Our Work Our Future Bill

I move, That the Our Work Our Future Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Government Administration Committee to consider the bill. This is a landmark occasion: it is the first time that I can find, in the history of this Parliament, that a leader of the Opposition has not only had two bills drawn from the member’s bill process but has had both bills before the House at the same time. This House has been very generous in supporting—so far, by majority—my Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), and I am sure that the same spirit of cooperation and collaboration will apply in relation to this bill as well.

This bill continues the golden thread of all Labour members’ bills, and that is a thread of fairness and opportunity. Not for us the complex, technical kind of law reform measures that are properly the province of the executive—but sometimes members get prevailed upon, obviously, to introduce that type of legislation through this process. I know there will be some members hanging out for the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill debate—well, I am. Personally, I am looking forward to that debate, because it is a very important area of law.

This bill is simple in form and deed. It amends a document called the Principles of Government Procurement, and the Government’s Rules of Sourcing. It amends these principles by adding two more considerations. First, choosing a winning bid for a Government contract on its ability to create jobs in New Zealand—and what could be more important in a small, very important, nurturing country and economy like ours? The Government should take a lead in ensuring that its decisions, particularly its procurement decisions, are there to promote job creation in New Zealand. The second consideration that must now be taken account of is that Government organisations develop procurement processes so that companies focused on creating jobs in New Zealand have a fair chance of winning contracts.

This bill is about New Zealand. This is about supporting the great country that we are. This is a bill for New Zealand. It is about making sure that our Government supports talented, skilled, and creative New Zealanders and the businesses they own and run when the Government gets to make procurement decisions. That is what it is about. It is very fair; it is not arduous, and it is not onerous on the Government, or on any other process.

Here is the thing: the Government spends roughly $40 billion a year on goods and services. But the reality is that too many New Zealand businesses and companies are missing out on the opportunity to be part of that Government contracting. We saw, just a few years ago, the tragedy that was KiwiRail, under its then management, going overseas to source rolling stock that for decades had been fabricated here in New Zealand. The price we paid for that was the loss of skilled, talented engineering workers at the Hillside railway workshops in Dunedin. When the rolling stock landed here in New Zealand from its offshore source it then required considerable remedial work—funnily enough, done by New Zealand workers—before it could actually be used. All of that could have been short-circuited, and we would have retained well-paid jobs and good, talented New Zealanders in those jobs, if the tender had gone to the Hillside railway workshops in the first place.

There is another example, and it is the IRD computer system—a project now running, as I understand it, at roughly $1.9 billion. The IRD went out and put together its tender process and insisted, as a condition, that it had to go to a large company with massive conglomerate-style approaches to its work. But the truth is that we have the IT talent and expertise here in New Zealand, which, with a little bit of creative effort and energy on the part of those in charge of the procurement process, could have put together an appropriate joint venture—a cohesive bunch of New Zealand suppliers and companies that could have done the job. But that did not happen.

And so this bill is about this Parliament saying to those who run the procurement processes and those who set up its rules that we want the Government to make sure that front and centre of those procurement decisions and those procurement processes is the ability for talented New Zealand companies to participate in this—not setting up processes and not having principles and elaborate documents that have the effect of excluding New Zealand businesses and companies.

This, as I said before, is about New Zealand. It is about New Zealand in a world that is more competitive and getting harder to get by in. It is a bill for a country that has a track record of creating and developing incredibly skilled and talented people who are in demand around the world. Well, if only they were in demand here, by their own Government—what a difference that could make.

This is about New Zealand’s economy and our ability, through the very simple mechanism and device of the Government, when it spends its money, giving priority to New Zealanders—the people who pay their taxes to the Government to provide them with security and certainty and prosperity. We have seen examples around the world. When good quality, solid government procurement processes work well, the Governments that do it create amazing companies that then become world players. That is the origin of the big defence contractors in the US: without a Government that was focused on what was right for that country and its businesses and its people, we would not have Boeing supplying aircraft—757s, for example—that can take politicians around the world.

This is an opportunity for the members opposite, actually, and this Government to say to New Zealanders and to New Zealand companies: “We back you and we’re going to support you. We take New Zealand business seriously, so that when we come to spend our $40 billion we are going to give you a chance to show us the excellence and the talent and the skills of the New Zealanders whom you employ, and to do good things for the New Zealand Government too.” Ultimately, when great New Zealand companies—excellent New Zealand companies—get the chance to tender and get work for the Government and display their talents and skills, it is not just good for the Government; it is good for every New Zealander.

