Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill

In standing up to speak to this particular bill, I just want to speak to the purpose of it and then talk about the Supplementary Order Paper that I have tabled—Supplementary Order Paper 142—and that I am hoping will be supported by the Committee. I think one really important point to make before I even get started—Ruth Dyson just found out this little fact—is that legislation came to the House in 1998, and that is when the technical error occurred. The interesting part of that is that the bill at that time went through the House in urgency as well. So here we are again, in urgency, correcting a technical error that was made under urgency back in 1998.

I guess that is the danger of rushing things through—not having the advice we need, not having all the checks and balances in place, not having the Attorney-General look over it, and not having a regulatory impact statement. Those are all concerns we have when we look at a piece of legislation like this, and even more so because of the fact that the technical error was made in 1998 when a bill went through in urgency. I really do hope that in 17 years’ time we are not back here correcting a technical error that was made when there was an attempt to correct the technical error that had been made 17 years beforehand as a bill went through urgency.

As I pointed out to the House during the first and second readings, we support the fact that there needs to be some correction here. We support the fact that we need to correct a technical error that occurred. Our concern here is the commencement date, which can be easily addressed by the Supplementary Order Paper that I have put up. We are concerned about the commencement date because of the fact that it closes out the opportunity for so many people to be able to have natural justice and make a claim. We saw in the media in the lead-up to this bill coming to the House today that the Minister for Social Development has allowed in this legislation a window of opportunity for those who missed out on that 1 day, between May 2014 and September in 2015, to be able to make a claim. The Minister’s statement is that because the Government had knowingly acted illegally during that time period it is important that that particular group of people, who may have been stood down and denied a day of pay, be given natural justice.

We have heard from members in the House who are supporting this bill that their belief is that because this is a technical error, anyone prior to May 2014 should not be given the same opportunity or the same level of natural justice. We oppose that because it is not actually the fault of the beneficiaries over the last 17 years that there was a technical error in the legislation. An example I used of where the shoe is on the other foot is the fact that the Government is still relentlessly chasing money owed to it in respect of the Novopay debacle. What we have seen in the media in the last week in that case is that $1.8 million is still outstanding to the Government because people were overpaid during that whole fiasco. That was not the fault of the people who were overpaid, and yet the Government, because it is money that it is owed to it, is relentlessly chasing that money.

Here we have the Government needing to make changes to correct a technical error, But the way it can be read, which I am sure is the perception of many, is—oops—the Government owes a whole lot of New Zealand citizens and it does not want to pay out. So it takes the easy option and retrospectively changes the legislation so it does not have to give people the money. How great it would be for all those citizens who owe money to the State if they could retrospectively change legislation so that they were no longer held accountable or liable for the money they owe. I am thinking of those poor teachers who now have to pay back the money that was overpaid to them because of a Government disaster that we call Novopay.

The Supplementary Order Paper that I have in front of me will delay the commencement of this legislation by 6 weeks. That is the window of opportunity we asked for right from the beginning. As the Minister pointed out—and I have alluded to it as well—we have tried to negotiate with the Government over this, and the reason we have tried to negotiate is that the technical error has been allowed to exist under both Labour and National Governments. So it is an issue that we should be working on together to find a solution to. The one area of disagreement is whether or not these people prior to May 2014 should be paid out. Our solution to this is actually just to put up an amendment that would delay the commencement of this bill by 6 weeks. And, as I said, that is all we said to Minister Tolley at the beginning, and that is all we asked for, really—that there be a 6-week period where those who are entitled to claim would be able to make or put forward a claim.

The explanatory note of Supplementary Order Paper 142 says: “This Supplementary Order Paper amends clause 2 so as to delay the commencement of the Bill for 6 weeks. This would give people who have been penalised by the incorrect payment of benefits a window in which to lodge a claim for back payment, in line with natural justice requirements.” Some arguments have been put as to why we should not do that. One of those arguments is fiscal. The unfortunate thing is that we have no real knowledge of what the numbers are that we are talking about here because of the fact that there is no regulatory impact statement. No one has really analysed it.

We were told by Alfred Ngaro that because the elements of this particular bill were originally in the extension of the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill, we might be able to find the detail in the regulatory impact statement there for these particular measures. Actually, I have gone through that regulatory impact statement. I know that Ruth Dyson, sitting here, has gone through it. Annette King has gone through it, and there is nothing in there about the commencement of benefit side of things, despite the fact that, actually, the commencement of benefits part was originally in the extension of the youth services bill. I think Poto Williams has gone through the regulatory impact statement as well.

So I need to point out to Alfred Ngaro, the chair of the Social Services Committee, who pointed us in the direction of that regulatory impact statement, that there is nothing in there about the elements that we are talking about today. So it is a real issue that we do not have a regulatory impact statement in here. No one can comment on the fiscal implications, because there is no evidence to say how many people have been affected and how much money is involved, and, to top it off, we know that a large number of people who might be eligible to make a claim probably would not make a claim because of the efforts they would have to go to.

There are many people who were briefly on a benefit but have been in work ever since that one period in their life when they may have found themselves unemployed and having to rely on a benefit—those are the vast majority of people who go on benefits—and they will not be wanting to put forward a claim. So we are concerned that so many people are being shut out in this process. We do know that many of them would probably not even want to make a claim, but it is just the fact that natural justice is not being given the opportunity to prevail.

I hope that Government members see the merits in having the majority of the House support them on a piece of legislation like this, particularly when it goes through under urgency and is a retrospective piece of legislation, and I hope, as Annette King said, not only that they see the merit of that but also that they see the merit of supporting Supplementary Order Paper 142. It is a small ask from us. We will support the bill if the Government or the majority of the House supports us on this Supplementary Order Paper to delay the commencement of this particular piece of legislation to allow that window of opportunity for all of those people who have the right to make a claim to make that claim, rather than shutting them out completely from the process and honouring only the claims that have already been made—even though we are glad that the Government is doing this now—or honouring only the claims of those people who were affected post 20 May 2014, when the Government became aware of the fact that it was acting illegally.

I do just want to say that a lot of the National Government MPs have stood up here today and said that there is a sense of urgency with getting this through—but, unfortunately, there was not a sense of urgency on 20 May 2014.

I rise to speak on the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill in this Committee stage. And there is, despite it being a very, very small bill, quite a bit to say about this, though it has been pointed out in this Committee that this is happening through urgency, that the provisions in this bill are—we are being told that they are substantially the same as the provisions that were included in the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill. I sit on the Social Services Committee; I have been hearing evidence on that bill. These provisions—although some aspects of them are the same, there is detail in this bill that is significantly different, and in this process and consideration of this bill in this Committee stage, we do not have all the information in front of us to be able to debate this properly.

As has been pointed out, the regulatory impact statement in the original bill made no reference to the provisions in this bill or, indeed, in the significant parts of the original bill. We are not able to put the departmental advice that was offered to the select committee on the original bill into discussion in this debate because it is still under the privilege of the select committee. I did want to bring that into the debate, partly because I think it illuminates part of my concerns about this bill and partly because of the fact that I do not believe that the principles of transparency and good oversight from Parliament have been enabled through this process. I would wish for that to be properly debated and considered by this Committee because I think it goes, potentially, towards raising some pretty fundamental concerns about the relationship between the Minister and the department, if nothing else.

So what this bill does is it amends the Social Security Act to correct—we are being told—with retrospective effect to 3 June 1998, an error in the legislation that does not give effect to the policy intent that a benefit commences on the day after a stand-down period ends, as opposed to the day on which the stand-down period ends. Already, through the first and second reading debate, we have had discussion on that particular point because we are being told that the intent was always for the stand down to end on the day after, despite the fact that the legislation says very, very clearly and unequivocally that the benefit should commence on the day on which the stand-down period ends. I do not believe there is any way of misinterpreting that, but we are being told that the intent was for it to be the next day but, somehow, for 18 years this has gone unnoticed and that the policy has been operationalised in a way that does not match the law. That, in effect, has been a breach of the law.

I do admit to there being a possibility—and I am aware that this has not come to the House’s attention or to a Minister’s attention, because it has been pointed out to the Social Services Committee on numerous times in my short time in Parliament about the problems with the Social Security Act. It is legislation from the 1960s, it has been amended so many times, and there are so many regulations attached to this piece of legislation that it is one of the—if not, the—most complicated pieces of legislation on our books. It is possible that although the language is absolutely clear—“a benefit commences on the day on which the stand down period ends”—people did not look at the legislation because it is so complex. We need to work on that because this is the legislation that enables the most vulnerable people in our country: people who through disability barriers in employment are unable to work, people leaving violent relationships, people who have been left responsible for the care of their children, and people who have been made redundant. They are people who are trying to feed themselves and put a roof over their head when they are not able to be in the paid workforce.

This is the piece of legislation that ensures those rights that we supposedly all uphold, those fundamental human rights to food and shelter and the ability to participate in our society—although that last point has been so hopelessly eroded. So when the Government comes to this Committee and says that we need to fix a mistake that it has made we need to look at this very closely. That it had got it wrong was brought to the Government’s attention in May 2014, and it was not brought to its attention just once; it was through two rulings of the Social Security Appeal Authority that it had it wrong.

If you were following the rule of law and the established relationships, the process would have then been for the Ministry of Social Development to change its practice and to ensure that it was abiding by the law, and for Cabinet then to look at the fact that it thought there was a different intention to this and then bring in legislation to change that in the future so that the law matched what it wanted it to do. There is nothing in that good process that says retrospectively you deny people access to their rights as they were written in law, and that is really at the heart of what this debate is.

I do want to say that I really have such a struggle with the fact that the Government is saying that it will give people who have had the law misapplied post May 2014 a period until 8 January to be able to get in their review, but that people who had the law misapplied before that date will have no chance of review. Once this legislation passes, that is it. We have been letting people know about this so that they could get that review in, because we believe that they should have that right of review as the law guaranteed them, and somebody has just emailed me saying that Work and Income is not accepting the documents that have been previously accepted by other offices where people are being paid out up to this point. Several Work and Income offices, I am being told, are now saying that those emails do not belong to the Ministry of Social Development and that they are not accepting them.

When you are going to cut off a deadline for people that gives people money and that gives people access to a fundamental right by law in this peremptory manner, this kind of stress and confusion is more likely to happen. It goes back to my very, very original point of the absolute importance of our seeking to ensure people’s trust in Government, and that trust is being undermined significantly by this legislation and by this process. The people who are most affected have already had, many of them, very difficult experiences with the State, and what they are now going to take away from this process is that they were entitled to something and the Government has decided that “Well, yeah, you were entitled to it, but now we’re going to change the law so that you can’t get it.” That is what people understand from this.

On average so far the people who have claimed have got $80. That is $80 that can go towards the rent, that could go towards buying a Christmas present for their kid, that could potentially let their kid go to a swimming pool—things we know that families on benefit at the moment are not able to afford. Those absolute basics that when I grew up I assumed everyone had access to of a holiday, of a kid having their own bed, of three meals on the table, of the chance for a camping holiday—things like that are not going to be able to delivered by this bill and they would not have been able to be delivered by that 1 extra day’s payment, but the principle is—

This is the question and answer time when the Minister in the chair gets to answer the questions posed by the Opposition. So, Minister Wagner, I have a couple that I would really appreciate you answering. First of all, was the Minister aware that the original legislation passed in 1998 was also passed under urgency, and does she think maybe that accounts for the fact that perhaps we—all the parties in the House—made an error at the time? And, hopefully, can the Minister assure the Committee that we are not going to be making another mistake and that we have got this absolutely right?

I would also like to know what the financial impact is of this change, because I have read what the Minister has said. She said: “We’re talking a day … it’s not a huge amount.” So if it is only a day and it is not a huge amount, what would be the cost of that—taking it back to May 2014, for the people who are allowed to apply—to the Government? I thought that work would have been done, because the Government has known about this problem since May 2014, and 4 or 5 months ago it introduced a bill, the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill, that had this particular part hidden in it. I thought it would have done this work for the Social Services Committee, and perhaps the chair of the select committee might be aware of what the financial impact is. Was that provided to the select committee? Because if it was not it seems to be a strange way to go about making a change to the law.

But I suspect there was no work done on what the financial impact was, because the departmental disclosure statement actually asks “[Is] there analysis available on: … the size of the potential costs and benefits?”, and the answer is “No.” So this has been put together on the word of the Minister—and Minister Bennett is mouthing to me. I am not quite sure what she is mouthing, but maybe Minister Bennett knows, as she is in Cabinet, what the financial cost of this is. Was the Minister for Social Development correct when she said that “We’re talking a day … it’s not a huge amount.”? If we are talking a day and it is not a huge amount, quantify the huge amount. If it is not a huge amount, what is it? Could the Minister—either the Minister who is in the chair, Minister Wagner, or maybe Minister Bennett if she would like to take the chair, because she is in Cabinet—tell us what the financial cost is.

