things are where they are, because inflation now and affordability concerns for Kiwis now did not materialise out of thin air in the last two years. They are a result of years of mismanagement by the previous Government. Economic effects have lag effects. It’s hard to acknowledge that. It’s even harder, as the Labour Party is finding at the moment, to actually come up with policies to deal with the complaints that they have.

What is the answer, ultimately, to affordability, to the cost of living, and to our standard of living, as New Zealanders? Well, there’s kind of two tracks. One is what I call “sugar-hit economics”, which is handouts that feel good at the time but don’t actually deal with the underlying issues. The cost of living payment was an example of this. People will remember the 2022 Budget: money handed out to dead people, French backpackers, investment bankers in London who still had a New Zealand tax residency—bit of extra lolly to get through the winter on the way to the election. We had the fuel tax cuts that were first meant to be temporary for three months, then they went to six months, then they went to nine months, then they went to 12 months. Yeah, sure, cut the price of petrol for a bit, but the expense was higher debt and that, ultimately, we all are paying for now—or have paid for through higher interest rates and higher inflation. You can have sugar policies that make you feel good for a while, but they don’t actually deal with the issues. That’s one path.

The second path is the path this Government is taking, which is harder, involves courage, involves boldness, involves tough decisions, involves actually weighing up trade-offs, and involves, actually, being honest and up front with New Zealanders that we can’t do everything all at the same time and that actually dealing with the structural issues in the New Zealand economy will take time, take courage, and take action. That’s why planning reform—multi-year, once in a generation, comprehensive reform to lift our living standards—is so important. That’s why the work that Erica Stanford is doing in education is not a sugar hit. Actually, that is going to take year after year of sustained effort to lift our education standards, which will have flow-on effects to the 2030s and beyond.

That’s why the work that Chris Penk is doing in building and construction is so important. Sorting out our earthquake-prone building legislation is not a sugar hit. It’s complicated, it’s difficult, but it’s the right thing to do. Likewise, sorting out the liability issues, joint and several liability, that successive Governments have put in the too-hard basket for 30 years is so important. Some of the work that Louise Upston is doing across our welfare system, making sure that the system is a hand up, not a handout, is so important. Again, it’s not a sugar hit; it’s not easy. Multi-year, long-term, sustained reform—that is the answer to our productivity challenge.

The honest truth is that we are nowhere near as wealthy a country as we think we are. The honest truth is that our productivity rates are on par with countries that experienced 40 years of communism: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania. As a small country of 5 million people at the bottom of the world, we need to be more nimble and more agile, and we need to take bolder action than other countries that have the luxury of natural resources or the luxury of hundreds of millions of people on their market next to them. We don’t have that luxury. What do we have? We have cheap and abundant renewable energy. We have the best people in the world, the smartest people in the world. We’ve got some work to do, but, by God, we’ve got the right opportunities.

If you go to the Labour Party website right now—I don’t suggest you do, but if you do—you will find five policies. I’ve done the math on the policies. There are five of them. Four of them are actually about the doctors visits. There are 23 photos across three policy documents; they mention the word “tax” 66 times. But here’s the number of actual policy ideas to deal with the underlying issues in the New Zealand economy. Here’s the number: zero. They are taking the public for fools at the moment. This Government has the long-term answers for New Zealand’s future.

15:14

The last 30 seconds of that member’s speech is exactly why New Zealand is in the position that it is in. With higher business liquidations, lower business confidence, inflation going up, interest rates on their way up, because that side of the House who are in Government—you are the Crown—are so focused on the Opposition that the Ministers, one of the most senior Ministers, would spend time going through the Labour Party website to count photos and count how many times they say a particular word. That is why New Zealand is in the position that we are in. It’s because they are not focused on the issues that matter to New Zealanders.

Recently, we’ve had a death in Porirua which I want to acknowledge and take a moment to acknowledge today. We’ve had a kaimahi and kaitiaki toi Māori, Nathan Rei, who has passed away. He is incredibly important to our whole Wellington region. There are pou, there is waharoa, there are tukutuku panels. There are carvings, including inside this place, which Nathan Rei helped to carve and has taught the next generation of carvers. I acknowledge Nathan Rei, the Rei whānau, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, for the loss of their kaumātua. I say haere, haere, haere atu rā.

In two weeks’ time, Nicola Willis will stand up in this House and deliver her Budget.

Her last Budget.

What did you say? Her last Budget—her last Budget. Here is the only test that matters to New Zealanders: does it make my life better? Does it make New Zealanders’ lives better? This Government promised to fix the cost of living, and it hasn’t. It has made it worse. If this Budget doesn’t lower costs, doesn’t protect jobs, and doesn’t support businesses and give families genuine relief, it will seal the legacy of a Government that broke its promises to the people who trusted it to New Zealanders.

After nearly three years of National’s mismanagement, families are actually paying more. Businesses are struggling. Confidence is falling. New Zealand cannot continue on this path. It is true that global instability has paid some part in the last two months, but that’s not an excuse for the last 2½ years, because it’s worse. Unemployment is now at a 14-year high despite their targets. Some 40,000 more New Zealanders are out of work; business liquidations are at a 15-year high. I don’t want to talk about the 12,000 construction sector roles that we’ve lost, the 1,500 engineers that we have lost, and the police people who are leaving our shores and going to Australia. That is not the New Zealand we need, where we are losing our skilled workers. The National Government has had three years to come up with a plan, and what have we seen instead? Tax breaks for tobacco companies and property speculators, and cuts to services that our families and every community depend on.

Now, everywhere I go—whether it’s Queenstown, whether it’s Northland, whether it’s in my home of Porirua—Kiwis are really worried about filling up their petrol tanks. This Government’s approach, though, is to let high prices do the rationing. What does that say to New Zealanders? It says if you can’t afford fuel, that’s too bad; it’ll go to those who can afford it. That’s not the New Zealand that we want.

What’s your solution?

The member over there is asking for our solution. It was quite interesting to hear from the Minister a really superficial discussion about sugar-rush economics. Where did you get that key line? Where did you get that key line? Actually, one of Labour’s solutions—which if the Minister actually read it properly; quite clearly he’s reading with a bit of difficulty—access to capital is one of the reasons why New Zealand’s productivity is lagging. What is Labour’s solution to that? The New Zealand future fund—that’s what it’s about. If you look at Ireland, they have a very simple sovereign wealth fund; Mark Carney and Canada just released their own sovereign wealth fund—[Interruption]

There’s a lot of noise coming from over there. That’s because once you actually provide a solution, they’re so worried. Because, actually, what it’s going to deal with is access to capital, which is one of the reasons why New Zealand’s productivity is going down. When Nicola Willis stands up in two weeks and points to global instability, New Zealanders, ask yourself: am I any better off?

Mr Speaker, I couldn’t—

No, I haven’t called you. The Hon Nicola Willis—[Interruption] Sorry. Well, they all look the same.

15:19

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, I sat through the Leader of the Opposition’s speech thinking to myself, “My God, that man needs to take some responsibility.” I can only echo the sentiment having heard the Labour Party finance spokesperson just give that five-minute diatribe, because I cannot help but think—and I’m sure members across the House will agree—the very cheek of it! The absolute audacity of the Labour leader to stand in this House, the very architect of New Zealand’s recent economic demise, to sit here and gaslight this country and gaslight this chamber into thinking that he had nothing to do with it.

There’s a magic number here. It’s not so magic; it’s actually an appalling number: $180 billion debt. That is what that previous Government landed on the people of New Zealand. It is a $9.5 billion per annum interest bill. It is a number that has been canvassed multiple times in this House, but we have to keep repeating it. We have to keep reminding New Zealand of the tripartite of chaos that will continue to spend and spend and spend, like that $9.5 billion in interest payments, which covers the vast majority of our Corrections, our Justice, and our Police budgets in this country. A $180 billion debt is what Chris Hipkins was responsible for leaving this country with.

So I ask for this country, I ask this House, to turn their minds to what this Government is doing to really truly make a difference for New Zealanders across the country. It is across the gamut. This Government has been working incredibly hard for two and a half years to advance proposals and regulatory and legislative changes that are making a real difference to the lives of New Zealanders. We are doing things that impact the everyday lives, like driving down the cost of rental: 120 bucks a week on average in my district alone. We have done that by pulling back on unnecessary Government expenditure. We are driving down inflation, as and where we can possibly do it. That, in turn, is driving down interest rates, which are having a real material difference to the lives of New Zealanders and how they go about supporting their families.

We are investing in health. That side of the House doesn’t like the people of New Zealand to know that, but a record investment in Pharmac: $688 million, having inherited a fiscal cliff. Labour forgets to tell the people of New Zealand they did not fund Pharmac. We have taken hold of it, and, thanks to David Seymour, who is the lead Minister responsible for that, 66 new medicines are being funded; 33 new cancer medicines that literally, tangibly save people’s lives. Again, that side forgets about it or chooses to ignore it entirely.

We’re doing what we can to power up the productive economy. We make no apology. We want this country to make money. We want the people of New Zealand to feel wealth. Not only do we want rural communities to grow and enhance their wealth, we want the entire country to grow and enhance its wealth. That’s why we’re doing what we can to power up farming in New Zealand. We have peeled back the red tape and the green tape, and David Parker and Damien O’Connor and the rest of the henchmen of the apocalypse had left rural New Zealand absolutely hamstrung. We had a negative sentiment of I think it was about minus 66 percent. It has turned around positive. It’s gone up 99 percent in terms of farmer sentiment and confidence. That, again, is a real, tangible result thanks to the work that this Government is doing.

But guess what? All of that work that our farmers are doing—we need markets to sell our products to. We have got out on the world stage. We have got on planes. We have hustled. Todd McClay needs to take a bow. That lot over the other side of the House said it couldn’t be done. They threatened and they blustered and guffawed and they cavorted around, saying “We’re not going to sign it. We’re not sure what’s in it.” We are going to pass this deal with India. It is one of the most progressive, exciting opportunities for this country that we have seen in decades. We’re very much looking forward to it.

There is so much to talk about that we are doing to improve the lives of New Zealanders through a real disciplined approach to the economics and to the fiscals of this country. We make no apologies for it. We’re looking forward to another term or two to continue the work we’re doing to improve the lives of Kiwis around this country and, indeed, the world.

15:24

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. The Government likes to talk a lot about aspiration, but the reality is, for most New Zealanders, all they are seeing right now is desperation. This Government would like to keep pretending that they can blame someone else or there’s some other cause going on for the current cost of living crisis that Kiwis are facing right now, but the truth is that it is the result of their political choices, and Kiwis know that.

Right now, unemployment is at a 14-year high. We have 40,000—40,000 more New Zealanders are out of work because National took office, and that has happened during their run. Business liquidations: business liquidations are the highest they’ve been in 15 years. Try and blame someone else for that. There are record numbers of young people—Kiwis—leaving our country because of those numbers. That is not a coincidence. That is the direct consequence of decisions that this Government made—decisions that have weakened growth, decisions that have undermined business confidence and left too many families and too many businesses carrying those costs.

Governments are judged by the conditions that people are living through, and Kiwis know that well and good right now. We know that things are getting harder under this Government. We know when jobs are disappearing. We know when our kids are leaving to go to Australia because there are no opportunities here for New Zealanders. Here are the facts: close to 100,000 young people are not in training, education, or employment. In the last quarter alone, it increased by 9,000—the last quarter increased by 9,000. You would think that that would set an alarm bell going for the Government to have some kind of strategy or think group or understand what might be happening and how they might intervene—but nothing. They’re sitting on their hands, simply blaming others and saying, “Oh, we’ll just wait for the economic winds of change to whisk things off to a better place.” Young people are doing what they’re being told to do. They’re studying, they’re training, they’re applying for job after job after job and not getting an outcome, when this Government is pulling the ladder up from under them. National promised New Zealanders opportunity. What young people got instead were cuts and nothing to hope for in New Zealand.

Let’s just outline some of the job opportunities that National has cut. We’ll do the top five, if we can get through them. Number one: the Apprenticeship Boost that helped thousands of young people into trades. At a time when we need more builders, more sparkies, more people trained up, they cut the Apprenticeship Boost and then they blamed Labour because they cut it. Number two: they cut Māori trades training in the last Budget. Number three: Tupu Aotearoa, a programme focused on rangatahi Māori and Pacific into work and training opportunities—cut that one too, now. Number four: scrapped the graduate programmes that help different groups and ethnic communities into public sector jobs—that one’s gone. Then they changed the Fees Free to third year and broke their promise and scrapped it completely. Number six: they increased university fees by 6 percent. They put up university fees while students are already struggling with rent, with food, and with public transport. “Oh, and, by the way, we’ll cut the half-price public transport while we’re at it.”

This is the pattern with this Government: cut, cancel, and walk away and sit on their hands. They say it’s not the Government’s job to create people’s jobs: “That’s not our job. We just create the economic conditions for them to happen.” Well, how’s that going? A hundred thousand young people not in education, work, or employment. Behind every statistic there is a young person wondering if there’s going to be a job out there. School leavers sending CV after CV with no return in the mail. A graduate with debt, moving back home because they can’t afford to do anything else. An apprentice whose pathway got cancelled because of the choices of this Government. The numbers keep getting worse. Youth unemployment is now three times higher than the unemployment rate.

This is what failure looks like. While National cuts programmes, Labour’s vision is to give opportunity. We want someone to have a job, to have healthcare, and to have a home. That’s why Labour has already committed to three free GP visits, to building a Future Fund that gives us opportunity, and to making sure that we have a pathway forward for our young people and giving them some hope so they stay in New Zealand, whereas that Government doesn’t care about our future, does not care about our young people, and that is evident in the statistics that we have to live with.

15:29

Ngā mihi, Mr Speaker. Ko te rākau e tupu ana, e taea te whakahoki ki te one i tupu ake ai? Nō reira ko tātou ko te kauri, ko te kauri ko tātou.

[A tree that is growing, can it be returned to the soil in which it grew? Therefore, we are the kauri, and the kauri is us.]

We are the kauri, and the kauri is us. This morning, I had the privilege of speaking at the final reading of the settlements of Ngāti Hei, Ngāti Tara Tokanui, and Ngāti Rāhiri Tumutumu. Something struck with me in those readings of those histories of those iwi across the common history of extractive industry and pollution across their rohe, their whenua, their water: kauri logging, kauri gum digging, flax milling, goldmining, overfishing. But these iwi have derived almost no benefit from these industries, and the long-term damage done to the environment in their rohe is a rightful source of grievance.

Settlements can serve as the reminders to all of us, the drivers that we need to avoid for future injustice. We have to learn consistently from what we have seen happen. The evidence is there that when profits are put over people and the planet, it benefits the few and not the many. We have to learn that extractive, exploitative practices do nothing but leave behind a tale of destruction and reward only the wealthy few. All the while, hapū, iwi, tangata whenua, ordinary people at local community levels are left to clean up intergenerational mess, to bear the hardest burden of having their waters and soils and their diverse ecosystems destroyed by these short-term extractive industries.

For te iwi Māori, for all people of New Zealand, the use of the natural environment is who we are. The Great Walks just opened, I think, in the past couple of days and sold out, which we see every single year, because why? Because we love our precious spaces, our wild nature, our diverse indigenous species, our ecosystems, and the habitats that we rely on. It’s clear about what we love, but our environment is also at risk. Over 4,000 of our native taonga species are at risk or threatened with extinction.

This Government has made it clear that when forced to choose between the interests of industry or the interests of the law or the public or the environment, it will always choose the bulldozer. Of course, alongside this Government’s atrocious attempts and constant undermining of Crown-Government relations, this Government’s war on nature will perhaps also be its most consistent legacy. I’ve got a list here—I’m checking the clock, and I’ve got to take a breath because it’s a bit of a list and it’s not even exhaustive.

This Government have passed the Fast-track Approvals Act, and the most harmful, destructive mining practices are getting fast tracked, for example. They have removed te mana o te wai from freshwater rules, weakened environmental bottom lines for fresh water, made it easier to mine coal and wetlands, reversed the ban on oil and gas, reversed New Zealand’s previous restrictions to bottom trawling seamounts in international waters; extended marine farm consents by 25 years in spite of significant environmental impact of marine farms, weakened climate targets, cut jobs at the Ministry for the Environment, cut jobs at the Department of Conservation, cut jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency, cut funding for native tree planting, ended plans to make farmers pay for pollution, cut funding for climate science, allowed commercial fishing in the Hauraki Gulf for the new high-protection areas, and enabled easier killing of kiwi by developers.

If I continued my list, we would be here all day; all the while, Ministers are wining and dining dairy and seafood and mining industry lobbyists; selling our precious places to the highest bidder. Then we turn to what Mr Luxon and his Cabinet are currently up to: making it easier to sell off public conservation land into private commercial activity on public conservation land. They are disestablishing the voices at the heart of Government for the environment. They’re giving more power to companies and businesses to do what they want with our environment by restricting climate litigation. It’s a complete and utter farce of the contract that we all care about which is protecting our ecosystems that we also rely on to live, not just for today but for generations to come.

This is a Government not for ordinary people. These are their political choices. This is who they are showing that they serve. The Green Party will continue to prioritise our taiao, our living systems, and the benefit of the many and not just the few, because that is a long-term economic vision and strategy that we are proud of. When the only way to economic fiscal strategy is by destroying the environment is what you think is all you’re up to, then you are limited. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

15:34

Thank you, Mr Speaker. National is fixing the basics and building for the future. We’re not going to be punishing those people who want to build. We will be promoting building and we’re looking forward and being aspirational, far more than what the other side is doing. We’re not reheating some failed tax policy and, in particular, taxes that New Zealanders have rejected time and time again. That, of course, is a capital gains tax.

We’ve been here before over the last couple of decades. Even in the last Government, there were some that wanted it, and some that didn’t want it. There was no consensus and in the end they walked away. Now, however, with an election on the horizon, they’re reheating it, putting it back on the table, dressing it up with a few more garnishes, putting a different language around it, wrapping it in a different bow. But don’t be fooled, it is the thin edge of the wedge, and we have proof right here in our backyard of what is going to happen.

We’ve already run this experiment time and time again. We know how it ends; we just need to look at Australia, but we also can look at our own country. Between 2017 and 2023, Labour extended the brightline test, removed interest deductibility, and declared war on property investors. Their stated goal: housing affordability. What was the actual result? Rents rose $175 on average a week, right? That’s nearly $9,000 each year just to keep a roof over your head.

Officials explicitly warned that was going to happen. Mind you, Ministers of the previous Government got warned about many things that they ignored; some more serious, some would say. They went ahead anyway. Renters paid the price; university students paid the price because of those policies. And house prices? Up 30.5 percent in a single year. That’s the fastest in living history. These policies were designed to make housing more affordable, but, unfortunately, they made it a lot worse.

Luckily, under this Government, housing affordability has improved. We have close to 29 percent of real estate sales now going to first-home buyers, the highest it’s ever been for decades. We are seeing more New Zealanders getting into the housing market now than the previous Government. When Labour says, this time, a capital gains tax will help first-home buyers, we are entitled to ask, “Why would we believe you? That’s what you said last time.”

Barbara Edmonds stood up and said, “Is this Budget going to make life easier?” Well, I’ll tell you what: it is, because the last Government definitely did not. This is a tax on saving. It’s not on privilege. A teacher who bought a property and held on to it; the family has scraped together a deposit for a second house for their retirement. These are not speculators. These are people that are being financially prudent, trying to do what actually we all should be doing, building financial resilience. That’s what this Government is trying to do for the country.

A capital gains tax—what would it tell these people? It would be that your patience will be penalised, your prudence will be penalised, and your savings, which are already eroded by inflation—luckily, we’ve managed to get that under control—will be taxed again when you finally sell. This is not fairness. This is a State punishing prudence and it won’t just stop at property. Labour says that KiwiSaver is exempt, and on paper it probably is. If we look at that little bit further, we find that when you dig a little bit deeper, many KiwiSaver funds have property companies in their portfolios. When these companies try and do business, their profits are going to be lower. Lower profits means their returns for everyday KiwiSaver members are going to be down, and, more importantly, this is how tax creep happens. You establish a principle in property and suddenly they’re looking around when they need the magic money tree, and they’re going to go, “What about this? What about that? Why should capital gains just be on property?” Then it becomes on KiwiSaver. Then it becomes on other things.

Labour has proposed a capital gains tax five times since 1973. Each time, the boundaries have moved. It started narrow; it always grows. The real problem is actually supply when it comes to houses, not investors. When you tax landlords out of the market, they are no longer going to be providing houses. When there are no houses to rent, property prices go up. So what are we doing? We’re making sure we’re dealing with the supply side of the market. The Government is doing the hard work. We’re going for growth in housing, which is increasing the land through re-zoning. We’re also making sure it’s easier to build by dealing with the Resource Management Act. That alone will eliminate nearly half of all consents that are needed. We are—[Time expired]

15:39

Imagine being at the Auckland Hospital emergency department, waiting hours and hours for a doctor, and the only thing that catches your eye is a big fat rat running around on the floor. Well, that’s exactly what happened in Auckland recently—in fact, 100,000 people have seen it on TikTok. But what’s worse is that at Hillmorton Hospital in Christchurch, there’s not one rat but a rat infestation—rats running around the Fergusson building.

But guess what? Wait, there’s more—there’s not just rats; there’s security issues. Currently, there is an active incident report of someone bringing a weapon into a mental health facility at Hillmorton. That is how bad conditions have got under this Government in our mental health facilities. There’s chronic understaffing, burnout, unsafe conditions, broken doors—doors that let patients go out into the public when they shouldn’t, but doors that lock staff into the unit when they should be able to move about freely. There is a massive shortage of senior doctors; there is an abuse of seclusion, where people are being kept in seclusion for far too long.

But guess what? That’s not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that patients are being let back into the community when they are not ready to be there safely. That is what people should be concerned about. We know with Hillmorton that there have been tragedies that have occurred through this terrible situation with our mental health facilities. It is no fault of the doctors; it is no fault of the hard-working staff; it is no fault of the families who are left to pick up the pieces. This is what happens when mental health is forgotten and where there is chronic underfunding. Where is the Minister for Mental Health? Well, he’s been missing in action. Workers have been calling on him to intervene—crickets, nothing from him.

But guess what? That’s not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that Hillmorton is only one example. What about what’s happening at Nelson Hospital? Again, doors not locking properly, doors locking staff in, very unwell patients being able to get out—these are the reports from the front line, from mental health workers who I have spoken to face to face. It’s not just Nelson, and it’s not just Hillmorton; it’s the Waikato—reports of violence and assaults in mental health wards, of staff saying that patients are becoming increasingly agitated, and the wards are becoming increasingly overcrowded.

What about Waikeria Prison? The Ombudsman—not just anybody, the Ombudsman—talked about the poor conditions, understaffing, excessive lock-up times, and inadequate mental health support. That is because our mental health services have been cut to the bone. It is being held together by exhausted staff. This is what under-resourcing looks like under this Government: burnt out workers, unsafe facilities, delayed care, and vulnerable mental health patients and the community being placed at greater risk.

The Government is saying there are no front-line cuts. Well, how does that land? The Government is saying that they are resourcing extra jobs—let’s take a look at that. Minister Doocey announced 40 extra places for mental health crisis teams nationally. As of today, guess how many of those 40 have been recruited. How many have been recruited? Would there be 20—maybe half? Maybe 10? As of today, three out of those 40 places have been recruited.

Meanwhile, down South, where I live, what’s happening to emergency departments? People with psychosis are being turned away—not a single increase, not a double increase, but a tenfold increase. Ten times as many people turning up to an emergency department in the southern region are getting turned away. These are people with psychosis; they’re seriously ill, needing support, needing help, needing to be kept safe from themselves, and needing their communities to be kept safe from them until they can get well. Where do they go? This is what is happening in our health system.

Things have got worse under National. Every region has experienced, in real terms, cuts to their health budgets, and mental health has been cut to the bone. There is no plan. Labour will make sure that mental health is taken seriously, and that those three free GP visits will enable people to access specialist mental health care faster by at least being able to go to their GP when they start to become unwell.

