General Debate

I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. It gives me great pleasure to rise in the House. It is a red-letter day, but what I thought I would talk about this afternoon is the state of the House. I thought it would be a good time to reflect on what has been happening, and, I must say, I extend my sympathy to the Labour Party. It is losing one of its brightest business brains, and I bet that it is feeling pretty gutted about that. As David Cunliffe goes off to another career, Labour Party members will be ruing that and will be quite worried about that.

In the meantime, what we saw with New Zealand First yesterday was a laudable attempt to reintroduce its caucus to the public of New Zealand. It left out a couple of members, but, nevertheless, it was a fairly—not even generic. It was a bit of a mishmash, but they mostly got on their feet and asked a question. No one was quite sure whether there was a plan or whether the plan was just to work through the names.

Then it comes to the Greens. Well, right now I think they are actually in relationship-building. They are not sure whether they want a relationship with New Zealand First, even though it might be necessary. They are trying to build their relationship with Labour. Nevertheless, they have a new member and a fairly new co-leader, and the relationships there actually do not look to be gelling just yet—but never mind. Maybe it is best described as jugglers looking for a circus. Actually, today what we saw was catastrophising, which I suppose is better than what we have had in the past, which was a crisis searching for a crisis—but never mind. New Zealanders are much more interested in the things that really matter to them and Better Public Services (BPS) is certainly something that is important to New Zealanders.

The National Government has picked some really tough targets, and we are having some success, but there is not a moment that we can be resting on our laurels, because these tough targets require us to keep at them to achieve them. I just want to talk briefly about BPS target No. 1, and that is helping New Zealanders to gain independence from welfare. The number has gone down 15,000 people since 2011. That is actually a future liability for New Zealand taxpayers of $3.6 billion, but there is a much more important thing about this liability going down, and that is the New Zealanders who are gaining a better life for themselves.

There are 51,000 New Zealanders who have actually come off a main benefit since 2011. That is a phenomenal change in their lives. It has gone down from 295,320 to 279,769 in the last result. Why does it matter? Well, if you are a child in a benefit-dependent home, this is what it means for you: you have a 48 percent chance of not achieving NCEA level 2 compared with those who are not in a benefit-dependent house.

💬 Hon Member: Stop labelling people.

In fact, you also have a 48 percent higher likelihood or chance of being notified to Child, Youth and Family. These are the facts. This is not a label; this is a fact. So having these children in a non - welfare-dependent household makes a very real difference to them. And 45 percent of them are going to end up on a benefit themselves, therefore limiting their life choices.

I want to also talk about today being a red-letter day when it comes to the household labour force survey, because there are some real highlights we should be celebrating. There are fewer unemployed women: down to 5.1 percent from 5.4 percent. The unemployment rate for Māori is 10.6 percent, down from 12.1 percent. For Pasifika it is 10.1 percent, down from 12.3 percent. That really matters. That means a change in the lives of those New Zealanders and their families. A new measure showing underutilisation fell from 12.7 percent to 12.2 percent, and if we are talking about those 15- to 24-year-olds who are getting out into the employment world, who are not in education or training, it is up very, very slightly, but you know what? There are lots of initiatives there. The important thing is that we are measuring and working on this.

So we are reducing long-term welfare dependence and supporting vulnerable kids. We are increasing the proportion of 18-year-olds with NCEA level 2, and those 25- to 34-year-olds with a level 4 qualification or better. We are reducing crime. These are the things that really matter to New Zealanders but clearly are not on the radar of the Opposition.

I am going to quote something that was posted on my Facebook before we came to the House at 2 p.m.:

God and soldier we adore

In times of trouble and in war.

Trouble gone and all things righted,

God forsaken, soldier slighted.

A couple of weeks back, on behalf of New Zealand First, I put out an invitation to all Ministers, to all members of the House, and to those who support our armed forces and our police—including their families—in the battle against suicide, to attend a book launch to be hosted this evening for the book Your Subconscious Bodyguards: The Good News About PTSD, written by Dion Jensen. We put out a press release on that and we gave the background on Dion Jensen. He is a Kiwi veteran. He served in East Timor, he served as a New Zealand Police officer, and he served as a security contractor in Iraq. He has drawn on his experiences in dealing with his demons to produce, through his book, a tool and a programme to help veterans, police officers, and, indeed, anyone to identify their symptoms and deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Noting the low numbers of people who have accepted that invitation, we put out a press release last night again advising Ministers that the book launch was happening this evening and why we felt it would be a good thing for people to attend. We followed up with some phone calls.

