Post-Cabinet Press Conference: Monday, 7 August 2023

Good afternoon, everybody. Today, I’m going to set out some additional steps that the Government is taking to turbo-charge New Zealand’s renewable energy generation, but before I do that, I want to acknowledge our country’s nurses, who have today accepted the Government’s latest collective pay offer. It’s further proof that the Government is in it for the nurses, and over six years has delivered pay equity as well as regular increases to this historically underpaid group of, predominantly, women workers. When we took office in 2017, the top of the registered nurse pay scale was $66,755. As a result of the most recent agreement, that will be $106,738. That’s a near $40,000 a year increase, or 59.9 percent, in just six years.

I have asked the Minister of Health to join me today to speak about some of the details of the deal. We’ll then take questions specifically on that, and then I’ll go on to talk about renewable energy and other issues of the day. So to Dr Verrall.

Tēnā koutou katoa, and thank you, Prime Minister. This afternoon, I was delighted to announce Te Whatu Ora and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation hospital nurses have reached an agreement on their collective employment agreement. This is in addition to the $4 billion announced last week, which meant we made history with pay equity for nurses.

When Labour took office in 2017, as the Prime Minister has said, the top of the registered nurse pay scale was $66,755. With this deal, it’ll be up to $106,738—as has been said—a $40,000 increase, or 59.9 percent, in just six years. The Government values the enormous contribution nurses and midwives make to the health system, and we thank them for the critical role that they play in looking after our people and communities. The Government has also already invested $200 million a year, on top of increased funding for primary and community sectors, to support primary and community providers to lift their nurses’ pay rates, too.

The rates we pay nurses in this country is important for keeping them in our health system. I recently announced a workforce plan which looks across the entire health sector to address workforce pressures, and this is a significant piece of work that continues in this space, including focuses on how we train, recruit, and retain our healthcare workers.

Last year, over 8,000 nurses registered for the first time, a 60 percent increase from the previous year, and in the last quarter, the number of nurses registered to practise in New Zealand has grown by about 2,000. The Government’s aspiration is that the health system is sustainably staffed and where New Zealanders can access excellent planned and urgent care when they need it, and I look forward to working with all healthcare workers to achieve that.

We’re happy to take a few questions on health before we move on to other topics.

We did have a contingency set aside in the Budget for the nurses’ pay deal.

Well, it was a contingency. It was set aside in the Budget, and so we can certainly afford to pay for this one.

Certainly the pay deal—the nurses extracted a good pay deal.

So the pay equity deal had a Budget contingency. This new settlement of the collective agreement was from within Te Whatu Ora baselines and can be afforded.

Typically, with nurses and teachers, the bargaining from them is often a little removed from other public sector bargaining. But, of course, I know that police, firefighters, other big public sector workforces will watch what happens with teachers and nurses closely.

Look, I think it’s important to look across the precise comparisons there—I know that is being discussed in the sector. But to look across the work that is being done by, say, a first-year junior doctor versus a senior nurse, there it is possible that the nurse may be better paid in that instance.

The principle of pay equity is to identify, actually, not from within health, but from across different roles inside or outside health and provide comparisons. I don’t believe the pay equity settlement for nurses was based on a comparison with junior doctors. It was outside of that.

I’ll let Amelia finish, and then I’ll come back to you, Jason.

I think the point is I am aware that the nurses’ salary settlement has affected relativities within the health system, but I think we all agree the important thing is to end gender-based pay discrimination within our health service, which is what occurred with the nurses’ deal.

Formally, they are two separate processes. I expect to know that a number of health clinical groups have claims in under the pay equity process and, separately, these issues are relativity, which you’re describing between doctors and nurses, come up at collective negotiations.

So I guess there are a variety of ways that we pay a settlement—well, there are multiple settlements in question here. So there’s a settlement and a pay equity deal, which is, of course, part of the numbers that we’ve just gone through. There was money set aside specifically for that. The money set aside for the wider nurses’ collective agreement, which is the most recent announcement today—that gets taken into account when we set the overall cost adjustment that the health system gets in each Budget.

The collective agreement is back-paid from April 2023, and then another tranche will be effective in April 2024.

No. The collective agreement agreed today is from the Te Whatu Ora baseline. The pay equity deal announced last week was a contingency.

I am not able to give you that figure. That is being calculated, but it was within the parameters that were set when the Te Whatu Ora budget was written.

I think this is an excellent time to start and stay nursing in New Zealand, given that we have turned around historic pay inequity and are doing a great job of addressing relativities with other professions and jurisdictions.

No.