There is no plan from this Government. We have not seen anything except lip service; except, today, an announcement about a digital service. Where are the front-line staff? We need to change this Government. The plan is November 7.

15:44

This morning, I had the great pleasure of spending four hours here in the House after a fantastic mihi whakatau for ngā iwi e toru o ngā Hauraki Plains, and I had the great opportunity to speak about the settlement for those three iwi. As we did so, more good news came through that I was on the general debate. Huri ōku whakaaro ki tōku hapori ake—my thoughts immediately turned to my own community. As we were celebrating the tremendous work—I keep looking back up there, because that’s where the iwi were gathered—of the negotiators on both the side of the communities of the Crown, my thoughts turned to the peacemakers of Maungakiekie. In my remaining time, I wanted to give you a quick tour de force of the people who are changing the lives of families and individuals of Maungakiekie.

First of all, I want to acknowledge—this has been my first opportunity to do this in this House since I attended the Governor-General’s service at her mansion in Mt Eden, just outside my electorate there in Central Auckland, a few weeks ago, where Jocelyn Grantham and Dr Fahima and Dr Arif Saeid received their King’s Honours. I’ve known Jocelyn and her husband for many years, and she is one of those quiet stalwarts of the community that sees an action that needs to be done, rolls up her sleeves, and gets on and does it. She has established both Te Papapa Preschool, Te Papapa Early Childhood Education Trust, and Tō Wāhi, which is an amazing community service centred right in the middle of Onehunga—actually in Oranga, one of my favourite parts of the country.

From there, they run an op-shop with inexpensive clothing, household items, community meals, te reo classes, barista training, and nutrition and fitness classes. Jocelyn has provided and found work for previously unemployed women across the social strata. She really is one of those social warriors, and to see her acknowledged and recognised at the highest level—the highest office in our land—was remarkable, as it was with Dr Fahima and Dr Arif, who seven years ago, as refugees themselves from Afghanistan, not that many years previously coming to our land, saw the needs of many other refugees that were coming and, together, co-founded the New Settlers Family and Community Trust in Royal Oak.

I connected with them there; I went and visited them a couple of weeks ago, and as I went down the driveway to their office, one of the things that struck me was that they were one of 12 different community organisations spread across about three acres of a property that is owned there by the Salvation Army. Again, I was struck with the number of people in my community of Maungakiekie who are investing their lives in improving the lives of others.

Later that same day, I had the opportunity to visit the Hearing House in Greenlane. Over the last 15 years, they have developed a $13 million premise there, and every single dollar of it has come from fundraising and come from the community. Yes, they provide Government-funded cochlear implants, and it literally transforms the lives of hundreds of people. The partnership there—between the community, between social entrepreneurs, and between Government—is the kind of vision that we have in this Government for flourishing communities, and we see it firsthand in Maungakiekie. We see it there with the likes of Disability Connect in Penrose; at Vinnies in Onehunga; at the amazing Mount Wellington or Maungarei Community Christian Trust; and at the CNSST Foundation in Panmure, let by the inimitable Jenny Wang, who over the last 20 years has supported hundreds if not thousands of new settlers in this country to thrive in our communities.

I wanted to acknowledge these people because it is these kinds of lives, these kinds of efforts, and these kinds of applications of people who see a problem that needs to be addressed—they see a gap in a community, they see people struggling, and they get on and they create an organisation, and they gather the resources and the people around them, and in doing so they become a blessing to us all.

I also want to mention—because I had the opportunity to take Minister Tama Potaka to both these places recently—Community Finance in Ellerslie, and the Home Foundation. Community Finance didn’t exist just a handful of years ago. As of last week, they have raised half a billion dollars from private funding—they are a charitable trust—to fund community housing providers in this country They are now, in Maungakiekie alone, providing well over a thousand social houses and affordable homes. Again, it’s that partnership between a Government that sees the power of the community sector to meet needs in a way that central government seldom can and those kinds of social and commercial entrepreneurs.

I am passionate about Maungakiekie; I am passionate about communities all across this country, and I’m excited about the fact that we could be here for many, many years to come. Tēnā koe.

15:50

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Well, as part of the redoubling of the war on nature, as this Government fast approaches the end of their one term, they are redoubling with a scorched earth policy.

Oh, are you talking about your own career, Steve?

They are talking about—hey, I’m not getting personal, Grant; I’m talking about your whole party. This Government has just committed to mining 40 percent of our conservation estate; the Minister was telling us about it at question time today. They have committed and redoubled on the bottom-trawling trashing of our oceans through the fisheries bill they’re passing. This week, we hear that the Government is now shutting down the public’s pathway to take New Zealand’s biggest polluters to court for the impacts they are having on our lives.

Minister Goldsmith has promised to kill the Mike Smith case currently before the courts, which addresses the vast plume of pollution coming from our biggest six polluters. The Minister says the matter can be handled in legislative frameworks around climate change, such as the emissions trading scheme or the zero carbon Act response. However, Fonterra, our biggest climate polluter, is not part of the emissions trading scheme, because the gases it primarily emits, methane and nitrous oxide—the superheating gases which make up 50 percent of New Zealand’s total pollution—are exempt from the emissions trading scheme. What exactly is the framework that the Minister talks about?

This is exactly and precisely the reason you need to bring a court case to the Supreme Court, because the failure of Government systems to actually reduce emissions and hold our most polluting industries accountable is why the case is possible. I attended the hearings of the Mike Smith case a couple of years ago, and the principle was that if there is insufficient action at the political level, it must be the recourse of the citizen to go to court to protect themselves from harm caused by the pollution of a company. It’s based on old principles of tort law—centuries of jurisprudence, primarily around river pollution from the United Kingdom—and the Supreme Court deliberated at length and agreed that there was a case to be heard.

Now, this Government hates comity. They are very happy to interfere and shut down cases where they don’t like the direction they’re going in. The principle of comity is simple—that a court case should be allowed to run its course, and, nevertheless, the executive retains the ability to overturn a decision if they don’t like it. They can change the law, but they shouldn’t interfere and stop the court case from proceeding.

Part of Mike Smith’s case was the fact that his hapū and his iwi and his whānau would be affected by climate change. We just heard a new climate report that colonisation has intensified Māori exposure to climate risk, degrading whenua and taonga while worsening impacts on health, housing, and wellbeing. The latest report explicitly identifies Māori as facing disproportionate, severe, and interconnected climate impacts. The report “accurately acknowledges that many kāinga, despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the frontline of increasingly severe climate events.” When there’s a disaster in your region, you go to the local marae, and you know you’ll get fed and you know you’ll get a place to sleep. Mike Smith is a rangatira of Ngāpuhi, and he is a first responder challenging the catastrophic impacts of our biggest polluters.

Nullification of the rule of law, done by the same Minister who rose raised the bar so high in the marine and coastal area Act that it’s near not worth going to court to claim that common law right—not a Treaty right but a common law right—likewise, wiped out pay equity. It seems that this Government is not just anti-Treaty; it is anti - British common law when it can be used to affect justice for Māori—or women, for that matter, because it was also used to stop the pay equity.

This is the war on nature writ large, through nullification of the right of people to use the law to check the rampant behaviour of corporations who are harming citizens through their pollution, and it’s actually an attack on the rule of law in general. This Government will stoop to the lowest depths it can, surely before it exits and is replaced by a much better and just Government from this side of the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

15:55

I rise today not merely as the MP for Tāmaki Makaurau, nor as a member for Te Pāti Māori, but as a messenger for Te Wao Nui o Tiriwā—the Waitakere Ranges—for the ancient kauri, who stood long before this Parliament existed, for the awa that once ran clear enough to mirror the stars, and for the kererū, whose wings will still thunder through the valleys like the heartbeat of the forest itself. If this House will not hear the tangi of the ngahere, then who will? Whakapapa, whenua, whanaungatanga are the threads that bind us to Papatūānuku, to the mother Earth.

For some in this House, the Waitakere Ranges are a green backdrop, a scenic amenity, but for the people of West Auckland, for Te Kawerau ā Maki, for the whānau of Hoani Waititi Marae, who have lived in the shadow of these ranges for more than 45 years, this is not scenery; this is a tipuna, this is tuakiri—identity—and this is our home, kāinga. Yet this Government calls its reforms “progress”. Minister Chris Bishop says the Resource Management Act is a gale-force headwind, battling any attempts to develop anything, anywhere—a headwind. To the ngahere, to Te Wao Nui o Tiriwā, those protections are not obstacles; they are the very lungs of our existence of Tāmaki Makaurau. They are the arteries. They are the thin line between survival and collapse.

This Government speaks of streamlining, of cutting bureaucracy, of fewer consents, but the ngahere knows another word for it. Guess what that is? Violation—an opening of wounds that have never healed since the first axe met ancient bark, since whenua became commodity, since awa became infrastructure, since the living world became measured only by what could be extracted from it. Te Wao Nui o Tiriwā is not vacant land waiting for economic activation; it is alive. It holds whakapapa in every root system and every layer of soil. The moss remembers what this country has forgotten. The manu remember songs no longer sung by the people.

Yet this Government advances reforms that weaken environmental protections and sideline Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations in environmental law. Chris Bishop confirmed Cabinet agreed not to include a Treaty clause in the replacement legislation—imagine that, removing Te Tiriti from the laws governing the whenua itself in a country founded upon Te Tiriti o Waitangi. When you bulldoze these laws, you bulldoze the history, the identity, and the rangatiratanga of the people who stand as kaitiaki of these taonga. This is not just environmental vandalism; it is an assault on the mana of West Auckland, of all of Tāmaki Makaurau.

The Government promises development and economic opportunity, but they do so at the expense of our native flora and fauna. They ignore the sanctity of our waterways: Nihotupu; Ngā Wai o Pareira; Ōpanuku, the life force that flows out to Ōrangihina and Ngā Wai o Te Mataa—the Waitematā. By failing to cross-reference the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act 2008 in the new Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill, this Government renders these protections toothless. They invite a death by a thousand cuts upon our most sacred taonga.

The submissions are clear. Dr Juliet Batten speaks of the cruel twist of seeing decades of protection wiped out. Dr T M Jenkin, with 73 years’ history in these hills, says this “sloppy drafting” is a betrayal. Glenys Scott warns that we cannot trade a dark-sky reserve for short-term regulatory ease. Even Susan Parker wrote to me to say that these taonga are what make living in this city of Tāmaki Makaurau worthwhile.

Then we heard the conservation Minister say that saving every species may simply be too expensive. Too expensive? Come on. Tell that to the kiwi—the actual kiwi; the bird. Tell that to the pekapeka. Tell that to the kōkako, whose call grows fainter every single year. What is the market value of extinction? What is the dollar amount attached to the final birdsong of a species found nowhere else in the world? Five minutes is not long enough to speak for our native species, our native rākau.

I leave you with this: the Waitakere Ranges are among the last and greatest lungs of Tāmaki-makau-rau, and lungs are not optional. Future generations will ask only this: did you protect what was sacred? Did you defend the forests when they could no longer defend themselves? And did you act as an ancestor worth remembering? Te Pāti Māori will stand for the justice of our mokopuna and our taiao mō āke tonu atu [our grandchildren and our environment forever].

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

16:00

I move, That the House take note of the Education and Workforce Committee’s report on its inquiry into online harm, specifically the harm young New Zealanders encounter online, and the roles that Government, business, and society should play in addressing those harms.

It is an inquiry that matters, because it is part of the environment that our young people, our children, are growing up in every day—not an abstract policy environment but the real digital spaces where they learn, connect, socialise, and, for better or for worse, increasingly form their sense of identity and self-worth. For many young New Zealanders, the online world is not separate from the real world. It is part of the real world, and that means the responsibility for how safe, healthy, and supportive that environment is does not sit with young people alone. It sits with all of us as legislators, as parents, as educators, as platform providers, and as a society more broadly.

Last year, Catherine Wedd brought sustained attention to the potential harm associated with social media use by young people. Her member’s bill elevated the conversation and was the catalyst for the political discussion that has ensued. Dr Parmjeet Parmar then proposed we undertake a formal inquiry. At the same time, Laura McClure advanced proposals focused on the emerging risks associated with deepfake technology. Together, those contributions made it clear that this was not an issue that could be solved through a single bill, a narrow legislative response, or a focus on one platform or one technology. This House then authorised the inquiry, and we deliberately adopted broad terms of reference.

From the beginning, we were conscious that online environments are not inherently harmful, as emphasised by submitters, including by the Stratford District Youth Council, from the wonderful Whanganui electorate, who told us that access to social media is important for supporting young people’s business enterprises and access to jobs. They commented that not only is social media a place for connections, it is also a place where enterprising young Kiwis can thrive, from students searching for work, doing odd jobs or babysitting, to young people promoting media-based businesses.

However, the evidence we received made it clear that, alongside those benefits, there are very real risks, risks that are often amplified by platform design, commercial incentives, and the pace of technological change. The committee received more than 400 submissions from individuals and organisations and heard oral evidence from parents, educators, experts, industry representatives, and, importantly, young New Zealanders themselves. Many shared personal experiences that were deeply concerning. Their willingness to do so was central to shaping the report before you. Submissions told a consistent story, describing a digital environment that while offering opportunity can also expose young people to harm that is persistent, difficult to escape, and, in some cases, invisible to the adults responsible for their care. Submissions highlighted the gap between the speed of technological change and the ability of systems—legal, educational, and social—to respond effectively.

To guide our work, the committee defined online harm by adopting a framework recognising four distinct but interconnected forms and experiences of harm: content harm, where young people are exposed to material that is harmful or inappropriate; contact harm, where interactions online can lead to exploitation, coercion, or grooming; conduct harm, involving behaviour such as bullying, harassment, and abuse between users; and commerce harm, which includes exposure to scams, manipulative or predatory advertising, and products such as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling. What became clear is that these harms do not exist in isolation. They are interconnected, they compound over time, and they are often shaped by the design of the platforms themselves, including the incentives created through algorithmic recommendation systems.

Submission after submission reflected that the responsibility for addressing online harm is shared. Government has a role in setting expectations and ensuring the regulatory framework is fit for purpose. Businesses and platforms have responsibilities in the way they design systems, moderate content, and manage risk. Parents, schools, and communities provide essential guidance and support, and young people themselves need to be equipped with the tools and resilience to navigate these environments safely. The committee’s report reflects that shared responsibility. It does not propose a single solution. The challenge is complex, and so too must be the response. We must do a number of things well. It is, therefore, fantastic that the Prime Minister has put the Hon Erica Stanford on the job of coordinating the Government’s response to these challenges.

New Zealand’s current approach is fragmented. Responsibilities sit across a range of different agencies, and the legislative framework has simply not kept pace with technological change. In response, the report signals the need for a much more coordinated and modern approach, including a complete review of existing legislation. We also examined the role of platform design in shaping user experience. These systems do amplify exposure to harmful content and reinforce behaviours over time. The report, therefore, considers how accountability can be strengthened in a manner that is both proportionate and workable.

One critically important note is that considerable focus has been on the banning of social media for under-16-year-olds. The committee has recommended by majority that this work be progressed. This is, and must be seen, however, as one component of a wider set of measures. It is not in itself a complete response to the breadth of challenges our young people face online. Technology will continue to evolve, and with it, new risks will emerge. The question for this House is not whether every harm can be eliminated but whether we are prepared to respond in a way that is thoughtful and proportionate to remove harm that is unnecessarily allowed to occur.

It was a privilege to guide the committee through this process during chair Katie Nimon’s maternity leave. Thank you to my fellow committee members for your engagement and for the way we worked collectively to gain insight and seek out solutions. It was commendable, and we should see more of this in this Parliament. Thank you also to Eve Tucker and the entire secretariat and advisers for all of your work. A special mention of Sophia Kalafatelis and Nick Law and the outstanding work you did. Your insights were critical to the outcome. Working with you all was the highlight of my 2025 parliamentary year.

Finally, though, New Zealand operates in a global, digital environment. Many of the platforms that influence young people’s experiences are international, and the challenges we face are faced by other jurisdictions. In that context, we recognise the importance of learning from overseas and ensuring that our response aligns with approaches that are effective in that global context. There is value in acting as a* fast follower, adopting and adapting what works. For some, however, it is easier to suggest that we sit and we wait, or easier to get on an ideological high horse and defend inaction. This inquiry highlights the reality that our young people are experiencing harm every single day. The time to act, therefore, is now. I commend the report to the House.

16:10

This inquiry was timely and urgent. Many teenagers today spend large parts of each day in algorithmically curated social media environments, often spending more time there than they do reading, playing sport, or participating in community life. In that online environment, their developing adolescent brains are exposed to a long list of harmful influences, and it is a long list: pornography and violence, marketing of tobacco, gambling and alcohol, political extremism and disinformation, deepfake technology, harmful relationships with artificial intelligence bots, cyber-bullying, prolonged exposure—and this is arguably the most pervasive and pernicious—to an environment where there is harmful body shaming, an environment that is a recipe for status anxiety, that is damaging and undermining of our young people’s self-esteem and mental health. All of this is delivered, in the case of social media, by platforms that are designed to be addictive.

Immensely powerful companies create and control the online world that is now a defining fact of modern life. It brings good and bad, but never in history have private corporations possessed such intimate and continuous and psychologically sophisticated access to the minds of children. The online environment is, in large part, unregulated, and while it undoubtedly delivers great social and economic benefits, it is also causing great harm. Submitters presented our committee with a wealth of evidence about the negative impacts on the health, wellbeing, and mental health of our young people, and they convinced me and my Labour colleagues and the majority on our committee that we must act now, that this is a public health issue and a question of regulating the exercise of corporate power to protect the wellbeing of our young people.

It’s time to put in place regulation that will rein in the power of the online platforms. We need laws and institutions that can respond to a fast-changing technological and online commercial environment, and we must do what the people expect of their elected representatives, and that is to use the power of government to protect them from harm and govern private interests in the public good.

This inquiry was a good example, I think, of Parliament’s committees at work. We drew on dozens of submissions and expert advice, and I want to thank, on behalf of the Labour team, all of the submitters, the officials, and I want to acknowledge the National Party’s acting committee chair, Carl Bates, for his very good facilitation of the inquiry. Record that—it doesn’t happen very often! In the course of the inquiry, we built a consensus between Labour and National and, for the most part, the Greens that resulted in our three parties backing the inquiry’s findings, and it’s my hope that this Parliament, this Government, and the next one and the next one, will act boldly and elevate this reform agenda above partisan differences.

Among the inquiry’s recommendations, we agreed on the need for a legislative overhaul of what is currently a patchy, outdated regulatory framework. We agreed the establishment of a regulator with the necessary powers and the ability to respond in an agile way to a fast-moving environment. We agreed, in the case of National and Labour members, an age delay that would set 16 as the age that young people can access social media platforms. There’s been a lot of discussion about that, a lot of commentary about the Australian efforts in this area. It was our view that although such a policy is practically challenging, we should not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and that the age threshold would give parents a tool and set an important standard that would help shape public behaviour and attitudes.

We agreed that we should ban “nudify” apps and work together to work out how we can regulate deepfake technology. We agreed to ensure that the law on the online advertising of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling is aligned with real-world restrictions, and importantly, that the Government should do whatever it can to educate, support, and, empower parents to actively manage and prevent online harm to their children. For many parents, it has to be said, the online world is a foreign country, in contrast to their digital-native kids. They need help, and this is where the Government can genuinely provide a service, and I think there are some great examples in our recent history of Government backing social marketing campaigns to help support and drive social change in the direction that we want.

I want to focus on two of the inquiry’s findings: first, that we should hold the online platforms liable for the harm that they cause; and, secondly, that we should regulate and require transparency of the social media companies’ algorithms. Online platforms are not adequately accountable or liable under the law for the harms they cause. There are big gaps in the legal framework in what are called “safe harbour provisions” that shield them from liability. They have nothing like the accountability and liability that was put in place to regulate newspapers, radio, and television in the 20th century. The online platforms must be held liable both through regulation, with appropriate penalties, and civil liability so people can take them to court. We believe that the safe harbour provisions should be removed or substantially wound back.

In relation to the recommendation systems driven by algorithms that determine what social media users see on their screens, we found that the Government should regulate these and require transparency. The all-powerful algorithm sorts and prioritises content shown to users. It is central to the social media companies’ business model because it drives user engagement, the number of eyeballs that they have looking at their content, and, of course, their revenue. Of course, it can amplify content that increases the user’s exposure to online harm. We believe that as well as regulating algorithms we should be requiring that they be transparent and made available to the research community that can independently analyse and scrutinise and explain them to the public.

We cannot underestimate the power of the online platforms that we are up against. Meta’s platforms are used by around 4 billion people every month. That is half of the planet’s human population. The combined market capitalisation of the major tech platforms is measured in trillions of US dollars. These companies do not merely distribute information; they rank it, prioritise it, amplify it, and increasingly predict and shape behaviour through algorithmic systems. Their algorithms determine what billions of people see, what they fear, what they desire, what they believe is normal, and, too often, what they believe is true. A handful of corporations now shape the information diet of billions of people every day. These companies insist that they are not publishers when harm occurs, but they behave like editors and publishers when they decide what billions of people will see.

Every generation eventually confronts concentrations of private power so great that democracy must respond. Previous generations found the courage to regulate monopolies of all kinds: railroads, oil companies, banks, tobacco companies, and broadcasters. Our generation must now find the courage to place democratic limits on the digital robber barons of the 21st century, and it’s my hope that this inquiry report will give this Parliament a way forward to start on that task. Thank you.

16:20

E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Each of us carries in our pocket a device that is designed to extract as much of our energy and attention and, dare I say it, outrage as possible. They are programmed to; they are designed to. More dangerously, these devices use everything that they know about us—which is more than, dare I say, many parents would actually know about what their kids are up to—in order to keep us stuck in that web. These private companies that pull those strings hold so much data on all of us that they intentionally—as many whistleblowers over the past decade have shown—are able to manipulate our emotions to undermine our democracies, and, ultimately, they also hold more money and more power than many Governments across the world do.

This is the problem that this House is trying to confront right now, and I want to applaud the fact that there has been some serious common ground that has been found in this select committee report, but I just want to acknowledge in my contribution on behalf of the Greens—which later will be followed by the Hon Marama Davidson—our engagement and involvement in attempting to expand the terms of inquiry here. We wrote to the select committee in May 2025, asking that the terms of reference were not simply focused on young people, but on these platforms as a whole. What we were concerned about was that with a narrow focus on young people, there was the potential to obscure the responsibility for these platforms. Now, I want to acknowledge that there has been some really explicit and robust acknowledgment of the power of these platforms and the responsibility that they bear in the recommendations and in their findings, but we continue to hold exactly the same concerns that we have consistently raised over the past 18 months or so that a ban on under-16s could result in some really perverse consequences.

Just to respond to the comments of the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, who talked about how members of Parliament need to get off their ideological high horse and said that the time to act is now, I agree about the fact that we should be following evidence-based ways to actually achieve the things that politicians in this place are saying that we want to achieve. Here, I would just reflect on one of the reports released by the Children’s Commissioner today or yesterday, I believe, in which the Children’s Commissioner, who is responsible for representing children in this country, said—and I quote—“There are problems with focusing on a social media ban for under 16s, which include: rather than addressing harm and strengthening platform accountability, a ban purely focuses on exclusion and does not make the internet a safer place; bans can have serious unintended consequences by driving children to even less regulated spaces, and by shifting accountability away from platforms and onto parents; specific groups of children who are already experiencing exclusion—such as rainbow and disabled children—may find themselves even more isolated from their peers and communities; and a ban would not apply to children of all ages—we need to make the internet a safer place for everyone.”, and I guess that therein lies our continuing, ongoing concern about the agreement between both the legacy parties of Labour and National for there to be this ban on under-16s.

There’s a lot that we do agree on, and we will get to those things in just a moment, but I’d just say to everybody in this House and everybody who may be tuned in—the nine people watching Parliament TV at the moment, for their sins—that if you’ve ever spent time online and if you’ve ever spent time in the Facebook comments section, then you probably are aware of the fact that online harm is not something limited merely to our young people. There is a lot of responsibility that these platforms actually have to shoulder, and so that continues to be our focus, as the Greens. We ask that if these two parties do pursue the under-16 ban, they engage with young people and put them at the centre of the design of this thing.