It is interesting and, sadly, ironic that this morning we read the story on Stuff of a report of the decision of the Wellington District Court, which overturned the ACC’s decision to decline a 56-year-old army veteran’s application for cover and compensation for PTSD. Looking at this case, we see the same old issues that have been raised over the last 30 to 40 years. This man has served his nation. He served in Afghanistan and he served in the police force. In the time of that service, he endured several traumatic incidents, particularly whilst on his tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2009. He witnessed such things as fatal rocket attacks, and watched as a helicopter carrying 16 people exploded and crashed. There is a list in this article of things that this man has endured, but what stands out very, very clearly is that, post his discharge from the army and post his inability to continue his employment in the police force, he ended up—as seems to be par for the course—in a battle with the ACC. The ACC adopted a very stingy and mean-spirited approach to his claim. As his lawyer, John Miller, said: “We wonder sometimes how people who argue the ACC points and deprive returned service personnel who have been diagnosed with PTSD compensation can sleep at night.”

Politicians are not held in high esteem by the Defence Force, and there is very good reason for that. Very often when Defence Force personnel deploy, they are sent off with accolades and promises afoot as to how well they will be treated when they return home. We wax lyrical on those deployments in this House and we do so again on Anzac Day, when we laud, applaud, and honour those who die. But where we fail so consistently is in honouring and supporting those who have returned home complete in body but already fallen internally, through PTSD. We throw them back into the mental health system, which fails them. We throw them back into a very heartless, mechanised system we call the ACC, and we leave them to flounder as their marriages fall apart, as their relationships fall apart, and as they head down a pathway to depression and suicide.

This evening at 6 p.m. we will host a book launch, and speaking at that book launch will be the author, Dion Jensen, and also another gentleman, Major Gordon Benfell, who has an astonishing military career but who is a man who suffers PTSD. We in New Zealand First would like to see those members of the House who support our veterans—and I mean truly support our veterans—appear there. At the top of the list of who we would like to see walk through that door—because they have declined these invitations—are the Minister of Health, the Minister for ACC, the Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, and the Minister of Defence. We also note that the Minister of Health is a former Minister of Defence. It is all the more reason why they should front and just listen. That would be very helpful.

I am very pleased to take a call in this general debate. Actually, it will be on the topic of health, which will be no surprise to anyone seeing that I chair the Health Committee. In fact, it is around the work of the Health Committee that I want to begin and just to acknowledge, first and foremost, the people who are putting and sending through many, many petitions. The Health Committee is incredibly busy—just shy of 20 petitions—and, in fact, another one came today from the Life Matters Suicide Prevention Trust, from Corinda and Denise on the steps of Parliament here, asking us to look more into suicide and mental health in New Zealand. We have petitions too from everything from tube weaning to smoking in cars, from the use of marijuana to breast cancer, psychoactive substances, autoimmune injectors—and the biggie, which often comes up, around euthanasia, or assisted suicide.

I thought I would just quickly touch on that—a sort of an update both to the House and those listening around the scope of this particular petition we are dealing with. It came out of the work of the Hon Maryan Street, as a petition, and the Health Committee to date has received 22,000 written submissions, all of them pretty much unique—in other words, they are not form-generated; these are individual submissions. This is unprecedented in the history of this Parliament. Eighteen hundred people have asked to be heard by the committee—in and of itself, again, unprecedented for this Parliament, any Parliament. And we have elected as a committee, all nine of us, to hear from those 1,800 people, and we are well under way.

Speaking more broadly now, moving to the whole Government agenda, there is a lot of positive news in the health space for the Government. Fundamentally, and built on increased funding year after year—I know this is constant good news to the Opposition, and just from the sounds I can hear from them at the moment, I am sure that is absolute joy, not opprobrium; it is joy, I am sure. There are three things I want to quickly note.

One is around telehealth, or the use, again, of telephones and tech services to access health. About a year ago, seven helplines were, effectively, merged into one—so, the likes of Healthline, Quitline, and the Gambling Helpline. Instead of having them separate, now they are coming through one system, and over the last year about 425,000 Kiwis have been assisted. This is a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week hotline, staffed—triaged, if you will—by everyone from nurses through to care support workers. It is a fantastic system. When I did some very basic maths, basically, we are saying that in the year that it has been in operation there is one contact every minute, and 81 percent of calls are handled within—sorry, I have to read my notes on this—20 seconds, which I think is fantastic and built on a $12 million boost by the Government.

The other thing is around kidney donation. This is something I have been quite interested in and I am sure the committee has too, with the organ donation discussions we have had. In recent days, we have actually had New Zealand’s first, effectively, three-way kidney transplant: three kidneys and three donors. This is not the usual way that it works, but it works incredibly well, and with a spot of luck it will help us increase the number of transplants in New Zealand. I think it is really important, too, that we understand that the Ministry Health, through the Minister’s direction, is working through some of the dynamics around transplants at the moment.