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: She was the Minister.

I think she was the Minister for Social Development in May last year. Was that correct, Minister? So did the Minister at the time seek to find out what the financial costs would be? Did she seek to find out what the costs would be if you allowed a period of time to allow anybody who was affected back to 1998 to put in a claim?

We have put up Supplementary Order Paper 142, which I support, saying why not allow this very small window—this very small, 6-week window—to allow those people who might be affected back to 1998 to put in a claim. Did the Government do any work on the financial cost if there was a period of time during which people could put in a claim? Were there any costings on that? Because maybe the Government would find that it was not very big at all, if we go by the Minister saying that it is only a day and we are not talking about a huge amount. So if that work has not been done, why was it not done? What we are getting here is a closing-off of natural justice. That is wrong, and I would have thought that before the Government closed off natural justice to people who had been affected by an error it would quantify what that impact is. What is the financial impact of it?

The other thing that I wonder whether the Minister could answer is why there has been no advice provided to the Attorney-General on any provisions of this bill that appear to limit any of the rights and freedoms affirmed in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. The Minister in the chair may or may not be able to answer this: was any advice sought by the Minister of the day on whether there would be any limits to the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders? I would have thought that was pretty fundamental, when you are going to carry out retrospective legislation—that you would want to know whether there was any limitation on the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders. Could the Minister in the chair tell us whether any advice was provided to the Attorney-General, to let him give some advice? Because I believe that Christopher Finlayson would have looked very carefully at this.

💬 Grant Robertson: As he does.

As he does. He is a very meticulous man, and very well related. He would have looked very carefully at this legislation to see whether it did limit their rights and freedoms. But he was not given the opportunity—because the departmental disclosure statement said he was not asked—so we do not know whether it does or not. So, Minister in the chair, I would like to know whether any advice was provided or sought from the Attorney-General. Would that, or would that not, have been an important issue for a Government that prides itself on human rights and democracy? Would that have been an important issue?

I urge the Government to reconsider Supplementary Order Paper 142 provided in the name of Carmel Sepuloni, who has said in this Chamber: “We will support this bill. We understand the problem. We know it has to be fixed.” But will the Government reconsider her Supplementary Order Paper to enable a window of time for anybody who is affected to put in an application? I would lay odds on that there would not be very many of them. I do not think a lot of us keep such good records that we can remember when we stopped and started work, and went on a benefit and did not go on a benefit. “Was it 1999, or was it 2001? Was it on 29 March?”. I mean, what are we talking about? Let us get real. How many—[Interruption]

💬 Chris Hipkins: Pre-pubescent; doesn’t have that problem.

Oh, well, I do not believe the member from Clutha would have a clue when he stopped and started work! Give us the dates that he stopped and started work.

I think they have made a mistake here, and I am saying: correct the mistake now by accepting Carmel Sepuloni’s Supplementary Order Paper. You would get the broad support of the parties in this House, Minister. Perhaps the Minister in the chair does not have the authority. I know she is not the Minister in charge of the bill—she is in the chair; good on her for being in the chair. But maybe she has not got the authority to make this decision. I suggest a little whisper to Minister Bennett—Minister Bennett is a very powerful Minister. She may be able, because she was there when this mistake was discovered, to persuade the Government to accept the Supplementary Order Paper. It would not be the end of the world for the Government if you did. I can promise you that we would not crow very much if this Supplementary Order Paper was accepted, because you know what? We would be providing natural justice and fairness to New Zealanders.

I wonder whether we would do this if it was something that affected a business. I wonder whether we would have the same approach. But this is about people who are on a benefit, and I just hope, Minister, that the Government has not been blinded by the words “benefit” and “beneficiaries”—that this is not just some sort of approach where, because they are beneficiaries, it is easy to deny them natural justice and fairness. I hope that is not the case. Give them the benefit of the doubt, in this House. So I say, Minister Bennett, do your best: see whether you can accept the Supplementary Order Paper. Give a 6-week period, and we would support the bill.

I want to pick up a couple of points from Annette King, but I want to talk about two things: I want to talk about the issue of principle and the issue of practicalities. Up to now I have not spoken on this bill, and, as somebody who has observed this, I fundamentally do not understand what the National Government is doing here, in terms of the point of principle—the idea that a mistake was made, an error occurred, and people did not get what they were entitled to, and the National Government chooses the date on which it discovered the error as the point at which compensation kicks in, rather than going back to when the error was made. There is not a point of principle in that. That is the problem, because if we were taking a principled approach, it would be that an error was made.

To quote the Attorney-General in this House recently—and he was quoting L V Martin—“It’s the putting right that counts.” The mistake has been made. The Government can now do what it needs to do in order to allow those affected by the error to make a claim. This legislation goes against the principles of natural justice, which get talked about constantly in this House—the very thing that we are all charged with doing when we are elected as members of Parliament to uphold the rule of law and to represent the concerns of New Zealanders. It just seems to me that, actually, the National Government has taken a call, for some reason, to limit this on a financial basis and to trash the principle. That is what it looks like.

That brings me to the second of my points—and I will come back to the issue of principle in a moment—which is, as a member of Parliament and with this bill not having been through a select committee process, I would want now to be reading a report from the Government that gave an estimation of costs. That is what would enable us to start making some good and sensible decisions. There is a factor that I know will make this difficult, and that is the point that the Hon Annette King has just been discussing, which is: just how many people would take this up? I have got an alternative idea about the information that we could get that would help us to decide the practicalities of this piece of legislation, and that would be to get some information about the amounts of money that individuals who have already claimed have asked for. Was it $80? Was it $100? Was it $1,000? How much money are we talking about at an individual level, where we know who the people are?

I accept the point that we are not necessarily going to know how many people will apply, but I think the Minister in the chair, or another the Minister, might be able to stand up and talk to us about the amounts that individuals are getting, because, in total, they will not be that much, but they will be meaningful to those people who get them. We are talking here about teacher-aides, people on short-term contracts, students coming in and out of being a student and in and out of work and study requirements—people for whom $80 or $100 will make a difference. But you know what? That is not the point. The point is not the $80 or $100, even though it will make a big difference to those people. The point is the principle: that an error was made—an error that continued through different Governments; for nobody here can wash their hands of it. Perhaps some party members who have not been part of the Government might feel they can, but nobody in here can really wash their hands of it, because we have all been in Parliament. We have all got a shared responsibility in doing the right thing, in actually saying “You know what? This was a mistake. We’re going to give a decent period of time”—and here I want to also support Carmel Sepuloni’s Supplementary Order Paper 142—“for everybody to have a look, work out whether or not it’s worth their while applying, and go ahead and do that.”

I simply cannot understand why a Government that tells us it believes in natural justice, that tells us it believes in the rule of law, that says that it upholds the rights of the citizens of this country, would not come here to this Chamber and say: “We get it. The mistake’s been made since the law was passed in 1998.” Now is the time to make sure that we can do that. Perhaps the Minister may well be able to do that now.

I am happy to take the first of what I hope will be several contributions—

💬 Hon Members: Many, many.

—many, many contributions during this Committee stage on this bill, particularly as the whole bill is now being debated as one question. There are many, many aspects of it that I hope to dig into, but first of all I want to start at a higher level, and call this bill for what it is.

This is a symbol of the National Government’s approach to governing the country, which is that it is quite happy to break the law—and let us be clear that that is what has been happening for many, many years now. The Government has been breaking its own law, and then, when it gets caught out, it comes to the Parliament to legislate to make legal what was previously illegal.

When Government members were in Opposition, which we can remember that far back, they railed against that kind of approach—how horrific it was that the Government of the day might legislate to make legal something that was previously illegal. Yet here we are, under urgency, legislating to make legal something that was previously illegal—with no public scrutiny, no select committee process, and a very truncated debate, in the sense that we are now debating it all as one question. That, of course, is symbolic of the approach of this National Government. And yet no one from the Government side has spoken during this Committee stage debate to answer the many legitimate questions that are already being asked, and I am sure that there are more to come.

Why is it that the Government is in such a hurry to remove this right, this monetary entitlement, from people who are on benefits? Yes, the Government may say that this is 1 day, but what happens if somebody has been on and off benefits over that period of time? Seasonal workers, teacher-aides, many, many people who could be affected by this are going to retrospectively have their legal entitlement taken away. Let us be really clear about that—they are legally entitled to this money. If a business was legally entitled, by the letter of the law, to a sum of money from the Government, would we be here, under urgency, legislating to take that entitlement away from them? I do not think we would be. I do not think the National Government would do that.

So why does the Government feel that it is acceptable to do that to someone who has been living on and off a benefit? They are the people who are most likely to be affected. They are the people who are making an effort to get out there and work. They may not be able to find full-time, long-term, sustainable work, so they might be doing seasonal work, or work that comes and goes, which means that they have an on-again, off-again relationship with Work and Income. They are the ones who are most likely to be affected by this.

So why is the Government doing this, if the Minister says that it is only a relatively small sum of money that we are talking about? That is what the Minister has said. Here is an open challenge. Question No. 1—how much? How much is “a small amount” of money? That is the first question—how much is “a small amount” of money? What is the total amount? I am not talking about per person. I am talking about what is the total liability that the Government is legislating to remove here. That is question No. 1 for the Minister, and I am looking forward to hearing the answer to that.

Question No. 2 is: how many people does the Government estimate are likely to be affected by this legislation? That is question No. 2. Question No. 3, related to question No. 2, is: within that group of people who are likely to be affected, how many of them are likely to be affected more than once? If it is just simply that they applied once and they missed out on a day, then that is one issue. But if it is that they have been on and off a benefit—and the seasonal workers whom I mentioned would definitely fall into this category—how many of them are there likely to be?

Those are the first three questions that I have for the Minister, and I am very much looking forward to those answers, because my contribution as the debate progresses will, in part at least, depend on what the answers to those questions are—bearing in mind that the Government has known about this for some time. It has known about this for some time. The Government moved to close the loophole only when the public found out that this loophole existed and that this problem existed, so it sat on this information for a significant period of time.

The problem, of course, has been in existence since 1998—a significant period of time, and only now are we addressing it. So why has it taken so long for the Government to bring this legislation to the House, and why the rush? Why the hurry? If this problem has been around since 1998 and the Government has known about it for quite a long period of time now—a year and a half it has known about it—why the rush to suddenly do this?

This brings me, of course, to a few other questions. Why is it that the Government is not giving people due notice so that if they have an entitlement they could actually gain that entitlement? Why is it that the Government is suddenly taking it away? Why is it that the Government is preserving the entitlement for only a very small subset?

I am pleased to take a call in this debate. First, can I start by apologising both to the House and to the chairman of the Social Services Committee, whom I particularly misinformed about something to do with this part of the bill being in the regulatory impact statement that was before the select committee. My understanding, and the advice that I have received, is that because the proposed amendments are technical revisions that re-enact the current law to improve legislative clarity, they are, therefore, exempt from the regulatory impact analysis requirement. So that is the first thing. I apologise to my colleague whom I misinformed about something in the regulatory impact statement.

With regard to the questions that have been asked about a number of issues, can I start by saying that in my first reading speech, introducing this bill to the House, I did actually quantify the number of benefits that we believe, at this early stage, have been paid since 1998, and that is 2.7 million benefits. It is impossible, without doing a manual check, to know how many of those are eligible, first of all, for the stand downs, because not all benefits—movements between benefits, sanctions, etc.—are necessarily accorded a stand down. Without going through every single one of those, and we have not done that work, I cannot give the member any further details, but 2.7 million benefits paid is a large amount.

Secondly, what I know is that, as at this morning, 8,500 people have lodged reviews, many of which will go back to 1998, and all of those are protected under this piece of legislation. That is because of the publicity and, I have to say, the very earnest work on behalf of a number of beneficiary advocates, in particular, Kay Brereton, who, I understand, because of her personal circumstances and the remote place she has lived, has done an outstanding job and gone without power in order to make sure that the power she had was made available to help people get their reviews in. So 8,500 people, as at this morning, have taken advantage of that, and I understand that the average payment is around $105.