There are, obviously, a number of things that we agree with, and we are really pleased to see that the committee recommended reviewing existing legislation governing classifications and harmful digital communications to address emerging risks. There I’d actually just point to the fact that, as cited in the committee’s report on the recommendations to the Government around how the current legislation is not fit for purpose, the underpinning framework that we are currently debating, which clearly is unfit for purpose, is two main pieces of law: the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993, a piece of law that is older than me; and the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015, which is 11 years old—11 years old.

In the context of how quickly our technological environment has developed, that is clearly, demonstrably unfit for purpose, and, therefore, of course we agree with the need to update these laws in order to keep up with the times. But that, I think, also relates to the importance of the recommendation to create an independent national regulator for online safety in order to hold the big social media platforms to account, and we would go further than that by making it explicitly clear that there has to be the requisite funding and the requisite resourcing going to this regulator in order to ensure that it actually has the staffing and the powers necessary to do what it is supposed to do.

Also, I’m really, really grateful to see that while we had expressed those concerns about the potential for the scapegoating, or, rather, the ability for these platforms to avoid accountability and responsibility, the committee very clearly did land on the necessity to strengthen the liability of these platforms for the harm arising from the content they host and the algorithms that they designed. We also are incredibly stoked to see the point of cross-party consensus for a requirement for greater transparency with these algorithms so that—as my honourable and learned colleagues alluded to—researchers are able to independently and robustly assess what these algorithms are up to. Again, we’d just make the really clear point that this harm is not limited solely to young people. It is responsible for undermining our fourth estate and for contributing to disintegrating social cohesion and the likes of the mental ill health and otherwise that others have cited.

We also agree with the banning of these “nudify” apps and the distribution of non-consensual sexual deepfakes. We want to mihi to those who have been involved in bringing that to the House and the whakapapa of the activists who have been working on this for a very long time.

We also agree with the need to regulate social media algorithms and—as I have alluded to—requiring those platforms to be transparent, and, of course, with the restricting of online advertising of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. This stuff is just common sense, but we would go a step further and say that the debate that is currently raging in Australia to completely end online gambling ads is one that we think should be imported here and we should expand it so that, in fact, there is no online advertising to anybody of gambling, and, clearly, tobacco shouldn’t be advertised at all, or alcohol.

This, I think, is where I will just take a step back and reflect on the few things that I know and understand about, particularly, drug harm minimisation, because there are parallels in this space and others have alluded to that in their contributions so far. In drug harm regulation and the evidence that has emerged over the past 40 to 50 years of the failure of the war on drugs, there is an understanding that there’s kind of a spectrum of approaches that you can take, arguably, to drug harm minimisation. At one end of the extreme, there is a complete criminal prohibition, and at the other end of the extreme, there is a complete legal free market of “Live and let live, c’est la vie.” and people can do whatever they want.

At both ends of that extreme, in the context of drugs, you end up with the maximisation of harm—because whether it is criminal entities or commercial entities exploiting vulnerable people to make a quick buck, vulnerable people are being exploited to make a quick buck. That ultimately tells us that we need to pull away from those extremes and get into a space of sensible regulation for all. Because as, actually, even the National Party speaker addressed, we are not going to be able to get rid of social media. We can’t turn off the internet. And I think therein lies the point: that young people will always find a way to access these things.

This is where, just finally, to put it on the public record, the concerns that the Greens have with some of the other recommendations. Of course, I’ve already alluded to our concerns about the ban on young people, because we believe that that ban would undermine the privacy, ultimately, of all users, notably because it would require these entities that have already demonstrated that they are not really to be trusted with holding so much data on us to then be the same ones that are self-policing and, ultimately, restricting people from accessing their sites.

On top of that, we’re worried about how that could drive young people into deeper and darker corners of the internet, and it’s focused, again, on the wrong target. We’re also concerned about the inquiry recommending a banning of virtual private networks because there are legitimate uses. That is the Green position.

16:31

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to start by acknowledging everybody who was part of this process. All the select committee members, all the submitters, the clerk’s team, and also all the advisers: thank you for your work during this process.

Yes, it was me, on behalf of the ACT Party, who wrote to the Education and Workforce Committee seeking to initiate this inquiry. That step was taken because, at that point, as was mentioned before, the National Party indicated that they are looking into banning social media for under-16s. This was after a member’s bill was made public, and the ACT Party straight away knew that we needed to do more work on it.

The reason was simple but very important. We know that this is a very serious issue. Young people encounter harm online, and it’s a concern of all—not just parents, but communities all around. I am a parent myself, and I can fully understand that concern. So far, the speeches that I have heard—there is a bit of that emotion coming through those speeches, and I fully understand that, as well.

What I want to say is that when we legislate something here, in this House, or we make any recommendations in a parliamentary select committee process, they should not be solely based on emotion. They should be tested for effectiveness, workability, and proportionality as well. If you don’t do that, then in that situation what happens is those kinds of things may look great in headlines, but, in reality, they fail. And not just that; they may have some unintended consequences—some unintended harm—as well. So good intentions are not always good.

I want to take this opportunity to use a couple of examples of recommendations in the report to highlight and make the ACT Party’s position clear. The first recommendation that I want to highlight is introducing age restrictions for social media platforms. The idea of the select committee inquiry was to dig into evidence to see that we get the opportunity to learn from what is happening in other countries because we know in Australia, yes, this legislation has been already implemented. They have banned social media for under-16s and in the UK—we had the opportunity to learn from them, as well.

In the select committee process, I was quite disappointed to see that in the second departmental report, which was presented by the advisers, we were not provided full assessment of this particular intervention, and this intervention actually was central to this inquiry. We were told that the Government has a work programme currently under development to explore such a ban and that, as a result, the department does not provide an assessment of this intervention. So there was this material gap in the evidence that was available to the select committee. I asked advisers why that assessment is not being provided. We were told that they fear that it might conflict with the advice that is being provided to the Minister in charge.

To insist on that point, I wrote to the select committee. This is the letter I wrote to the select committee: by majority, the select committee declined the request to get full assessment done on this particular intervention, which was central to this inquiry. Now, not just this; YouTube wrote to the select committee. This was after Australia’s ban was already implemented. So we had this great opportunity to hear from YouTube, to hear about their experience in Australia and learn from them. By majority, the select committee members declined that request. So I question this, when members stand here in the House and say that this report is based on evidence. No, the evidence was not fully explored. So much of that evidence was actually turned away. This is a real concern in this report. Also, from what happened in the select committee, it felt like it was a rubber-stamping exercise, because members in the committee felt that they have to just put the recommendations that matched with their party’s political narratives. Members, before the work started, knew what should be the recommendations. This should be concerning—concerning for all New Zealanders—because the job of the select committee is to challenge, to look into evidence, but here it became a rubber-stamping exercise. It should be concerning to all New Zealanders regardless of where they stand in this debate; whether they support a ban or do not support a ban, this should be really concerning.

Now, the question here was, will this ban actually protect young people? Everybody in this House, I know, wants to see that young people are protected online. We all are concerned, and we want to do things that will, in real terms, protect young people online. The question is: will this protect young people online? The answer to that is no. We have seen, in Australia, since the ban came into place, there are so many media reports. I have a couple of them printed. This is straight after the ban was implemented: “Young women using make up to bypass restriction and stay online”. And there were young kids who were making facial expressions to bypass restrictions and stay online. In the UK, we have seen reports of young boys drawing moustaches on their faces to bypass restrictions.

This age verification system is not effective. So what will that result in? That will result in platforms asking for people to upload their IDs digitally. This is not just young people; this will be all New Zealanders. We are concerned about people’s privacy; we are concerned about people’s freedoms. We do not want people’s privacy or freedoms to be compromised. That is not something that the ACT Party takes casually.

Now, there is another very quick example I want to use from this list of recommendations. One of the things that the report mentions is about the future regulator looking into the use of virtual private networks (VPNs). Now, this is an example of how far this report drifted from what it was supposed to do. Looking into the use of VPNs, it says that VPNs are not criminal tools. It says that we parliamentarians use VPNs. Journalists use VPNs. Businesses use VPNs. So many New Zealanders use VPNs to protect their data and their privacy online, and that to even entertain the idea that a future regulator should look into use of VPNs is going into a very dangerous zone. We know, the report notes, that if you look around the kind of countries that have restrictions on use of VPNs, these are the countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. In those countries, the restriction on VPNs is not to protect people; it is actually to supress their freedoms.

It is really concerning that we actually drifted—the select committee; we, of course, in the ACT Party didn’t support that and don’t support that going forward. In the select committee, the members actually wanted to support looking into the use of VPNs. Here, the concern is that young people, yes, are harmed. But when young people are able to bypass restrictions, they are still remaining online, which means they can also be downloading VPNs. Yes, that is a concern; we understand that. Through VPNs and by other means, when they are online, they will not be actually sharing if they experience any harm online. So, actually, what will happen is, instead of us having the ability to address problems, the problems will become hidden. They will be getting into internet spaces which are not supported and have fewer safeguards, and that is actually going to create a bigger risk for our young people.

Here, I also want to acknowledge that not every young person experiences social media in the same way. Just the day before yesterday, I received an email, and I have received correspondence from young people saying, “Don’t ban social media for under-16s.” So there are a lot of people—young people, especially—who don’t want to be banned from social media.

We need a proper solution here. We had this real opportunity in the select committee to come up with some practical and helpful recommendations that balanced both child safety and people’s privacy, liberties, and practicality, as well. But the select committee, by majority, didn’t want to go in that direction, because every time any question was asked, some members thought that that was a delaying tactic. So there was this big rush to report back on this inquiry, which is deeply disappointing.

If the path forward is more surveillance, more control, less privacy, I say that New Zealanders should be alarmed, New Zealanders should be concerned, and New Zealanders should utterly reject this path forward of more surveillance, more control, and less privacy. That’s why we are not supportive of most of the recommendations in this report, and we are quite concerned about people’s privacy, people’s freedoms, and we want to see that we are not becoming a country like North Korea, Iran, or China, where VPN controls are actually controlling people’s activities and creating a surveillance kind of State. So overall, yes, it was me who wrote to the select committee to initiate this inquiry, but, at the same time, I’m quite deeply disappointed as well, as I’ve highlighted in my contribution here. Thank you.

Dr David Wilson. You do need to seek the call so that the people in the booth know who’s speaking.

16:41

Thank you, sir. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the inquiry into the harm that young New Zealanders encounter online. The reason I am speaking is that I have a special interest in this area, and I want to thank all of the people that have put this before the committee and have driven this through to this stage. I also want to thank all the members of the House who are looking at this as a cross-party opportunity, and it absolutely is, because it’s been a fundamental change and, some would say, a social experiment gone horribly wrong. I would agree with that assessment.

I am persuaded by Professor Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation, and I’d just make a quick comment before I go there. That is that a lot of what we’ve been talking about—virtual private networks (VPNs), algorithms, under-16—are mechanisms trying to achieve a much larger objective, which is a very difficult, complex objective. I’m just going to read to you something that he had written. He said, “For most of the parents I talk to, their stories don’t centre on any diagnosed mental illness. Instead, there is [this] underlying worry that something unnatural is going on, and that their children are missing something—really, almost everything—as their online hours accumulate. But sometimes the stories parents tell me are darker [than that]. Parents feel that they have lost their child.”

A mother he spoke to in Boston said she could see the damaging effects it was having on her daughter, and they did not know how to curb her access. They tried various programmes to monitor and limit the apps on her phone. Apps are another mechanism that we focus on that will not necessarily solve this issue. They tried various programmes to monitor and limit the apps on her phone, but Emily, the daughter, eventually found ways around those restrictions. In one distressing episode, she got into her mother’s phone, disabled the monitoring software, and threatened to kill herself if the parents reinstalled it. Her mother said, “It feels like the only way to remove social media and the smartphone from her life is to move to a deserted island. She attended summer camp for six weeks each summer where no phones were permitted—no electronics at all. Whenever we picked [up] her [phone] …from camp she was her normal self. But as soon as she started using her phone again it was back to the same agitation and glumness.”

Most parents don’t want their children to have a phone-based childhood, but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their children to social isolation. Surely, one of the best things we can do for our youth—and I’m echoing the member from Labour here—is provide them with unstructured play, sports, face-to-face engagement, and the opportunities for social connectedness and community engagement—getting off their phones. The harms that are caused by social media and small computers—aka smartphones—are horrendous. They have led to increases in bullying, personal attacks, dramatic rises in social isolation, loneliness, anxiety and depression, and other psychological harms—and worse, increases in suicidality and suicide. And with boys, they seem to manage to achieve that end. Laura McClure’s deepfake bill is part of the wider context of online harm. My own experience of fraud online elicits so many memories of how the platforms are involved in all of these things. I hear the Green Party member when she is saying we actually need to focus on making the internet a safer place.

Let me give you an idea about what I mean by the mechanisms are not necessarily the answer—VPNs, for example. Well, yes, we could ban VPNs or we could try and restrict them, but, you know, AI now has agentic AI, so we can have an agentic approach to get a way around those bans. The dark web is something else. And so what we’re dealing with here—oh, and I’m just going to take a little bit here and sort of have a shout-out to my son, Ash, who looked at algorithms and their place in fake news and echo chambers for his Masters, first class, at Auckland University. What he found at the end of that thesis was that the algorithms were in fact a mechanism and that that will not change behaviour if you try to take them away, because there will be another way that they can be used, and there will be workarounds. I think we just need to step back a little bit and understand what we’re trying to ban here. Is this actually going to achieve what we want to achieve?

I’m saying that we’re in a position here, since 2010 when the “like” button came on and we had smartphones for that generation—the smartphone generation—where things have changed substantially. We’re in shifting sands, and there’s a lot of complexity, and what does that require? Actually, that requires a little bit of flexibility and a little bit of adaptability to what we’re confronting, but I also think, sitting behind that, we need to be very clear about what we’re trying to achieve in terms of the principles and the ethics around some of these things that are causing harm to our young people but also wider. We do not need a kind of whack-a-mole approach where we see that this is a bad and we need to hit it down—this is a bad and we need to hit it down. For example, in the debate around whether the age is 16 or 18 or 25, we actually need to understand the psychological effects that happen in all of those ages and decide whether or not that ban is going to be effective.

I think from New Zealand First’s point of view, we really like the direction of travel here. We would like to see some further debate in some of these things. There should be some definitions around addressing the gaps and overlaps—one of the recommendations—and establishing an independent national regulator for online safety: yes. However, can we please, please, please make sure that they’re taking a high-level approach about the objectives that we’re trying to achieve by this and not dive down into the detail to make it look like we’re actually achieving something by hitting one of the moles, like a VPN? Focusing on the mechanisms and regulating algorithms—look, there are workarounds is what we’re saying, so please take time with this. It’s a very, very important thing.

I also was really pleased to see in the report the additional areas for consideration, which kind of does exactly that. It pulls back from this overall complex system and says things like, “We need to talk to young people. We need good education and digital literacy for young people.” Then it dives into the mechanism a bit, but OK, is it the device-level restrictions or is it collaboration with online platforms to limit VPNs? To our way of thinking, by and large, the thing that is the problem is the phone. It is the smartphone. It’s like the window into this whole area. It’s a computer available to our kids.

Could we please consider some of these really, really difficult issues and make recommendations that cut to the chase, but also consider the wider discussions like we had around freedom of expression and so on? Things like grooming, fakes, all of these things—jeepers, it’s just rife. We just have to address it, but we implore the Parliament to take some time with this and address some of the issues that have been raised today so that we can all get online and have the best possible outcome for our community. Thank you.

16:50

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. I rise on behalf of Te Pāti Māori to speak to the inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders encounter online and the role that the Government, business, and society should play in addressing those harms.

To put it into perspective, I’m Gen Z, and I don’t know a world without the internet; Gen Alpha don’t know a world without social media, and Generation Beta don’t know a world without AI. That’s the reality that we’re moving into, and that’s the future that we live in. We are completely underestimating how rapidly fast this has affected and continues to affect the fabric of our society. Today’s society, through the lens of social media, has completely altered. The online world can help create the impossible by reuniting families, finding organ donors—all the magical things—but it can also create chaos, danger, and extreme harm. It is where identity, behaviour, politics, and learning all collide in one.

The inquiry heard evidence relating to a wide range of online harms affecting young people, including cyber-bullying, racism, misogyny, sexual exploitation, harassment, violent and extremist content, harmful algorithms, AI-generated abuse, and deepfakes. The data that we’ve found is that UNICEF estimates that one in three young people globally have experienced cyber-bulling. Around 70 percent of New Zealand rangatahi report experiencing at least one form of unwanted digital communication online. The reality is that many platforms are designed to maximise engagement, not wellbeing. Algorithms push harmful content faster than ever before; outrage spreads quicker than truth, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence is making these harms harder to detect and more dangerous to stop.

This inquiry also highlighted how online harm affects learning and education outcomes. Cyber-bullying has been linked internationally and in New Zealand research to lower self-esteem, reduced educational achievement, poor mental health outcomes, stress, and reduced wellbeing. Nearly one in five New Zealand teens reported experiencing harmful digital communication that negatively affected their daily lives.

I’m also going to talk about Māori online harm. Lately, it’s been a difficult place to navigate, as Māori very much value kanohi ki te kanohi. The social media world has become our new paepae, but without tikanga. We’ve also all had our own negative experiences as politicians, but we’ve almost become immune to digital online hate in this job.

We need stronger digital literacy in schools, as well as regulation and oversight. This inquiry also raised calls for an independent online safety regulator and stronger oversight of social media platforms. Current legislation is not fit for purpose. The majority of the Education and Workforce Committee considered that the current regulatory approach under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 and the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 is no longer fit for effectively regulating the modern online world we live in. Current laws largely focus on responding to individual pieces of harmful content after harm has already occurred.

The inquiry discussed the potential establishment of an independent national regulator for online safety here in Aotearoa. Key focus areas included monitoring online platforms, enforcing online safety standards, and protecting children and young people from harm. New Zealand can learn from other countries. The inquiry noted that several overseas jurisdictions have online safety regulators, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. Examples raised included the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023, empowering Ofcom as an independent online regulator in the UK, and Ireland’s Online Safety Commissioner and Online Safety Code.

When it comes to deepfake and AI-generated harm, the inquiry highlighted growing concerns about deepfake technology, AI-generated abuse, fake images and manipulated videos, synthetic sexual content, and harassment. The committee identified exploring options to better regulate deepfake technologies as AI continues to rapidly evolve as an area for further consideration. This is where, as politicians, we can work in a bipartisan way to create faster-evolving legislation to do our part in keeping people safe on the internet.

I also want to acknowledge Catherine Wedd and her member’s bill, and also Laura McClure, for opening these discussions on how we can evolve into the future with technologies, and with AI, especially for young people. That’s the part that I’ve been doing since last year; I’ve done work supporting Laura McClure’s bill against deepfakes—which are essentially AI pornographic images of young people, created without their consent. There are currently no laws that criminalise this issue, and that is what this member’s bill directly addresses.

Obviously, there are an enormous number of issues that Te Pāti Māori and ACT don’t agree on, but legislation like this and inquiries like these—politicians coming to a common ground and establishing safety regulations for online platforms—are a step towards moving into the future. Nō reira—do I have 10 minutes? I usually only get five. Great—awesome. I’ll carry on.

I’m sure you can fill three minutes.

Speak to your Gen Z experience.

From the heart.

Opening these conversations and listening to Chlöe Swarbrick and all the politicians across the board tonight—it’s been extremely eye-opening to hear that we can come to a common ground on some of these issues. I think, as a Gen Z, or as a young person—as a Māori, as a wahine—being exposed to the online world can be very harmful. It’s not the phone’s fault, and it’s not the tool’s fault; it’s how we use that and how humans engage with that behaviour and the algorithms that are being sent from God knows where.

We’ve done some research in terms of AI, and it’s actually just multiple patterns in one space—whether that’s misinformation or disinformation—and that’s what can be very harmful to people. There used to be a time when people could just put in—”Oh, let’s just ask “Uncle Google”; now it’s just straight, “Let’s ask ChatGPT”. People are actually using ChatGPT as online counsellors. People are using ChatGPT and thinking that that’s the only form of information and that it’s factual, and that’s not always correct. The world that young people are exposed to in 2026 is concerning—it’s very, very worrying.

When we went over to New York, we went to an AI conference, and they said that in 2023, it was predicted that AI would reach the intelligence of a human in 50 years; in 2025, that’s gone down to five years. We’re really underestimating the algorithms and ChatGPT and AI, and our legislation needs to be modified to the existing evolution of the society that we see today. That’s a huge reason why I support Laura McClure’s member’s bill—because if there’s small alterations in legislation that we can see today and that we can alter to criminalise rangatahi being affected by the internet and being affected by breaches of their privacy, I think that’s what we should be doing as politicians. Tēnā rā koe.

That’s an example of why I encourage members to leave their notes alone and speak from the heart. Thank you.

17:00

I’m pleased to rise to contribute to this debate. Can I start by thanking the select committee under the chairmanship of Carl Bates, who did an excellent job.

I want to start by recounting a story of a young girl that I met at an event around social media and young people’s use of it. She recounted a story of her experiences online and how she learnt the destructive behaviour of cutting herself, using the blade of a pencil sharpener, on TikTok. She had learnt this behaviour, fed to her through a social media algorithm with a destructive intent to teach herself how to self-harm using an everyday object from her home, that she then did.

Now, I often have people say, and, indeed, it’s been said in this House tonight, that if we ban social media use for under-16s it will just drive these young people to darker places of the internet. The comment I always make is: what darker place on the internet is there than to use a pencil sharpener to cut yourself—on TikTok, that has been fed to our children. What darker place is there than that?

I speak to child psychiatrists around the country, and they tell me of the explosion of young girls at the age of 13 cutting themselves around New Zealand. It wasn’t helped by COVID lockdowns—young people spending more time on their devices in their bedrooms with these algorithms. The more parents I speak to—they open up to me because they know I’m leading this work, and they open up to me with their stories. It is so much more prevalent than I could have ever imagined. Friends of mine who opened up to me, strangers who walk up to me in the street and tell me their stories of their teenage sons and their teenage daughters and the destructive behaviours that they are learning from these social media giants. There’s a reason that the tech media giants don’t want their children to use social media, because they know the harms, because they know the destructive behaviour of the algorithms that they’re using to harm our kids.

When cars got faster, we added seat belts. When cars got faster, we added airbags and the anti-lock braking system, and you can’t use the phone, and we mandated that you had to have a seat belt. We now have the most powerful device in the world imaginable in the hands of our children, and there are very few regulations to keep them safe. Frankly, parents—not only in New Zealand but around the world—are feeling completely helpless. I’ve heard it, and you will all hear it from the social media giants: “But we have parental controls.”, they say. But there are so many of these platforms, and they are so difficult to navigate as a—whatever we are, XYZ, the old people like me who didn’t grow up with this. It is a completely new world to us, and trying to navigate all of these controls across all of these platforms—half of them we’ve never even heard of—is really difficult, and parents are screaming out for help.

This Parliament, I believe—cross-party—wants to help parents. A ban, we already know, is not going to be the silver bullet. But I tell you what a ban does: it changes social norms. Just like you would not take someone else’s child and put them in your car without a seat belt, over time behaviours change when we have these bans in place so that you would not have a child over to your house and let them use social media. It takes time, but it does change social norms. But it is not the silver bullet on its own, because, I’ll tell you what, the social media giants would love a ban because, as you know, children can try and get around it. That’s why it is so very important to have a strong regulator that changes their behaviours. That is going to be the key, and that is what more than 40 countries around the world today are doing. We need to be in lockstep with them.

As my friend across the aisle Phil Twyford—occasionally my friend; my friend today, I gave him a clap after his speech—said: “We should not let perfection be the enemy of the good.” My message to parents today is simple: you are not alone; we have your back, we are prepared to act, and I will work with any party in this Parliament who is prepared to support this work. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Before I take the next speaker, just a reminder that the next lot of speeches are five-minute speeches.