The third element I want to highlight, I think, is around the mobility teams—probably forgotten by many in the House, unfortunately. We have invested a substantial amount of money into developing these mobility action teams. That work is around musculoskeletal issues, basically—think of the likes of arthritis right through to orthopaedic problems. So, it is about teams to support people to get mobile, because atrophy—as Opposition parties know—is really a killer. The second mobility team has been formed, and it is here in Wellington, I believe, which will be good news to my colleagues here—including, even, Grant Robertson, the local MP here in Wellington Central.

💬 Grant Robertson: I have a high threshold for being impressed, but that does sound impressive.

He does sound impressed, and I am very pleased about this. I just want to finish off by acknowledging, fundamentally, those amazing community groups that are supporting our healthcare system every day. I want to acknowledge the likes of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, which we had here a few weeks ago, celebrating 50 years of medical research. In that vein, I also attended a forum the other day by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand—amazing work. I also want to draw the House’s attention to two wonderful groups, which are coming into this Parliament, actually, in the following weeks. We have got the Lung Foundation, which is going to tell us about, effectively, this cancer killer—the largest in New Zealand. It will come in next week. We also have macular degeneration, one of the major issues for New Zealanders, the week after. So I encourage—I encourage—members to come along and hear about the—

When the Prime Minister was elected into the office 8 years ago, he stood up and said to New Zealanders: “I expect high standards from my Ministers. If they don’t meet those standards, then I will set about doing something about that.” Well, today in the House, we have seen the impact of 8 years of John Key’s standards. We have a Minister of the Crown who believes that the fact that he escaped the Crimes Act definition of corruption means that he is doing his job well for New Zealand. That is the standard of John Key’s Government today: if you avoid actually committing a crime, you are doing a good job. That is how low it has got under this Government.

Today’s report from the Auditor-General on the Saudi Arabia Food Security Partnership is actually, in many ways—because most of the House will know that the Auditor-General is finishing in her role, towards the end of her report today—is sending a message to the Government. She is talking about transparency. She is saying in the report: “I have had more and more complaints coming about corruption.” She is saying that transparency matters. To the members on the other side of the House: today we heard Bill English say we are best in the world for ease of doing business—good-o, we have gone up one spot there.

💬 Todd Muller: Most transparent country and Government.

We have gone down in Transparency International rankings, Mr Muller. We have gone down under the National Government because of the attitude of John Key and his Ministers to the way they go about their work.

Here is what the Auditor-General had to say about Skycity, the Government’s deal with Skycity on the Convention Centre: “a range of deficiencies …”, “[did] not consider that the evaluation process was transparent or even-handed.”, “meetings [with Skycity and the Government] … were materially different in quantity and kind [from the Government and other parties]”, “[it was] poorly planned and executed.”, “[their processes] fell short of good practice …”, “[there was a lack of] fairness and credibility of the process.” It is a pattern of behaviour, because today we have another report that tells us that the Government once again has failed the basic standards of Government: to be fair, to be transparent, and to be even-handed.

There is a different definition of corruption—not the legal definition, but one that I think many New Zealanders would attest to—that corruption is a dishonest action that destroys people’s trust. It is a dishonest action that destroys people’s trust. The dishonest action that is in here lies at the feet of Murray McCully and the Cabinet paper that he put up, because in that Cabinet paper he did not tell the truth to his colleagues, and he did not tell the truth to New Zealanders. What he said in that Cabinet paper was that there was some great legal risk out there, and on page 39—since Mr McCully is very keen for all New Zealanders to read all of the report—of the Auditor-General’s report today said: “… we did not find evidence of officials’ real analysis of other options. We also did not find evidence of Ministers or officials requesting or receiving internal or external legal advice on the extent of a risk of a claim of compensation from the Al Khalaf Group …”.

There was no legal problem here. Mr McCully was solving a personal grievance that he thought might do something for New Zealand—goodness knows what, because nothing has actually been achieved at the end of the day.

💬 Hon David Parker: To facilitate the free-trade agreement.

Exactly, to facilitate a free-trade agreement—a personal grievance to solve a diplomatic problem. And, again, as the Auditor-General says in her report: “I was surprised that it was decided to use a contract with a private individual’s business interests to resolve a diplomatic issue between governments.”