I have said, both in the first reading speech and in the second reading speech, that the Government has tried to strike a balance, remembering that this is not a change of policy. The policy was clear back to 1996. A 7-day stand down means 7 days standing down. That is basic English. What we had was when an amendment was made to the law in 1998, it was worded badly. Nobody knew about that—neither a National-led Government nor a Labour-led Government. Neither did the beneficiaries. Everyone processed that stand down as though it was 7 days, meaning 7 days without State assistance. So there has been no change of policy.

The Government has tried to strike a balance between being fair to those who, when that error in law was pointed out to the Government, should have been entitled to that extra payment, and we have made that available to them. I have got a Supplementary Order Paper to extend that through to that New Year break—so right through until 8 January. That is plenty of time, and I have made every effort to make sure that it is as easy as possible to get that review in for those going back to May of last year. Anyone who currently has a review in the system will be treated as business as usual, and they will go through that review process.

I have got a few questions for the Minister, the Hon Anne Tolley, and a few responses to some of the stuff that she has just said, as well. Firstly, I just want to raise the issue around the fact again, because the Minister may not have heard this earlier argument, that, actually, this technical error was committed in 1998 when this bill went through under urgency in a similar way to what we are seeing now. So is the Minister concerned that when we rush through legislation like this, as was done in 1998, these errors do occur because of the fact that we do not have anyone looking over it, we do not have any of our officials giving us advice, and the Auditor-General has not had an opportunity to look at it? Is she concerned that that may happen again? Really, we do not want to be back here in 17 years’ time correcting a technical error that happened 17 years beforehand to correct a technical error that had happened 17 years beforehand whilst the bill went through under urgency.

The Minister has brought up the number of people whom they think may have been impacted by this. She said it was 2.7 million. She has not mentioned any fiscal cost, but we know that this was highlighted in the departmental disclosure statement. It says, basically, that provisions in the bill have retrospective effect and that the retrospective provisions can be justified because of three different things, including, apparently, financial costs to the Crown, but we have no figures. Actually, even in this departmental disclosure statement it points out the fact that there are no numbers or no figures around what this could potentially cost.

The Minister has said that 8,500 people have made claims so far. I guess, with that in mind, what is the rate of application that has gone on here? I know that, really, the applications started to be made after the Government started to pay out. I know that there was an increase in the number of claims that were being put forward once people knew that they could actually get paid out. So I just want to know from the Minister what that rate of claim has been. Have they been getting a thousand a day since then? Then we could maybe anticipate 6 weeks down the track, if they were to delay the commencement date as I have asked for in my Supplementary Order Paper, potentially what the cost to the Crown would be. But at the moment we are going blind because there is nothing here that we can see with regard to costings or anticipated costs for the Crown if they were to open it up so that all of those people could make a claim or, as we suggested, have that small window of opportunity for people to make a claim.

The Minister talked about the reason why there is no regulatory impact statement and has cited the fact that these are technical changes as a reason for not having a regulatory impact statement. I just want to point out that I did look this up because I was interested to see where there would be a rationale for not having a regulatory impact statement. What I have found is—3.1, “Exemptions”, says: “The value of completing even a modest Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) is likely to be limited in some circumstances, such as those where the potential proposals would result in little or no change to the status quo legislative position or would have no or very small impacts outside of government.”

That makes me question the Minister on what she was saying. Actually, this does not have no or very small impacts outside of Government. This has huge impacts outside of Government because of the number of people—2.7 million people—whom the Minister cited as having gone on or gone through a stand-down period to go on a benefit over the last 17 years. So I think it is not fair to say that the Government is justified in not producing a regulatory impact statement, because I do not think any person in this room would think that the potential to affect 2.7 million people outside of here is something that would not have an impact.

So I really would like the Minister to speak to that. Again, I would like her to answer the question around the rate at which the claims have been coming in so we can get some idea of potentially what that 6-week window of opportunity would mean for those people in terms of cost. I would like to know at this stage what the average amount is that people have been claiming for or what they have been eligible to receive. So the Minister would know, in terms of those who have already been paid out, what the average amount is that is being paid out there. How many days have they been claiming for? Has it just been the one day that the Minister mentioned?

I would just like to speak on the Supplementary Order Papers that have been put forward. I can understand the rationale behind why Labour and the Greens have put the Supplementary Order Papers forward, based on their perspective, on their argument, that beneficiaries are owed a day’s stand down. That is obviously not what New Zealand First believes.

The theory of the Supplementary Order Papers I can understand, just not the execution of them or the justification for them. So a couple of the justifications for Labour’s Supplementary Order Papers are that it will not cost much because there will not be many people who will apply—the majority will not apply. If it is a matter of principle, like we have been hearing about the Supplementary Order Papers and it being a matter of natural justice, if it is a matter of a fundamental right by law, if it is about trusting the Government, then based on the principles in the Supplementary Order Papers from Labour and the Greens should not everybody be getting that day’s stand down extra? They should not have to apply for it. Should they not be getting it automatically?

The Minister says that, on average, at the moment it is $105 per payout, and we are talking about 2.7 million benefits that have been paid. Of course not all beneficiaries will be eligible, but if we take even half of that, even a good chunk of that, where would that money be better spent than retrospectively thinking that a beneficiary should be owed that extra day’s payment when, in fact, the intent of the bill was fulfilled in the first instance?

Like I said previously, if the mistake was not made in the writing of the law, beneficiaries would still have received the same amount of benefit as they did. That is because the intent was fulfilled. The Supplementary Order Papers from both Labour and the Greens—New Zealand First cannot support them because fundamentally that would be going against and contrary to what we are agreeing to with this bill and why we are standing and supporting the bill. We believe that the intent of the bill was fulfilled and that there is no money owing to the beneficiaries.

I have just put a typescript amendment on the Table. If we are talking about natural justice, then the point from where the Government knew that there was an issue—which was May last year—is the point where people should be eligible. They are, and the Government is giving 7 weeks for them to apply. We actually believe that everybody who received a benefit who is eligible and who was not given that 1-day stand down should be automatically paid that amount. That is the point in time—from when the Government knew—that every beneficiary should be paid from. That is the natural justice aspect and the perspective that New Zealand First stands by.

We find ourselves in an interesting situation this evening. What we are doing is we are, under urgency, rectifying a mistake that was made under urgency 17 years ago. It demonstrates the danger of using urgency for these matters. We do not have a regulatory impact statement. We have not had the select committee process to scrutinise the legislation.

I want to look at the departmental disclosure statement, but to say it is scant is a bit of an understatement. There is very, very little advice for those of us who are being asked to vote on this legislation to actually give us confidence that we are getting this right. I have been a member of this House for only 7 years, and in that time I have seen a number of errors made—a number of errors made—when we have been in a rush.

My concern is that again, quite unnecessarily in this case, we are rushing this legislation and we are in danger of mucking it up again. To the best of our knowledge, this legislation will meet the Government’s purpose and intent, but it thought back in 1998 that it was going to do that, and it was wrong then. There is every likelihood the Government is going to be wrong again tonight.

There is another thing that I find slightly unusual. It is not that we are retrospectively making something that was previously illegal legal, because, as Chris Hipkins pointed out, that has happened before. Parties in Opposition tend to rail against that type of thing and then when they find themselves in Government they suddenly discover that it is actually perfectly acceptable, so I am not going to rail against that as such. But what I do find odd is that the Government was prepared to carry on acting illegally once it discovered that it was doing so.

This is not something that the Government has realised in the last few days, or weeks, or even months. The Government realised this was happening in May 2015, a full year and a half ago. So the Government has carried on, quite happily, acting illegally, until it realised it was a political issue for it. Now, all of a sudden, we are in a rush.

The Government could have brought this legislation—I feel like it is sort of Groundhog Day, because I was saying the same thing yesterday with the last piece of legislation under this urgency motion. The Government could have acted more swiftly and brought legislation—the legislation is only two or three pages long.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): It is tragic to interrupt the member.

It is, is it not?

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Immediately before the dinner break, I was lamenting the fact that it had taken the Government a year and a half to bring this legislation before the Parliament, all four pages of it. It really does baffle me why it took so long to bring this legislation to the Parliament, and now, after waiting for such a long period, why the Government is passing it through all stages under urgency without any opportunity for scrutiny. There is no regulatory impact statement and no select committee process.

What we do have is the departmental disclosure statement, which I think raises some issues and questions. Is there any publicly available inquiry review or evaluation reports that have informed or are relevant to the policy to be given effect by this bill? No. Were there any regulatory impact statements provided to inform the policy decisions that led to this bill? No. For the policy to be given effect by this bill, is there analysis available on the size of potential costs and benefits? No. Is there analysis available on the potential for any group of persons to suffer a substantial, unavoidable loss of income or wealth? No, even though we, in fact, know that the impact of this legislation is to limit the opportunity people have to seek redress for having lost a portion of income that they were entitled to under law.

Essentially, for just about every question that is asked—the standard questions asked by the departmental disclosure statement—the answer is no. I think it actually demonstrates just how little work has been done to prepare this legislation and to make sure that what we do tonight rectifies a situation that was caused by legislation being passed under urgency back in 1998, and the errors that came with that.

I would like to turn my attention, though, to the Supplementary Order Papers. There are three Supplementary Order Papers: one in the name of Carmel Sepuloni, one in the name of Jan Logie, and one in the Minister’s name. I would like to start with my colleague Carmel Sepuloni. The effect of her Supplementary Order Paper would be to delay the commencement of this legislation by 6 weeks, and that is simply to give people an opportunity to actually seek some redress.

I think we are particularly thinking here of the people who have been affected by the incorrect application of the law numerous times. We have spoken about the fact that for a lot of people this will not have affected them just once. There are many people, particularly those on fixed-term contracts, those who are in casual work, and those who are in seasonal work in particular, who will have moved in and out of work many, many, many times over the 18 years that this policy has been implemented inappropriately.

For some of those people we could be talking significant sums of money. For most people, if it has occurred only once or twice, then, probably, the hassle of applying to retrospectively gain that 1 day’s worth of income is probably not worth it for them. But for some people there may well be some value in making that application.

What Carmel Sepuloni’s proposed amendment would do is give people a very short window—and I think the Government could easily work with us on this—to allow people that opportunity to apply to receive the income that they ought to have, had the legislation, as it was originally drafted, been applied appropriately. I have heard a couple of members dismiss this approach. I think when they do that they assume that everybody falls into that category of people for whom this has happened only once or twice. There will definitely be people—not that we know for sure, because the Government has not been able to provide us with figures—for whom there would be value in exploring exactly how much they are owed by the Government and taking the time to do that.

Jan Logie’s amendment is similar, only it gives a 6-month window. Really, what we are debating here is how long is an appropriate length of time for people to be able to make that application. Certainly, on this side of the Chamber we have got no problem with the 6-month window—6 weeks or 6 months; either of those would be acceptable to us.

Then we come to the Minister’s amendment. This is a really interesting one. This amendment allows people who have been denied what they were legally owed under the law during the period in which the Government knew it was acting illegally to be able to apply for that and to pick up retrospectively the money that they were entitled to. I find this interesting. I think it is good, in a way, that the Government is trying to rectify the fact that it was acting illegally, but, nevertheless, it is a fact that the Government, for a year and a half nearly, knowingly denied people income that they were owed under the law, even though the Government knew that the legislation as it was drafted said they were entitled to something different.

We can support that as well, but we do not think it goes far enough. We actually think that the amendments in one of those other Supplementary Order Papers—either Carmel Sepuloni’s or Jan Logie’s—need to be passed if we are to take a principled approach to this, which is that people were entitled to some income, it has been denied them, and they should be given the opportunity to apply to receive what they were owed.

My suspicion is that most people will not apply. It will not be worth their while to make that application, but for a handful of people it will be worth their while making that application. I think there is value in supporting those two Supplementary Order Papers on that basis. I think I will end this particular contribution at that point.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I am not doing this to trifle with your earlier considerations. I am doing it because the Minister for Social Development, who is responsible for the bill, is now in the chair. The point of order that I raised earlier, which I now wish to repeat and seek further guidance on from you, was that because this bill was introduced as part of another bill that is still at the Social Services Committee—this part of the bill has been taken out of the select committee process and is now before the Committee of the whole House, under urgency, going through all stages—we do not have the benefit of the officials’ advice. [Interruption]

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The first thing is that Ruth Dyson will resume her chair. The member who interjected while I was on my feet will stand up, withdraw, and apologise.

💬 David Bennett: Withdraw and apologise.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Withdraw and apologise?