I’m not aware of that conversation being part of the negotiations. I believe the comment was about cost of living, and I note that many elements of the deal reflect the PSPA—or the public sector pay agreement—which I believe is an appropriate setting for the constrained situation we are in.

And I note that we don’t typically build automatic adjustments into people’s pay in almost any aspect of the public sector, because in collective bargaining there are always trade-offs to be made around what’s more important to the people who are doing the bargaining—whether it’s base pay or whether it’s other things related to their working conditions—and there’s always trade-offs between those. That’s the essence of collective bargaining.

It would be quite a big change to employment law. So, at the moment, the law still works on the basis that there is regular bargaining for base salary and for other employment conditions.

No, I doubt it.

I am certainly aware that people don’t—that people sometimes forgo the dental care that they need because of cost. I’ve seen it in my own practice, and I’m aware that that’s an issue across the country.

I think that’s an important aspiration, and I’m pleased with the progress we’ve been able to make with increasing the access to emergency dental grants.

I accept there’s unmet need with the present settings, but I think we’ve addressed an important component of that with the emergency dental grants.

I think all—sorry.

No, no.

I mean, I think all of these issues come down to a matter of setting priorities.

We will set out our health policy well in advance of the election and we’ll answer those questions, and we’ll also set out our full text policy well in advance of the election, as well.

Well, it’s not just a question of how much free dental care might cost; it’s also having the capacity to be able to deliver that—which I think at the moment the system wouldn’t have the capacity to be able to deliver it—and there would likely be significant investment required just in order to build capacity to meet the need for additional dental care, regardless then of the question of how that dental care itself might be paid for. So I think that the proposal that we’ve seen from the Greens is somewhat simplistic in the sense that there would be a lot more to it than what they’ve set out.

Certainly not at the level required to achieve universal dental— no.

There has been workforce development initiatives in the dental area, and I believe that was also in the workforce plan that we put out previously, but not to the level to achieve universal dental.

As we’ve indicated, the COVID isolation periods are due to be reviewed in the next week or two, and then we’ll have announcements as soon as they have been.

OK. Thank you to the Minister of Health.

Right, moving along. So coming back to renewable energy, the Government is significantly accelerating progress on new wind and solar farms to generate more of our power generation. I’m announcing today that there are new wind farm projects—three new wind farm projects—that have been approved for fast-track consenting. They would cut around 150 million kilograms of carbon emissions and create up to 840 construction jobs in the Manawatū; Waiuku, near Auckland; and in Southland. Combined, they would generate about 419 megawatts of electricity at peak output. That’s about the same as New Zealand’s third-largest hydro-electric dam, the Clyde Dam.

New Zealand is increasingly well positioned globally to harness wind power onshore and offshore. When it comes to offshore generation, for example, our location in New Zealand matters. The least windy sites here in New Zealand are considered to have better wind energy potential than the windiest sites in Australia. This means that we’ve got amazing opportunities right here at out fingertips, and we’re determined to make the most of those.

But it’s not just wind power that we want to make more progress on. We’re also fast-tracking solar energy projects, with nearly 2 million solar panels already sped up through the consenting process. That’s part of nine solar farm projects which have been fast track referred to expert consenting panels since 2021. If all of those are approved, they could add 1.87 million solar panels to the national total and generate 1,147 megawatts of energy at peak output. Again, tying that back to the Clyde Dam, that’s almost three times the power output of the Clyde Dam.

When you put those things together, the fast-track solar and the wind projects, along with geothermal projects that have also been referred using fast-track consenting—they could create about 3,500 construction jobs nationwide and employ more than 350 full-time staff when they’re completed. It’s another of the reasons why the Government has been relentlessly future-focused and why we firmly believe New Zealand’s energy future is a renewable energy future. This is the future, and we can’t afford any more backward-looking thinking that would keep us tied to the past. That’s why we’re going hard out for half New Zealand’s total energy needs to be met by renewable energy by 2035, and for 100 percent of energy generation to be renewable by 2050.

These decisions to fast track projects are the latest to underpin the strong momentum that’s been building towards what we think is an achievable aim. Fast tracking is a critically important tool for us to get there. It means these projects can proceed faster, provided they meet normal environmental tests as determined by the expert consenting panels. It’s already reduced consenting time by an average on 18 months per project, saving infrastructure builders time and money. It’s become a key part of the Government’s strategy to accelerate economic recovery, boost jobs, and speed up our emissions reductions. That’s why we’re making it permanent through the Natural and Built Environment Bill that will become law later this month.

Finally, at a time when the cost of power is eating into people’s budgets, the benefits of maximising renewable energy will flow through to cheaper bills for households and for businesses, not just for one month or one year, but to cheaper prices the public can build into their budgeting and that they can rely on.