17:05

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I guess I just wanted to start by saying that the internet is an absolutely amazing thing and it has enormous potential, but it also has enormous potential for harm. That’s what the purpose of this inquiry was all about, with a specific focus on our young people and the organisations who work with and support them.

I think everybody who sat at that table through those select committee inquiry hearings and heard from the many people who shared deeply personal and very powerful stories about how they had been affected negatively through interactions and engagements that they’d experienced online, couldn’t help but come into this House to have this debate and speak about the importance of what we do to work together to address that.

I wanted to start, really, by saying thank you to all of those people who came and shared their stories and their experiences. A lot of the time, they’re not stories or experiences that you would ever want to happen to you, or admit that they had ever happened to you, or then to step into a select committee environment and speak about. But thank you to all the people who hear those stories and work with the people who have those experiences every day, through the work that they do, often voluntarily, and the advocacy that they provided to our select committee to raise those concerns and make sure that those stories and those important messages were heard.

There’s a couple of things I wanted to single out in the inquiry. The first is that I think we always need to come back to the title of the inquiry, and the fact that it says that this was an “Inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders encounter online” but also “the roles that Government, business, and society should play in addressing those harms”. This is not simply the role of the Government, and, as we have seen, it has not been able to be the role of the social media platforms that we are so concerned about. Despite signals and in some cases steps towards making young people safer, we haven’t seen effective or meaningful protections put in place to ensure that that is the reality—that they should and can enjoy those spaces. It is also those businesses and, more widely, society that have a responsibility in that space.

The specific recommendations that I think speak strongly to that are recommendations 7 and 8 that really address the concerns around algorithms and algorithmic transparency, the need for people to know what they’re seeing and why they are seeing it. The assumption from olden days that Facebook was a place that you went to share photos with your friends is not the reality that we live in anymore. As other speakers have alluded to, some of the content that some of our youngest and most vulnerable New Zealanders are served up on a daily basis on these platforms is not content that they seek out and it is horrific and damaging and entirely inappropriate for our young people to see.

The other point—given the opportunity, I could have rambled for a long time on this— is the ability to educate and empower parents, caregivers, and young people, because they absolutely deserve the opportunity to be empowered and educated and informed.

I’m really pleased to see the broad support in the House for this from just about every side. I really just want to finish by thanking those submitters who were so brave, who came to us. I think our mission is to tell those people that we see you, we hear you, we will take meaningful action, and we do need to stop the very real harm.

17:10

I will start my contribution by acknowledging the constructive work—the always constructive work—of the Education and Workforce Committee, particularly in this case. The inquiry was started while I was at home in Napier with my new son, and it was skilfully chaired by my colleague Carl Bates. Carl has been acknowledged for his work on that. It’s always an interesting thing going away from select committee and having a whole thing happen largely while you’re not here, and coming back and seeing the result. I’m really pleased with how that was done, and I just thank the entire committee, the staff, and submitters.

It’s obvious, as a result of what we’ve heard, how important this issue is to all of us. I’m going to get back to a couple of things in a minute. I was going to talk about the role of the Government and the part we have to play, but we’ve heard a lot about that. We’ve heard about how outdated the Acts are—the fact that there’s no single, powerful regulator. We’ve been piecing together a number of various responses that haven’t really cut the mustard at all. That is the very thing that this inquiry has outlined. In the case of, as has also been mentioned, Laura McClure and Catherine Wedd’s members’ bills, they are an attempt to try and rectify what we’re experiencing, the gaps and the shortfalls of what we’ve got in our legislation and regulations. That was really brought to our attention through this inquiry: what more there really is to be done.

I’m inspired by a couple of comments from colleagues across the House. It’s a really fun time to have a special debate that’s largely supported across the House. I am a millennial, and I’ve had a Gen Beta baby. He was the first—2025 is the start of Gen Beta. I can’t believe we’re there already. I have my own unique experience with social media. I talk a lot about the impact that social media had on my life. I grew up at a time when phones were just becoming a thing. They were bricks. We had the first classrooms with computers, and some classrooms didn’t have them. Maybe one or two did. The internet was still MS-DOS and dial-up and all of that kind of stuff. It was a unique experience, but while I was at high school, social media became a thing: Bebo, Myspace—

Oh my God.

I know! You had to pick 16 friends and give them love hearts, and if you didn’t get one in return, heaven forbid what happened. It started a while ago and, as we heard, this legislation in 1993 took account of none of that. Bebo turned into Facebook, and Facebook had its own issues. And then out comes Snapchat. Then comes TikTok. I’ve got to say I’m really glad I never experienced TikTok. I’ve never downloaded it, I’ve never used it, and I don’t want to, but I’m so aware of the generations that have had the same experience I did with the likes of Facebook and Instagram that are just completely, deeply ingrained and embedded with it.

I often say, as anyone with a baby would understand, they all have their favourite toys and they want to play with them. They go to day care and they want to play with their friends’ favourite toys. In our household, my son thinks that this—[Holds up phone]—is my favourite toy, because it is always on me, and it’s always on me because it’s my job. I always tell him—he’s nearly one, so he can understand—that this is not a toy. The world wants me to think it’s a toy so that I play with it all the time, so it makes me more accessible, and they make it look fun and all colourful and there are things to do and interesting things to see. But it’s a trap. My role is to tell him, as much as I possibly can, that it isn’t all fun and games, but that’s my role as a parent. Parents have to understand that first before they can do something about it.

Of course, we talked a lot about what the Government can do, and we have to do this in partnership with families, but we have heard about how powerful these platforms are. We need our Government and our regulators to be as powerful. We need our parents to be as powerful, because knowledge is power, and the more we understand about how harmful these platforms are, the tools that are being used, what they do and how they are affecting us, we actually can do something about it. If we’re understanding the trap that we’re walking into, we can prepare for it, and if our Government is powered up, if the regulators are powered up and preparing for what’s coming, they can inform and educate and protect us. That’s going to go a massively long way to preparing my son for when he’s going to school and getting in front of devices and, heaven forbid, when he’s a teenager and independently doing his own thing with devices, which is going to happen, because that’s the way of the world.

I grew up in a time when we were not prepared for the impacts of social media, and my entire mental health as a young person has been affected by that. There’s no debating it. The more we can do to prepare and protect future generations, we’ve got to do it. This is a turning point. I am so pleased that most of this House is on board with the direction of travel, and I really support the work that Minister Erica Stanford is doing already, and I really look forward to seeing where we get to with this. We have got to get the right balance. Thank you.

17:15

A proud Gen X-er here. I don’t even know how to use that chat PG, CP—chat thingy. And yet I’m addicted to my phone. I think if all politicians across the House here were to be quite honest, we would probably—like, you’re waiting somewhere; there’s no such thing as waiting without looking at your phone, whether it’s at the doctor’s or even the supermarket when you’re waiting at the checkout. That is by design. The addiction is absolutely to scroll and to scroll and to scroll, and you can literally keep going for ever.

The benefits are real for online platforms and social media. I belong to, for example, breast cancer community pages and chat groups. The connections are real. The information, the learning, is real. The harms are also very real, and I genuinely think that across this House there is good faith here. I think maybe this is one of the issues where we don’t have to do political argy-bargy, where we can agree we are all seeking to keep our people safe, especially our young people. I genuinely can say that—even though there are some slight disagreements on how—and I hope that continues.

My colleague Chlöe Swarbrick has already traversed what we support, the letter that we wrote—that we wish this inquiry had broadened its terms of reference to not be just about the focus on young people, because we all need to be kept safe online. What I thought I would do instead, in my short time, is focus on the voice of children. I’m particularly paying attention to the explainer done by the children’s monitoring group, because that is one of the key areas where I know it is not intended as a punishment, to ban and restrict use to an age—under 16. I know it’s not intended as a punishment, but it just is. It is punishing young people for a platform that should instead be held accountable. That was the quote at the top of the explainer from the children’s monitoring group, which says, “Social media has become a major part of our lives and there’s not that much point in trying to push teenagers away from it. Rather, we should focus on making it a better place.”

I also understand that those parties who are supportive of a ban truly want to keep our children safe as well, but we, the Greens, are really clear that it is about holding the platforms accountable, holding the platforms responsible for the design that intentionally harms young people and addicts young people. That is where the focus of my contribution was to stay today. Children and young people are pointing out very clearly that this is where they connect with friends, they build their identity, they express culture, connect with peers and whānau, communities of belonging, where they otherwise might not have grounds of belonging; information and education; creative outlets—we’ve definitely seen that, and it’s awesome—exercising agency they might otherwise not be able to, taking part in things that are supporting them, and wellbeing services. All of these things are true, and they are also expressing loudly a call for better safety online. They are calling for stronger accountability for social media companies and more education to help them, which was a widely supported recommendation that came through from all of the political parties—education to help them and their families and whānau navigate this complex digital world, to be able to get the best out of it, to be able to stay safe online, including on social media. We do see the positives, we do see the benefits, but we really want to safeguard properly against the harms.

The thing about the age restriction is that it would require, in effect, a breaching of privacy and an exposure of privacy. We are really concerned about how we would uphold their information and privacy rights and their right to be protected, including with breaches of privacy.

We agree that the work that we all must continue to do together should absolutely centre on children’s rights, children and young people’s ideas, and the understanding for what has worked overseas and what has not. I take seriously the call from the Children’s Convention Monitoring Group that a blanket ban on social media for under-16s may appear to be a way to keep our children safe—which we all want—but the reality is that, alone, a ban will not address the problem of online harm to children. Thank you.

17:20

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak as a member of the Education and Workforce Committee on our inquiry into the harm that young New Zealanders encounter online. I want to really acknowledge the significant amount of work the select committee did, particularly the leadership of acting chair Carl Bates and the lead Opposition member, the Hon Phil Twyford. It was a very constructive and cohesive process.

What became clear throughout this whole process is that online harm is affecting families right across New Zealand and many parents feel that the safeguards have not kept pace with the technology. Most young people now have access to smartphones and social media before they even reach high school, bringing risks that simply did not exist a generation ago. One of the more confronting things I saw during this debate was The Worst Children’s Library exhibit, which was displayed here in Parliament. Some of the material represented in that exhibit was so explicit, it would be inappropriate for me to describe it here in the Chamber, yet it was content that our children are regularly exposed to online. There was a huge irony about this, because as we were going in to look at the display, there was a warning to adults to be aware of what we were about to see. So I found that quite ironical.

Now, this whole area should concern every single one of us. We heard from Our Kids Online, founded by Rob and Zareen Cope, who have spent years working with families around online safety. I want to acknowledge Russell Shaw, who’s the CEO of Top Energy in Northland, whose passion around this issue led to Rob Coke coming and presenting here in Parliament. Russell spoke about attending a presentation at Springbank School in Kerikeri and being genuinely shocked at what he saw and the scale of what he saw. This led to Russell and Top Energy committing to fund Our Kids Online to visit all the schools in the Far North to educate parents on the risks and what they could do to protect their kids online. It’s just a fantastic community contribution.

I think that reaction reflects what many parents feel when they begin to understand the extent of what children are encountering in the digital environment. One statistic they shared was particularly striking: 92.9 percent of parents surveyed said they had little to no idea how to keep their children safe online. You know, I certainly wouldn’t have had any idea. I’ve had enough trouble working out how to use it myself. That tells us something important: this is not simply about telling parents just to do better, right? Most parents are trying to do the right thing. The report highlights that safety tools do already exist, but parents are somehow expected to navigate their way through privacy settings, parental controls, VPNs—whatever they are—and constantly changing apps that many have never heard of. It is no surprise many feel overwhelmed.

That is why I believe recommendation 3.10 in this report is one of the most important recommendations. The committee recommends that the Government invest in public online safety campaigns and better resources to educate and empower parents, caregivers, and young people—because one of the clearest findings from this inquiry was not that parents do not care; it was that many do not know where to start.

I would like to acknowledge my colleague Catherine Wedd and the work she has done in this space through her member’s bill on restricting social media for under-16-year-olds, alongside the Government’s wider work programme looking at age restrictions for social media. After all, we accept common-sense protections around risks for children in the physical world. Think about things like how we require seat belts in cars, we fence swimming pools, and we regulate harmful products like alcohol. The online environment should not be exempt from the same common-sense thinking simply because it is digital.

Importantly, this report does not say the Government alone can solve this issue. It recognises that online platforms, parents, schools, businesses, and wider society all have responsibilities, as well. But if we are serious about reducing online harm, then empowering parents must be part of the solution. We need to strike the right balance. We need to understand that no single reform will solve this overnight but doing nothing is not an option. I believe this inquiry is an important step towards a practical and balanced solution. I commend this report.

17:25

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you for the opportunity to take a short call in this really important debate. It was a pleasure to be a member of the Education and Workforce Committee and I am really pleased that we actually took the time to do an in-depth look at the issue, because I believe that having a bill or a piece of legislation that simply introduces an age limit is not going far enough, not doing enough to actually address the real harms that many have spoken to us about. It was really important work for the select committee to do. Like others have, I want to acknowledge all of those who took the time to submit to our select committee so that we had good information available to us. We support the report and the recommendations in the report.

The one thing that I want to focus on—and, actually, Grant McCallum mentioned it—is I attended The Worst Children’s Library when it was up in Auckland. I had my children with me that weekend. Usually, on those sorts of things, I will take the kids out and about with me, but I looked at this and then I looked a bit deeper at the invitation and I went, “Oh, hang on a minute. This is definitely not a kids’ event.” It wasn’t immediately apparent to me. So I turned up alongside Priyanca Radhakrishnan and Lemauga and we go into The Worst Children’s Library. They had explicitly prohibited any under-18-year-olds from going into to view this, and once you get in there, you can really understand that, because they’ve set it up like a library, it’s got all of these pretty books for you to look at, but when you go closer and you look at the titles on those books, what it is demonstrating to viewers is we know that children have been exposed to and have seen this online. And it was really confronting.

My children are 8 and 11. They don’t have social media accounts; they don’t have cellphones, but we are quickly approaching that age, and I was one of those parents not aware of the sorts of tools that might be available to restrict their viewing of these sorts of things that you might see on there. So for the benefit of the House, I will read a couple of those book titles that are actually the content that our children have seen. The Parrot in a Blender; “I saw someone put a parrot in a blender”, child, 14 years old; “Sex things I wish I never saw”, child, 11 years old; Thinspo Girls—how to get extremely skinny: “It makes me want an eating disorder.” These are the things that our children are being exposed to in an online environment.

I want to acknowledge those who put this library together and who also brought it to Parliament and hope that many of you had the opportunity to see it. What we know is that so much more can be done to protect our children—so much more—and what is the role of the Government? What is the role of parents? What is the role of business? I want to acknowledge in the report there are many, many recommendations that talk about what the Government can be doing, what parents can be doing, what businesses can be doing. I want to acknowledge my colleague Reuben Davidson, who also has a member’s bill in the ballot that talks about putting clear legal duties on online service providers to ensure that these platforms are safer.

The report recommends an independent regulator so that it’s safer and social media companies could be held responsible for the harm that they cause. These are really important recommendations that need serious consideration. All of them should be seriously considered, and we shouldn’t be looking at simply an age limit.

Others have spoken about the important role of education and educating parents, and the role that the Government can play in that. I want to highlight that recommendation in particular, which is No. 10: “Educate and empower parents, caregivers, and young people. We recommend that the Government invest in public online safety campaigns or consider ways to fund the creation and promotion of comprehensive resources designed to educate and inform parents, caregivers, and young people about online safety.”

In the final 10 seconds that I have, moving forward, we need to include young people in the conversation and the design of the solutions to address this issue, which is all about them. Kia ora.

17:30

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak on the Education and Workforce Committee’s report into online harm. Specifically, I want to focus us in on those algorithms that have been mentioned multiple times, because this is not just simply a technology debate—it’s not merely about phones, apps, or screen times. This is about childhood, it’s about mental wellbeing, but it’s also about shaping identity, self-confidence, behaviour, and social development in an environment that’s unlike anything that we have seen in any previous generation. Importantly, it’s about power. For the first time in human history, a small number of global technology companies possess the ability to influence, on an enormous scale, what millions of young people see, think about, worry about, aspire to, fear, and compare themselves against every single day.

The key mechanism for that influence is those algorithms. Those algorithms are not simply about scrolling. It’s not through content that’s being made through our friends or other contacts. This is a curated, complex recommendation system that’s based on mathematical black box systems that are given to people based on the likelihood of continuing to keep their eyeballs on that screen. These systems continuously harvest that data. They harvest the information about what a young person watches, what they pause on, what they replay, what they comment on, what keeps them online longer, and then the system feeds them more of it. That’s algorithmic amplification. It’s concerning because that’s not necessarily optimised for truth or balance or resilience or healthy development; it’s optimised for attention. And what gets attention is what gets advertising revenue, and emotionally charged material is exceptionally effective at capturing attention.

Adolescents are neurologically, psychologically more vulnerable to these feedback systems because of their brain development and the point of development they’re at. They’re also wired for social reward, for peer approval, for novelty, for identity information and formation. They’re wired for chasing and feeling that sense of belonging. That makes them uniquely susceptible to this algorithmic amplified cycle of comparison, anxiety, outrage, and reinforcement. And, yes, as has been mentioned across the House, adults are not immune to that either. As other members have said, they’re addicted to social media. Well, I admit that I have suffered that addiction, as well.

Suffering.

Well, suffering, and I am aware of this algorithm, and some of us have probably played with that algorithm a little bit and tried to see what we can get it to refer us to. Most of the time, of course, I’m getting speeches from the Prime Minister and Nicola Willis and those fantastic other members of the National Party, but sometimes I take a break and I watch videos of puppies and men chopping wood, and I get more and more and more of that and you get more of what you look at.

The thing is that algorithmic transparency is a mechanism that we can gain some potential control over. This is a matter that’s being discussed internationally in other forums. The recommendation systems are not necessarily benign, and they are the key to the business model on which these platforms are designed. They are deliberately black boxed because they are the key to their financial revenue-gathering. That’s how they make their money. They are able to provide access to researchers in certain settings; TikTok is able to do that. However, Meta is not as transparent, although they will tell us, and they did tell us, that they are the most transparent. If you go to the transparency centre for Meta, however, what you will find is a step process that they go through and it gets to a point where it says, basically, in not so many words, “and then the algorithm does its magic”. Then on to other steps.

There is no transparency. This is something that we will tackle amongst a range of other options. This is an important piece of work, but it’s not the only thing we’re doing. I commend the report to the House.

17:35

I love this debate. I wish we had more of these kinds of debates where intelligent contributions are made by everyone around the House. I picked up a shadow portfolio last year, the sexual and family violence prevention portfolio. I did so with a rather heavy heart, but I knew almost nothing about the material that we’re looking at today when I picked up that portfolio, and it was a great shock to me. I first of all want to thank people like Nikki Denholm of The Light Project, who gently showed me what was going on for the children of New Zealand, and it was utterly horrifying, and they didn’t provide black and white answers. People like Nikki have a level of knowledge that is exemplary and a commitment to making New Zealand better. I look at her work and the work of her colleagues with great admiration. I think it’s something that all of us across the House have much to learn about.

One of the things I did last year was—and the Hon Willow-Jean Prime has just talked about it—was bring The Worst Children’s Library to this Parliament, and I did that with a colleague from the National Party. That was a deliberate attempt to make sure that this was not politicised in an unhealthy way. We let those from all the parties who had brought member’s bills on these issues, speak at that event. So we heard about the contribution that they were making. I think that’s incredibly important.

I was talking to the Radio New Zealand reporter, and I said, “Thank goodness my children have grown up and they haven’t had to navigate this landscape.” My daughter rang me from Sydney and laughed at me. She said, basically, “Of course I saw this material.” I had absolutely no idea that she was being exposed in that way. In fact, I saw the issue of digital navigation as something that I would be wrong not to let my children do because I did think that they needed to learn to connect in the world that was currently here, and I didn’t have enough of a grasp on it to realise quite what I was imposing on them.

Nikki Denholm uses language that I’d like to adopt and I’d like to credit her with. She talks often to crowds about the changing digital landscape that we are in, and she actually describes some of the things that are going on and she talks about making sure that children navigate those rough seas. So it will involve multiple responses on our part, and I think that’s an incredibly strong message from the sector that it’s not one thing. It’s not going to be something that doesn’t cost us. We’re going to have to educate our parents and our children. We’re going to have to look at critical analysis.

Now, I want to make one final point here, which is something that shocked me that I found out about, and it relates to what the Hon Phil Twyford was talking about, about liability of our social media companies. We cannot afford not to be brave about this. I found out about a practice that’s been happening where people are watching child abuse, child rape on their webcams, and they do this internationally and they do it in countries of great vulnerability like the Philippines—500,000 children in the Philippines have had that experience.

What has happened is a market has been created that we never expected to be created, and it is unregulated. The answer is not the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The answer is we demand that our social media companies—that the internet—actually does not allow this sort of thing. The technology exists. We cannot have police people across the world trying to cope with this by prosecution, because the children will still be abused. We must take global responsibility for this. We must stop this happening in the first place. We must not allow markets to be created that are evil, that hurt our children in that way. We cannot simply talk about “freedom of speech” and leave them to it. We are beyond that point.

This is a wake-up call for New Zealand. We must look at it, and we must provide answers and solutions and support to our parents and children. Thank you.

17:41

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak on the inquiry into the harm young New Zealanders encounter online. I would just, firstly, like to acknowledge all the members that are on the environment, education, and workforce select committee—[Interruption] I had the fortune to—

It’s all right. Carry on.

Education and Workforce Committee. Did I say environment? I apologise. I had the good fortune to sit on there for a while until I left that committee.

There was a broad range of views. I’m certainly not someone that’s OK with technology—a bit like my colleague here beside me. There may be several decades in difference of age, but I think there was a very common theme that we do need to do something. The horse has long, long bolted, and it’s not just out of the stable, it’s actually multiple paddocks away now. I commend Minister Erica Stanford for being the ministerial lead on the inquiry. We are the adults in this conversation, and they are our children.

I would particularly like to speak in regards to, again, section 10 in the select committee report, about educating and empowering the parents. There’s a bit there in regard to what role parents should play, as distinct from the companies, as distinct from the potential role that a Government could play. We did have quite a bit of discussion around that. There was a view that it should be the parents’ responsibility, but I also had a view, a bit like my colleague here, Grant McCallum. He grew up in rural New Zealand as well. I mean, I’m an individual. I talk about it with children, that I never had a phone until eight years ago. They look at you in disbelief. It’s like, we never had a phone, we never had connectivity. We never grew up with it. It was not an option. The connectivity is slightly better. It’s not a world that we grew up in, understanding.

Our four children grew up at the start of that journey into online devices and phones and things like that. We actually saw the behaviour and how it impacted our kids and how addictive it was. We saw the impact it had on their friends as well. I’ve seen the impact it has on friends of my kids and, in some cases, very tragic circumstances. There is a lot to like about technology, but there’s also a lot of challenges with it as well. Those tragic circumstances—it was bullying that was perpetrated online, and it just goes boom like that. There are some real challenges around that.

I think there’s a lot assumption that parents know. I would hold the view that a lot of parents don’t know. They’ve never grown up with the technology. They’ve never had the ability to use the technology. I think it’s just evolving at such a pace, an unprecedented pace, that the minute you get familiar with how to do something, it’s like, next minute, it changes, it gets an upgrade, and you’re lost again. I find myself looking around for the youngest person in the room, saying, “Can you, please, help me with that?”

Tom Rutherford by any chance?

Yeah. And that is my point—the young people have far better understanding, typically, of the power and the ability to use those things and what they’re capable of than a lot of people my age. That would be something that I would just like to highlight as well.

There’s the connectivity, there’s the capability, there’s the speed of transformation with the technology. I’m really pleased that, as a Government, we’re actually prepared to help our parents as well, because they do need help, and we are prepared to act. I do note that there’s an avalanche of countries wanting to do something as well. I think we’ve finally realised there are some fundamental challenges with the speed of it, as well.