💬 David Bennett: I do withdraw and apologise, yes.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Thank you, Mr Bennett. I am ready to rule on this. I have previously ruled. I think the first time the matter was raised the Minister was in fact in the Chamber. It was raised by Jan Logie. What I ruled at the time was that I suggested that the chair of the select committee—and it would have to be a committee member, I think, to have the material—excise that material from a report and seek leave of the Committee in particular terms, so that members are able to debate it. Then it would be up to the Committee. It would have to be a unanimous decision of the Committee, and members would be able to do that. No one has done that, and therefore I am going to rule that I have got nothing further to rule on.

I want to deal with a number of issues in this contribution, the first of which is that I note that this bill, at clause 3, refers to the principal Act. It states that this Act amend

s the Social Security Act of 1964. I am going to refer, in many of the comments that I make, to the actual original Act in the part that we are amending. But I do want to note at the outset that the Ministry of Social Development website notes that there is actually a full rewrite of that legislation under way and that it is due in the House by the end of 2015. I wonder, in fact, whether that has highlighted other areas that might need to be addressed, which the Minister may want to alert the Committee to.

The reason that I am referring to the principal Act is that I wanted to check with the Minister on what basis the Government is claiming that the wording in the Act was inconsistent with the policy intent at the time the original amendments in 1998 were passed. The reason that I ask that is that we are amending clause 80BA(4), and if you look at 80BA(3), the clause immediately prior to that—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The section.

What was that?

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The section.

The section—sorry—immediately prior to that, that defines when a stand-down period begins. The sections that we are amending amend when a stand-down period ends, but if you look at when a stand-down period begins, it is actually very clear: “… if the person’s employment terminated or the person is given notice of termination of employment before he or she applied for the benefit, the day after the date the person’s employment ceased.” So in that section it is very clear that it is the day after that that the stand-down period begins. But then the very next subsection, which was in exactly the same amendment—the same legislation that amended the Act, which is what we are now amending—it goes on to say that benefits commence on the day on which the stand-down period ends. It seems to me that if the policy intent in the original drafting was to make that differentiation, or it was to make no differentiation, why was a different form of words used in the drafting of the Act?

So, really, the question that I have for the Minister is, on what basis is the Government claiming that the legislation was incorrect, not that the application of the legislation was incorrect? If the application had been incorrect, then I do not think that there is any justification for the Government to retrospectively go back and try to change the law to make right an incorrect interpretation of the Act as intended by the agency that was implementing it. On the other hand, there may be some justification if it was a genuine drafting error in the legislation, but I struggle to accept that when the subsection immediately prior makes a clear differentiation between the “day on which” and the “day after”.

For anyone following along at home, they will probably think “What on earth is he talking about?”, but actually it is quite important because it comes down to the issue of fairness and whether, in fact, this was a mistake by the agency implementing the law in that it interpreted the law incorrectly, or whether it was a mistake made in the passage of the law in the first place. I think, given very careful scrutiny of the original Act, I am actually falling in the category that it is the former, which is that it is actually a mistake in the way the law has been interpreted by the ministry in its implementation. Therefore, I do not think that there are good grounds to retrospectively change.

If the Government is saying it is now changing the policy intent to bring those two things into line, that is a legitimate call for the Government to make. It can pass that legislation going forward into the future, which would make the two clauses consistent, but what is the rationale, other than it being a fiscal cost to the Government because the agency implementing this has made a mistake in incorrectly interpreting the law? There cannot actually be a justification for amending the law retrospectively in the way that the Government is seeking to do through this bill because the mistake is in the interpretation of the law, not in the law as passed. The law as passed, it seems to me, made a clear differentiation in its intent and in the way it was drafted between the stand-down period beginning and the stand-down period commencing. That is specified very clearly that the stand-down period commenced the day after somebody’s employment ceased, but that the stand-down period ended on the day the stand-down period ended.

Therefore, I do not think that there is a case to be made to say that it was a drafting error because the sections are inconsistent. That must have been picked up at the time. This went through a full scrutiny process, I presume, at the time, and, therefore, trying now to say that the policy was not incorrectly implemented by the drafting of the law, I do not think stands. I think it is perfectly legitimate for the Minister to say that the law was incorrectly applied by the agency responsible for paying out the benefits, but, frankly, I think, who should wear that liability? It was not the mistake of the beneficiaries receiving the money. It was the mistake of the agency. So who should bear the liability for that? Should that liability be with the Crown, the Government, or the agency responsible, or should that liability be with the recipients? If it was the incorrect application of the law, I do not think it should be the recipients who bear the liability. I think it should be the Crown, the Government, and the people who made the mistake who bear the liability for that. I would be interested in hearing further comments from the Minister on that.

Thank you to the member Chris Hipkins, who has just resumed his seat. Thank you for that nice try. But in fact it is very clear that the Government policy that was developed in 1996 was in the legislation enacted in 1998. It has been Government policy since 1998 that the stand-down period would cover a full week. So a 7-day stand down meant 7 days without State support. That is what was intended.

I do not know how the legislative error was made—none of us were here at that time—but the policy intent is clear. The operational intent has been clear and has been carried out. What the Government has said, and we are talking about liability, is that once the agency knew—so from that first appeal—that the legislation did not support the operational policy, those people are entitled then to a review, and that is what is protected in this bill.

I do have to say, to clarify a statement I made earlier, that as at this morning just over 8,500 people have asked for a review. That is not just from May of last year. They are perfectly entitled, and protected under this legislation, to that review, going right back to 1998.

Following on from that, I really have had some of my concerns echoed in those raised by the Labour member Chris Hipkins around the interpretation of the law and whether that is the problem or whether it was a drafting problem. I am grateful that the Minister is here in the Chamber and is speaking and engaging on this bill. However, we have heard from the Minister, as we have heard from other members on this side of the Chamber, that the policy intent was clear that it was for a 7-day stand down.

But I believe if you are bringing retrospective legislation to this House to say what the intent of the law was when it is so clearly different from what was written in the law and from what the courts have decided is the meaning of the law, then the onus really, I believe, should be on the Government to provide us with some evidence of that assertion. We have had no evidence of that assertion. We have not had anything in the Hansard debates. We have had nothing on paper from the Minister. We have just had the oft-repeated assertion that that was the intent. We have nothing to back that up whatsoever.

I would now like to speak in my contribution to our Supplementary Order Papers, which we have been hearing about, that we have put forward on this bill. We have been hearing from Government members again that the Greens are being irresponsible for asserting people’s legal rights to access their legal entitlements. Somehow that is fiscally irresponsible, and a certain definition of fiscal responsibility obviously overrides the rule of law and people’s access to their legal entitlements.

I do want to just point out that actually our Supplementary Order Papers clearly demonstrate that we are willing to work with the Government to ensure the certainty that they seem to be seeking with this legislation and that we believe that that certainty can be balanced with what I believe is the primary responsibility of Government, which is to seek to build trust in this Parliament and in our public institutions. So what we have proposed in our Supplementary Order Papers is to allow a 6-month period for everyone to be able to lodge applications for a review and to require the Government to advertise this opportunity. So if it was a genuine mistake, it is OK to fix that in the future. If the Government has a particular policy intent that it would like to see implemented, then we will debate that policy intent on its points. But if you are going to introduce retrospective legislation to deny people their legally established entitlements, then I think a bit more should be required than what is in front of us with this piece of legislation.

I really think that the proportionality—the Government needs to offer more, particularly when we look at the balance of this and at somebody who is accessing the entitlements of Work and Income who may have missed a bus, whose bus may have been late, or who may have been at a tangi or in hospital for a psychotic episode and who misses an appointment at Work and Income and gets their entire benefit—or if they have children, half of their benefit—cut. The severity of that penalty for what is in most people’s minds, I would suggest, a completely reasonable situation or mistake—for it to be penalised so harshly, and then for the Government to come to this House and say “Well, OK, a mistake has been made. We’ll take that and we will give some of you 6 weeks to be able to put in an application and we are not going to mention it.”, is completely unnecessary. And we have to point out that this will be reported in the media tomorrow and there will be people who would be entitled to money now if they had heard about it today, who will hear about it tomorrow, potentially after the Royal assent, who will not be entitled to money.

That is setting up a situation of grievance that is completely unnecessary, when we could actively seek to build people’s trust and confidence and see the Government as recognising its wrongs and seeking to right them and give people access to an entitlement. That is possible in this debate, and members can choose to support our Supplementary Order Papers to be able to deliver that.

What we are going to get at the moment—and I do need to speak to that kind of process around those who have missed out on money because of the misapplication of the law from 1998 until May 2014. When they hear this in the news, potentially tomorrow, they could think: “Oh, I’m an educational support worker. Actually, the way the Government funds our schools means that I need to rely on a benefit outside term time. Gosh, I might be eligible over each year for three lots of quite a lot of money, coming up to this Christmas, while I am really struggling to feed my family and doing a fantastic job in schools, in helping schools run and our children being able to learn. Gosh, I’d be entitled to this—but oh, I’m a day too late. It’s all over the media today and I didn’t hear this in time and I’ve missed out.”

I do not see how anyone in this Committee can think that is fair, when we have educational support workers and we have seasonal workers in some of the lowest-income areas in this country who we know—you know, there are not many job choices in particular areas in this country. There is seasonal work, particularly in the area the Minister is from, I think, where we know that a lot of people are stuck into seasonal contract forestry work. They will have been on and off benefit, and their legal entitlement as of today would be for quite a significant amount of money. But when this bill goes through and gets the Royal assent—probably tomorrow; I cannot be sure—they will not be entitled to anything.

That is setting up quite a significant impact. We do not have a regulatory impact statement because, we are being told, there is no significant impact from this legislation. Well, I would like to hear the Minister or anyone else tell me how it is not a significant impact for somebody in the community to have heard about this and then find out from their auntie tomorrow that they were able to claim some money, and then they are not able to. That—in real terms, in real life—is a major impact, and I am at a complete loss to understand how that is not considered a significant impact.

I would also like to speak about the fact that the law was interpreted by the courts in May 2014 and the Ministry of Social Development did not change its interpretation of the law or the way it enacted it, knowing—and it was given two court rulings telling it this—that what it was doing was, in effect, illegal. The ministry continued that practice. The Minister has told me that she was shocked to find that out. Despite this law change apparently having gone to Cabinet at around the same time—so, knowing that there was a problem there and there had been a court ruling—she had not checked whether the ministry had changed its policy. That, to me, raises some pretty significant issues relating to either the Minister’s oversight or the ministry’s responsibility in informing the Minister. That does seem to me a very worrying breakdown of relationships. I am particularly worried that it may not be isolated to this point.

There was a report put out by the Child Poverty Action Group last year looking at the interpretation of relationships, there is a very famous case, Ruka v Department of Social Welfare, and then the report by Frances Joychild, which was instituted by the then Minister, Ruth Dyson, I understand, looking at whether the Ministry of Social Development had implemented the changes that were signalled by the court at that time, and it found out that it had not. So I am very worried, and the Child Poverty Action Group report indicates that it still may not have implemented the changes. I would quote, if I had the report right in front of me, some of the strength of language of the report. It is deeply worrying for me, when the courts have the role of interpreting law and the ministries and the Government have the role and the responsibility to implement it as it has been interpreted. If that fundamental relationship is being broken on a consistent basis by this Government, or any Government, then we have an absolutely fundamental problem that should worry many people.

I seek the leave of the Committee of the whole House to have the officials’ advice provided under the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill that is related solely to the matters under consideration in the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill excised from the select committee and provided to the Committee of the whole House.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member might want to add a little bit more: “so that members can use it for debate purposes.”

So that members can use it for debate purposes.

Because otherwise, I would have to stop you. I think that is relatively clear. Is there any objection to that material being provided? There is objection. It cannot be.

I would like to thank the Minister who was in the chair a moment ago, Anne Tolley, for her contribution with regard to the concerns that I was raising about what the original intent in the passage of the legislation was. I have some further comments to make on that in response to the Minister because she raised the issue, first of all, of what the Government policy of the day was, not what the legislation was. Ultimately, the question, therefore, from a legal standpoint, becomes: which takes precedence—Government policy, or legislation? Actually, the law is pretty clear: legislation trumps Government policy. Government policy informs legislation in the way the Government presents it to the House, but the word of the law is what ultimately takes precedence. So regardless of what the Government’s policy intention was at the time, the question was what the legislative intent was at the time, and the legislation, it seems to me from a very clear reading of the principal Act, was actually quite clear.