There are a lot of words to use about this operation by Murray McCully—secretive, incompetent, cavalier, immoral, irresponsible, dodgy—but it is just plain wrong, and this out-of-touch Government does not understand that $11.5 million is not its money to play with. That money could build 31 State houses. That money could give hundreds of hours of special education support. That money could lift children out of poverty. It is not the Government’s plaything. Its arrogance that it gets to do whatever it wants, whether it is a deal with Skycity or a deal with Mr Al Ali Khalaf, is out of control. John Key told New Zealanders there would be high standards under his ministry, but all we have had is a record of incompetence and corruption, in my words. Maybe it does not meet the Crimes Act level of corruption, but I think most New Zealanders will see this dodgy deal for what it is.

An issue that I hear about frequently in the Epsom electorate, in Auckland, and up and down New Zealand, is not, oddly enough, the Saudi sheep deal. What I do hear about from people with increasing frequency is that they are anxious about inequality and anxious about the levels of immigration, and they tie the two issues together at one nexus, which is the housing market, particularly in Auckland and particularly in the Epsom electorate. I am just interested in why that is and whether these issues really do go together. Is the problem with inequality, the housing market, and immigration really a problem caused by excessive immigration, as some would have it, or is it a problem with a dysfunctional market in housing alone?

One way to answer the question yourself is to ask how some other markets have been impacted by record levels of immigration. Well, we might ask ourselves: “What has happened to the market for jobs?”. Just today, at a time of record immigration, we have the lowest unemployment in 8 years, and it is kind of interesting. People like to claim—what is known as the lump of labour fallacy—that there are only so many jobs in a particular place, and if more people come somebody will be unemployed. The reality of this is that when people come to a country, when they earn money, and when spend it, they create demand, which leads to jobs, or Say’s Law, which is that demand creates its own supply.

You might ask yourself about the electricity market, another market that is free and flexible in New Zealand. What has happened in the past decade to the price of electricity? Well, it has actually gone down—partly because some generators overbuilt in the middle of the last decade—but we have not seen an increase in the price of electricity because there are too many immigrants. We have not seen an increase in the price of food, cars, electronics, or clothes. In fact, all of those things have stayed relatively static. The Ministry of Social Development tells us, and Statistics New Zealand tells us, that the increase in inequality based on consumption over the last 30 years is practically negligible.

Why then is there so much anxiety about equality, immigration, and housing? It is simply because the housing market—and the Auckland housing market in particular—is highly dysfunctional. It is extraordinary that New Zealand reached its peak in home building in 1974. People should just think about that for a moment. In 1974 there were more homes built in New Zealand than in any year since, and they did not have nail guns, and they were not built by the State—a couple of thousand of the 39,000 were built by the State. Something has gone seriously wrong, and if you want to ask what that is, well, it is simply this: the price of available land that people are allowed to build upon has gone through the roof because of dysfunctional regulation of planning and dysfunctional funding of infrastructure. Those are the problems that we need to solve.

It also tells you something else, which is that there are two worlds in New Zealand when it comes to concern about inequality and poverty. There is the world that works. All of those markets I mentioned—electricity, clothing, transport, food, and electronics—are free and open markets exposed to competition from the world, or at least very well regulated within New Zealand, where prices go down and people have plenty. Then there is the market where the Government regulates the supply of land, where the Government regulates the standards of building, and where the Government has almost a monopoly on the way that infrastructure is funded, and the price of housing has gone up. It is the only commodity that has gone up in price in real terms in the last 30 years, and it is the one that is the key contributor to inequality and poverty.

So what I say to this House—and what I say to people in Epsom, in Auckland, and up and down New Zealand, and overseas, if they will listen—is that we do not have a crisis of immigration; what we have is a crisis in the Government regulation of our housing market. That is what this Government and any other Government need to fix.

I have already been contacted by a number of people who are absolutely disgusted that Murray McCully and the National Government claim that this Auditor-General’s report exonerates them. I am going to go through a few of the exclusions from this report.

💬 David Seymour: I hope he’s got some new material.

These are things I have read since my first contribution. It is actually quite a long report; you should read it, member for Epsom, before you say stupid things. On page 4 of her report, she says: “It is not within my legal mandate to comment on or criticise the Government’s trade, diplomatic, or animal welfare policy decisions.” There is nothing in this report about whether it was proper to do a shabby deal to pay off a disaffected Saudi businessman. There is nothing in this report about it because it is not within the legal mandate of the Auditor-General to say whether that was a proper thing to do or not. She says it time and again.

The next time she says it is on page 8 of the report, where she says: “The use of a contract for services to resolve these matters was a decision made by Cabinet. I comment below on the quality of the Cabinet paper process but not on the decision itself.” Again, she is highlighting to anyone who reads the report that she is not commenting on the morality of paying off a disaffected Saudi businessman in order to get a free-trade agreement with Saudi Arabia. What she does criticise is the fact that the contracts did not set out what was actually going on.