Now, happy to open up for questions. Jessica.

This speeds them up. It means we can see them coming to fruition faster.

Fast-track consenting means that these projects will come on stream faster.

Obviously, the companies who are sponsoring these projects need to then go through the fast-tracked consenting process, which, as I said, shaves about 18 months off the overall time that it will take to bring these things live. But at the moment, in the environment we’re in at the moment, where we want renewable energy coming on stream faster, it’s a significant advance.

If you look you across the country, there aren’t that many more big hydro opportunities for us, so we have to look at other options. Also, just to put it into context, the Clyde Dam took over a decade to build and to come on stream—“come on stream”, if you’ll excuse the pun. Actually, these can be generating electricity a lot faster than that.

It will ultimately depend on the people who are applying for the consents to build these things. The fast-track consenting project cuts about 18 months off the timetable, but of course the timetable then depends on when the companies choose to build them.

There are a range of different things that affect people’s power prices. One of them, of course, is peak demand and the price of electricity at the peak, which determines quite a lot of retail pricing. Some of that’s still determined, of course, by our existing fossil fuel electricity generation. So the more renewable we have, the more sustainable our electricity prices will be; the lower, ultimately, in the long term, our electricity prices will be. But it’s hard to pin point at a particular time what the impact of these projects will do. But we know that overall, the cumulative effect of more renewable electricity generation is that it means a more sustainable price path for electricity generally.

Yeah.

The fast-track consenting process has itself been a fast-tracked process, and that as these applications come through, we actually have a relatively rapid process for advancing them through. So it will be a question of when the applications came in and the amount of time it took to consider those. But it is significant. As I said, it’s about 18 months faster than it would be if it was under the conventional process.

No, no—not at all. Look, I can tell you that almost every Cabinet meeting during the time that that fast-track consenting—in this case, we were using Cabinet meetings as the sign-off point for those, and almost every Cabinet meeting had a list of them.

I don’t agree with the overall assessment, and certainly the way some of it’s been presented publicly. I haven’t had the chance to talk to Helen Clark about that directly in person. But what I would say is New Zealand’s foreign policy approach is a very balanced one. I’ve been very clear all the way along in my time as Prime Minister that there are areas where we work closely with our like-minded countries like Australia, the US, the UK, Canada—our Five Eyes partners—and there will be areas where we work with countries like

China, for example, and there’ll be areas where we disagree. And we have, I think, a robust enough relationship with all of the countries that I’ve just mentioned to be able to navigate that.

We have an overseas investment process which considers where there is an investment flowing into the country for whatever reason, there’s a strategic interest test that determines where the funding’s coming from and whether it’s in New Zealand’s interests to accept that funding, and there have been some high-profile examples recently where some overseas funding has been rejected on that—using that criteria. I don’t propose to change that.

It is not something that our Government is proposing to do.

Not in the last few hours, no.

I’m absolutely concerned about any escalation in public violence and in gang tension. We’re resourcing the police to be able to deal with that. Police have issued—I think at last count it was something like 43,000 charges have been issued against gang members as a result of Operation Cobalt. A lot of the work that we’re doing around getting illegal firearms out of circulation will help. The establishment of the firearms register will help us to identify where firearms have come from where they’ve been used illegally. All of that work is very important. I don’t think that any of these sorts of events are acceptable.

I’m sure the Minister of Police will be updated on that. I can say that the issues around illegal firearms have been a focus for the Government since we took office, and particularly since the events of March 15, and the establishment of a more robust licensing regime and the establishment of the firearms register, which is now being populated— licensed and law-abiding firearms owners are able to enter their firearms into the register now, and we encourage them to do that as quickly as possible. These things will give police a significant head start in addressing this type of criminal offending.

Yes—well, I believe they should. They have good grounds to feel confident in the work that we’re doing as a Government.

Yeah—sorry?

Oh, I believe that the public have reason to be confident in the work the Government has been doing around crime. I acknowledge that there’s a certain heightened anxiety around some forms of crime at the moment—so around youth offending, we’ve been working on tackling that quite intensively over the last 18 months, always looking for where the gaps in the system are and how we can plug those gaps. Issues around gang offending— and we have seen an escalation in gang tension and gang-related criminal offending, particularly in recent years, as we’ve seen new gangs emerging in New Zealand that haven’t been part of the gang landscape in New Zealand recently. We’ve been giving the police additional tools in order to be able to deal with that.