I’d just like to touch on the fact that, as Grant McCallum said there are some tools available, which I’d never heard of as well; internet service providers and virtual private networks and all these sorts of things. I would certainly encourage parents to have a look, probably online—ironically—at the tools that are potentially available to help them moderate the access that their children probably do have and to the platforms they have as well. It’s something that I don’t think we’re very well aware of. That was one of the decisions the select committee arrived at, about the role of educating parents and the role that the Government may have to play in that as well.

It’s certainly something that I think is worth considering, but I would come back to the fact that, at the end of the day, we are the adults and we have a responsibility to do everything in our power to protect our children as best as we can. Thank you.

17:46

Thank you, Madam Speaker. In September 2024, a 13-year-old girl called Annabelle Daza was online and experiencing distress. She’d been bullied at school. She had been looking at things related to eating patterns, and she had an eating disorder which had not been picked up by her GP. She was struggling with self-worth and she went on to TikTok and expressed that she was feeling suicidal. She also reached out to several different digital platforms that are there to help young people if they are feeling overwhelmed and, unfortunately, none of them, nor the New Zealand Police, got to her in time and she took her own life.

This is really heartbreaking, because Annabelle Daza had reached out for help and had been failed. She is an example of what the Youthline youth mental health summit has reinforced in its report around the amplifier effect of digital harm. It’s not just a tech issue. It amplifies things like bullying, anxiety, exclusion, shame, and social isolation. I’ve had the privilege of working with Annabelle’s parents, who I want to mihi to tonight, who are doing whatever they can now to try to help other parents from not going through the same thing they went through. They did not see this coming.

There is no silver bullet, as has been expressed. A blanket ban sends a good signal and may have some help, but really we need a multi-layered approach, as has been said in the House already. We need education, we need prevention, we need peer support, we need accessible youth mental health care, and we need the platforms to take responsibility for the environments that they create.

Labour supports a joined-up approach. We support levelling the playing field against these billion-dollar technology companies who are making platforms that are designed to maximise profit and engagement, and, as has been said in this House, addiction, as well. We need stronger accountability, and we absolutely need more transparency around the algorithms that they deploy.

We’ve heard that the online harm is not just about content. It’s about design, it’s about addictive design, engagement, engineering, infinite scrolling, autoplay, algorithmic amplification, and behavioural targeting. That is very predatory and very curated, and yet these devices that our children access this world on are in their pockets, sometimes 24/7.

The committee, which I did not sit on, also heard about loot boxes, gacha mechanics, reward systems, and other things designed to keep young users hooked.

While I applaud the bipartisanship that’s being expressed tonight, I do have concern that we have just seen this House pass the online gambling bill, where the definitions in that bill were archaic. They did not include any of the things that would be captured that have just been expressed. That bill creates and expands an online digital gaming market, and it encourages competitiveness, which we have not seen before in New Zealand. Yes, it’s unregulated, but now we’re going to have a competitive market available to our young people 24/7 in these devices that they carry around.

What concerns me is that we’ve heard, again, a bipartisanship about wanting to reduce harm, yet one of the big elements of that bill was the advertising our young people would be exposed to, and it was put into regulations, not to come before this House, not to be subject to a select committee process. When I asked repeatedly, at the committee stage, the Minister of Internal Affairs to explain the harm minimisation elements of the bill, she did not seem to know the difference between harm minimisation and consumer protection.

I think the proof will be in the pudding. There is a lot of good will tonight, but how we go about engaging these protections that we want to implement will be the real test. We need to see the complex, layered, nuanced, and varied approaches that are going to cast the net very widely to make sure that we don’t see any more cases like that which happened to Annabelle Daza, like has happened to others who have been victims of these platforms. Let us hope that we can do the right thing, so their deaths won’t have been in vain.

17:51

Today marks a significant moment in this House, as we work across parties on this very important issue: to protect our kids from online harm. It’s refreshing to see that so many of us agree that we need to do more to keep our kids safe online and we need to work together to achieve positive change. This is bigger than politics. This is bigger than this House. The future of our kids is too important to get this wrong.

I welcome this report which recommends that the Government should consider restricting social media for under-16s, saying it is time to be a fast follower and follow other countries around the world which have already moved to ban social media for under-16s. There is a global movement, and we should not be left behind.

I want to thank the members of the Education and Workforce Committee for all their work on this inquiry, and I thank Carl Bates for his leadership. Last year, with the support of our National Party caucus and our Prime Minister and education Minister, I introduced my member’s bill to ban social media for under-16s. It’s great to stand here today and see this work progressed.

Hearing submitters from across New Zealand voice their concerns about protecting our kids from online harm sends a powerful message. I want to acknowledge the parents, educators, health providers, caregivers, advocacy groups, and young people who have shared their stories. Thank you for your courage to stand up. And thank you to the 50,000 people from across New Zealand who signed a petition and presented it here on the steps of Parliament calling for political parties to support a social media ban for under-16s. You have all taken the time to tell us how you are feeling about the impact of social media on your families, on your children, on your grandchildren, and the harm social media is causing in our community. From cyber-bullying, inappropriate content, sextortion, mental health issues—the list goes on. The harms are real.

As a mum of four children, I hear you. Please know that your voices are driving change. The submissions received by the committee were heartfelt, and I’d like to pay special mention to Havelock North Intermediate, a school in my electorate. Their staff and board were among the schools who spoke about the negative impacts of social media in our community. They shared concerns about the persistent harm, the constant distraction, and the social pressures caused by social media.

We have guardrails in the physical world to protect our young children, but we have no guardrails in the online world. It’s high time we do. We have a drinking age. We have a driving age. We should also have a social media age.

The inquiry found that algorithms can amplify content, which could increase exposure to online harm. Social media platforms are addictive. The shrieks, the scrolling, the dopamine hits—it’s hard enough, as we’ve heard, for adults to stop, but our children are more vulnerable. The social media addiction, lack of sleep, and mental health issues are real.

The inquiry also looked at other countries around the world, especially Australia, where they have already moved to ban social media for under-16s. In December, almost 5 million social media accounts were disestablished in the first few days, and it’s been successful. I was recently in Australia and saw the successful, positive impact of their ban for under-16s on social media.

While there will always be enforcement challenges, a social media ban is also about shifting behaviour and empowering parents. Right now, parents feel like they are fighting a losing battle against multimillion-dollar social media platforms exploiting our children. When a parent says no to their 11-year-old child being on Snapchat or TikTok, they feel like the mean parent excluding their children from a social life. If there is a social media ban, a social media age, parents can say no, it’s not OK, because the law says so. I commend this report to the House.

17:56

Well, first of all, I just want to acknowledge the hard work from the Education and Workforce Committee, led by Carl Bates, for this fantastic report. If you are anyone interested in the issues, I recommend that you read through it. It’s very detailed and covers a lot of topics, so well done.

One thing I want to cover is that we know our society has transformed dramatically through the digital world. Technology and the internet have changed the way we live, work, learn, and communicate. Today, information is available instantly at our fingertips. Families separated by oceans can stay connected through video calls and social media. Young people can access educational resources, build friendships, and discover opportunities that previous generations could only imagine. But along with this advantage comes an ongoing challenge: online harm.

If you look at this report, the committee has heard deeply concerning evidence from parents, teachers, social workers, community leaders, and young people themselves. We heard about cyber-bullying, harmful online content, online scams, gambling advertisements, addiction to social media, and the negative impact that excessive screen time can have on mental health and child development. But those harms—is it new to us? It is not.

I go back to the days when I was 15 years old. The first social media I used was called ICQ. I’m not sure how many people have used it before. You can actually call with it online, call with it worldwide, to make friends. And there’s always a risk that that happens in using those social media, so I believe that this inquiry is overdue. I’m glad that we started looking into these issues and trying to address that. Now, after so many years, as a father myself, this concern resonates personally with me. Like many parents, I worry about the kind of content our children are exposed to online, the amount of time they spend on devices, and the pressure they face in digital environments.

This is why, this last year, I organised a public meeting on online harm as well, to raise awareness and to hear directly from our community. The feedback was pretty similar to what we actually learnt in this inquiry.

I just want to mention what’s being highlighted in this report. First, at a Government level, a lot of submitters mentioned that the current legislation is fragmented and inconsistent and there is no single national regulator with clear responsibility for online safety. Stronger coordination and leadership are needed to better protect our communities.

Second, online platforms themselves must take greater responsibility. This report highlights concerns around the advertising and promotion of harmful products and harmful content online. Technology companies have influence and that influence comes with responsibility.

Third, parents and caregivers play a critical role. We heard repeatedly that children need guidance, boundaries, and support in navigating the online world. Spending quality time with our children, understanding what they are doing online, and having open conversations are essential steps in reducing harm.

Finally, to the young people themselves, I believe that we need to have a little bit of faith in our youth sometimes. They are actually smart and they understand the potential harm online, and they have the resilience to navigate those challenges. I think we just need to give them a little bit of guidance and education, so they can safely and responsibly engage online. This report contains 12 key reflections and recommendations for future action, but, ultimately, reducing online harm will require all of us: the Government, schools, communities, industry, parents, and young people working together

But, for me—for me personally—one message stands above all others: family connection matters. Maybe it is time for all of us to reflect on our own habits. Maybe it is time for us to put down our cellphones a little bit more often, spend more time with our children, listen to them—

And your wife.

—talk to them, and show them more care and attention. That’s right. We need to talk to our wives more often, as well. Technology will shape our future, but no technology will replace the guidance, love, and people of our family. I commend this report to the House.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

The time for this debate has expired. It’s perfect timing. Thank you, members. It’s also time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m.

Good evening, members. The House is resumed.

19:30

I move, That the sitting of the House today be extended into tomorrow morning to consider the:‌

• Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill second reading,
• Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill second reading,
• Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill second reading,
• Environment (Disestablishment of Ministry for the Environment) Amendment Bill committee of the whole House stage, and
• Redress System for Abuse in Care Bill committee of the whole House stage.

19:31

I move, That a respectful Address be presented to Her Excellency the Governor-General commending to Her Excellency:‍

• the alterations to the appropriations for the 2025/26 financial year in respect of Vote Audit,
• Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and the estimates of expenses for the 2026/27 financial year in respect of Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Vote Office of the Clerk, and Vote Parliamentary Service.

It is about the appropriations for the Officers of Parliament. It is an annual process that basically allows for the agencies to recommend their budgets to the Government. This is the first time that the process has also included the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk, due to the passing of the Parliament Act last year.

19:32

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. E tū ana awau mā te Pāti Reipa ki te tautoko i ngā whakaaro e puta ana i roto i ēnei kaupapa kōrero.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand on behalf of the Labour Party to support the ideas that have emerged within these topics of discussion.]

I rise in support of the recommendations for the 2026-27 draft budgets for the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The recommendations recognise several important priorities: maintaining secure and modern parliamentary technology, supporting select committee and legislative services, strengthening digital access and public engagement, and ensuring Parliament continues to operate efficiently and transparently under tight fiscal conditions.

I’m sure we agree across the House that these priorities directly support not only constituents of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti but across Aotearoa whānui. Over the past two years, whānau have become increasingly engaged in the submissions process. I think of people from across Aotearoa, some who live in the back blocks of Te Araroa, some who live in the beautiful Tai Tokerau, and in the depths of Te Waipounamu. Often those whānau rely on good connectivity and digital access to be able to fully participate in our processes with integrity, and I think that is reason enough to support that recommendation.

Speaking of select committee processes, I want to acknowledge all the clerks and all the other support staff who make that process smooth for everybody involved. I also want to take the time to thank everybody out there who has taken the time to write submissions, often at short notice, so that you can fully participate in parliamentary processes. Once again, Labour absolutely supports ensuring the efficiency and integrity of the select committee process.

Now, at a time when people are talking about the cost of living, some people may perceive this to be simply maintaining systems and processes in our offices here in Wellington and across Aotearoa. There is an element of truth to that, but also the fact is that that investment, once again, will directly benefit our constituents. It’s also worth remembering that Parliament itself is not immune to rising costs of operation.

Recent legislation has absolutely increased the participation of whānau across Aotearoa in these processes, so it is with pleasure that I stand up on behalf of the Labour Party to support these recommendations to ensure the efficiency and integrity of all our parliamentary processes, but, more importantly, to ensure them for the constituents across Aotearoa who put all the representatives here in this House. I commend the recommendations to the House.

19:35

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand to also support the alterations to the 2025-26 appropriation for Vote Audit, Vote Ombudsmen, and Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment; the draft budget for the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General, the Office of the Ombudsmen, and the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment; as well as the newly added appropriations for the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

I want to discuss each in turn, the first grouping being the Officers of Parliament, and just noting that all of these were heard in the Officers of Parliament Committee. There are three particular Officers of Parliament that we’ve heard from: the Controller and Auditor-General, the Ombudsmen, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

Now, in terms of the Ombudsmen, one of the major things for all three is in terms of the increasing cost and the pressure that applies and the potential trade-offs for each of the three officers. I just note that the reason that alongside this we will see the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk is because of the independence that is required for some of these functions, and particularly when we’re looking at the Officers of Parliament.

For the Ombudsmen, I think one of the major things is around some of the trade-offs we’re seeing with the increased number of Official Information Act requests, but at the same time, the increasing number of complaints for using the Official Information Act. I think it’s important to acknowledge the continued importance of the role of the Ombudsmen, and the Ombudsmen that came before the current ones in terms of upholding that ability to scrutinise, but also the checks and balances between the legislature and the executive. That is the incredibly important function that the Ombudsmen play.

With the Controller and Auditor-General obviously the standard work that the Controller and the Auditor-General does is in terms of audits of various aspects of agencies here in Aotearoa. They also support members of Parliament at select committees on some of our scrutiny requirements. Most importantly, it’s also important to note the most recent merger between Audit New Zealand and the Office of the Auditor-General into the new Audit Office. I think that is something that, for the rest of us, will take a little while to get used to.

Finally, in terms of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, one of the things that was raised as part of the select committee process was the fact that the budget that has been requested is staying the same for the next four years. That’s an important thing to note, because one of the things that we did ask is how the commissioner is able to continue achieving the same quality and the same quantity of reports and investigations despite the increasing cost, even if you’re looking at the baseline of the Consumers Price Index. That is something that we have received reassurance from the Commissioner for the Environment on, as well.

Finally, it is incredibly exciting—it is genuinely incredibly exciting—that we are looking at the first report by the Officers of Parliament Committee detailing the consideration for the budget to parliamentary agencies, and that’s the Parliamentary Service and also the Office of the Clerk as part of the passing of the Parliament Act 2025, last year. The reason this is exciting is that, for the first time, Parliament has absolute independence in determining its own budget, which means that we are able to scrutinise, we’re able to really fulfil our role as parliamentarians when we’re looking at that separation of power and the checks and balances between the legislature and the executive. Previously, our budget was determined by the executive, so that is an incredibly powerful thing to do, and, obviously, we thank all political parties in the House for years of work on the Parliament Bill.

I also do want to take this opportunity to acknowledge everyone in the Parliamentary Service as well as the Office of the Clerk, because as members of Parliament—the 123 of us—the reason we are able to do our work every day to the consistency and quality that we’re able to is because of all of the support that we get from the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk. I want to thank all of you, and particularly the extra hours that everyone has put in, in terms of all of the work that we are doing here. We know we’ve seen an increasing number of extended settings, urgencies, etc. Thank you to everyone that makes our Government, our Parliament run smoothly. With that, the Green Party supports this appropriation.

The proposed address is available on the Table of the House. The question is, That the address be adopted.

Address adopted.

19:41

There are bills that come to this House that make you get up in the morning and say, “This is why I came to Parliament.” This bill is not one of those bills, but it is a necessary piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

Dan Rosewarne—night of the Dans.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As Dan Bidois mentioned, this isn’t a flashy bill. It’s not transformational, and it’s not pretending to solve congestion or emissions or the cost of owning a car overnight or anything like that, but what it does do is very important.

I want to speak to this bill and, as someone who generally lives in this transport system, I like to see the transport system from multiple avenues of approach. I mean, I’ve got all my licence classes. Like the majority of this House, I’ve got class 1. I’ve got my class 2 licence as well. You needed that to drive the light armoured vehicles in the army, so I managed to get that relatively young. I then also got my class 4, heavy rigid, and then up to class 5, so I can drive the B-trains, which I very much enjoy. I also have endorsements to drive over the vehicle dimension and mass limits, which the Government is trying to increase—those axle weights—so plenty of experience in that.

I also have the class 6, the motorcycle licence, so that’s been very handy over the years. I’ve had lots of motorcycles over the years too. In fact, when I was in my mid-20s, I had a Harley-Davidson. Interestingly, if you want to feel young, you go out on a ride with a bunch of Harley owners. Even now, when I go out riding, I still feel young, riding with Harley owners.

I’d actually like to send a message to a lot of the young people out there. If your boss or your employer offers up the opportunity to get a driver’s licence and for them to pay for it, or even a forklift endorsement or a wheels, tracks, and rollers endorsement, absolutely take it. It’s a fantastic opportunity. I was told, as a young person, that if you have your heavy transport—HT is what they used to call it—and your forklift endorsement, you’ll never go hungry. You’ll always find a job somewhere in New Zealand, because there’s always someone that needs something moved or something transported from A to B.

I very much loved my cars. I also have a classic car. If anyone here knows their classic cars, I’ve got a fully restored HJ Kingswood. You used to have the Kingswood. It was the mid-range of the old Holdens. You used to have the Belmont, which was the base model, and then you’d have the Kingswood, and then the Premier, with the twin headlights. I very much enjoyed taking that around.

I think I need to remind the member it’s actually a five-minute call. As much as we’re enjoying the nostalgia trip around their car, I thought I’d better warn him.

I was very much about to get back to the bill and I was just kind of dialling back into that.

The bill also covers the old drivers’ licences—and we all remember the old ones. You would just have the colour of your eyes. There was no photo ID in there, so it wasn’t very secure. Some people—I don’t know who they were— used to use them as ID. They used to pass them around to get into bars and clubs and things, but I would never do anything like that, and neither would any good member of this House. Going to the electronic drivers’ licences is very good for security, but bear in mind that the hard-copy drivers’ licences might still be very important if you’re travelling overseas. Some people might prefer to hold on to those hard-copy licences if they’re going to hire a car, or if they decide to go to the Cook Islands on holiday.

If you don’t have your licence, you’ve got to go to the police station in Rarotonga there, but if you’ve got your hard-copy licence, you can just go to the rental, hire your scooter, and crack on with your holiday. Some jurisdictions might still require us to have a hard-copy licence, but, yeah, that’s what this bill does—it enables us to move to kind of like a digital form, which definitely enhances security.

The bill also allows things like a warrant or fitness and certificate of fitness and other key documents to be handled electronically. When I take my car to car shows and things, I don’t like it to be plastered with registration stickers. It looks a lot cleaner. I’ve got the original glass in it from 1976. I just like to have that on display. As someone who looks after older vehicles, I like the idea of digital tags, and a lot of the classic car owners feel the same way.

Another big reason that Labour supports this bill is because it strengthens safety and enforcement as well. It gives the New Zealand Transport Agency clearer powers to close unsafe highways. It allows unsafe operators to be suspended immediately, and it also strengthens investigation powers across road, rail, maritime, and aviation. That very much matters because transport law isn’t something just kind of on the side. We need it for our roads, especially when they’re wet or especially when we need to cut them off for maintenance. It’s very important. For that reason, I commend the bill to the House.

19:47

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As much as I enjoyed the member’s speech, I will make mine very short. The bill is a modernisation bill. It is bringing us to a digitalised driver’s licence, which I look forward to. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Labour supports this bill as it’s a set of technical but meaningful improvements that modernise our transport laws and reduce inefficiencies across the system. This is a practical piece of legislation that closes regulatory gaps, strengthens enforcement, and brings New Zealand into better alignment with international transport and labour standards. These are sensible, necessary changes, and Labour is very pleased to support them.

However, there’s a large hole in this bill, in that it does not tackle the bigger issues around transport and affordability, emissions reduction, or public transport accessibility. The Government had an opportunity to consider a wider remit as part of this amendment bill, and they have chosen not to, so I want to speak to both of those points today.

First, this bill makes compliance simpler, more efficient, and more suited to the modern world. One of the most noticeable shifts is the move toward digital systems. The bill allows infringement notices and reminders to be served electronically. It’s pretty straightforward, but it reflects how we’re actually living in modern-day society and how we communicate today. It also enables electronic warrants of fitness, certificates of fitness, and certificates of loading.

I think in years to come we will look back and wonder why we ever stuck little pieces of paper on our windscreen at the front of our car, and how, if we didn’t have the little paper there—even if we had a registration—we’d get a $200 fine. I’m not speaking from experience but from what I’ve heard from other people. It’s kind of like a fax machine and how we used to put pieces of paper into a machine and then it would go to someone else’s house. We kind of look back at that and think that is a bizarre situation that we did that.

Then, the other one I was thinking of is a CD and the thought of when I explained to my kids that we used to get a little disc and put it in a machine to play a song—after you go to the shop to buy your music, your CD, of one particular artist. They find that completely ridiculous because they can just get music at the tap of a button. My point is that I think that we will look back on this and think the same. I can’t believe that we had to walk around holding little licences in our hands when we were driving a car, and so I’m very pleased that we have these changes.

On your phone, it will be.

That’s right. It’s a sign of the times, and I note that the law just sets up this framework. The development and implementation of these tools we will see in the future, and I hope that that comes sooner rather than later. The change removes unnecessary hassle. It saves time for drivers, businesses, and regulators. It reduces paperwork and modernises a process that has, frankly, been very overdue for an update.

The digital driver’s licence is something that I personally welcome as someone—like, probably, most Millennials—who doesn’t like holding things in their hands apart from their phone. It’s going to be a great step in that direction for freeing up my hands because I don’t have to carry my wallet any more, but I can have my licence in my phone, and so that is a very positive step. However, I do appreciate that the bill still allows for physical copies of licences. While we move towards digital solutions, it still ensures that we have choice, and people who prefer physical licences and documents will still have that option.

What I wanted to mention here is the wonderful times when we used to have cheques and cheque books. I never used one, but I know that when cheque books were removed from circulation, many people were very concerned and upset about that. It is a hard thing—and I’m saying this in a genuine way—for people to make the shift from something that they’ve been using for a very long time and move to a different process. I think we’ve all experienced that—either ourselves, or our parents, or our grandparents—and so I’m very pleased that people can continue to have a physical copy of their driver’s licence.

Alongside these changes, the bill introduces practical administrative improvements like requiring email addresses and mobile numbers on licensing records, and these small changes will make the system more responsive and more workable in a digital age. Taken together, these reforms will reduce friction, they’ll make compliance easier, and they will improve how people interact with the transport system. However—to my second point—I’m disappointed that this Government has chosen not to go further with a more ambitious transport vision, one that puts climate, fairness, and accessibility at the heart of our transport system, where they should be.

This bill does not directly address affordability, congestion, or emissions. These are bigger issues that still require a stronger policy. Labour supports having a more ambitious transport vision, one that puts fairness and accessibility at the centre. On this side of the House, we like to dream big about what our future could look like in the transport space, and this bill reflects the priority of this Government, which is not a forward-focused transport system.

That reminds me of a train trip that I took two weeks ago from Hamilton to Tauranga—and it’s good to see that Ryan Hamilton is in the House, because he also supports trains. He wasn’t on the trip, but maybe he’ll be on the next one. We went through a tunnel in the Kaimais that hasn’t had a passenger rail train go through it in 14 years. It takes about 10 minutes, and you’re in the dark and it’s a little bit scary, but it’s so forward-thinking that we can connect our largest-growing region. We’re connecting Auckland, Hamilton, and Tauranga, the “golden triangle”, with public transport options. At a time when fuel prices are increasing, now is the time to make that change and to invest in more public transport. I’m disappointed that this bill, although it is a good step, is a small step, and I’d encourage the Government to go further because that’s what New Zealanders need—more options in our transport system.

Now I want to turn to another important part of the bill, which is safety. This bill strengthens the safety framework across road, rail, and maritime transport a little bit. It goes a step in the right direction, and there’s obviously more to do. I think that we can all agree that safety in transport is an incredibly important part of our society, and we should keep moving forward to increase safety where we can.