Next, she says: “I was surprised that it was decided to use a contract with a private individual’s business interests to resolve a diplomatic issue between governments. It is difficult to reconcile the words of the contract with the unstated objectives,”. She says: “The contract for services was a convenient mechanism by which the allocated $10 million, later $11.5 million, was put towards achieving those unstated objectives. It does not tell the full story.” And the Government claims this exonerates it. The Government claims this exonerates it.

And then there is this issue: McCully says he is OK because he has not committed a crime. He says he has not paid a facilitation payment. Do you know what sort of facilitation payment it was that the Auditor-General was talking about? She was talking about the sorts of facilitation payments that the Ministry of Justice explained are: “A ‘facilitation’ or ‘grease’ payment … a small payment made to a foreign public official to speed up a service to which the payer is already entitled.” That was never the allegation. It was never the allegation. He has never been a public official. These were not small payments. It was a $4 million cash payment. It is not a criminal act facilitation payment; it is a $4 million payment to facilitate a free-trade agreement. It is still a payment that is wrong—morally wrong. Paying someone off who was not owed anything—$4 million in order to get out of the way of a free-trade agreement.

Why did the Government do it this way? Well, you know, at the back of the report the Auditor-General has gone to the trouble of setting out how you have got to seek authority for different sorts of payments from Cabinet. She explains that if it is a compensatory payment of more than $750,000, it has got to be approved by Cabinet and “In either case, the payment must be endorsed by either the Crown Law Office or a court judgment.” Neither of those things here—that is one of the reasons why the Government has been so unclear about what this payment was for.

We now know—and it has dodged this for over a year—that there was no substantive cause of action, that it did not have any legal advice, either internal from the ministry or external to the ministry, in support of the allegation that there was some legal risk to it. What if it is an ex gratia payment? An ex gratia payment, she sets out, of more than $75,000 must be approved by Cabinet. Those members are hiding under the fact that this is a diplomatic payment that is beyond her jurisdiction to scrutinise and that, therefore, somehow what they have done is legitimate. It is legal, but it is immoral. It is a facilitation payment that has bought off a wealthy Saudi businessman who had no legal claim against the New Zealand Government. It is shabby, it is unprincipled, and if we have reached such a low stage in New Zealand that a Minister has to be in the dock before he has to resign, I think that is very sad. [Interruption]

Order! No. [Interruption] Order!

I know today everything is all about the sheep, and although I have some sympathy for Mr Parker and the report that has been put out, that is not what I am going to talk about; I am going to talk about something else. I am going to talk about a very significant day in New Zealand history. I am going to talk about 28 October. People are looking around right now, going: “28th of October? What the heck happened on the 28th of October?”. It was actually the anniversary of my maiden speech—but no, that was not the historic day. Well, history is yet to tell, but hey. The 28th of October is also my wedding anniversary, and although that is rather significant—28 years, “Nice ring.”, “Thank you darling, I bought it for myself and said that this is what you got me.”—that is not the historic day.

The 28th of October is, in fact, the day on which we remember He Whakaputanga, or the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which made this country its own sovereign State—well, recognised it, at least, in the eyes of the British, because they were the ones who drew it up. We already knew it was a sovereign State. We did not need anybody to tell us; we lived here.

Anyway, the 28th has now been made a historic day that everyone in this nation is going to have the pleasure of celebrating together as a nation, because it is time that we grew up. It is time that this nation recognised its history—with all its warts, with the good and the bad, and with everything that has come from it since, and how that then impacts upon our future—because 28 October has now been set aside as the day that we will remember in time immemorial the Rā Maumahara for our land wars. That is correct.

I have to recognise the petition from the Ōtorohanga students, who came here to Parliament, because this certainly was the impetus that convinced the Minister, the Hon Maggie Barry, that, yes, something needed to be done. There on the forecourt of Parliament, she committed to that crowd of people—all of those waka tauā [war canoe] that came in and did this massive haka on the forecourt—that she would commit to finding a day and finding a way forward to ensure that all of New Zealand remembers the Land Wars. Thousands of people—in fact, more, we understand, than died in both the First and Second World Wars from New Zealand—were killed during the Land Wars, or the civil war, that saw the establishment of this nation. It saw the confiscation of lands and it saw the rise of the peaceful protest here in Aotearoa with Te Whiti and Tohu Kākahi that then inspired Ghandi and Martin Luther King.