This is about supporting New Zealand, supporting our economic base, and supporting our people. It is about making sure that New Zealand companies—the entrepreneurs who set them up, who are trying to do the best for New Zealand, who want to create the job opportunities for New Zealanders, and who want to pay decent wages because it is skilled work that they are offering—get a chance to get the work that the Government needs, that requires that skilled and talented labour. This is a great opportunity. This is a great opportunity for New Zealand, but, most importantly, it is a great opportunity for the members opposite to do what every member of Parliament is morally obliged to do, and that is to act in the best interests of all New Zealanders.

If they have been instructed by their research unit and their Ministers to knock this over, I just prevail upon those members and their good conscience to do the right thing for all New Zealanders—the businesses in this country, the companies, and the talented workforce that they have got. Think about those who are struggling to get work; think about those businesses that are struggling to get the opportunity; think about the talent that sits behind them. Think about the opportunity that this provides to create that springboard that can create the next Microsoft, the next great New Zealand - oriented company, the next Weta Workshop—the next whatever it is—the next Fisher & Paykel Healthcare.

This is the opportunity, here today, in this House, to do the right thing, to generate great jobs and to generate great wealth for all New Zealand, so that every New Zealander can look at their Government and say: “At last, a Government with a set of rules and a set of guidelines that gives us all a chance and gives this country a chance to be prosperous but, most importantly, to give Kiwis a fair go.”

I certainly will not be agreeing with that motion. This Our Work Our Future Bill should be called the “No Work No Future Bill”. I can only assume that Mr Little has been set up by people in the Opposition research unit, given that he has just cited the example of Boeing, which is a notorious company that has accepted bribes and has recently breached World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. That is perhaps the worst possible example of Government procurement that Mr Little could have come up with. I really do wonder whether he is being set up internally by his own party there.

I will be speaking against this bill because I care very deeply about jobs. I care very deeply about good quality, well-paying jobs in Wellington Central, the electorate that I live in and am working very hard in. Over the 8 years of this National Government, we have been focused on creating jobs. That is one of the reasons that the unemployment rate here in Wellington Central, where we are currently standing, fell 1.6 percent last year, down to 4.6 percent.

Jobs are not going to be created by trying to sell more things to ourselves, which is, effectively, what Mr Little’s bill does. We are a trading nation, and we have to look beyond the confines of our own shores. Looking at good companies that are based here in Wellington—such as Xero, a world-leading cloud-accounting-system provider, I think—they should have loftier goals than selling an accounting system just to the New Zealand public, although I would note that if you go into the school system, over 600 New Zealand schools do use their system because over the last few years we have made it easier for the Government to procure locally. But I think companies should have much higher objects in sight, such as selling to the United States of America.

This is an ironic piece of legislation, given that only this year we have had the Labour Party vote against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have done exactly that. It would have allowed our competitive IT companies here in New Zealand to play on the world stage, not to have their sights set just on what is here in New Zealand.

This is a Government that takes some pride in having reduced the overall proportion of our national wealth, the GDP, that goes into the State sector. There has not been a wholesale reduction in public servants to achieve this. In fact, there has been an expansion of provision in a number of areas. But because we have managed to grow the economy at an OECD-leading rate—we are actually near the very top of the OECD, whereas back in the days of the previous Labour Government it was an aspiration to get out of the bottom half. We are now near the very, very top. By growing the economy, we have actually managed to shrink the size of the State as a proportion of the overall economy.

This is a positive thing. It gives our businesses room to operate. It stops sucking the life out of those innovators who were, under the previous Government, massively overtaxed and under-supported, except for the make-work schemes and the preferential treatment that certain businesses got with grants. This piece of legislation does nothing to advance the interests of our IT companies, of those innovators, or of the creative people here in Wellington, and citing Weta Workshop as an example—again, I cannot think of a scenario where the Government might be out commissioning films to be produced with Government production values.

💬 Andrew Little: I’ve got a bunch of them.

In history there have been a few examples, Mr Little—Stalin was a great one for producing films through the State film production company. I think there are a number of Third World dictators we could look at who believed in producing propaganda pieces to peddle their ideology. I think Fidel Castro was a good example of a person who liked to produce pictures to promote his own views, to promote his own interests, and to promote his own political ideology. So I do not know why Mr Little cited Weta Workshop as an example of somewhere where we would go and do Government procurement, because, to my knowledge, they are operating in a place that is very different from that.