Then the question becomes: what remedy is there if there was an error in the Act? So we turn to McGee, the authority on these issues in the New Zealand House of Representatives, and it makes it very clear that if there is an error in the drafting of legislation, the law that takes precedence, the law that applies, is in fact the law as assented to. Even if there are mistakes between the House’s passing legislation and it being signed by the sovereign—being given the Royal assent—it is the legislation that receives the assent that ultimately becomes the law. Even if the Government’s intention was not enacted by the law, the fact is that that was the law that was signed by the Governor-General and, therefore, that was the law that applied. Therefore, is there good cause for retrospectivity?

I then turn to the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee’s advice on these matters. The Legislation Design and Advisory Committee guidelines are very clear. It is in the very beginning of the committee’s principles of legislative design—Chapter 3, Part 1.7—that it specifies “Legislation should not affect existing rights and should not criminalise or punish conduct that was not punishable at the time it was committed.” It goes on to say: “The presumption against retrospectivity: The general rule is that legislation should have prospective, not retrospective, effect.” Therefore, the question that the Committee needs to turn itself to is whether there is good justification for effectively taking away someone’s rights—for making right something that was wrong, or wrong something that was right previously.

I think that the Parliament needs to be very, very careful in doing that, particularly when it comes to issues of individual rights and entitlements. This is not an authority that we are dealing with. It is not a legislative body. It is not so much a Government department. This is something that affects individual citizens. I think the Parliament needs to tread very carefully when we are trying to change the law retrospectively in that regard, particularly as these retrospective changes go all the way back to 1998. It is the better part of two decades’ worth of previous application of the law that is being retrospectively changed by this legislation, and I think we need to be very careful about that. I think that the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee is quite right in its guidance to the House and to those drafting legislation that prospectivity should be the main principle behind legislative drafting, not retrospectivity.

To recap those three points I just made—regardless of the Government’s policy intention at the time, it is the legislation as given the Royal assent that takes precedence and that triumphs. Secondly, if there were mistakes in the legislation that was given the Royal assent, it is the version of the legislation given the Royal assent that ultimately is the law. Regardless of whether the mistakes were in Government policy or in the drafting of the law, once it was passed and once it was assented to, that was the law, and that has been the law since 1998. The third point is about whether there is a case for retrospectivity, and, really, I think the Parliament will be going against itself, against its own advice, and against its own better principles if we allow this legislation to go through with the retrospective clauses that exist within it. I think we enter dangerous territory when we pass the legislation in the way we are going to be passing it, if this bill is passed now.

There are further points I am going to make about the substance of clause 5, but I will do that in a further contribution. Thank you.

No, the member will not, because he has had four calls.

I want to expand upon the arguments that have already been made in the Committee this evening about the potential conflict. Are we talking about the issue of drafting errors or are we talking about the application and the implementation of policy? I think it is very clear, from what my esteemed colleague has already provided, that when we talk in clause 4 of the bill about section 80BA(4) of the Social Security Act, which talks about the end of the stand-down period, we have not included the previous subsection, which talks about the commencement of the stand-down period and has the fullness of that period, where the language in one talks about ‘the day after”, and the language in the other talks about “the day on which” the period ends. We obviously have an issue here. The issue has been around the original drafting of the legislation, which was rushed through the House under urgency, and, as another of my colleagues has noted, we are again in a process of urgency to correct what may have been either a drafting error or a policy implementation error.

I just want to pick up on the policy implementation part of this. We are in a truncated process and we have not had the ability either to have the input from officials or the input from people who will see the fullness of the application of this bill when it becomes law and is implemented in the workplace. There is obviously a problem, a concern, with that. If we had had the opportunity to have that, if we were not in a truncated process, and if we were not in urgency, we would not be heaping, in my view, a problem on top of a problem on top of a problem. We could be doing this correctly. We could be crafting the legislation appropriately and doing what we should do, which is to ensure that we either amend what happened in 1998 or amend the application of this policy, this legislation, in its application on the ground.

We have heard very clearly that there have been calls from this side of the Chamber, after the issue was raised initially by Jan Logie and then by my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson, for an opportunity for us to have the information from officials as part of this process, which would certainly add an opportunity to debate this more fully. The previous Minister in the chair, Anne Tolley, has been saying that the intent of the policy is clear. Well, we are not sure of that because we have not been given the evidence of that. It would be in the best interests of ensuring that we get the legislation right, to have that information. Clearly it is needed. Clearly the members on this side of the Chamber would like that information, but, unfortunately, it appears that we have not been able to get access to that.

But there is a real issue with what happens with bills over time, when they become enacted and when the legislation is then interpreted by the courts, and then we have the opportunity to implement that at the coalface. This legislation actually has a significant component within it that may provide opportunities to people to gain back what they are owed. It might come as a surprise to members, but there are people who are watching this debate at home who actually contacted me during the dinner break, asking about their ability to become part of this process. Would they be able to apply? The Minister spoke earlier of 8,500 people who have applied for this process. What will happen this evening is that by virtue of the fact that this legislation will pass, we are putting a stop to a whole lot of people being able to apply for what is owed to them. That is hugely unfair when the Government has not, as it should do, made every effort to contact people and to advertise the fact that this is a process—

Tēnā koutou Te Whare nui. I have been in this House for nearly 7 years, and I thought I was pretty cynical. I look at legislation and I think it might be misguided, but, usually, it has got some understandable merit. Then we get to this bill. This is extraordinarily mean-spirited, it is extraordinarily bizarre, and it is so arcane that the people who have actually suffered from being underpaid by the system—

💬 Darroch Ball: It’s not underpaid.

“Not underpaid.”, my colleague says—quite right. Well, they are not receiving their full entitlement. [Interruption] No? It sounds to me like they are not receiving their full entitlement when they do not get a day’s pay that they were entitled to. They are going to have enough trouble understanding it, let alone applying for it. So I think that we need to look very hard at ourselves tonight and ask “What are we doing in this House? Urgency to fix urgency.”

First of all, I would like to talk about why we do not support urgency for this kind of thing, because look at the mess. There was a drafting error, supposedly, and the courts have ruled clearly that the spirit of this is not just a spirit; it is actually in the law already—that when you are going back after a stand down, you get the money the day that the stand down finishes. This is not rocket science—thank goodness, because I am not a rocket scientist. It is pretty clear, but what about the people at the receiving end? It is fantastic for people to spend time having arcane debates on the clauses, but what about the 70 people who contacted Jan Logie today—let alone any other person in this Committee—about whether they are going to be able to get their just entitlement?

The reason that I am fired up about this, as someone who has been a beneficiary advocate on the East Coast, is that if a beneficiary dared to miss an appointment, or if a beneficiary supposedly dared to do something wrong with their paperwork, let us watch the benefit fraud unit descend on them. I have sat in meetings with the benefit fraud unit; I have seen what they do. If anyone who is on a benefit makes a mistake, it is a ton of bricks time. And then, in the last couple of years, there have been sanctions—cutting money from people. Today on Lambton Quay I talked to a beggar. She gets $13 a week from Work and Income. She is a mental health survivor who cannot get the invalids benefit. And this is the kind of system that creates this kind of mess, and then, when we make a mess, the willingness is not there to clean it up so that people can get what is fair.

How can we hold our heads up in this House and do this kind of stuff to people who are at the bottom of the heap, many through no fault of their own? And then, when the Government makes a mistake, it will not fix it fairly. It is pretty basic: fix it fairly, Mr Chair. Do not be mean—do what is right. Actually, it is pretty basic.

💬 Iain Lees-Galloway: Be fair, Mr Chairman.

Yeah, be fair and do not be mean. It is not very sophisticated language. After all, this is about natural justice. Is it not about natural justice? If we make mistakes, we have to own them. At the moment, this bill does not own what it is creating. So people are going to be knocked out of being able to apply for what is fair. They are going to be knocked out because they were on the benefit before May. If you are after May, you are in, but if you are before, you are out.

If anybody here knows anything about what it is like to live at the tough end of society, the person is on the benefit and then they get some work. The person gets some work and then they lose their job. The person gets stood down and the person then applies for a number of jobs. The person may get some part-time, contract work. The person loses that work and then the person tries to get back on the benefit—the person is constantly on and off. This is not new. This has not happened just since May 2014. This has been happening to people for—well, I would like to say since 1984, actually, but that is going back rather a long way. The benefit system is not treating people the way it expects beneficiaries to behave.

I want to begin this contribution by taking us all back to 1998. This may or may not be a pleasant memory for everybody in the Committee—1998 was an interesting year. But during that year—in fact, on 14 May 1998—this House was debating the second reading of the Social Security Amendment Bill, which, as best I can tell, is the piece of legislation that is at the root of the problem we have got today.

There is a large number of things I could raise about the debate that night. One of them involves an honourable member by the name of Trevor Mallard, who raised a number of points of order during that particular debate, including an exchange with Joy McLauchlan that involved a number of withdrawals and apologies, some of which I could refer to. If I used some of the language—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No. I am now going to ask the member to come to the bill’s Committee stage. Thank you.

But should, at a later date in the evening, you wish to hear that, Mr Chairperson, do let me know.

I want to refer to a speech that was given during the debate by a Labour Party member, Steve Maharey. I want to highlight three things that he said that are relevant to the reason that we are here tonight. The first of those is that early on in his contribution he made the point that the Minister of Social Welfare had that morning given to the Opposition the legislation that was being debated. That was the amount of notice it got. Is this ringing any bells for anybody? The reason we are here tonight, with a National Government deciding to retrospectively take away the rights of a group of New Zealanders, has its roots in the same rushed, hopeless pace of legislation, which this Government, once again, puts us through.

Mr Maharey was very prescient, as he occasionally was. He said: “Yet again we have an example of this Government running along behind itself, trying to get legislation together and trying to get a programme together. When we look through the Bill we see that yet again there are many issues to be cleared up and cleaned up, leaving hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries wondering exactly what it means for them.” That was in 1998. Fast forward to 2015 and the same thing is being done all over again. That is the problem members on this side of the Chamber have. Mr Maharey then went on to say “The Bill is being dealt with under urgency. It will not go to a select committee.”, and he went on to tell us the problems with that.

Once again, we are in this Chamber tonight debating a bill that has not been to a select committee. As parliamentarians we have had our right to actually see the evidence that has gone already to a select committee about this matter denied to us tonight by the National Government. But, again, the problems are—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! No, the member will resume his seat. I want to make absolutely clear that no member has been denied the right to see that evidence. There is a right to table it that was not allowed. Members can share evidence with other members. There is no restriction on that.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and I will take up that offer in due course. So we have the problem here, just to repeat how we have got to this point. A piece of legislation has not been thought through properly. A piece of legislation was pushed through under urgency in 1998, and here we are again. The Government is attempting to retrospectively correct that with another piece of legislation that has not been adequately looked at, that has no regulatory impact statement, and that is, again, being pushed through under urgency.

Then there is this line from Mr Maharey: “This Government wants to see beneficiaries be the fall guys for its faults.” Well, you could not get a better example of history repeating itself from 1998. What I want to know from the Government, and I still have not heard a satisfactory answer since an earlier call when I asked this question. We have now been given an idea of the number of people who put in an application—$8,500. What I want to know from the Government—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: 8,500 people.

Sorry, 8,500 people—thank you. What I want to know from the Government is what amounts of money we are talking about here. Are we talking about $80 each for those people? Are we talking $1,000 each? Can we actually get some information into this Committee about what it is that the Government is so concerned about here? Is it the cost? Just be up front with New Zealanders. Just be up front with New Zealanders, and tell us tonight the sums of money that are at play here.

I would actually be extremely surprised if we were talking about individuals with $5,000 or $10,000. We do not know. I do not know the answer to that question right now. The Government must have some idea. The Government must be able to do this, otherwise what we will be sitting with here are members of the Government who are simply not prepared to get up and justify this legislation.

I am really struggling here. You heard Chris Hipkins earlier talking about what this Parliament has effectively decided is the way in which retrospective legislation can work in this House. There will be, from time to time, occasions where retrospective legislation makes some sense. But how can a piece of legislation be retrospective for people after an error is discovered, but not before the error was discovered? The error exists. The error has been there, according to the Government, since 1998.

It is not a matter of finding a dividing line of when a Government official told a Minister, and that happened to be in 2014, which means there is a limited scope to the number of people who can be involved. If it is an error, it was an error made in 1998, and the Government should simply front up to that. But what we learn is that history repeats itself. History repeats itself because the Government tries to ram through legislation and makes mistakes and creates further errors and further inequities.