If you look at issues around violent offending, one of the big drivers in the increase in reported violent crime has been increased reporting of violent family harm. I would never say I welcome the fact that more of that has been reported, because I’d never welcome the fact that it exists in the first place, but the fact that New Zealanders are less tolerant of it and are reporting more of it to the police, and therefore it’s coming through in our violent crime statistics, does mean that we can do something about it.

I generally don’t give the Government a rating of one to 10 on any criteria.

Look, there’s always more to be done in the law and order space, and you’ve seen even just a couple of weeks ago, we were looking at more options in the ram-raiding space that we’re working through the system now because I don’t think that what we’re seeing at the moment is acceptable.

As I indicated a couple of weeks ago, when we announced the latest programmes of work in the ram-raiding space, our first port of call here is to try and avoid this pattern of offending in the first place. We’ve put in place some fast-track intervention programmes that were designed to get these kids out of trouble, and not undertaking ram raids and not getting into this cycle of crime. That’s worked for more than three-quarters of those kids, who are not going on to reoffend, but for that persistent remaining group—it’s somewhere between 20 and 25 percent—clearly, more needs to be done, and that’s what we’re doing.

Look, ultimately, I think that the public has reason to have confidence in the Government’s work on crime, but, you know, you can read opinion polls all you like. I’m sure it sounds like there are some opinion polls coming, and no doubt we’ll all find out what they are.

I think the public can have confidence that we acknowledge their concern around things like ram raids and escalation in gang tensions, and that we are doing something about it.

There’s a general election on 14 October, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to know every opinion poll question that you might be teasing in the next few weeks.

I haven’t heard anything on the Auckland shooting—no, no, the answer to both of those questions is no at this point. But I’m sure the Minister of Police will have more recent updates than me.

Jo.

Sorry?

The Labour Party hasn’t done much manifesto announcement yet. You’ll see that coming in the next few weeks.

It’ll be a Labour announcement.

I wasn’t aware of that recommendation, which I understand emerged from a review that was done last year. I understand it came from some earlier work that Mike Bush had been doing for Oranga Tamariki. The reason that it wasn’t actioned at the time—so I understand that there were about 11, 12 recommendations, and all but that one have either been implemented or are in the process of being implemented, and the reason that that one wasn’t actioned at the time was that there wasn’t anywhere else to put those young people.

As I’ve indicated, there wasn’t anywhere else to put those young people.

Ahh, as I’ve indicated to you, we’ll make announcements in due course. I’m not going to set out the timetable for our manifesto announcements yet. I did say it would be within the next few weeks, and we’re still within that timetable.

I said a few weeks ago that it would it be in the next few weeks, and I stand by that statement.

Jacinda is going to be out of the country for most of the campaign—I think that’s already been well-signalled publicly—so I’m not expecting her to be hitting the campaign trail with us. Of course, I’m sure that she’ll have a view, and if she wants to share that, she’s welcome to do that.

What’s that?

Well, you should ask her that.

Look, I acknowledge as a father who has taken time off when my kids have been born that families want to be able to make decisions and they want to have some flexibility to make decisions around how they handle parental leave and so on after the birth of a child. We’ve worked hard to give them extra resource. So the extension to six months of paid parental leave is something that I’m very proud of—a decision that was taken by this Government, and at the time we set out the reasons for doing that—and that can be taken by either parent, so it’s important to note that that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s always mums who are taking that leave. It can be shared between mum and dad. I acknowledge some of the issues that were raised last week around the desire for mums and dads, or a different parenting arrangement—you know, the two parents—to have leave concurrently, and you’ll see us say a few more things about that shortly.

That’s ultimately a decision for parents to take.

That’s a question for them. Ultimately, it’s a decision for parents to take—how they allocate their entitlement to parental leave.

I haven’t had much direct feedback. I’m certainly aware it’s generated some discussion, though.

Yeah, I do, and, you know, I’ve always been quite careful in my conversations around parental leave to acknowledge the fact that both parents have a role here, and it’s important that we have systems that accommodate that.

Sorry?

I think, you know, where we can give parents more options to spend more time at home with their babies—which is something that our Government has been consistently working towards, as evidenced by the fact that we extended paid parental leave to six months—I think that that’s a positive development. It gives parents more choices and more options. We’ll announce our policy around paid parental leave in due course.

What I would note here is that parents make choices around how they use their paid parental leave entitlement, recognising that not all parents use all of the entitlement that they have now. Some will make other choices, and that’s a matter for them—those are the choices that they can make. There is good scientific evidence around attachment for babies in the sense that a consistent presence, whether that’s one or two parents, in the first six months of a child’s development is very good for those babies. That of course, though, is evidence that parents can draw on in making their decisions.

Well, that’s probably a question for the people who were proposing that.