I am grateful to have attracted such a good audience here in the House and such a wide level of support for this speech from members opposite, but to come back to the bill in question, this is an unnecessary piece of legislation. As I said, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has now got world-leading Government procurement processes in place. Over 8 years we have done much to streamline and improve the Government procurement system. This includes creating clusters of excellence within the Public Service. When it comes to, for instance, procuring vehicles for Government departments, when it comes to procuring technology for Government departments, and when it comes to looking for office space and accommodation, which is a highly topical issue at the moment, following the Kaikōura earthquakes, this Government has done much to make that as efficient for the tax-paying public as possible. This is so that we can be sure that when we are spending that precious taxpayers’ money—which we all work very hard for—to contribute to that pool, we are getting the best possible value for the taxpayer, unlike the case in the previous Government, where we had huge wastage, huge overspends, huge cost overruns, and a disgraceful waste of taxpayers’ money.

This bill is also contrary to a number of our free-trade agreements, those commitments we have signed up to internationally—not only the WTO Government procurement agreement, which we signed up to last year and which would enable Kiwi businesses guaranteed access to a $2.3 trillion international overseas Government contract market. Let us just put that into perspective. A NZ$2.3 trillion international market that we would have access to, when we are talking about figures at home of a much more modest nature because of the size of our economy and of our Government—I think they have got their priorities completely wrong on the other side of this House. Let us give our companies access to a $2.3 trillion market. Think of the jobs and the economic opportunities that would create in New Zealand, rather than focusing once again on closing ourselves off to the rest of the world and selling things only to ourselves rather than to those who have the money to pay for them and the need for our excellent services.

There is another area I want to touch on. I had the benefit, in my career with foreign affairs and trade, of seeing a number of companies that were operating in partnership with Government to sell New Zealand Government intellectual property (IP) offshore. For instance, take an example in the Middle East, where there was an education system that did not have a good qualifications framework and did not have a good curriculum in place. There was a partnership between the Ministry of Education, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, Auckland University, and a number of private sector consultancies to package up that IP that we have developed over time, to gain a benefit not only for the students who wanted to study in that country but also for the New Zealand taxpayer, who has invested much in that intellectual property.

We must set our sights far higher than the dark days of protectionism. We must look at the opportunities that are available in the rest of the world, and I am proud to be in a Government that has made it so much easier for small businesses, especially. I look at, for instance, the difference we have made to small businesses in the tax year, and I want to congratulate the Minister for Small Business, Craig Foss, and the Minister of Revenue, who have actually really made a difference for the small businesses of the sort that maybe Mr Little, in his heart of hearts, wants to help. For instance, we have the local stationery company that might be looking to provide stationery to a Government department. It now has a provisional tax regime coming into place very soon, which is so much better for it. It is going to be paying tax as it goes, and it is going to have the doubt and its potential penalties—as long as it acts in good faith and complies with the rules—taken away. Labour sat in office for 9 years and did nothing for that. It is happy for small businesses to be punished by a punitive provisional tax system. This is a Government that has actually done something about it, and it is one that I am very proud to be a part of.

The new user-friendly framework that we have put in place for companies is actually transparent and in line with our international trade deals and best practice internationally, and the new guidelines replaced 44 different pieces of legislation, so it seems to me that Mr Little is simply aiming to muddy the waters with this bill. This is a political ploy, and it is a rather cheap political ploy because it will do nothing to create jobs, it will do nothing to create economic growth, it will do nothing to help people in the regions of New Zealand, and, I believe, it will do nothing to help the hard-working Wellingtonians who are in both those small businesses and those large enterprises like Xero, like our airport, and like the Weta Workshop, which, for some reason, Mr Little thinks will be getting his taxpayer-funded propaganda films when he gets in.

I think this is an extraordinarily bad, but perhaps well-intentioned, piece of legislation, and for all of those reasons I have cited, I oppose it and I do not commend it to the House.

That was Todd Muller leading the applause for Paul Foster-Bell’s valedictory speech there. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the working-class community of South Dunedin, and that is bounded on one side by the very rugged, robust coastline where St Kilda and St Clair Beach are. I went to primary school and intermediate school and secondary school on the flat land there. The other boundary of South Dunedin was my beloved Carisbrook, where I would go and see the Otago rugby team have some huge wins, and the odd loss here and there, as well. Right next door to Carisbrook was the Hillside workshop, and when you would go down to Carisbrook you would see the mainly men, but some women, of the Hillside workshops coming down to get their afternoon tea from the shops in that area. They were a core part of that community as I grew up in it in the 1970s and 1980s, a community where people looked after each other, where people had decent work and decent wages and participated in their community. That was what South Dunedin was like.