What I want to hear from a Government member or from the Minister in the chair is some indication of the individual amounts of money that are being discussed here. This would normally have emerged during the select committee process. It is a dead-set guarantee that somehow, someone in the select committee process would have said: “This is how much it is. This is the estimation. This is how many who have come forward to us today and asked for an amount of money.” Otherwise we are flying blind here, and all we are left with is the impression of a Government that is determined to take away from a group of New Zealanders the rights that they should have. There is nothing that has been put forward in this Parliament that would give justification for that.

The intention of Cabinet, the intention of an individual Minister—we have got the names of them here. Shall we go upstairs and find Peter McCardle and ask him what his intention was when he moved this? It is irrelevant—it is absolutely irrelevant. It is irrelevant what Cabinet decided. What matters is what ended up in the law in 1998. That is the only thing that should matter to this Parliament. If we spend all of our time trying to work out what the intent of Ministers like Peter McCardle and Roger Sowry, who were the Ministers who moved it, was we could have any old thing come up. We have not seen Cabinet papers to justify that. All that we have got is the law. It is our job in this Parliament to make the law, and then, when there are mistakes, to deal with them in a way that is fair and is equitable for New Zealanders, and not to deal with them in a way that is convenient for the Government. That is the impression that I have got from this debate—that what we are doing here in the House is what is convenient for this Government.

Let us all own this as parliamentarians. A mistake has been made. A group of people, individuals in our community, have been denied something that they should have got. Let us give them the time—all of them—to make an application to get their funding back. They will not all do it—lots of people will decide it is not worth their while—but that should not be the criteria either. The criteria should simply be that when Parliament gets something wrong, it corrects it, and it allows those people who have been aggrieved and who feel that they have lost their rights or their entitlements to be able to take the course of action that should be available to them.

There is nothing that has been put forward in this Committee tonight that should justify overriding Parliament’s doing the right thing. I want to hear a National member get on their feet and give us a reason for this breach of the rights and entitlements of New Zealanders, because without that, and unless they are prepared to support our Supplementary Order Paper, we cannot support the bill.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I just seek some clarification around the official advice on the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill that Carmel Sepuloni earlier on sought leave to table and to be debatable. As you have correctly pointed out to members, we do have the ability as members to share that advice with other members of Parliament. What we are unclear about on this side of the Chamber is whether we are able to use that official advice as the substance for debate in the Committee, given that it is still part of a select committee process.

I can answer that relatively easily for the member. The member cannot refer to the advice, but the member can use the advice to inform himself or herself—all right. Is that clear?

Yes, that is clear.

I would like to talk on clause 4(2) of this bill, which refers to section 80BA(4)(b) of the Social Security Act 1964. But just before I do, I would like to read just one statement from the departmental disclosure statement. What the departmental disclosure statement says is a rationale of why we are putting in retrospective legislation. It says that this: “could be seen as contentious, as generally legislation should operate prospectively not retrospectively. However, in this case, the retrospective provisions can be justified to ensure: … financial costs to the Crown that were not anticipated are avoided.” And that is important.

So what the Crown is seeking to do is to avoid costs that were not anticipated. Let us look at section 80BA(4)(b) of the Social Security Act 1964. Let us look at the sort of people that this piece of legislation is potentially going to disadvantage. We are not talking about middle-class New Zealanders who can afford things and we are not talking about the wealthy, for whom $20 means nothing; we are talking about these people.

The Act actually outlines the people whom this is going to disadvantage: people who are on the benefit for “(i) sole parent support; or (ii) a supported living payment; or (iii) jobseeker support granted on the ground of sickness, injury, or disability; …”. We get the picture. These are the most disadvantaged people in our society. These are the people whom Parliament has decided need support from the Government. Therefore, what Parliament has mandated is that we give these people a level of support that allows them to live a life of at least dignity, or, certainly, allows them to stand on their own two feet while they get out of their circumstances.

Section 80BA(4)(b)talks about “(iv) jobseeker support granted to a sole parent; or (v) jobseeker support granted to a person who has recently lost the financial support of his or spouse or partner by reason of death, the spouses or partners commencing to live apart, or the ending of a de facto relationship; or (vi) a youth payment; or (vii) a young parent payment.” Again, I would like to emphasise that the people who we are looking at really screwing, in a way, or certainly denying natural justice to, are those who are the most disadvantaged in our society. We have heard that that is about 8,500 New Zealanders. In the scheme of things, that is actually quite a lot of disadvantaged people in our society who could well do with this payment, if they decide to take it up.

The term “natural justice” has been used. Let us have a look at what that means. It is actually a legal term, and what it actually means is the rule against bias and the right to a fair hearing. That is what natural justice means. That is why we are in this Parliament standing up for those who have an inability to stand up for themselves. We are the voice of these people who are disadvantaged and who look to us to do what is right. And when the honourable member Catherine Delahunty said that she was becoming cynical, I disagreed. I am not cynical. I am hopeful that we are here for the right reasons, and I am hopeful that we can actually do the right thing for those who are the most disadvantaged in our society and who need us to stand up for them and to do what is right.

I listed a group of quite specific people under the legislation that is being amended by clause 4(2) of this bill. We can see that these are people who, yet again, are possibly—let us make an assumption here—some of the most disenfranchised. I would wage a bet that the vast majority—well, a good number of them—will not know that this debate is going on.

Some of them will have advocates in the community who, when this law is passed—if we do the right thing, and Carmel Sepuloni’s Supplementary Order Paper goes through—will contact their networks and who will go out to these people as defined in section 80BA(4)(b). They will say to them: “Let me help you. Let me help you get that money back because it’s coming up to Christmas.” This bill is going to receive its Royal assent before Christmas, of that there is no doubt. And they will say: “So let me help you, and it might make a bit of difference.”

Again, I suspect what will happen is that the word will slowly spread out. When I see here that one of the three reasons for this retrospective legislation is that—

This is my first call, and I am surprised that, given the importance of the legislation that we are debating at the moment, the only two pieces of information that are available to me are the Act itself and the departmental disclosure statement, which does not provide a lot of information.

I want to follow through on something that I do not believe that this Committee has really considered in depth in debating this particular piece of legislation, and that is that we are amending the Social Security Act 1964, and this bill—the Government’s bill—does not really provide a lot of information in terms of the principles and purpose of the Act of 1964. I just want the Committee to cast its sight on that particular Act, because that is what we are talking about. That is what we are amending tonight.

The purpose of the 1964 Act is “(a) to enable the provision of financial and other support as appropriate—(i) to help people to support themselves and their dependants while not in paid employment; and (ii) to help people to find or retain paid employment; and (iii) to help people for whom work may not currently be appropriate because of sickness, injury, disability, or caring responsibilities, to support themselves and their dependants:”. That really underlines what we are missing in all of this.

This is about vulnerable people, and given that we do not have the select committee process and we do not have the benefit of advice from the general public, I am asking the first question. How many of these people whom the vulnerable that this 1964 Act was set up for are affected by this retrospective legislation?

How many sickness beneficiaries are affected by this retrospective legislation? How many disabled, or people with injuries, are affected by this retrospective legislation? Some people have caring responsibilities, are unable to support themselves and their dependants, and are dependent on the State to provide support. How many of them are affected by this? If the Minister is able to provide that information, that can give us some clarity in terms of how much money is involved in this, because I understand that Minister Tolley made a comment in an interview she conducted on Radio New Zealand National. She said on 16 September 2015 that we are talking about only a day so it is not a huge amount. So if it is not a huge amount, what is the Government doing? What is it doing to the most vulnerable group of people in our community?

All the Government has to do is ensure that those people who missed out on that 1 day of a payment are given it. At the community level, the people on the ground would see that for the past 18 years a Government department has broken the law, because it has not paid them something that they should have been paid. So it has broken the law. If a business breaks the law, we take it to court. But, in this case, the harm or the damage was done by a particular Government department, and now the Government wants to act on it by refusing to pay out 1 day to the most vulnerable people.

As my colleague Stuart Nash said, $20 is a lot of money to people who are in need. In the last 7 years the group of people in need has grown, and continues to grow. So I am asking the Minister in the chair, Nathan Guy, to give us a total of the number of people in the various beneficiary brackets. How many are affected by this? Can the Minister also provide the amount of money that we are talking about, because that has not been given to us.

I am very happy to take a call on the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill and to put some further questions to the Minister in the chair, the Hon Nathan Guy, because we have been putting these questions but still do not have any answers. In the course of my contribution on this bill I want to share some of the questions that I have been asked by my constituents in Wigram, and share some of the stories from there.

I would like to echo the questions that my colleague Su’a William Sio just asked around what the numbers are that we are talking about here. We were told by the Minister for Social Development, who was previously in the chair, that we have, so far, had 8,500 claims made since this has gone public, but how much are they for, what brackets do they fit into, and what kind of quantum are we talking about here? That is a question that is really important to us here on the Opposition benches in order for us to understand the impact of this legislation. The Minister is dismissing it and saying that it is only 1 day, but, as my colleague quite rightly pointed out, if it is only 1 day and it is such a small thing, what is the problem? Why are Government members not looking to support Carmel Sepuloni’s Supplementary Order Paper 142, which would allow for natural justice to occur?

We also have a very big question around why we are doing this under urgency. The fact is that this was found out in May 2014—there was a High Court ruling—so why is it that we are here in November 2015 pushing this through under urgency and in real danger of making the same kinds of mistakes that got us into this place in the first place? My colleague Grant Robertson read very well from the Hansard of the debates of 1998, which showed just how we got into this predicament—sloppy lawmaking under urgency, when we do not use all the tools at our disposal as legislators to examine legislation and ask the kinds of questions that we need to ask.

Given that we do not have that opportunity for the select committee process and we do not have that opportunity for people to come and make submissions, I would like to share some of the feedback I have been getting from constituents in Wigram. A group of constituents—I have had a lot of traffic into my office in Hoon Hay—are actually a group of teacher-aides. This is a group of workers, many of whom stand down each term. So when the Minister says that this is 1 day only, that is many days multiplied by the end of term. So for her to dismiss it as being just 1 day shows the Minister does not understand the problem.

This is a group of workers—teacher-aides—who are reasonably low-paid. They work incredibly hard and make an incredible difference in our schools, but these are largely women who, when they stand down, need to reapply for the benefit to support their families. This is a group of mothers who often struggle, who have been denied assistance with raising their children—because, let us be clear, this is what they were entitled to. This is not people here seeking something that was not theirs; this is about asking that people be paid what they were rightfully entitled to.

Something I have noted is that a number of the people who have come into my office to talk about this and who are employed as teacher-aides are actually people whom I have had to help with Novopay issues. This is a group of workers who have already had to deal with the Ministry of Education not being able to get their pay right in the Novopay debacle, and now they are having to deal with another Government agency denying them what was rightfully theirs.

I think this is a very unfairly treated group of workers, and I would like to know from the Minister in the chair, Nathan Guy, how many of the 8,500 are teacher-aides—another question. We would like to see you get on your feet, Minister, and answer some of these questions that we are putting to you. This is being done under urgency and there are real questions that the Opposition is putting to the Minister, and we believe that they deserve to be answered. So for the Minister to just sit there and do his paperwork and not take a call and answer these questions, it really is not giving the dignity to this legislation that it deserves. I would like to know how many of the 8,500 who have already made a claim under this provision are from this group whom I have described—teacher-aides. How many days were these workers affected for? When the Minister says that it is just 1 day, I know that many of the women whom I have spoken to have had a stand down every term. If you put that back—they have been doing this since 1998—that is many terms. That is many days of entitlement that they have been denied.

So I look forward to the Minister taking a calling on that. I look forward to the Minister explaining to us why this is being done in urgency. I look forward to the Minister describing to us how many of the 8,500 fall into what brackets and what the actual liability on the Crown is.

It is customary when rising to take a call, especially one’s first call, as this is, in this debate on the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill—and what a lovely, benign, positive, rosy title that is—to state whether one supports or opposes the legislation. Unfortunately, my colleagues and I are not in a position to be able to do that because our support for the legislation is contingent upon the excellent Supplementary Order Paper 142 being put forward by Carmel Sepuloni MP—the gist of which is to delay the commencement of the bill in order to allow all those who have received a benefit between 3 June 1998, when the mistake first arose, and 19 May 2014, which, in the current bill, is when the Government is prepared to restore their rights—to fill in that gap.