As I’ve said, we haven’t announced our paid parental leave policy yet. When we do—when we do—I’ll happily answer more of those questions.

It would not have given parents any more choices this side of the election, and the official advice that we have is that the bill as drafted was un-implementable. So I think the decision to vote against a bill that was unimplementable was probably a responsible one for the Government.

No, what I’ve said, because if you’d listened to what I was just saying—I was saying that the science around attachment and around having a consistent presence in a baby’s life in the first six months of their life is good for a baby’s development. Decisions around how families achieve that is a matter for those families.

I’m not going to get into speculating on what we may or may not put on the table when we announce our policy on that.

Again, I’m not going to get into future speculation.

Oh look, I’ll put the cards on the table: the more time that parents can spend at home with their kids and the more we can support them to do that, the better. Of course, there’s financial constraints on both sides in that regard. Even with paid parental leave—of course, paid parental leave for most families is less than what they would get by being in work, and so there are always going to be financial considerations here, both for the Government in terms of what we can support and for families in terms of what they can afford to live off during that period of time. But, you know, I’ll always be aiming, as long as I’m in politics, to increase the amount of time that parents can spend with their kids.

What was that?

To be honest, it’s not something that I’ve looked at in the last couple of weeks, so I’m happy to go away and have a look at it and come back to you.

Look, as I’ve said, I’m happy to go away and have a look at it—bearing in mind that the wage subsidy was not paid direct to employees; it was given to employers on the basis that they would keep their employees on.

I’d have to go away and have a look at it and see how it stacks up against the minimum wage and the living wage. I haven’t looked at that.

Yeah, I haven’t looked at it.

So, Jason.

So I guess there are two things at play here. One is that the Government’s monthly accounts get released publicly all of the time, so there’ll be more updates and people will be able to see them before the election. The next is the pre-election fiscal update, which is, basically, Treasury’s reckons on what that means longer term—so what are the current accounts telling us about what’s likely to happen a year from now, three years from now, and, actually, longer term into the future in terms of the Government’s long-term fiscal forecasts. The Treasury do that process independently of the Government, but they will factor in to that any decisions that have been taken since their last update, so they will look at any areas where the Government’s identified any additional spending and any areas where the Government’s identified any additional savings. And so of course both of those things are a regular occurrence for Government. We’re always looking at areas where money isn’t being spent or where we no longer need to spend money, and we’re always looking at areas where there is a new pressure where additional spending is required.

Look, I’ll refer you back to the comments the Minister of Finance himself has made about the meeting that he had last week, which I think has been somewhat misrepresented.

If I had McAnulty here, I’d tell him to give you some bookie’s odds, but I generally don’t tend to offer them myself.

I’m heading off to one on Friday, but, to be honest, I haven’t had the opportunity to see many other than the Kiwi games.

I think I already did make—I made my contribution for Australia last week.

In the context of paid parental leave, I’d note that paid parental leave is a supplement to help parents to have more choices. Of course, I know from experience and from other families that I’ve spoken to that they will also draw on other financial sources when they have new babies, as well. We’ll always look at how we can better support parents to have more choices.

Point noted—thank you.

It’s a fast track consenting process—so it still has to go through a consenting process, as I indicated. There are still some criteria it needs to meet, but it cuts about 18 months off that timetable.

There’s always a chance. But in order to refer them to the fast-track consenting process, they’d have to have a pretty robust case to get through that particular gate.

Because we’ve been transparent around the fast-track consenting and the fact that we are making it a priority to get more of these projects through the consenting process.

Well, regularly we will announce things that haven’t been consented yet. Typically, new roads get announced before they’ve been consented, as well.

We haven’t changed that.

Certainly, more renewable energy projects—be they solar or be they wind—going through a fast-track consenting process and, potentially, coming on stream faster are going to help us get to that target.

2030 is still a very ambitious timetable.

It certainly helps.

I cannot promise you that I will be as humorous in my discussion of boondoggles as the Minister of Finance is, but I’ll let him speak to his own comments on that.

Well, no, I don’t think so.

Right, are there any other questions that—

I—you’ve left me speechless, Jenna.

The wind farm ones are the new ones that we are announcing today, and then solar ones—I think some of them might have been. OK—

What was that?

It’s a summary of the recent decisions that we’ve taken around fast-track consenting.

I can get you that number; I haven’t got that with me. Of course, not all of those are energy projects. There’s a number of land development projects that have gone through the fast-track process, as well.

I haven’t got it with me, but I certainly can get it for you.

That ultimately comes back to the companies who are constructing them, and, obviously, we’d like to see them done as soon as possible.

Well, again, that’ll come down to the companies who are building them.

OK, thanks everyone.