On 5 November, instead of celebrating terrorism, and instead of celebrating a terrorist act where somebody tried to blow up Parliament, and for years they burned an effigy of this man and thought that that was fun—what a fun night out that would be—let us celebrate “Parihaka Day”, and remember what went on here. These are the scars that are left upon our nation. I travelled to Ngāruawāhia this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the koroneihana of King Tuheitia, and on one of those celebration days there was a gifting back of land that was taken after a battle at Rangiriri—the first of its kind. While I was there on the forecourt of Māhinarangi, on the ātea, a kuia looked at me and said: “Marama, it’s easy to find where the battle sites of Aotearoa are. The road goes straight through them.” There is no hallowed ground, no place to remember, no plaque, no grave, and no memorial. But now we have a day, on 28 October, where we, as a nation, can grow up, open up, and discuss the issues that have plagued us all in the settling of this nation, and that is te rā maumahara, te rangi e whakamaumahara atu i ngā pakanga o tēnei whenua [the day of remembrance, the day that commemorates the wars of this land]. That is our speech. It is not sheep, but it is important, and I look forward to celebrating the Rā Maumahara in the future.

Kia ora. The National Government is absolutely committed to delivering better public services for all New Zealanders. Getting the best possible outcomes for spending taxpayers’ money is a challenge for any Government, and it is a real responsibility. Spending taxpayers’ dollars as intelligently as possible and investing in the right places in the Government system delivers better and more services, and provides better opportunities for New Zealanders.

In 2012 the National Government set 10 challenging targets for Better Public Services—to produce better outcomes and to focus on getting the best use of our taxpayers’ dollars. It is not something that many Governments are up for, but we are absolutely committed to using that money as effectively as possible, and to making a real social investment. Four years later, I would just like to highlight some of the successes of the Better Public Services targets, starting with early childhood education.

We all know how important it is to get our young people learning-ready. We have increased from 94.7 percent of young children getting into early childhood education in 2011 to 96.6 percent in 2016. Those children are really getting a step up into schooling, which will open doors for them in their future.

What about early childhood health? Infant immunisation rates and reducing rheumatic fever have been a huge focus of these Better Public Services targets. Immunisation is one of the best and most cost-effective public service initiatives that we can have. We are increasing the numbers of children being immunised, and we have increased them from 84 percent in 2012 to 92.8 percent in 2016. That makes a significant difference to children’s health and well-being, and, with that, it supports families and gives them a better quality of life. In the cases of rheumatic fever—that is a dreadful childhood disease, and they have dropped by 40 percent. That is extremely good for families right throughout New Zealand.

As an ex-teacher, I am delighted always to see improvements in education. When we look at the number of 18-year-olds with NCEA level 2 or equivalent, that has increased significantly from 74.3 percent in 2011 to 83.3 percent in 2015. This means that these young people can open doors, can go to further education, can go to trade training, and can actually contribute and build a life for their future. On the same theme, looking at trade training, we have increased the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds with advanced trade qualifications, diplomas or degrees. The number of those who have New Zealand qualifications at level 4 and above has increased from 51 percent to 56 percent in 2016. Many of those young people are working in Christchurch. The rebuild has made young people see the opportunities of getting a trade, knowing that if they go through that programme then they can see a job and they can build a future. The number of young people who are not in education or trades is very low in Christchurch.

You would have seen recently that New Zealand has been seen as the easiest place in the world to do business, and part of that is to do with Better Public Services No. 9, which is all about an online shop for Government service, advice, and support to help small businesses grow their businesses. The fact is that New Zealanders can complete their transactions with the Government easily in a digital environment, and we have made a huge increase in that area. Originally, in 2012, only 29 percent of our transactions were done online, and these days it is almost 50 percent.

So you can see that these Better Public Services targets have made a real difference. They have targeted how we have spent our money, and they are making sure that we get the very best value for money and deliver the best services for New Zealanders. Kia ora.

E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Huri noa ki ōku mema hoa mahi o Te Whare Pāremata, tēnā tātou katoa.

[To you, Mr Assistant Speaker, thank you. My appreciation throughout to all of us, my fellow working member colleagues of Parliament House. Well done.]

Aotearoa New Zealand must support the Standing Rock opposition to the construction of the Dakota oil pipeline. I stand as the Green Party spokesperson on indigenous rights and human rights, because the opposition to the pipeline in North Dakota is directly linked to the political campaigns here in Aotearoa New Zealand to care for our waters, for our land, and for the sovereignty of our very own first peoples.

The pipeline in North Dakota will cross the Cannonball River and the Missouri River, threatening indigenous waterways and primary drinking sources. This pipeline will carry around 470,000 barrels of fracked oil per day over about 1,200 miles, from North Dakota to Illinois.

I have written an open letter to the United States Ambassador to New Zealand, Mr Mark Gilbert, to ask the US Government to listen to the call of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the millions of people around the world who have joined the campaign to stop this construction altogether. Since April, over 90 First Nations groups have gathered at Standing Rock to peacefully and non-violently resist the construction of this pipeline over their lands and sacred places. In doing so, they are exercising their sovereignty as First Nation peoples. They are also doing so in a long line of oppression that the United States has had over its First Nation peoples.