If the Government assents to doing that, Labour will certainly be supporting the bill, but Labour cannot support it without that assent, because to do so would be to deny people their legitimate rights after the courts found that the Government of New Zealand is in an unlawful position, and, thus, to trammel the dearly and long-held principle that although Parliament is sovereign, no New Zealand Government can operate outside the law. A retrospective law change to fix a 17-year-old blunder being passed through Parliament in urgency without so much as a select committee meeting, is a travesty, unless it retrospectively restores the rights that, in error, the Government and Parliament unlawfully took. So either we fix it—in which case we can live with the truncated process—or we have to remind the current Government that this principle is worth fighting for and vote against it. The Government is not helping anybody. It is not helping the public of New Zealand; it is not helping the Opposition parties, which are showing willingness to cooperate under certain circumstances. That is because the legislation is being rushed through all stages under urgency, and we are going to be here until midnight tonight, and possibly thereafter, debating this bill.

There is no regulatory impact statement attached to the bill. That means there has been no set of alternative policy options put forward and analysed in the normal way. Therefore, there has been no argumentation advanced by the Government as to what the best option is and, therefore, the public has been denied the usual rigour and thoroughness of policy advice. There is no regulatory impact statement. To make matters worse, no Cabinet papers have been released to the public or to Parliament to show the logic that Cabinet followed in making its decision. The Minister in the chair may wish to take a call to explain what the fiscal risk is that the Government is concerned about. Surely that can be the only reason for not restoring, as the court has indicated, the full legal rights of New Zealanders since they were inappropriately and mistakenly taken away in 1998 and thereafter.

If it is a fiscal risk issue, and if there is a fiscal veto of Carmel Sepuloni’s amendment, then at the very least, Minister, take a call. Be up front with New Zealanders. You pride yourself, Minister, on being a rural chap who does not mess around with words. Well, just stand up and take it on the chin. Tell us how it is; we are big enough to take it. If you think it is going to cost $200 million to fulfil the High Court’s orders, tell us.

💬 Hon Nathan Guy: Mmm.

Was that a “Yes”, Minister? Because there are those who think that Yes Minister apparently is a training video for the current Government, and the Sir Humphreys are alive and well—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Come on—back to the bill.

—but we will not go there, with your guidance, Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No, you will not.

So there are no fiscal estimates contained in the bill. We do not know what the fiscal risk is. We do not know what the difference is between the 2014 fix and the 1998 proper fix, and that matters, actually, because we want to know what the Government’s price is for sacrificing principle here. As I said, there has been no options analysis, so the public cannot tell. Why has the Government not—and the Minister may wish to answer this—considered an interest component in the payback, because the time value of money wrongfully expropriated since 1998 would not be inconsiderable. If I can turn now to several of the clauses of the bill—

I have got several questions to raise and points to make. I just want to start out by saying that because this is going through an urgent process, we really have been denied the opportunity to access the information that would inform us better in respect of considering this bill. Because it has been such short notice and it is going through under urgency, we do not have the opportunity to put in an Official Information Act request to find out why the Government has delayed and did not make this change on 20 May 2014, when it was informed of the technical error in the legislation. Because we have not been given the opportunity to go through a select committee process and have not had the time, we also cannot put an Official Information Act request in for the Cabinet papers—the original Cabinet papers—that would have discussed this issue back in 1998, when the original legislation was going through the House. So it is really difficult for us to take the word of the Government in terms of the intent of this bill being something, when clearly the legislation does not paint that picture.

The Chair has made it clear to us that we cannot talk about the official advice that we have got through the Social Services Committee on the bill that this bill previously sat in, which is the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill. However, I am assuming that we can talk about the submissions that were made publicly at that select committee, where there was relevant information that was made there during submissions that applies to this particular bill. I want to talk about that because this is the only information that we have to inform us, really, given that this particular bill has not gone through a select committee on its own. So I do want to point out the fact that submitters on the Social Security (Extension of Young Persons Services and Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill raised the point that they had concerns that the appeal rights provisions in that bill—which applied to this bill—would limit the ability to review and appeal decisions, and they had concerns that the provisions may not be consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

I now want to just reflect on the departmental disclosure statement on the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill that we are looking at now, and just point out the fact that this bill did not go to the Attorney-General. So when we look at the section on “Consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990”, we are told here that this bill did not go to the Attorney-General, and yet the advice is that the bill does not impact on the rights and freedoms affirmed in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Well, actually, the submitters did not feel that that was the case. They had genuine concerns that actually what the Government is trying to do, which is retrospectively change the legislation, is not consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. So I think that we should be really concerned as a Parliament that the Government is looking to put something through tonight that potentially runs a high risk of not being consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

I really want to point out some of the points that were made during that particular select committee consideration, where we had the opportunity to discuss the elements of the bill that we are talking about tonight. A submission that was made by the very effective beneficiary advocate Kay Brereton raised the concerns that I have talked about. She raised concerns that “The bill reduces the right to review for affected beneficiaries in this way, people already experiencing significant barriers in accessing their review rights, and we see this step in reducing their rights, as a move away from the principle of natural justice, where a person has a right to understand and review a decision which affects them.”

I want to take that point and then I want to go back to the bill, and I want to look at clause 5, “Retrospective effect of amendments to section 80BA”, where we see that “subsection (1) does not apply in the case of any decision or determination made before the commencement of this Act—”. Those people who are quick enough to get in are not going to have the decision on them overturned. That is because the Government recognises that their claim was valid, and I think we need to acknowledge that. The Government recognises that the claim was valid. That is why, in clause 5 of this bill, they are not—

I would also like to take the opportunity to have a closer reading of clause 5 of this bill, principally because of a comment that was made by Minister Tolley when she was in the chair in response to a point raised by a number of us on this side that this legislation acts retrospectively and that people will not be able to seek compensation for having been denied some of their benefit income. The Minister seemed to be saying in her comment that that was not correct and that people would be able to apply retrospectively. However, I do not believe that that is what clause 5—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: They can apply, but they’ll be turned down.

My colleague says that they can apply but they will be turned down. That may be an accurate reading of what the Minister meant.

But I just want to explore the Minister’s statement, looking through clause 5. Clause 5(1) says that “The principal Act must be read as if the amendments to section 80BA(4)(a)(i) and (b) made by section 4 of this Act had come into force on 3 June 1998.” In other words, this legislation acts retrospectively, and we are to imagine that the changes made by this legislation came into force back in 1998, when the National Government rushed its amendment through under urgency and stuffed this up in the first place.

That, to me, appears, on the face of it, to mean that people cannot seek retrospective compensation. However, we have clause 5(2), which reads: “However, subsection (1) does not apply in the case of any decision or determination made before the commencement of this Act—”. Then we have a series of paragraphs: “(a) that affects the appellant in Social Security Appeal No. SSA 001/14 and SSA 002/14 ([2014] NZSSAA 39);”. I have no idea what that means, and that is the issue with doing these things under urgency. Here we are, debating this legislation, and I have absolutely no idea at all what that clause means. I would be grateful if the Minister, or any member opposite, could get up and explain that, because I have zero understanding of that clause.

Then there is “(b) that affects the appellant in Social Security Appeal No. SSA 115/14 and SSA 134/14 ([2014] NZSSAA 106);”—ditto paragraph (a)—“(c) that is a decision to commence a benefit on the day on which the stand down period ends;”—again, I am not sure how that will be implemented—“(d) that relates to the commencement of a benefit on or after 20 May 2014 and is the subject of an application for a review under section 10A of the principal Act made at any time within 6 weeks after the commencement of this Act;”—that bit I kind of do get. The Government accepts that it was acting illegally for a year and a half, and it will accept applications from people who were treated in a fashion that was illegal during the period in which the Government knew that it was acting in a fashion that was illegal. I get that one.

Finally, there is “(e) that relates to the commencement of a benefit at any time on or after 3 June 1998 and is the subject of an application for a review under section 10A of the principal Act made at any time before the commencement of this Act;”. I understand that one as well. I get that. It means you have to get your application in before this legislation receives the Royal assent, which is probably why the Government is pushing this through under urgency—so as to reduce the opportunity for people to actually get their applications in.

So I challenge what the Minister said, which was that people will be able to apply, although maybe Ruth Dyson is right. They can apply—apply away to your heart’s content—but the law will say that you cannot actually get compensation. I understand paragraphs (d) and (e), and I do not think they operate in the fashion that the Minister led the Committee to believe they would operate. I have no idea what clause 5(2)(a) through to (c) actually means, and I would really appreciate a member opposite rising to their feet and actually explaining that. We are here in the Chamber debating legislation, attempting—

I wish to spend a few minutes going through the departmental disclosure statement. This is a very unusual disclosure statement, for people watching—unusual because of its thoroughness, or lack thereof. Here is the first page, and here is the second page—they are mainly blank. There is a very pro forma series of tables thereafter, in which there are only two substantive paragraphs. So the departmental disclosure statement, which is really the only piece of analysis attached to the draft bill, is only two paragraphs long. It replaces the normal release of Cabinet documents and the normal regulatory impact statement from Treasury.

Let me then turn to the two paragraphs concerned. The first one attempts to answer the question “Does this Bill affect rights, freedoms, or impose obligations, retrospectively?”. It answers, truthfully, that, yes, of course it does, because these rights to the extra day’s benefit have been deprived since 1998.

The bill attempts to retrospectively squash what is legitimately owed under the current law to beneficiaries. It might be that the current Government thinks beneficiaries are subhuman, or that they do not deserve normal legal rights. It is here extinguishing 17 years’ worth of rights, minus a 1-year exemption, literally with a stroke of a pen, under urgency, and denying people the opportunity for the normal select committee process, and with barely a fig leaf to hide its modesty. This departmental disclosure statement is the fig leaf, and it is a pretty small one. It is pretty thin. It goes on—I think this is really interesting. Retrospective provisions are not normally allowed, of course, because that takes away people’s rights if Parliament is coming over the top and squashing rights that existed in the past. It says, however, that exceptions are “justified to ensure: the Government policy intent is upheld”. Well, how on earth would we know what the Government’s policy intent is, because there is no evidence of it, from either 1998 or 2014, provided to the House or the public.

My colleague Grant Robertson has gone to the extent of pulling out the old Hansard from 1998, and that made the point that it was a jolly rushed process and the mistake was made because the Government of the day, another National Government, acted with undue haste. But surely it cannot be sufficient justification simply that an undescribed and unvalidated policy intent—call that what you will—is upheld? If you accept that argument, then the Government could intend anything, and upholding any intention could, by that argument, be validation for retrospective law.

Second dot-point—“practice and understanding that has been previously applied …”. Well, you know, that is simply saying that if you made the mistake consistently, it is OK to keep making it. That cannot be a sufficient justification.

Third dot-point—and this, I think, is the most telling of the lot—“financial costs to the Crown that were not anticipated are avoided.” Well, there we are. That is what this all comes down to: financial costs that were not anticipated are avoided. But if the Government is going to override legal and constitutional rights on the basis of avoiding un-forecast financial costs, then the least—the very least—that it can do is to make clear what those costs are. This arrogant, out-of-touch Government does not even deign to tell the public of New Zealand what the costs are that it is overriding people’s legal rights for 17 years to fix. It does not care. The Government members do not even bother to take to their feet. I challenge the Minister in the chair, Nicky Wagner: show us you care by taking a call and telling people what the cost is and telling them why it is justified to override a court-ordered right.

The justification, such that it is, says that certain decisions of the Ministry of Social Development’s Social Security Appeal Authority are protected from retrospective validation. Well, you can say that again. They are protected by a Government that is arrogant.

I look across the other side of the Chamber, and I see several members of the Social Services Committee—Government members who were part of the discussion for the substantive part of this—where we were discussing the wider bill from which was extracted the component of the bill that we are now discussing. Not a single member has stood to give their view on this bill—not a single member. They have been in the Chamber for hours, probably looking at Facebook, and not actually taking this seriously. I challenge them—[Interruption] Oh, you are actually reading some other things. Have any of you got the legislation in front of you, so that you can actually track what the Opposition members are saying with regard to this bill? I suggest you have not.

Let us talk about the people who are impacted on by this, who could be positively impacted on by this: the beneficiaries of New Zealand who were denied a day’s payment because of an inaccuracy, an error that was made 17 years ago, in a piece of legislation that was rushed through under urgency. We cannot stress enough that here we are, back to the future, doing it all over again 17 years later.

What kind of information has the Government provided for us to make and pass and debate this piece of legislation? A flimsy departmental disclosure statement, but no regulatory impact statement, no idea of the cost—there is nothing on which we can base the assertions of the Minister for Social Development that the policy intent of this legislation is clear. There is no clarity. There is very little information. There is no evidence. There is no select committee process. There is no ability for anyone to feed into this process. It is only for the members of the Opposition to stand and take calls, to review old Hansards, and, actually, to do the work the Government should have done before this piece of legislation hit the Table. It has not been done. Where have you been? Why are we debating this under urgency when the Government clearly has not done the work?