This bill gives regulators stronger enforcement tools, ensuring that they can act when safety is at risk. It updates penalties across the system, bringing them into line with modern expectations and ensuring consistency across different transport modes. This bill also strengthens powers in the rail sector, expanding investigation capability following accidents and incidents. We know that rail is a very high-risk environment. When something goes wrong, it’s critical that we can respond really quickly and efficiently, and this bill helps to ensure that we have the powers needed to do exactly that.

In addition, the bill lowers the threshold for maritime investigations, allowing regulators to respond more readily to safety concerns in that sector, and I also want to highlight the new powers given to the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi to close unsafe highways. I think that this is a really good safety move. It’s a common-sense measure. When a road is unsafe due to weather damage or other risks, the regulator is able to act quickly to protect people, and this bill ensures that that can go ahead.

I want to acknowledge that this bill has been through the select committee process and I’m sure that there have been many questions about the integrity of things like the digital licences and the documents, and I look forward to seeing how that is implemented as it is.

To conclude, look, the bill does some work in the right direction. There is much more to do. Labour supports this bill on the basis of it being meaningful improvements to our transport system.

19:57

I’d like to congratulate the member there, Georgie Dansey, on what I assume is her first 10-minute call. Well done, you’ve completed the challenge.

Planes, trains, and automobiles—it’s a great bill. It’s taking the licences of old, as Dan Rosewarne talked about and which I remember, to become a new one, and now we have the optionality of it being digital. I commend the bill to the House.

19:58

I present a legislative statement on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill.

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

I move, That the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I’m pleased to be here today to present the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. This is an omnibus bill that deals with the regulatory systems overseen by the Department of Internal Affairs. The bill’s primary objective is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of those regulatory systems. The bill addresses minor errors, gaps, and inconsistencies across legislation. It also addresses overly prescriptive and out-of-date provisions.

The bill amends 30 Acts, including restricting under-18s from purchasing tickets for lottery products and allowing individuals to apply to have their passports cancelled if the data has been compromised. It also strengthens the department’s ability to share information with international law enforcement agencies to prevent the spread of objectionable content such as child sex abuse material online. The department’s digital safety team work hard to take down this horrific content and I’m pleased to be able to support their efforts through this change.

I thank the Governance and Administration Committee for its work on the bill. The committee has had a huge variety of topics to consider, from processes for disposing archives and the requirements for issuing emergency travel documents, to addressing details that will support the implementation of the fire and emergency levy. I also thank everyone who took time to submit on the bill. The committee received 46 submissions including from the New Zealand Law Society, the Office of the Ombudsmen, the Insurance Council of New Zealand, Fertility New Zealand, and the New Zealand Mixed Martial Arts Federation.

I was pleased to see that the committee unanimously supported the progress of the bill. It shows a general consensus that this bill will improve the Department of Internal Affairs’ regulatory systems and, ultimately, will deliver benefits to Kiwis who interact with those systems.

I also consider the committee’s recommended changes are reasonable and will improve the bill. For example, one of the recommendations for an additional amendment would give greater flexibility to local authorities to publish notices online, rather than having to publish notices in the newspaper. This will provide small but worthwhile cost savings for councils.

The committee also recommended a range of technical improvements that will strengthen or clarify existing amendments in the bill. One example is providing a definition of “personal representative” in the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act so that it is clearer as to who can provide donor information to fertility clinics. Another is providing more detail on the health and safety risks that would justify the Chief Archivist authorising the destruction of a public archive.

In conclusion, this bill will deliver a wide range of small improvements to the Department of Internal Affairs’ regulatory systems. The select committee process has helped to ensure that we will get the details right to deliver the best benefit possible. I’d like to thank the Governance and Administration Committee again and the people who made submissions. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

20:02

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d like to make a contribution to the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. Following on from the Minister with regards to this bill, it is a very important bill that amends out-of-date provisions in over 23 Acts. I want to acknowledge the Governance and Administration Committee members. We were able to work collegially and hear from over 40 submitters from the community with respect to various pieces of legislation.

What was important was to understand that provisions under each of the Acts were brought forward to the select committee, and the submitters came to the committee with their individual concerns. It was then for the select committee to do their work with assistance from the officials. So I do want to acknowledge the officials who carried out the work in terms of the Department of Internal Affairs and the respective departments.

I also want to finally acknowledge the submitters who came forward. Some had very interesting information in their submissions because select committee members were not aware of those circumstances in the community.

Of those over 20 Acts that are recorded in terms of this bill, it is important to understand each scenario of the submitters and that specific piece of legislation. So in my contribution, I do want to quickly talk about specific pieces of legislation that have been covered under this Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. The first one that I would like to highlight is the changes in the Births, Death, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act. The submitters highlighted the gap in terms of the current processes under the legislation. Part of the select committee’s role was to do the checks and balances when it came to specific information that is registered on a birth certificate.

For example, when the information is specifically registered at the Internal Affairs office, it is important to understand the gap. The submitters were saying that once their information is registered, unless you go back to the registration at the Citizenship Office to have that changed, your information can be recorded incorrectly. That is quite upsetting to members of the public who take a lot of pride in terms of the information that is registered. The provision or the registered information that is covered in terms of correcting the provision, the select committee members were able to discuss that and make the suggestion for it being updated and corrected.

Another Act that we did cover and we heard a few submissions on was the Boxing and Wrestling Act. It was important to understand that there are athletes in the community in that specific sport and that the outdated legislation needed to be updated. In terms of combat sports, it’s actually quite different today in 2026 from when the legislation was written at the late 1950s. It was important to reflect that the legislation needed to be updated to keep those athletes safe. That is important in contact sports and combat sports. So that was really helpful to understand from those submitters. When we received that submission, the oral submission, the committee members had the ability to ask and clarify questions and so that was helpful.

I do want to look at the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act because there’s been quite a lot of activity in this House with regards to Fire and Emergency New Zealand. This specific amendment bill contains changes in terms of mixed-use properties, those that are residential and non-residential. To achieve the purpose of the provision is to get that levy right. So it’s important to understand that a number of recommendations were made with regard to this amendment, and we also heard from the officials that there needed to be some amendments. The definitions needed to be accurate, and the transitional provisions must be correct so that those members in our community that this piece of legislation affects have that calculation correct.

I just want to quickly cover the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, because there were things that submitters raised. When we heard from a couple of the submitters, it was important to understand their specific scenario and how the provision affects their scenario. So the legislation was important to understand the role of the donor and then the role of that specific scenario so that we could make sure as select committee members that the tidy-up of efficiency and effectiveness is reflected in the new provisions. So it was helpful to understand, but also there was quite some sensitive information in that piece of legislation.

One of the things that I—with interest—hadn’t realised was in terms of who can purchase Lotto tickets. It’s important to understand that our young people, under 18 years of age, cannot purchase a Lotto ticket because there are rules around it. So sometimes in our community—I’ll take in Māngere for example—some of our young people who are not 18 but look like they’re 25 will just rock up and think that they can purchase. But, actually, there is a provision, and they need to be protected as young people in our community, and the business or the shop owner needs to ask that question, “Are you 18 years of age?” Some of our 14-year-olds look like they’re 25 and if they can’t provide the identification, then there need to be tidy-ups. I say that politely and respectfully.

It was important to understand that only those over 18 are responsible adults and that there is law relating to those under 18, and mum and dad cannot just send young Johnny or young Jane along and say, “Go buy my ticket”, and, in actual fact, the business needs to ensure that they are asking those responsible questions.

If there is a complaint and that complaint is investigated by Internal Affairs officials, then there are specific rules. So the law needs to be black and white so that members in our community understand that those who can purchase, whether it’s Lotto or Keno or whatever it is, are of age and are doing a responsible purchase.

The last one I just wanted to quickly cover was the changes in terms of the Gambling Act where it highlights the rules in black and white. Online gambling or gambling has been quite a big topic in this House, but with this bill—the tidy-ups of effectiveness and efficiencies—it’s really important for New Zealanders to understand that Internal Affairs has a specific role, that there is going to be a tidy-up of these over 20 pieces of legislation, and that they know the rules are black and white, and that whatever the tidy-up has been and whatever work the Governance and Administration Committee has done, it is updated, correct, and accurate.

Then it does allow the officials to do their role in terms of advising the community. If there is a question on the different pieces of legislation, the public then knows to go on the Internal Affairs website. They are able to ask questions, and they are able to log those queries. When the select committee received this amendment bill, we did a lot of work, and it was really important for us as members to understand the impacts of different pieces of legislation in our community.

I do want to thank all of the officials involved and especially my colleagues and the submitters who helped us understand how a change or an updated piece of legislation affects them in their community and in their situation. I’m very grateful that we were able to work collegially as a select committee. We were able to make recommendations. Officials helped us, and it was really good that we were able to achieve that. I commend this bill to the House.

20:12

I seek leave to make a personal statement to correct a statement I made in the House on 21 April 2026.

Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection.

Thank you. The statement was made on the basis of advice that I received at the time from the Ministry of Education. I incorrectly asserted that not a single word of the new curriculum in Te Marautanga, the updated refresh, had been done. This afternoon, the Secretary for Education notified me that there was an error in their advice and formally apologised to me for not advising me that one strand of the social sciences curriculum area in Te Marautanga o Aotearoa had been developed.

20:13

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m delighted to rise on behalf of the Green Party to speak to the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. This is actually a second night where I’ve done a regulatory systems amendment bill. The other one was transport, and very exciting bills these are, indeed. The Green Party does support this bill, and obviously it covers a lot of Acts; 23 Acts, all up. Those Acts are—we may as well let the people that are watching online know what the Acts are. I think that’s actually quite important because it is very important to give them all the information they need.

There’s the films—oh, hang on. There are so many that it’s on two pages. There’s the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021; Charities Act 2005; Citizenship Act 1977; Electronic Identity Verification Act 2012; Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993; Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017; Gambling Act 2003; Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003; Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2004; Inquiries Act 2013; Land Drainage Act 1908; Legal Services Act 2011; Local Authorities (Members’ Interests) Act 1968; Local Government (Auckland Council) Act 2009; Marriage Act 1955; Passports Act 1992; Public Records Act 2005; Reserves and Other Lands Disposal and Public Bodies Empowering Act 1915; Reserves and other Lands Disposal and Public Bodies Empowering Act 1917; Reserves and other Lands Disposal and Public Bodies Empowering Act 1920; River Boards Amendment Act 1913; and last, but not least, the Rotorua Borough Act 1922. Also, with those ones the bill is going to repeal the Boxing and Wrestling Act 1981 and revoke the Boxing and Wrestling Regulations 1958.

So a lot of Acts are being changed, and it’s obviously—as people described it yesterday, housekeeping, with these types of regulatory system amendment bills—very technical in nature. I will touch on a couple of the bills, just to go through, because I also think that’s quite important. I’ve had a little bit of involvement through this process because I obviously came in late last year and I was fortunate enough to actually listen to some of the hearings panels. It was good to see there were 44 individuals or groups that submitted on this. I believe 11 were heard and I was fortunate to listen to a very, very, I guess, sensitive hearing which focused on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act and actually how the legislation truly affected her ability to have ownership of her own tissue coming from overseas and where that was. Unfortunately, it was outside the scope of this bill, but it is noted in there.

I think when we have incidents like that come to select committee, I think it’s one thing to note it, but it’s when we see there are actually serious issues with legislation, it’s like, how is that picked up and moved forward so it can be rectified? The story that this woman gave us was very emotional and it was very powerful. It’s a shame if it just stops there on a piece of paper to say, “Oh, well, that’s out of scope.” I’d hope that, like we saw with the transport bill with the person who could not drive and therefore could not get a driver’s licence, that was actually going to get progressed. I do hope that also happens in this case as well.

Another Act that is going to be revoked is the Boxing and Wrestling Act 1981. It was quite interesting because obviously there are a lot more combat sports, I guess, that we now see, that are not subject to an Act. There was a little bit of concern that because we had some boxing and wrestling that was covered by an Act and some other combat sports that weren’t then the solution was to revoke the one that had an Act so that everyone was fair, and there was a little bit of concern about—so it was good to see that the Governance and Administration Committee did have a look at how we could actually ensure that something was developed and try and get the timing right that when this was revoked, something would be coming in its place.

Now, personally, I was involved in a charity boxing match where one of the participants died and I was ringside at the time when that happened. I know firsthand that actually these things do happen and we need to ensure that we have legislation in place that does protect people that do participate in sport. Things like that affect so many people and you can’t take back when something like that happens, so it’s really important that as we repeal this Act, we actually put something in place that has the ability to protect people when they decide to participate in a sport that does involve conflict. It was really good to see that the committee had a look at this to try and ensure that when it does get repealed, there will be something put in place that will actually cover all the combat sports that we see.

Some of the other Acts that were changed were the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act , and that was just to clarify provisions relating to overseas divorce, dissolution, name changes, historical information, and some small changes to the functions of the Registrar-General. Most of the Acts were very, very minor. I think there was the Local Government (Auckland Council) Act; that was just to correct a cross-reference.

I think one of the ones that was quite interesting, I guess, was the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act. A lot of that was just trying to align the Act and the definitions of what a multi-use dwelling was to what was in the newly created Natural Hazards Act. It was quite interesting. I used to work for the Earthquake Commission and looked after the multi-units division there, and it was not easy when you had these multi-use buildings, especially when there was a commercial element involved, trying to actually work out where the 50 percent was or was it not—it took a lot of time and effort and created a lot of confusion. It’s really good to see that was fixed up in the Natural Hazards Act, and then this has been replicated into the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017. I think it’s really important that we have Acts that make it very simple for people to understand how things are defined when in legislation.

Another Act that, obviously, was looked at was the Passports Act 1992, which provides additional reasonable grounds for when a Minister can cancel a passport—for example, when it’s stolen or is requested to be cancelled, and the Citizenship Act 1977, to remove references to specific genders and to clarify exceptions for obligations and providing certificates.

It was very, very straightforward, and so this is one of the reasons why the Greens support these things, because this is a technical housekeeping bill that is just tidying up some Acts, and some of these are very, very old Acts. I think I was mentioning before that there were Acts from 1915 and 1908—the Land Drainage Act. It’s always good to be looking at these Acts to make sure that they’re fit for purpose.

The other thing, in my last minute, I think it’s really important to touch on is the Fire and Emergency Act, because part of that was, obviously, doing some updates regarding to the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) levy. We see right now how under-funded FENZ has been and the impact of that on its fleet. While this was, obviously, an opportunity to tidy things up, I think really the question that should be asked is whether the current way that FENZ is funded is actually sustainable. Is it giving us the right outcomes for our country, for an emergency service that responds to so many different things, not just fires? We have seen, since their formation in 2017, it seems to be going backwards. It’s great that this is a technical tidy-up, but I think we know from this that there are bigger things that also need to happen that we should be focused on as well.

Just in closing, the Greens do support this, and I look forward to the next stage.

20:23

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to congratulate the Governance and Administration Committee for this piece of work: 23 Acts—it’s an omnibus bill—10 minor changes to the Acts, and unanimous agreement in select committee for all of those changes. With that sort of support from across the House, we should keep this moving. I commend this bill to the House.

Thanks, Mr Speaker. I rise both on behalf of New Zealand First but also as a member of the Governance and Administration Committee, which considered this bill. What’s really great is that in hearing this debate, which is about a regulatory systems bill, people are actually focused on the bill. That’s marvellous, because that wasn’t the case yesterday when we were talking about transport issues. Well done to the Opposition for actually focusing on the bill—good stuff. We’re making improvements.

This bill is, as we have heard, largely a housekeeping bill, largely technical, and, as we’ve heard, a great long list of 23—I hope this is not wishful thinking that we’re going to keep to that kaupapa, but anyway. It is largely technical, and as Mike Davidson said, 23 Acts are affected, but there are some issues which are not entirely technical, and there’s also—I think this is good work by the select committee, because we’ve identified a number of areas where, in fact, we were outside of the scope of the bill, but we’ve said that, actually, more work needs to be done on those.

Mike Davidson already has mentioned the issue around combat sports, where we heard from some of the combat sports who said, “Basically, we’d like some form of arrangement that, actually, somebody’s managing our sports so they are safer.” You know, it’s a hard thing to be sitting at an event and see somebody killed in one of these combat sports or die as a result of injuries in one of these combat sports. They said that they wanted some form of regulation or some form of governance. We’ve said we actually think that’s a good idea, and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage—an interesting ministry to be in charge of this—were doing some work, and so we said, “Actually, just taihoa on removing the existing legislation, but keep on with that work, get on with doing that work so we actually get an outcome which is good for the people who participate in our combat sports.”

The second one I wanted to mention is the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act. There were some really interesting things there. It was really around sperm donating and the situation where somebody might donate to multiple different clinics, and it’s the ability to be able to share information between them in a way that works, because you don’t really want to be in the situation of having someone be a donor to one clinic and a donor to another clinic, and people get together in a relationship 20 or 30 years down the track and you’ve actually, effectively, got biological relations who are then in a relationship with each other. Again, we said it’s a complicated area, but we do need to see some more work done. That’s outside of the scope of the bill, but we’ve said that, actually, we think more work needs to be done in that area as well.

The other area I wanted to identify is in the Public Records Act, and this is the one area, as you see right at the beginning of the commentary from the committee, where we did have a disagreement, with a minority opinion rather than a majority opinion. Unusually, in this case, the majority opinion was from Opposition parties and New Zealand First, and National said—and this is why we have a dissenting view—that they don’t agree with that.

I just wanted to briefly walk through that, because the idea here was to be able to exempt some agencies particularly where they’re working overseas, and the particular one where the concern was around the Defence Force. Of course, this relates back to Operation Burnham in Afghanistan, the situation there, the inquiry that happened into that incident. This is about saying, “Well, so we exempt the Defence Force from having to comply with the Public Records Act?” We had a number of submitters who said they were concerned that this is just too easy a way out and we should not be doing that, should not be countenancing that. By majority we actually said, “Look, we agree. It doesn’t mean that it can never happen. It doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an exemption at some stage in the future, but it needs to be carefully thought through.” So the recommendation from the committee—and I know that this was something where we specifically got advice from our leader’s office, and we said that this is something we had signalled, he had signalled, is a concern—was that they didn’t want to see the Defence Force being excluded because of the situation around Operation Burnham.

We’ve got to take this this very carefully, very thoughtfully, and that is why the recommendation in the committee report back refers to the Department of Internal Affairs telling us that it will continue to work on this issue, and we’re encouraging it do so. We’ve particularly said that we think there should be further consultation on this because there are a lot of people with an interest in it. There are a lot of people with a lot of knowledge in it, and we think that that work should be done. There are several areas in this report where they are not merely technical but we think that further work should be done, because they are issues which are sensitive and could give a significant benefit to the country going forward. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a 5-minute split call—Lawrence Xu-Nan.

20:28

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party, also in support of the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. I want to pick up on where the previous speaker, Andy Foster, left off, which is the Public Records Act, and particularly clause 162 of the bill. Now, this is quite a substantial bill, as we heard before, and it does cover 23 different Acts. I think we’re finding ourselves in a really peculiar situation where this is one of the few instances I’ve seen this entire term where the National Party actually had a differing view. What I think surprised me more is the fact that no one I’ve heard so far from the National Party has actually spoken on their differing view or articulated their differing view.

So I would be really keen to hear from the National Party rather than the member here from New Zealand First. I would like to hear from the National Party on why that differing view exists and what is their intention behind that view. I think that is going to be an important thing to highlight, because it is, again, quite an interesting anomaly that we don’t normally see in any bill, let alone a regulatory systems bill, which is usually supposed to have cross-party consensus and be unanimous, but in this particular case it is done by majority.

Now, in terms of the regulatory systems bill, and I think, you know, quite a few people have spoken on this, and we’re going to be seeing quite a few of these regulatory system bills in general, and they are, usually, the housekeeping bills that we’re seeing that are a necessary but important tidy up. Arguably, I would say that some of the regulatory systems bills that we see are more important than some of the bills that have been introduced in this House by this Government in the first place.

But, nevertheless, what we often see is regulatory systems bills being sort of left on the sideline a little bit, and they usually don’t even get picked up until much further. For those people with keen eyes tracking regulatory systems bills, it’s really interesting to see how long between a first reading and select committee stage, with the regulatory systems bill, it needs to take before it actually gets picked up on the Order Paper to be able to be read a second time—let alone a committee stage and third reading. Whereas, as I mentioned, and as other members of this House have mentioned, there are some really significant aspects of this bill that are repealing in higher legislations and important changes that genuinely will make tangible differences to people in the communities—again, as opposed to some of the bills that we’re seeing in the House this term.

I do want to pick up on a few aspects of this bill. We mentioned before, in terms of the public records and particularly when it comes to overseas exemption in clause 162, but I think, to start with, one of the things we’re looking at is the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act, around the ability for the Registrar-General to emit registered information from a birth, death, name change, and marriage or civil union certificate.

Now, of course, what I’m going to be mainly speaking on for the remainder of this time are changes and recommendations through the select committee. Despite my best efforts, I will not be able to cover all 23 Acts that will be covered in this bill. I will try my best.

Seek leave for an extension of time.

Yes, seek leave for more time—there we go. I could use up the time that other people did not use up. That would be new. I could use up the two minutes that I gracefully gave up last night prior to the Hon Judith Collins’ valedictorian statement.

But anyway, in terms of this, I think it is important some of the changes that, although I’m not a member of the Governance and Administration Committee, I’m really impressed with the quality of the report and the ability to listen to the submitters and make those sort of really tangible and really practical changes as a result. I do want to commend the chair at the time, Camilla Belich, for being the chair of that committee and being able to work collaboratively with the members on some of these changes as well.

Another one that is important to note is the Boxing and Wrestling Act, which my colleague Mike Davidson has mentioned before, and I think that’s an important change. I think a lot of the changes we’re seeing, whether it is the Boxing and Wrestling Act, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act, the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, and the Gambling Act are all based on feedback from submitters and from officials on being able to plug that loophole that, potentially, might be created between the first version of this bill and now the second version.

With that, I’m really pleased to see regulatory systems bills progressing in the House and the Green Party is happy to support this bill.

20:33

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill; it’s a synonymous bill and seeks to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of regulatory systems.

As Dr Shane Reti said, all parties right across the House have to actually agree to it, and, you know, many members from the select committee, and those who have actually spoken who are not on the select committee, have mentioned many, many things. I’ll mention two things: one is—because I don’t think anyone’s actually talked about this one—the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act. Part 6 of the bill talks about it. It is about labelling films and videos—for example, R18. The issue that they have is that the film and video labelling body, which currently undertakes the labelling body role, is actually finishing their work. It ends its operation on 31 March 2027, and that, effectively, creates a gap in who may actually do that. The Minister has actually made an amendment; proposed an addition inserting clause 47A and 47D to Part 6, to make sure that the classification office can, in fact, fulfil the work that the labelling body has provided in the past. So that actually fixes the problem.

In answer to Lawrence Xu-Nan, I just want to say that the National Party’s differing view, which was discussed quite widely in the select committee—and I’m acknowledging the work of the previous chair, Camilla Belich. I think this issue relates to New Zealand service people, servicemen and women who actually partake in, for example, peacekeeping operations overseas, whether it’s in the Middle East or whatever, and often those records are not kept by New Zealand because they are actually serving overseas in those jurisdictions, and often that information is not able to be attained or kept. This is the reason why this differing view was actually added to the select committee report, so that we can actually look at it and actually make amendments to it.

On that, I actually commend the bill to the House, because the whole of the House actually agrees to this bill.

20:36

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thanks to colleagues for their kind words. I was just saying to my colleague Tangi Utikere, I’ve missed the Governance and Administration Committee. It’s a great committee, and reading through all of this material does remind me of the really interesting work that the Governance and Administration Committee does and, of course, including this regulatory systems bill, which we looked at.

Now, if you look at the cover of this bill, you’ll see that it’s described as small changes that are done in a regulatory systems bill. But this particular bill—and it was something that was raised at first reading—does get into some issues of substance. They’re not, as you can see by the agreement of the House, things which have ended up being sufficiently controversial to mean that this doesn’t have support from across the House, but they are important issues. I want to thank all members of the Governance and Administration Committee and also the staff of the Governance and Administration Committee and the advisers that we had from the Department of Internal Affairs. They had to cover a number of different bills in order to provide us with their advice.