I have written to the ambassador, Mr Mark Gilbert, not just to call for the halt of the construction of that pipeline but also to protect those protesters at Standing Rock against the intimidatory police violence. Under US international law, police arrests cannot be used to intimidate people who are holding peaceful assembly, but that is absolutely what has been happening. The police have been shooting protesters with rubber bullets, pepper-spraying people—old women, old people—in the face, and dragging people out of sweat lodges. They have set dogs on to peaceful, non-violent, direct resistance.

Here in Aotearoa, from our own campaigns such as Te Whānau-a-Apanui resistance to Petrogras, and Te Hiku and northern iwi resistance to Statoil, we understand the global fight to uphold indigenous sovereignty and to have a clean-energy future that protects our environment and our waters and earth for everybody. We understand that these fights are connected, and we ask the New Zealand Government to show some leadership in upholding the very issues that are being fought here, in our own waters.

As an indigenous woman and as an MP, I understand that when I am standing on the banks of the Ōmaru Creek in Glen Innes to call for that river to be cleaned, it is directly linked to the resistance of indigenous peoples around the world who are speaking out against and showing up violent campaigns of dirty fossil fuel extraction. They are doing the work for all of us, for cleaner energy and for a climate that we can actually all survive in. So it is my job and my privilege as an MP, as an indigenous woman, and as a mother to ask for all of us to support the Standing Rock opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Kia ora.

I am going to focus on the education results under the National Government. But before I get to the substance of my speech I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate our Minister of Education, the Hon Hekia Parata. Minister Parata has been deeply committed to enhancing the performance of our schools and raising the achievements of our students. She has worked extremely hard and has overcome numerous challenges. She will leave this Parliament with a legacy of a modern education system that is more flexible, more efficient, more innovative, and also more future oriented.

I have said repeatedly that education is a key responsibility of any Government, simply because our students are the future citizens and future workers. In that sense, they are the future of the country. It is important that our students have the necessary skills and qualifications to do well in society and to contribute to a thriving economy. For that reason, the National-led Government has made education a key area of our Better Public Services. We have invested heavily in education since we came into Government in 2008. As a matter of fact, among all OECD countries New Zealand spends the highest percentage of public money on education. We are spending over $4 billion on tertiary education and a record $11 billion on other sectors of education. We have more than doubled the spending on the youngest Kiwi learners since 2008, to about $1.8 billion.

We are spending a lot of money on education, but at the same time we have been trying to modernise our education system to make sure that it reflects New Zealand, now and in the future. Our efforts have paid off. A recent OECD report, entitled Education at a Glance 2016, shows that the performance of the New Zealand education sector compares very well with those of other OECD countries.

Also, the mid-year report on Better Public Services results, released a couple of days ago, indicates that New Zealand is on track in lifting participation and achievement from our earliest learners through to tertiary graduates. I will read these three results of education targets: participation in early childhood education is up, from 94.7 percent in 2011 to 96.6 percent in 2016; achievement in NCEA level 2 is up, from 74.3 percent in 2011 to 83.3 percent in 2015; and the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with New Zealand Qualifications Framework level 4 or above has increased, from 51.9 percent in 2011 to 56.6 percent in 2016. We are pleased with all the results, but we are particularly pleased with the increased proportion of 18-year-olds with NCEA level 2, because NCEA level 2 gives students more opportunities for further education and employment. Also, very often NCEA level 2 is the minimum requirement for jobs. Under National, more children are starting education earlier, staying in education for longer, and achieving better results. Thank you.

What a dark day for New Zealand when this Government thinks that being let off the hook on a Crimes Act test for corruption means that it has been exonerated. What a disgrace. What message is this Government and this Parliament sending to the New Zealand people? Well, they have not been exonerated. This Government had not been exonerated in the minds of the New Zealand public today.

In the second to last paragraph of the report today on the Saudi sheep debacle, the outgoing Auditor-General said this: “My final thought relates to transparency. New Zealand has worked hard to have an ethical and transparent public sector. Accusations of corruption and bribery should be of concern to us all. During my time as Auditor-General, I have seen an increase in these accusations. None of my inquiries have upheld those accusations. However, complacency is not an option. We should all continue to demand transparency in how our public resources have been used and what was achieved with our money. Transparency is the best foil for corruption.”