When I was taking my last call I was starting to refer to a beneficiary advocate, Kay Brereton, who, according to Minister Tolley, has run out of electricity in her attempt to ensure that beneficiaries are made aware that they actually have a process that they can apply to. Surely it is the job of the Government and the Ministry of Social Development to do that work, and not to rely on someone—at their own cost, at their own expense—to find people who may benefit from this bill. It is extraordinary that the Minister actually congratulated Miss Brereton for her work but has done nothing to support her in doing it. The Government has got the resources with which to advertise for people to come forward.

I want to just quote something that Kay Brereton has said: “Beneficiaries are not able to fix a mistake they made which created an overpayment in any way but by repayment of the debt. If a person’s benefit ceases a day later than it should have under law, that person must repay the overpayment in full. There is no clemency shown to people who owe Work and Income money. This is a debt to the Crown and will be collected from the person, their estate, or any other party that can be held liable. This money currently owed to beneficiaries by the Crown would make a significant difference in the lives of many and would be a windfall, albeit small and only a day or two’s payment for families and individuals struggling with bureaucracy that gives them no leeway.”

However, when the Government underpays them, what is the response from the Government? It is to actually change the legislation so that it actually does not have to meet its obligations. Clearly, what is happening here is that when the Government found it had made its mistake, it put the line in the sand. It put the line in the sand and said that from this point forward until the legislation is passed—

I move, That the question be now put.

Thank you for the call on the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill, which is proposed to amend the Social Security Act of 1964 with retrospective effect.

I feel compelled to speak to and to address clauses 4 and 5 of this bill. Clause 4 of the bill would amend the principal Act to entrench in law the so-called day after principle so that the benefit starts to run a day after the benefit stand-down period ends. Clause 5(1) provides that the “day after” amendment will have retrospective effect up to and including 3 June 1998. Retrospective effect is not something that Parliament should be taking lightly, particularly in passing legislation. We are here today discussing a fix, and this is something that my colleagues Carmel Sepuloni and Grant Robertson as well as others have spoken about previously. We are trying to fix legislation that was actually passed under urgency by yet again passing a bill under urgency without going through the full process of this House.

The Legislation Design Committee and Legislation Advisory Committee was established to provide advice to departments and agencies on the design and content of Government bills. In its guidelines in 2014 it notes that legislation should not affect existing rights and that New Zealand law operates on a presumption against retrospectivity. The general rule is that legislation should have prospective, not retrospective, effect. Clause 5(2) carves out expectations to the “day after” amendment in certain cases, but the retrospective effect of this bill would deprive many vulnerable New Zealanders of their right to a payment. Retrospective effect in this instance is designed to take away a full day’s benefit from many Kiwis who over the last 18 years have been owed money by this Government.

Just today the Salvation Army came out with a report that basically said that, particularly in Auckland, we have so many vulnerable families. I know that many members in this House—I am not talking about members on this side of the House—prefer to walk around with their eyes closed to the fact that there are so many vulnerable families in New Zealand. What the Salvation Army report found was that 50 percent of these families are children—those who are homeless and living in cars today in Aotearoa New Zealand in the biggest city that we have, the city of Auckland. This Government is trying to change the law that would wipe the rest of the arrears so that those who are not in the know will miss out.

The current unsightly scramble under urgency to change the law is clearly ruled more by economics rather than by concern for people or for the welfare of some of our most vulnerable citizens. Beneficiaries advocate Kay Brereton told Radio New Zealand National recently that this legislation would apply to almost every benefit that has been granted in the last 18 years. For some people, they might have gone on and off the benefit a number of times. Every time that they have gone on again, they have been short-paid by a day. These are clearly underpayments under the law. The Minister has admitted that for nearly two decades this has been the standard practice. The Minister has been quoted as saying: “We are talking a day, so it’s not a huge amount.” I can tell this Committee that although it might not be a huge amount to someone on a Minister’s salary, rectifying these underpayments could make a real difference to people’s lives—the type of good people who live in South Auckland in my electorate of Manukau East, those who are struggling every day just to feed their kids, clothe them, and to pay their rent.

It is appalling that the Government is acting in this way to take away the need to pay money owed to people on the lowest incomes, who need every cent to make ends meet. This situation has been known since last year, yet here we are today watching this Government scrambling under urgency, without the benefit of proper scrutiny, to manufacture a patch simply to save money. This is yet another instance where money comes before people. Thank you.

I move, That the question be now put.

I know that it is not appropriate to bring the Chair into the debate, but could I invite the Chair to join in my little quiz?

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No.

I have a little quiz that I want to start my contribution with tonight. The answer is a day of the week. That is my clue for you. Consider this statement: “If a stand down period applies under this section, benefits commence as follows: (a) benefits except those described in paragraph (b) commence on the later of—(i) the day on which the stand down period ends;”—let us say that Thursday is the day the stand-down period ends—“or (ii) the day on which the application for the benefit is received:”—whichever is the later. Here is my question: if the stand-down period ends on a Thursday, what day does the benefit start?

💬 Iain Lees-Galloway: Thursday.

Right. I heard the buzzer from my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway. He said “Thursday”, but for 18½ years Work and Income has said “Friday”. In May last year, through a series of events, Work and Income was told that it has had it wrong all this time. It has been paying people their benefits starting on a Friday and it should have been a Thursday. That is the problem that we are seeking to address in this question. I want to particularly urge New Zealand First members, Māori Party members, and the Hon Peter Dunne to think about that.

The words that I read out are the actual words in section 80BA—as only social security legislation can be numbered—(4)(a)(i) and (ii) of the Social Security Act 1964. That is what it says. If the stand-down period finishes on the Thursday, the benefit starts on the Thursday. Work and Income started it on the Friday for 18½ years, and we are fixing that problem tonight. So we have two choices. We can say: “Oh, well, we’ll just fess up. We got it wrong.” It was not deliberate, of course. Nobody in Work and Income read that and decided to short-change anybody by a day, I am sure, and I am certain no Minister has, over any of that period, regardless of which party they are from.

So we could just say: “Let’s fix it. We got it wrong.” We could say to everyone, going back to 1998, since that legislation was passed: “Put in a claim and we will look at it, and if you got short-changed by a day because we misinterpreted the law, we will pay it to you.” Or we could have a nasty, mean-spirited response and say we are not going to do that—we are not going to fix a wrong that was clearly created. We could say we are going to pay only the lawful amount to a very small percentage of people. That is what this Minister has decided.

This Minister has decided that instead of paying what the law required she is going to pay only from the day her department heard about it to the day it was determined that it had been paying it wrong. That is outrageous. It is outside the law. What the little National Party people across the Chamber are going to do is vote to retrospectively make an illegal action legal and take away a day’s entitlement from a beneficiary.

Well, I hope they sleep well, because, frankly, I would not feel too good about that being my contribution under urgency in the New Zealand Parliament. I would be thinking: “Truly? I worked so hard to get in here so I could cause the law to be changed retrospectively because it does not suit us to comply with the law?”. That is what they are doing. I would be ashamed, actually. I would be worse than feeling not good about it. I would be ashamed to be a New Zealand member of Parliament saying we got it wrong and we are not going to fix it—well, we are going to fix it for a very small number of people, but not for all those who were legally entitled to get their benefit on the day their stand-down period finished.

That has really frustrated me and puzzled me. Why would members of Parliament do that? All MPs have worked hard to get here. Whether they are list MPs or electorate MPs, they all worked hard to get here. Is that the goal? Is the goal to change law retrospectively to take money off people who currently are legally entitled to it? Those members are lacking ambition, I would say to them, if that is their goal.

I want to also comment on the process. I think the process has been outrageous. We have been denied the tabling of documents and advice from the officials. We have got no regulatory impact statement. The question for the Minister to answer is—

It is my pleasure to take a call in this Committee stage of the Social Security (Commencement of Benefits) Amendment Bill. I would like the theme of my contribution to be mistakes. We are correcting a mistake that happened here in this Chamber back in 1998, as the previous National Government was in its last throes and its members were preparing to take the Opposition benches.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: A bit like now.

A lot like now—ready to come back over here. A mistake was made that has taken some time to fix. But the worst thing about making a mistake is when you try to fix that mistake and you make things worse by making more mistakes. It is for a mistake that we are here under urgency—again, without the transparency that should be afforded the public and this Parliament—rushing this piece of legislation through.

Looking to clause 2, it is a mistake that the Government may not—and is probably likely not to—support a couple of Supplementary Order Papers, one from my colleague Carmel Sepuloni and another from Jan Logie, to look at making things fair for those people who are affected by pushing out the commencement date by either 6 weeks or 6 months. That is a mistake. Those people who are affected have not had the opportunity to go to a select committee, because we are here under urgency, pushing this piece of legislation through.

The Government could right the mistake that it is about to make and seriously consider supporting Supplementary Order Paper 142 from my colleague Carmel Sepuloni. It is a very simple Supplementary Order Paper. It would change clause 2, the commencement clause. It reads: “In clause 2, after ‘on the day’ … insert ‘that is 6 weeks’.” That is to give those people time to be able to mount a case to say: “It is the right thing and the fair thing for us to be able to ask for a review, and if this money is rightly owed to us, we should get it.”

Can I just use an example where we think the Government would potentially add some time on to the commencement date. Let us say big corporates found out that they were entitled to money because there was a slight discrepancy within taxation law. I can bet your bottom dollar—and probably millions of them—that corporates would find a way to make sure that they could get what they thought was properly owed to them. But in this case this Government is not willing to amend clause 2, probably because of the people who may benefit from it. It is not willing to help those who are on a benefit to rightfully claim what is theirs, to give them an opportunity to say: “Hey, the right thing and the fair thing is that you should consider paying me what I think is rightly owed to me and giving us more time to be able to do that.” That is why I think the Government should seriously consider supporting Supplementary Order Paper 142 in the name of my colleague Carmel Sepuloni.

It should also seriously consider righting its mistake of not consulting people by rushing through this piece of legislation under urgency. Supplementary Order Paper 144 in the name of Jan Logie from the Green Party looks to add a new clause 7 after the final clause in this bill, to ask the department to have a period of prescribed time to undertake an advertising campaign to let those people who are affected by this change in legislation know that they should have the ability to ask for an appeal, ask for a review, and ask for what is rightly theirs.

If you look at this process at the moment, this piece of legislation is being rushed through with little or no fanfare. In the time that I have been watching this debate, there has been very little contribution from members across the Chamber. They want to sweep this under the carpet in a late-night session of Parliament so that nobody knows about it. The less that people know about this the better, in terms of the Government. That is why there is no select committee process, that is why we seem to have no regulatory impact statement, and the departmental report that we have got does not really add too much to what is going on here. So that paints a picture of a Government that would rather not have this out there in the headlines and that would rather not pay back or give the opportunity for those people who are affected to have their say, and I think that is a shame. That is why I think the Government should seriously consider the amendment to insert new clause 7 as proposed by Jan Logie, to give those people some time—

I move, That the question be now put.

Yes, I am going to accept the closure motion. We have had 2 hours 50 minutes. We have heard 34 calls. It has been well canvassed over that period of time.

A party vote was called for on the question that the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. At the beginning of the debate the member who has actually moved the closure motion sought leave for this debate to be taken as one question, or at least to have a single debate. That then elicits a wide-ranging debate, and it also restricts the number of calls that members can take. A number of members have reached their—

I have heard the member, yes. I look very closely at relevancy; I look very closely at repetition. In that period of time the Labour Party has taken 26 calls of the 34 that were taken. It has been well canvassed. I have listened to all the points that have been raised in the last hour that I have been here, and that is why I am prepared to accept the closure. The Committee will decide whether that is accepted or not. So I intend to put it.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Is this a new point of order?

It is a different point of order. I am just seeking your advice because you have been privy to the debate that has gone on here tonight. I just want to get clarification from you. Given that the point was made that the technical error that we are here debating tonight was made because the same sort of legislation went through under urgency 17 years ago, I just wonder—

No, you are canvassing a point that could well have come up, and did come up, during the course of the debate. That is a debating point. It has got nothing to do with my putting the closure. The Committee will decide whether we accept the closure or not. I intend to put it.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. There are particular clauses that we want to support and then at least one clause that we want to oppose. So can I just clarify with you that we can vote clause by clause, rather than as a whole.

Yes, I will be putting the six clauses separately, so you will have the chance to exercise your preference at that point.

Clause 1 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 142 in the name of Carmel Sepuloni to clause 2 be agreed to.