I also just acknowledge the fact that, as some have noted, this is a bill that does differ. The bill that we have in front of us now, at second reading, is a different bill than the one that was proposed at first reading. That is because the system that we have for scrutinising bills—we’ve done this and worked in this instance where we had a select committee, we had a number of different submitters; it wasn’t the most popular bill to submit on in the Parliament, but there were a number of submitters that had very targeted feedback for us on the part of the bill that was related to their particular life or experience. That meant that we did have very specific, varied submissions and we were able to, I think, in many instances, agree, almost all by majority, to make changes, which did improve the bill in my view.

So I’m much more confident in the support of this bill following the select committee process than we were at first reading. I think that’s a testament to how officials, the Minister, and the committee was able to work together to get these forward, but most importantly, really, it was the New Zealand public who, with their expertise and experience, did provide that feedback to us.

I did want to go through some of the changes that we made because I think some of them are quite important and some of them are quite interesting. I will focus on the changes that the select committee made rather than the bits of the bill—I think there was 23 different pieces of legislation, and some brave members have read out all of those. I won’t do that, but I will focus on the changes that the select committee did make because I think there were some important ones. I think I’m minded to start with, probably, the most significant one first—just to ensure that there is enough time to go over this—and that is focusing on the feedback that we did get about how our archives were kept. There were probably two changes that were made: one’s been touched on, which I’ll come to soon, but the other change that the select committee made was in relation to dealing with our important archives, which are a health and safety hazard or need to be destroyed.

Now, you may think that this sounds quite unbelievable, but, of course, we have significant archives in New Zealand. It could be that important documents are contaminated with asbestos; it could be that they are involved in a fire—there could be many different reasons that mean that something that would otherwise be kept as an important archive for some reason is now posing a health and safety risk to people.

According to those that submitted, this is not totally fanciful or unusual when you deal with a large number of records over a significant period of time; this does come up. We did hear a number of submissions around this, and the greatest thrust of the submissions was really that the destruction should only be made when it was truly necessary to do so and that when such destruction needed to take place, for health and safety reasons, a clear record was kept of that. I do want to thank the submitters that submitted to us on this point. You’ll see, from the changes that are made, that we took that really seriously.

Another key thing was the exemption in relation to those overseas, specifically concerning the New Zealand Defence Force, and you’ve heard colleagues reflect on this. We had a serious situation in New Zealand, and this does go slightly further than what you would normally be discussing in a regulatory standards bill, but we did have a situation—a high profile case, under Operation Burnham—when we did have deficiencies in our overseas record keeping identified, and the deficiencies were extremely problematic. That has been addressed separately to this bill, but this bill did overlap with that particular example in the sense that what was being proposed to us was a situation where those important New Zealand records that may be kept overseas would not necessarily be held to the same storage standards.

We did take this really seriously and we did have some passionate advice given to us around the concerns on this. I want to acknowledge the submitters that did come to the Governance and Administration Committee for that reason. You will see, by majority, we have decided that perhaps such a significant change is not appropriate for a regulatory systems bill and needs to be done with consultation led by the Department of Internal Affairs. In the end, that was the advice proffered, and that was the advice that the majority of the committee took, which was to make sure that any change was subject to an extensive consultation process. I want to thank the committee for looking at that issue with the seriousness that it deserved, taking a stance that said that this particular exemption would be premature, and that more work needed to be done to ensure that there were the proper checks and balances in place. I think we reached the right point on that particular issue. I do want to thank again those who brought that to our attention and the advice we were able to receive.

There are a few other issues which I think are important to note in this bill, apart from that significant issue. We’ve heard that the National Party had a differing view on that, and I invite members to address that if they wish, as, again, the Hon Melissa Lee has already done. The other matter which I just want to raise now—because I may not have time to go through all of the changes that we made at select committee—is just to note the changes in relation to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act. We did receive a number of submissions as part of that particular Act.

Unfortunately, the two issues that we really received submissions on were the issue of having more information about the number of times that sperm donors had donated to multiple clinics. Members of the committee had genuine concern around the fact that there may be people who were genetic family members who were not aware of that and that there was no way of testing or no register that told them that information. We asked for advice from officials on that. We were told that was out of scope of the bill. We thought it was important, so we’ve put it in our report, and I do bring it to the attention of the House as something that could be looked at in the future. [Interruption]

Can we keep the chatter down a bit on that side, please.

The second issue that I just wanted to raise was a very serious issue around the storage of embryos and the overseas storage of embryos. There seems to be general agreement in this area, from the experts and scientists who have knowledge about this type of genetic storage that is made, that this particular part of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act is out of date. This is currently causing harm and distress to New Zealand families at the moment. We took those submissions really seriously. We know that those who submitted to us had genuine reason to want change. We received advice that that particular change was out of scope of the bill.

At the same time, we wanted to make sure that the House took note of the fact that there currently is a piece of legislation which is perhaps not meeting the concerns that New Zealanders have. It’s about a very emotive issue, a very serious issue, around the storage of embryos. I think that it would be very good if the House and those in Government or those who have the ability to look at this issue could address this issue. I just want to acknowledge those people who did submit on that issue. It is really serious, and we were sorry that we were not able to address this more fully in this bill.

There are a number of other changes that the Governance and Administration Committee made. I won’t have enough time to go into all of them. I just wanted to acknowledge the quick change on the Boxing and Wrestling Act—that we did get an extension for that too—so I commend it to the House.

20:46

Sir, thank you. It was great to hear the submissions on this bill in the glorious Governance and Administration Committee. There are a lot of bits I’d like to touch on. There are some good changes I think the committee made, like the change to the Boxing and Wrestling Act, delaying that date so that there is time for regulations to be brought in. I did want to just touch on the Public Records Act. It’s not something I ever thought I’d be getting into the nitty gritty of, but I want to highlight one point, which was around access to the overseas exemption, because what it’s saying is: there used to be an overseas exemption but now there is no exemption for records that are stored overseas.

The easy one to think about is a military deployment. We see New Zealanders overseas in a coalition. Perhaps the UK military, in the case of our troops supporting Ukraine, holds some records which relate to New Zealanders but are actually British sovereign property. This bill now says that they must be provided for under New Zealand law. The only challenge is that we can’t actually tell them what to do. That’s not an authority we have. I do want to highlight this. This was debated at select committee, and I guess, ultimately, I haven’t won that argument, but I just want to highlight that we can pass the law to look good and like we’re doing the right thing. I don’t think this is something that can necessarily be delivered, and we need to be a little bit eyes wide open to that.

Some other practical changes: of course, in the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act; adding in the Local Electoral Act, the deputy electoral officer now able to take an oath. The Land Drainage Act: actually quite a good change that you can put notices online. The Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act: we had some heartfelt examples for that. And making Lotto R18; I’m a fan of that. I commend the bill.

The next call is a split call—Georgie Dansey.

20:48

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. I stand to take a call on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill in its second reading. The Labour Party supports this bill. This is an omnibus regulatory systems amendment bill, administered by the Department of Internal Affairs. For those listening at home, and me three months ago, I’ll explain what “omnibus” means. What it means is that it makes changes to multiple pieces of legislation administered by the department, and also to legislation administered by other agencies where the department plays an operational role. In this case, as other speakers have spoken to, this provision is over 23 Acts of Parliament. This bill aims to modernise and streamline numerous regulatory regimes, and it targets unnecessary provisions, outdated references, redundant provisions, and other technical inconsistencies across several Acts overseen by Internal Affairs and related portfolios.

This bill makes a few important changes that will increase safety and streamline regulation, and I’ll speak to a couple of those today. The first one is the restriction of sale of all Lotto products to those aged 18 and older, and other speakers have spoken to this provision. Currently, in Aotearoa New Zealand there is no age limit for playing instant lottery games and similar lottery games. There is no expectation that one is asked for ID when purchasing these games, and this is harmful. We know that gambling is a huge issue in Aotearoa New Zealand, and this House is having discussions on gambling harms on other bills. I note different views on gambling harms, but all the same, the Labour Party stands for reducing gambling harm in all phases. The platforms that are considered as part of this bill—the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill—they include Lotto, Play 3, Keno, and Bullseye.

Interestingly, despite anyone under 18 being able to play Lotto, if you’re under 18 and you go into a Lotto store and you manage to buy a Lotto ticket, and then you win more than $1,000 in prize money, you have to get a parent or guardian to come in and sign an acknowledgement form before you get your prize. That’s obviously really clunky and a clunky piece of law that doesn’t make any sense, so it’s really good to see that that’s being addressed as part of this bill. This bill will pull the rules around Lotto in line with other gambling platforms, scratch cards like instant play, Instant Kiwi, and other similar games, which are strictly for over-18s under the Gambling Act 2003. It brings it all into line, reduces harm, and gains consistency across the Acts.

One of the other changes to the bill that I wanted to speak to, that others have also spoken to, are the changes to the Boxing and Wrestling Act 1981 and associated regulations. This change will keep our legislation in line with international boxing and wrestling organisations, requirements for rings, boxing gloves, rounds, and durations. I don’t think anyone can argue that more safety around boxing and wrestling is important—it’s a pretty intimidating sport. I personally have never partaken, but I feel like my colleagues like Dan Rosewarne are probably an expert at this sort of thing—he can tell me about that later. It was really interesting to learn about the provisions that we have and what’s included and excluded from this, and so I look forward to seeing what comes next for protection across all combat sports, as the previous speaker, Mike Davidson, has spoken to. I’ll finish up there. Thanks very much, Mr Speaker, and I commend this bill to the House.

20:53

I stand to speak at the second reading of the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. Not being on the Governance and Administration Committee, I am, I guess, a lot more enlightened about what’s going on because the topics that have been covered in the debate tonight have been wide-ranging and have talked about all of those 23 bills that have been amended or repealed. I do have quite an interest in the repealing of the Boxing and Wrestling Act 1981. That’s because my grandfather was a national referee in wrestling and I grew up in a family—my uncles used to talk a lot about the famous Octopus Clamp of Lofty Blomfield, the wrestler.

Show us!

I could later. I commend the bill.

20:54

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Beat that, Jan!

I can’t beat that one!

I’ve recently joined the Governance and Administration Committee, and I have to say that in my first few meetings, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work that this committee is undertaking. Unfortunately, I wasn’t part of this bill as it was going through the select committee, but I am really intrigued. I love these regulatory systems bills. The work that goes into the modernisation of legislation in our public service is just phenomenal, and this bill is one such example of that work that goes in—23 pieces of legislation that are being modernised and scrutinised at the highest level.

At the time that this went through, I’ve gone through and I’ve read the departmental report to have a look and see what was suggested and some of the recommendations that were made. Having a look at some of the work that the committee undertook, and also the submitters and what they submitted on and the concerns that they had are absolutely fascinating, and that’s why I say I love these bills. This is some of the quirkier stuff that we see coming through this House, but some stuff that is supposed to be of a minimal standard but can actually sometimes have a big impact.

When you read the departmental report, there were 46 submissions to this bill; 31 and two groups made two submissions, so really, only from 44—31 individuals and 15 submissions were from organisations. Three totally supported the bill, 13 totally opposed the bill, 13 partially supported, four partially opposed, and 11 did not state; and there were 11 oral submissions into this bill as well. I love those sort of statistics because it just shows that even though that’s not a huge amount compared to some of the submissions that we received through select committees, you can see that there’s a wide variety of views even within that number of 44 that came through. You see that wide variety of people, and you also see the passion that comes through in the different areas that people want to talk about.

Some of the submitters actually said that they felt, because there were 23 pieces of legislation, that maybe this bill shouldn’t have proceeded as an omnibus, and that maybe it didn’t get the complete scrutiny that it probably deserved. Well, I’d challenge that, myself: having read the departmental report, you can obviously see that there was a high level of scrutiny into this bill and you could tell from some of the previous contributions here this evening that there were actually quite a number of changes that were made right throughout the select committee process. It was an absolutely robust process that went through. I think those submitters that said that this shouldn’t have gone through in the form because of the numbers or the pieces of Acts that it was aiming to replace or change—moderate changes—they can be reassured, and they should go and have a read of that departmental report or the advice that was given to the select committee to actually see how much scrutiny this particular bill went under.

Also, the officials actually said in that report that amendments included in the bill as it’s now written are in scope of a regulatory systems bill as they are non-contentious or well supported and/or make no more than minor policy changes to the relevant legislation. That’s where they have landed and that’s where the select committee landed as well.

One of the areas—and it has been traversed here a little bit this evening—that I did want to just briefly talk about was the amendments to the purchasing of Lotto tickets. I sort of had a little bit of a chuckle, at the same time a little bit horrified, that we’ve had legislation in place for so long that hasn’t protected our young people from partaking in gambling by buying a Lotto ticket. But the reason I say I had a little chuckle is because, when I was at school, my teacher used to send me to buy her cigarettes over at the dairy across the road, and there was no legislation that stopped that back then.

Did you have a smoke on the way back? I know Willie Jackson would’ve.

I am quite old, but I could go across the road, buy the cigarettes, and bring them back to my teacher. I will have to say, back then there was also no legislation that they couldn’t smoke them in the classroom, so she was actually smoking in the classroom those same cigarettes.

We laugh about that because that’s something that we couldn’t even conceive that that was possible now—that we would send young people to do that—because we also know the harm that smoking can cause. We also know that we try to discourage our young people from partaking and even starting smoking.

We try to keep them away from those sorts of things because research has showed that. We put that legislation in a long, long time ago, but here we are tonight, talking about changing the Lotto laws, because our young kids have been able to go and buy Lotto tickets, and there hasn’t been legislation that’s been able to stop that. Yet gambling does cause a lot of harm, and research, again, shows that if young people start gambling at a young age, even by buying Lotto tickets—and yes, the research does exist to show that there is a correlation between buying Lotto tickets when they are young and then later on experiencing gambling harm.

I’ve actually met people who have been in this situation. I can remember a former colleague in this House telling me that it was a problem in his family—that he had young cousins who were able to go and buy Lotto tickets, and frequently did, when they were children. That unfortunately led to other gambling, and then that led to gambling harm. Yet here we are—we laugh about the smoking situation, but we’ve done nothing until tonight. I really do congratulate the Governance and Administration Committee for taking that seriously enough to put it through—that we’re going to replace the clunky wording that was there—to tidy up something that should have been tidied up a long time ago and to make sure that our young people stay safe.

When you read the report, there was a little bit of pushback in that area. Some people felt that perhaps young people could buy the Lotto tickets, but they had to be older to get the winnings. That’s just too confusing; let’s just make it as it’s written in the bill as it stands now. Let’s make it really clear that young people can’t go and buy those Lotto tickets any more, and the other gambling areas that they could partake in. Instead of saying “an instant game”, it’s going to change that wording, as it stands in the bill now, to say “a New Zealand lottery”. That will cover that young people won’t be able to do that.

Maybe there’s something else that sits in legislation, where, one day, we’ll talk about, “Oh, remember when kids could go and buy Lotto tickets?” We might have something similar that comes up, but I hope we don’t. I hope we’re always looking and taking that safety-first and harm-reduction look at what should happen in legislation.

On this side of the House, Labour supports this bill. We believe that the changes that are being made are good changes. I will say that it’s been very interesting listening to the parts that different members who have been on the select committee have picked out. I think that that’s something that you see when you’ve got such a big omnibus bill—that different parts will appeal to different members. We’ve heard about all sorts of ones here this evening.

On that note, I would like to once again congratulate the work of the Governance and Administration Committee in working through such a big omnibus bill. I also congratulate the officials who have done so with great scrutiny, and I once again assure anyone that thinks it was given a once-over-lightly that this select committee did an amazing job of putting this through, and we’ve come to a great position here. I commend this bill to the House.

21:04

This bill is amending 23 different Acts. It’s time we got this through, just like the changes that the previous speaker, Jan Tinetti, spoke about—particularly in the lottery space. I’m not going to hold it up any further. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s great to ensure that this final call allows me to take the sufficient time just to go over some of the final details in this, the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill, second reading.

As other speakers from our Labour side of the House have attested, this is a bill that we do support. I didn’t have the opportunity to be there through the select committee process, but it’s been great to hear from those who were on the Governance and Administration Committee about the submissions that stuck out for them, but also the specific points that they wanted to address. For me, there are a couple of things that are of particular interest when you look at an omnibus bill that rolls together 23 Acts.

Probably where I want to start first is that it takes some important steps towards minimising gambling harm. We know that there is a lot of harm in our communities. I hear and see this in the community of Christchurch East, where I’m lucky enough to be the member of Parliament. We know that this happens nationwide, and there’s a huge social cost to that. There’s also a huge financial burden as a result of the harm that gambling does. That’s estimated, from what I can read, in the 2024-25 year, to be $4.2 billion as an economic load on New Zealand. I think that anything we can do to assist people to minimise the harms of gambling, but also to try to address some of those further costs that are passed on—those further financial costs and harms that just go out like a ripple of the harm that we see from gambling—is a good thing.

One of the other Acts that is addressed in this omnibus bill is the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 and some of the regulations that are made under that Act. There are some pretty peculiar things when legislation gets as old as 1993. Technology and the mediums in which we access and observe content have shifted exponentially in that time. We’re talking about a period of, my calculation, about 33 years. For example, if you purchase a game to play, like a video game, and you purchase that on a disc that you then take home—and I agree, not many people do, these days—if you were to purchase it in that format, it would need to carry a rating from the Chief Censor. But if you were to download that game, which is, let’s be honest what most people do on their phone or on their device, there’s no need for that game to receive a classification from the Chief Censor.

Now, that could be exactly the same game as the game that you bought or were given by someone who buys games on discs—it could be exactly the same game; the content could be exactly the same; the potential pleasure you could get from that game, or the potential harm that that game could cause, is exactly the same. The only issue here is the piece of legislation that hasn’t moved with the times, that is 33 years old, that doesn’t see the changes that have happened in the way that we see and access content—films, videos, and publications. I think that when we are able to move an Act like that into an omnibus bill like this, it is of advantage to be able to refresh and modernise it.

One of the other points I wanted to make—and hopefully I still have time before the clock runs down—is that the bill also strengthens the ability of the Department of Internal Affairs to share information with international law enforcement agencies to prevent the spread of objectionable content, such as child sexual abuse material, online. I think any step we can take to put stronger safeguards in place, to protect vulnerable people, and to stop the kind of harm that this level of criminal offending and the kind of abuse that happens in the creation of that content—anything we can do to stop, prevent, and take any step we can to make the stopping and preventing happen, we should be doing that.

Thank you to everyone on the select committee who took the time to give this the thorough, robust examination that it needed, and to the officials who guided it through.

The question is, That the amendment recommended by the Governance and Administration Committee by majority be agreed to.

21:10

I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training (System Reform) 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 Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

It is crucial that our country strives for a world-leading education system that equips every single child and young person to reach their full potential. Achieving this requires a cohesive education system with clearly defined roles and responsibilities and the right level of oversight and support. This bill introduces system-level changes that aim to strengthen the structure and accountability of our education system to ensure that it is fit for purpose and well positioned to support schools, teachers, and learners to succeed.

I want to thank the members of the Education and Workforce Committee for their careful consideration of the bill and their suggestions to strengthen it. Thank you to the more than 900 submitters who took the time to make the submissions on the bill and share their thoughts. This level of participation shows that New Zealanders care deeply about their education system and the outcomes it delivers.

Speaking to the proposals in the bill, I begin with the select committee’s recommendation that the bill provides for the transfer of regulatory functions for early childhood education—ECE—from the Ministry of Education’s director of regulation to the new director of regulation to be established within the Education Review Office (ERO). In July 2025, the Government signalled its intent to progress this proposal through the bill. It responds to the Ministry for Regulation’s review of ECE, which found confusion and overlap between the roles of the Ministry of Education and ERO. The review recommended that the agency roles and responsibilities be clarified to ensure efficient collaboration and improve accountability.

Shifting ECE regulatory functions to ERO will consolidate core regulatory functions within a single agency, reducing duplication, improving timelines of compliance action, and providing more clarity and certainty for service providers and parents. The proposal couldn’t be included in the bill at the time of introduction last November because it relied on the enactment of the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Act. That Act was passed in late November and came into force in February this year, establishing the director of regulation within the ministry.

I want to thank the committee for opening up the public submissions process to consider the proposal to transfer the ECE regulatory functions, alongside the proposed transfer of regulatory functions to private schools and hostels to ERO. This has enabled consideration of valuable submitter feedback and shaped the committee’s recommendations to improve the proposals.

I acknowledge submitter concerns regarding the perceived tension between ERO’s existing review functions and the new regulatory functions it will receive. The bill addresses these concerns by ensuring clearly defined functions, duties, powers, and role separation between the chief review officer and the new director of regulation role within ERO.

I support the committee’s recommendation for additional amendments to reinforce the separation of ERO’s role in the new functions through strengthening the requirements for managing conflicts of interest. I also support the committee’s recommendation to clarify that the ministry retains its policy-setting functions for ECE, private schools, and hostels in response to submitter concerns about the loss of system coherence and the scope of the new director of regulations role. This aligns with the policy intent and best practice where standards and criteria are set in one agency and regulatory decision-making happens in another. Transferring these key regulatory functions to ERO represents an important step in delivering the system changes needed to better support the outcomes and safety of our children and young people.

I’d also like to briefly highlight another proposal that clarifies the respective roles of ERO and the ministry when responding to schools of serious concern. I’ve heard submitters’ concerns and I want to be clear that this proposal is not about taking a punitive approach. Rather, it strengthens existing processes and sets clear expectations and time frames for the ministry and ERO to respond promptly and consistently when a school needs support. In too many cases it has taken too long for the system to respond to schools that need help.

The bill establishes also the New Zealand School Property Agency—NZSPA—and a new Crown agent responsible for maintaining and managing the education property portfolio. The 2024 ministerial inquiry into school property found that the current system was not fit for purpose, and while some improvements are under way, more substantial change is needed. NZSPA will drive critical changes to ensure the system delivers effectively for schools and students. Its board will provide specialist independent advice, ensuring efficient delivery with good investment and asset management practices. This will allow the ministry to focus on delivering essential educational outcomes for students. The purpose of NZSPA will be to make sure that children can learn in safe, warm, dry buildings. It will provide improved property services focusing on value for money and supported by clear leadership and oversight to make sure the investment in education property is well managed.

A high-performing education system relies on a high-quality teaching workforce. Recent reports from the OECD, ERO, the Royal Society expert advisory group, and the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research highlight concerning findings about the confidence and readiness of new teachers, particularly in teaching maths and science. I am concerned that the current workforce settings, including for initial teacher education (ITE), do not support the delivery of high-quality teaching.

This bill shifts responsibility for professional standard settings from the Teaching Council to the Ministry of Education. This includes setting the standards and criteria for teacher registration, initial teacher education, ongoing practice, and the code of conduct. Teacher preparation, curriculum expectations, and workforce regulation have developed separately over time. This has created a variation in how expectations are interpreted and applied across the system. A new standard-setting function within the ministry will support stronger alignment across these areas and it will ensure that the suite of teaching standards are set, maintained, and reviewed to reflect curriculum expectations, system priorities, and the skills and knowledge required for effective classroom practice.

This change is consistent with occupational regulation settings in other jurisdictions, such as in England and Singapore, where standard-setting and regulatory functions are separate. It will enable the ministry to ensure that we set high standards for ITE. Teaching. graduates will be able to enter the workforce with confidence and schools will be assured that their new teachers are well prepared. The new standards will be also backed up by the changes the bill makes to give the Teaching Council greater powers in monitoring ITE providers, including setting conditions on providers and, ultimately, cancelling programme approval. These powers will give the council the leverage to work with providers to ensure they are meeting very high standards.

I acknowledge that submitters have concerns about the impacts of these changes on the independence of the Teaching Council. The Teaching Council will retain its statutory and operational independence, particularly when making decisions affecting individual teachers or commercial teacher education providers, such as the approval and monitoring of ITE providers. The Teaching Council will retain responsibility for teacher registration and certification as well as competence and conduct processes. Other changes in the bill support the Teaching Council’s new scope and ensure it remains focused on its core functions.