Well, what is the state of transparency in New Zealand? This year New Zealand slipped down Transparency International’s record, to fourth place, and, as we know, transparency is all about perception. In a report written by a board member of Transparency International New Zealand, it was said: “It is impossible to actually measure real corruption—by its very nature corruption is somewhat hidden and intangible—and therefore other metrics are necessary as proxies. For example, when Transparency International commissioned a survey of public opinion about corruption in New Zealand in 2013, it found that 65 per cent of New Zealanders said corruption had increased over the previous three years. Other surveys have also provided alarming evidence. The State Services Commission Integrity and Conduct Survey of 2013 found that 15 per cent of public servants ‘reported observing illegal conduct in the previous 12 months’. And in 2011 a TVNZ poll asked: ‘Is New Zealand the least corrupt country in the world?’, with 57 per cent choosing the option ‘No, we’re deluding ourselves’.”

If that poll were taken today, what would the figure be in the New Zealand community? It would be a much higher rate than 57 percent, which should be of concern to this Government—but no, it thinks that being let off the hook for a Crimes Act test means that that is OK, that that is an OK message to send to the New Zealand public. It is not an OK message to send to the New Zealand public. Paying lip service to transparency, not listening and not paying attention to the requirements of accords that we sign up to, such as the Open Government Partnership, shutting down whistle-blowers, intimidating people, blaming public servants instead of taking responsibility as Ministers—all of those things are the pattern that this Government has shown over and over again. What message does that send to young people who are going through school and looking at politics and wondering whether they should vote? What message does that send to the public generally?

It sends a message about a Government that is out of touch, a Government that is not connected to its community, and a Government that thinks that getting away with it means that it is OK. Is that the message that we want to send out there to our children, to the voters of New Zealand? I do not think so.

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: It’s a low bar.

That is a low bar, and this Government should be ashamed today, and McCully should resign or be set aside.

I want to talk about a report that was issued today by the Human Rights Commission. It is a report called Staying in the red zones. This is a summary of it. If I were to retitle this report, I would call it Unfinished Business, because, really, that is what it is about. Many people in New Zealand think that the issues about Christchurch—the earthquakes, and the red zones, and the people who have been affected by it—are all over, but of course that is far from the truth. This particular report relates specifically to 350 people who are still living in the red zone in Christchurch—350 people—so, for them, things are not over by a long shot. The report that I have in front of me is something that I think the Government should take particular notice of, because it does show that there is unfinished business. There are things that the Government still needs to do.

Some of the issues, for example, which are listed here, that people have to face because of red zoning—which is after all a Government measure, remember, not something that the people did themselves; this is a Government measure—are that people still have difficulties with their mortgages, people cannot get the finance that they need, people cannot get the insurance cover, and people are worried about services that may or may not continue to be delivered. As the summary of the report says: “Red zone residents have faced difficulties securing insurance for their red zoned properties. At the time of the research almost half the red zoned [residents] had full insurance … while the remainder had partial insurance. Insurance is one of the most significant issues facing red zone residents and it has affected their levels of stress and wellbeing.” It is a very serious matter when we know that so many people cannot get full insurance for their properties. That is something that needs to be addressed.

You might say to yourself, why then did they not accept the Government offer? Why have they chosen to stay and live in the red zone? The report from the commission surveys shows the main reasons. First of all, there is attachment to home, financial reasons, and a perceived drop in the quality of life if they intend to move. Of course, with home prices the way they are now, you can understand why that may be. People also felt that during the process they have been through, they have not been properly informed, that communications by Government agencies have been poor, and that is something, in particular, that needs to be addressed.

In addition to that, there were the people who were living in uninsured properties or whose land without properties on them could not be insured, and they have suffered. They had to go through the whole process of a Supreme Court decision and the legal proceedings leading up to all of that before they got the Government to really take notice. They are worried about the delay. They have been worried about the difference between the compensation offered to others, the compensation offered to them, and the fact that the compensation offered is well out of date given that so many years have now moved on.

This is what the summary of the report says about that: “Following the earthquakes, the land revaluation process in Canterbury scheduled for 2010 was delayed until 2014. The new valuations significantly affected owners of red zoned land, with the rateable value of red zoned properties falling dramatically for many by up to 80 to 90 percent. The loss of equity in what for most people was their biggest asset has been a source of stress, and was perceived by some residents as an added pressure to accept the Government offer to purchase properties at 100 percent of the 2007/08 valuation. Owners of uninsured properties, who are not eligible for the Government offer, were particularly affected by the drop in the value of their properties.” Those people have not been fairly treated.

There are many other things listed in the summary, and summarised on the last page are what the key issues are: human rights should be front and centre of this and they are not; the right to property in New Zealand has been compromised by this process; post-disaster actions by the Crown have been inadequate; communication needs have been inadequate; community engagement has been inadequate; and, finally, there is no one size fits all for matters like this, and the Government simply needs to review it again.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.