Since the bill was introduced, two further reports into the Teaching Council have been published: the Francis review of the council’s culture and performance, and the Public Sector Commission report into the council’s procurement practices and handling of conflicts of interest. These show that there are significant performance improvements the council will need to make alongside the changes in this bill to ensure it can deliver on its core statutory functions of protecting the safety of students and maintaining the quality of teachers’ practice.

Quality teaching must also be supported by a high-quality curriculum. The bill proposes a set of changes to strengthen the curriculum, including requiring regular rolling reviews of curriculum areas to ensure the curriculum constantly stays up to date and informed by the latest evidence. Like other highly performing jurisdictions, like Australia and Singapore, we will have smaller, more regular updates of the curriculum in a rolling cycle rather than wholesale reforms every 20 years, which is far more disruptive to the sector.

Some submitters were concerned that the bill increases ministerial control over the curriculum. Legislation has enabled the Minister of Education to make, amend, and revoke the national curriculum since 1989.

The changes to attendance exemptions in this bill are part of the Government’s plan to lift achievement and attendance so that more young people experience educational success, and I acknowledge submitters’ concerns that principals need discretion over attendance exemptions to reflect student circumstances and needs. However, the current requirements are unclear and applied inconsistently. The proposed attendance exemption rules will be developed in consultation with the sector to ensure they reflect the needs of the school community and support consistency and transparency.

Other aspects of the bill strengthen the education system by improving the quality of system-level data by requiring schools to participate in system-monitoring studies like the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment—PISA, as we know it.

The bill also supports the next stage of the charter school model by enabling multi-school contracts and providing more certainty for converted charter schools that a similar type of State school may be established if the sponsor terminates their contract or opts not to renew.

I want to express again my thanks to the committee for their recommended changes, and members of the public who made their submissions. The bill is another step towards this Government’s priorities in lifting student achievement and attendance through developing a workforce of the future and establishing a knowledge-rich curriculum. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

21:20

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Labour opposes this bill because it does nothing to improve the educational outcomes for our children. It is about centralising power in the hands of the Minister and Wellington officials while weakening the role of parents, teachers, school communities, and professional bodies.

This bill reflects a Government that fundamentally does not trust the teaching sector. They do not trust parents in local communities to shape their schools; they do not trust teachers to exercise professional judgment; and they do not trust independent professional bodies to regulate their own profession. They certainly do not trust Māori to operate in genuine partnership for education. At every level, this bill shifts power away and upwards—away from schools, away from parents, and away from our communities—and towards the Minister and her bureaucracy. That is why so many New Zealanders see this bill as just plain wrong.

The clearest example of this is the Government’s approach to the curriculum. This bill moves away from a national curriculum framework towards a prescriptive, centrally controlled version that specifies exactly what should be taught, when it should be taught, and how it should be taught. It gives sweeping override powers for the Minister of Education to determine what our children learn.

At the same time, the bill removes the requirement for school boards to consult with their communities, replacing that obligation with a far weaker duty to simply inform our communities. The Minister has failed to understand that schools work with the communities they serve, not in isolation of them. Labour believes that national consistency is important, but so too is local flexibility. Good schools respond to the needs of their parents, students, and communities. A rural school, a kaupapa Māori school, a large urban school—all these schools have different approaches to achieve the success they need to for their students and for their communities, and this bill prevents that from happening.

This bill moves us in the opposite direction. It is particularly concerning that this approach marginalises mātauranga Māori and weakens commitments under the Treaty of Waitangi. Māori learners succeed when education reflects their identity, language, and culture, not when those perspectives are squeezed out by rigid control from the top. Labour believes that we should have Kiwi content in our schools; we should be proud of who we are; we should learn where we came from and stand strong and be proud of being New Zealanders—that reflects our national identity. This decision takes away who we are.

The bill’s changes to the Teaching Council are equally concerning. The Government proposes transferring core standard settings and registration powers from the Teaching Council to the Secretary for Education. That is a profound shift of power. It moves teaching away from being a self-regulated profession and towards political control. Just imagine if this was done with the medical profession or the legal profession. It is hard to understand why the education of our children is being treated differently.

It is important to reference the concerns that have been raised regarding the chair of the Teaching Council, who was appointed by the current Minister of Education in August last year. It is well documented that David Ferguson has lobbied for Government funding for a teacher training institute that he helped to set up. He received funding and thanked the Minister of Education for that funding. The Teachers’ Institute has now received over $5 million of Government funding. The Teachers’ Institute charges around $4,000 for each of its trainees.

When The Teachers’ Institute’s initial application for funding was declined by the panel, Official Information Act documents show that an unknown person messaged the panel with this: “If it’s a decline, I’m not sure that that’s the right decision”. That decision is then overturned by the deputy chief executive of education with the conditions that the application needs to be approved by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Teaching Council. The Minister of Education has appointed David Ferguson to both of those bodies. For a Minister who initially showed a lot of concern about conflicts of interest within the Teaching Council, she appears to think that it is acceptable that the chair of the Teaching Council can regulate the teaching profession and profit from it at the same time.

There is nothing in this bill that tightens the conflict-of-interest rules around the chief executive, the chair, the council members, and their links to training providers. This bill also reduces elected teacher representation on the governing council and removes functions promoting the status of teaching and professional best practice. At a time when the profession is already under enormous pressure, the Government is weakening professional independence instead of strengthening it.

Parents and students deserve an independent professional body with practitioner majority. They deserve confidence that professional standards will be guided by expertise, by ethics, and by evidence, not by political ideology. Labour opposes the transfer of these powers to the Secretary for Education and believes they should remain with an independent teaching council.

Another troubling feature in this bill is the label “schools of serious concern”. The problem is not just the label itself; it is the enormous discretionary powers that come with it. The bill provides no clear thresholds in legislation for how schools are designated, yet it opens the door for ministerial intervention following escalation from the Education Review Office. That creates uncertainty and fear within the teaching profession.

Even more concerning is the potential for schools to be converted into charter schools without any meaningful consultation with communities. Labour believes that struggling schools should receive support, resources, and partnership, not public branding exercises and punitive intervention models. Schools facing difficulties are often dealing with wider systemic pressures, staffing shortages, poverty, learning support needs, infrastructure issues, and funding pressures. Those problems are not solved by labelling schools or centralising power.

This bill also significantly expands the charter school model. It enables multi-school charter contracts—chains of charter schools, a bit like McDonald’s—including for-profit and overseas sponsors, while strengthening ministerial powers around conversion and reconversion. Labour remains opposed to the privatisation of public education. We believe that publicly funded education should be accountable to communities, not to private operators.

This bill sidelines our parents, staff, and local communities from decisions that directly affect their schools. It also creates uncertainty around employment conditions and public assets. If a school community is expected to live with the consequences of conversion or reconversion, then community must have a meaningful role in that decision-making process. Instead, this bill concentrates those powers centrally.

System monitoring: this bill makes participation in national and international monitoring studies compulsory, including programmes such as the Programme for International Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Monitoring educational achievement is important, but the question is how that data is used, who controls it, and whether communities have a voice in defining that success. This bill centralises control over educational data while increasing compliance burdens on schools. There is a real risk that data becomes politicised and used selectively to create crisis narratives or to justify predetermined outcomes. Labour believes monitoring systems should support genuine educational improvement, not political messaging.

There are also changes to the property agency, and there are also changes to attendance exemptions, but it’s important to note that this bill does not put our children at the centre. It’s not even about learning. It reveals a Government far more interested in control than collaboration. Instead of partnering with educators, it centralises authority. Instead of strengthening professional trust, it weakens it. Instead of empowering our communities, it sidelines them.

People know that education works best when schools are connected to their communities and when teachers are respected as professionals. Labour believes that educational forms should be evidence-based, which this bill isn’t; sector-led, which this bill isn’t; equity-focussed, which this bill certainly isn’t; and grounded in the Treaty of Waitangi, which it most definitely isn’t. This bill fails on all of those accounts. It fails our children. It will be damaging to our community, and, quite simply, it takes New Zealand backwards.

21:30

What a joke of a bill! Honestly, when we looked at this bill and when we heard it in the select committee stage, two things were clear about this bill. One is that this Government only cares about a one-size-fits-all education model and does not care what child is left behind as a part of the process. They are more willing to listen to the elitist schools in the likes of Epsom and also East Coast Bays rather than the voices of the majority of Aotearoa and the rest of the 2,500—potentially 2,498—schools. What is also clear about this bill is the power grab—the shameless, shameless power grab—by this Government and the complete lack of trust by this Government of the teaching profession. What this Government is trying to do is everything to undermine the professionalism of our teachers, at the same time saying how much they care and how much they consulted. What a slap in the face for the educators out there!

You know what? Let’s talk about some of the details. Let’s, actually, first start with the process of this bill. During the select committee stage, we sent out an invitation to hear about early childhood education, ECE, and also the shifting of ECE functions to the Education Review Office (ERO) as well as the director of regulation. Now, there was no bill drafted at that stage. We asked submitters based on vibes. The select committee asked the submitters based on the direction from the Minister. Where is that separation of power? Where is the legislature’s, the MPs of this Parliament’s, sacred duty to, rather than collude with the executive, scrutinise the executive and this bill? We did not see that when it comes to the ECE sector. At the same time, we have seen that the director of regulation has not even been embedded. The Minister of Education herself has said, when this bill was introduced in the House in the first reading, that the only reason that no bill was drafted at that stage was because the previous bill, the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) hadn’t gone through third reading, which establishes that role in the first place. It completely, completely makes a mockery of our democratic system and our legislative procedure when we’re looking at this particular bill.

At the same time, ERO—really? ERO has decided to overhaul their entire reporting system based on the consultation of 12 schools and 500 parents—12 schools; that’s all. That’s 0.5 percent of all of the schools. Imagine how many parents are out there. Surely there are more than 500 parents here in Aotearoa. I don’t know if the Minister or the members on that side of the House know anything about math, but that math seems off.

Furthermore, around the ECE with ERO, what we’re also seeing is a department—for example, let’s look at ECE. Let’s look at ERO’s review of ECE. They have weakened the reporting of early childhood centres over time. There is no accountability in how they’re going to address ECE centres who have been downgraded in terms of their registration or even being deregistered. Yet, at the same time, this Government believes that ERO should be in charge of all of these. Well, we don’t actually see how they’re able to do that. Furthermore, we talked about the Teaching Council of Aotearoa.

They’re a disgrace!

The thing with the teaching council—what is a disgrace is the fact that the chair of the teaching council has a clear conflict of interest with The Teachers’ Institute, which he is a director of. There is a clear conflict of interest when one of their council members was appointed acting chief executive and was trying to do two roles in one go, before it was pointed out that, actually, you cannot do that and they had to step down as a council member. It was also the same particular chair of the teaching council, recently, who decided he was going to have elected members from the sector on that council and then found out that it was illegal for him to do that. What is really disgraceful about the teaching council is who this Minister has appointed as the chair. That is disgraceful. The Minister herself, at the annual review hearings, said that she got advice around the clean slate Act and that there was nothing the previous chief executive could have done in terms of some of the things that had been reported on in the Debbie Francis report. It wasn’t about caring for children; it was a witch hunt by this Minister.

Also, we talked about the curriculum, and I want to acknowledge all of the submitters currently in the Waitangi Tribunal for Wai 3553. When we were looking at the changes removing section 127 in the previous bill that we saw here—again by the same Minister—as well as the changes we are seeing to the curriculum, what we were hearing is how it violates and undermines our Te Tiriti obligations. That, again, is under this Minister’s watch and under this Government’s watch. What we are seeing and being consulted on—all of us have gotten feedback, including the Minister, because we get CC’d on some of those emails from teachers, from experts, and from parents who are concerned about the curriculum and where the curriculum is going. The Minister often says, “Well, show us some numbers. What are some of the numbers?”, but I am yet to hear from the Minister on giving us tangible, actual numbers about who is writing the curriculum and how many people have been consulted. I mean consulted, not informed, because apparently this Government has a passing acquaintance with what is called consultation.

Here are some actual numbers from the select committee. In terms of the New Zealand school properties proposal, only 3 percent—only 3 percent—supported it. Only 4.5 percent supported schools of serious concern; 0.5 percent supported the changes of the teaching workforce proposal; 2.4 percent supported the attendance exemption proposal; 2.7 percent supported the monitoring studies proposal; 1.3 percent supported the charter school proposal; and 0 percent, not even a single submission out of 570, supported the changes we’re seeing here on curriculum. Those are the numbers, and that is an actual fact, not the spin that we’re seeing from this Government when it comes to education. What we are seeing is not evidence-based decision-making, but rather decision-based evidence making. That is what this Government is really good at.

There are so many more things that I want to say about this bill, and I do know that time is limited, but I do want to touch on some of the other points of this bill. I mentioned the power grab by this Government, and the teaching council is only one part of it—whether it’s the lack of clarity for schools of serious concern, which allows the chief review officer to inform the secretary of the intervention, which, let’s face it, is, essentially, just a blatant way of saying, “We’re going to be looking into forced conversions into charter schools.” Let’s see what that looked like overseas in the UK with orphan academies as a result of academisation. We’re seeing that principals have had their ability to make sound judgments—and these are experts in the field—to be able to exempt people from school attendance based on community needs and also based on the context of the community and the hardship.

Overall, we are seeing sweeping changes overseas—in Australia, in UK, in China—that show that the standardised approach that this Government is trying to take, the one-size-fits-all approach that this Government is trying to take, no longer works and no longer serves its students. What we’re seeing with this Government is that they’re trying to hold on to the relic of a should-be-forgotten past, and they are no way preparing our tamariki for the future. “Mātai ki te rangi, homai te kauhau wānanga ki uta, ka whiti he ora.” [“Look beyond the horizon, and draw near the bodies of knowledge that will take us into the future of health and prosperity.”] That is the original intent of Te Mātaiaho.

What we need is a truly independent education system that trusts our teachers, that trusts the sector—a system that takes our young people into the future; a system that allows them to be curious, that allows them to thrive, not what we’re seeing here where we are putting our kids further into a box. The Green Party will not support this bill.

21:40

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of the ACT Party to support the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill. As a member of the Education and Workforce Committee, first I would like to thank everybody who was involved in the select committee process, especially the submitters. We received submissions from more than 960 individuals or organisations, and we heard from more than 50 submitters—this was online and in person as well. So I want to thank them all. All submissions have been taken into consideration, and I do not intend to list all the changes that we have made in the select committee process, because the Minister of Education has already listed all the concerns that were expressed by submitters and how those concerns were addressed—the concerns which were within the scope of this bill.

But there were some submitters, as always happens, who submitted their views which were not in scope of this bill. Sometimes, it happens that submitters submit something that actually is based on an assumption or reflects, actually, a mistake in their understanding of how this bill works. I want to give an example—

What a way to call our experts and teachers a mistake.

—an example that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan should listen to as well. This is under the changes to the school attendance exemption. Many submissions reflected a misunderstanding about the current Act—this was regarding section 45—because many submitters assumed that the short-term illness exemptions don’t fall in this provision, but that is wrong. If these submitters say that the points they made are not reflected in the changes, they should know that it is because what they said actually was not right.

The second example I would like to highlight is about charter school changes. We are making changes to the charter school model. Yes, some submitters submitted on the provisions that we are changing, but then many submitters also talked about why they don’t like charter schools. That is not in the scope of this bill. This is the same message I would like to give to the Labour Party member and the Green Party member who just spoke. If members speak about exactly what this bill does, then this debate becomes more meaningful.

The ACT Party supports this bill. Thank you.

21:42

Thanks, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First. Now, we are not represented on this particular committee, the Education and Workforce Committee, but I did want to make a few comments about it. First of all, it seems to me, sometimes you see a piece of legislation and you think, “Actually, I thought we’d already done that.”, because these are things which have been well signalled in advance, so they should not be surprises to anybody. They are things which the Minister of Education has been talking about for some months, so it is good to see them in front of us today.

I think we can all agree, despite all the rhetoric that’s been going on, that quality education is essential to the prosperity of this country, to the prosperity of the young people who are going through the education system. What is also very, very clear to us is that the education system is not working properly at the moment. I listen to the sound and fury coming from the Opposition, and they are trying to defend what, in my view, is the indefensible, because our education system has been going backwards for some time. We see the work that is being done under this Government and under the Minister who’s introduced this legislation, and it is putting education back on the right track; it’s actually seeing some better results.

If I could just actually mention a few of those, some of the achievements we’ve got there: we have mandated structured literacy. Now, we have 58 percent of new entrants reaching or exceeding reading expectations by term 3, 2025, up from 36 percent. That sounds like a positive. Then we have maths improvement; we also have the work that’s been done in supporting students with learning difficulties—$746 million put into that, which is something that the teaching profession has been crying out for, and this Government has delivered on this.

There are four particular areas within the bill that I wanted to touch base on. The first one of them is the recognition of the value of micro-credentials, and I think that is something, particularly in the employment sector, that is really valuable. It is good to say you don’t actually have to be doing a course that lasts a year, two years, three years—actually, sometimes there is value in a micro-course—

Yeah, that’s what NCEA is about, but they’re scrapping it—isn’t it?

—something that might only last a few months. Those things need recognition. I’m not sure if the Green Party disagree with this and they don’t think that micro-credentials are a good thing, Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan—

Oh, it is good.

—but if they are a good thing—that’s fine, good; I’m pleased you support those things.

The second thing I wanted to mention was the health curriculum. Now, one of the things that this party, New Zealand First, has been very, very keen to make sure is that our health system actually teaches things that our parents are comfortable with being taught. So making sure that parents are informed about what is in the detail of what is in the curriculum and have the option of being able to opt out of that is something which we think is very, very important.

The next comment I wanted to make is regarding the Teaching Council. Look, I heard the comments that particularly the Hon Ginny Andersen was saying, but it’s as though, you know, she’s sort of glossing over that there are some failings, I think, in the teaching education process—that is, the education for teachers and the standard that we’re getting. We need to make sure that the people who teach our young people are capable of doing so and have the qualifications to do that—that is what this legislation is about trying to make sure happens. The Opposition are trying to say it’s all wonderful—it’s all wonderful—but it’s not, and so this legislation is about trying to fix that.

The other thing that I wanted to say is about the establishment of a school property agency. I’d like just to draw your attention—I mean, the way that Labour was delivering things, basically, is “Here’s the cheque book; let’s spend it—doesn’t matter how much it costs.” and that’s exactly the kind of result we got. That’s why, in many ways, we’re in the position that we are as a nation. They spent money hand over fist, regardless of what the result was. Now, in 2023, it was costing $1.2 million to build the average classroom; in 2025, it was $620,000, so barely half the price. That is efficiency. That is what this Government is delivering compared to what that Government delivered. We are giving more value for the taxpayer dollar, so I think that is a really, really good thing.

I’m going to finish off with one other thing, which is about Labour and the Greens’ comments, their dissenting views, about centralisation. Now, please, cry me a river. This is the outfit that brought us Te Pūkenga. This is the outfit that brought us Three Waters, which was “Oh, you can opt in.” then “You can opt out.” then “You’re damn well going to be in.” They cannot lecture anybody about centralisation, because they are the architects of centralisation. I suggest that they look in a very large mirror and try and learn some lessons, because if they are trying to preach to this side of the House, they need to look in the mirror, they need to learn the mistakes that they made, and they need to be very, very quiet about it. I commend this bill to the House.

The next call is a split call.

21:47

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. I’ve heard from other members that the education system is going backwards. In my eyes, when it comes to Māori education, it has never been seen more than right now that it is going forwards, although by successive Governments we’ve only ever been funded 1 percent of the overall budget, for Māori education. We are reaching 100 percent pass rates across all NCEA, and that is, yes, amazing. It’s because we’ve established these systems on our own terms, what works for us, and it has not been a standardised, one-size-fits-all approach. That is our concern not just within this bill here but the overall education reforms that we’re seeing that will affect Māori education. Those are some of the points that I want to raise in tonight’s debate, not only focusing on this bill but all changes made to the education system that have affected Māori education specifically.

This Government has been chipping away with small, minor changes, legislation by legislation, but the overall picture of it is that it completely puts us in a one-size-fits-all, standardised, monoculturing education system.

So, charter schools.

I support some of the charter schools that are in Waikato, but for the majority of us who are in the Māori education system, this is the way that we know that works for us, and really we just need to be funded more than 1 percent of the education budget, because we’re producing 100 percent outcomes.

When we look at this bill, which is the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill, this bill tightens up provisions for attendance exemptions which currently allow the Secretary for Education and principal to exempt a student from attending school. Now, our concern around that is it’s giving more power to ministries and not to the teachers, to the communities, and to the people who can—for instance, education is not just in a classroom; it can be in many different forms, it can be in many different ways, and it’s not the ministries who are determining that. It’s the teachers, the whānau, and the communities who know what works best for their tamariki and for their kura.

The other thing is context. Historically, we’ve seen within this coalition the context removal of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori; changes to history curriculum in schools; and less Māori personal development and learning for teachers, also at the delivery; and narrowed focus on literacy and numeracy with the set time frame of one to two hours a day. Even to the environment: no barnyard-style classrooms; even to the assessment, the removal of NCEA. Now, I agree that we should be looking at different ways of how we can assess but not with this lack of consultation.

The 2023 data shows that Māori education has outperformed with a majority of 100 percent pass rates. Even to the consultation: lack of consultation with Māori leaders with the recent Waitangi Tribunal hearing in the Māori education space to the partnership; the removal of Te Tiriti in the Education and Training Act 2020. Then, specifically in this bill, it looks at the property space; kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa Māori have said this will make it harder for people to access property. In our research, we found that there was a $39 million gap within early childhood education that could have gone to the 12 properties that kōhanga reo have requested, because if you’ve ever seen our kōhanga reo, you know that those are not proper classrooms that our tamariki can function in. We need more support in that area because there are 2,000 tamariki across this country who are on the waiting list for kōhanga reo. Our demand for Māori education is going through the roof, but this Government and successive Governments cannot keep up with the supply in that area and that’s what we need to challenge.

It’s not just this bill alone; it’s the overall approach in terms of Māori education and how we are funded less and how we are less resourced, and how we are outperforming the education system that has been imposed on us, that can work for not just Māori education, but bilingual and mainstream. Kia ora.

21:52

I appreciate being able to get this call and I want to reassure the members and the Speaker that I won’t be speaking beyond 9.55 p.m., so, three minutes, there we go. Let’s see.

Lawrence could take less.

He could, he could. I’m choosing to go home, though. I want to begin my contribution by acknowledging an achievement that’s happened over the weekend, which is the sweep of the Pavs Game Awards by two Dunedin developing companies, Atawhai Interactive and Balancing Monkey Games, and then I’ll go on to this bill now.

The Greens have—well, you know, I think that Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan has already clearly articulated our opposition to this bill but, from my perspective, I see three key reasons why we’ve risen in support of this bill. The first is the democracy angle of things, and one of our serious concerns is that this bill—and consistent with how this Government has gone on with their treatment of submissions—has basically just ignored the public feedback. I mean, on the curriculum side of things, out of the 570 submissions on that specific part of the bill, none supported it. Now, this is a worrying and consistent trend with what the Government has done with other parts of the feedback, and basically how they’ve treated democracy throughout this term.

We’ve seen attacks on the media, we’ve seen attacks on the Public Service, we’ve seen attempts to basically restrict the franchise with the changes to the voting eligibility, and we’ve seen the most use of urgency this term than we’ve ever had across previous terms. This is why I really wanted to stress the democracy angle of things, because ignoring public submissions is just really on brand with what the Government has done and their general treatment of democracy.

All the unions turned up.

Well, look, unions are a part of our democracy as well. They’re stakeholders as well, so I don’t see why we should necessarily ignore democratic organisations, which unions must—yeah, it’s 9.55 p.m., so thank you so much, Mr Speaker, and good evening to all the members here. Have a wonderful rest of your night and week.

This debate is interrupted and will resume at 9 a.m. tomorrow. The House is suspended.