Over time the Hillside workshop built itself up from being a mainly hard industrial base to being a technology company. There were still those people there on the factory lines building up those railway wagons, but the designers were there as well. It was a sophisticated engineering company, and it kept helping to build that South Dunedin community. Then this Government came along—this Government came along—and said: “We’ll take the cheap option. We’ll take the cheap option on the railway wagons. We’re not going to back New Zealand workers. We’re not going to back strong communities like South Dunedin; we’re going to take the cheap road.” And do you know what happened? Hillside went down the gurgler, and the railway wagons—the wheels literally fell off them. They fell off them and they had to be fixed again. That is what you get when you take the cheap road, when you do not invest in New Zealanders.

This piece of legislation gives us the chance to say we back New Zealand workers, but, even more than that, it gives us the chance to say that we back strong communities. We back strong communities right around New Zealand to say we will help put decent jobs in place. We on this side of the House know that creating jobs is something that happens right across the community. Fantastic private-sector companies create jobs every day. But do you know what? The Government can do its bit. We contract $40 billion worth of goods and services every year as a Government, everything from IT products through to railway wagons. The Government does that, and Governments all around world say: “How can we make use of that process to back our people, to create decent jobs?”. What this piece of legislation says is that when the Government is thinking about how to do that, it thinks about Kiwis. It thinks about communities like South Dunedin, and it says: “How can we do our best by them?”. This lot over here might not care about that. They might not care about those communities like South Dunedin and the regions of New Zealand, but we on this side of the House do. We are going to back them with the goods and services that this Government buys.

Paul Foster-Bell wanted to give us a lecture about Wellington. Well, those IT companies in Wellington should be getting a share of the IRD computer system upgrade.

💬 Brett Hudson: They are.

They are not. There are people who can do coding, there are people who can do programming, and they are not getting to do it, Mr Hudson, because Accenture is doing that through the Philippines. We are not doing that coding work in New Zealand. It is time to get creative with those contracts: break them up, put them into chunks—it is actually better procurement practice to break a big contract like that up into chunks and give New Zealand firms a fair go. There are companies in Wellington like Boost and STQRY Inc that got their start doing contracts for the public service, and have gone on to be major exporters of services. This will enable more companies to get that kind of role.

This is an important piece of legislation because what it symbolises is that we in the Labour Party are prepared to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to supporting decent work, strong communities, and a fair go for everyone in New Zealand. It is time in New Zealand that we back our people, we back our companies, and we put decent work for New Zealanders at the top of our agenda. That is what the next Labour Government will do. This kind of legislation will pass when we come into Government next year.

I rise in opposition to this bill. I would like to find something good to say about it, but, quite frankly, I cannot—it is completely unnecessary. I will traverse two main areas. One is that this bill is not required. The measures you take—its overarching one—of improving the well-being of New Zealand and success of New Zealand businesses are already covered by the work this Government has done. The second point is it actually puts New Zealand in harm’s way in respect of our treaties and obligations to the likes of the World Trade Organization (WTO). So let us deal with those.

Firstly, this Government has reformed the rules for Government procurement. They permit and require that New Zealand Government agencies, when making procurement decisions, look at the total cost across the lifespan of the product or service that they are purchasing. So let us just look at a New Zealand business and the natural advantage it will have against a foreign business—particularly, a foreign services business. New Zealanders who live in New Zealand are coming to do work. Any foreign-domiciled workers who are coming in will have travel and accommodation expenses—that is just one simple area. The idea of taking a total lifespan approach to cost makes sure that New Zealand businesses are given a fair shot at that work, and, more importantly, it does it without breaching any international treaty obligations.

Mr Robertson tried to say that New Zealanders are being excluded from opportunities such as the Inland Revenue Department’s Business Transformation programme. That is 100 percent false. There are many employees of the Inland Revenue Department who have been brought on for that work. There are contractors that the Inland Revenue Department has brought on for that job. There are New Zealand contractors that Accenture has brought on for that programme, and there are New Zealand contractors that the vendor of the new system has brought on—in New Zealand—to work on that programme. The member would be better to allow the facts to weave their way into his grandiose story, because he is 100 percent wrong.

Let us look to the second part then, which is about how doing what this bill proposes might affect our international treaties—international treaties and agreements that, for instance, give New Zealand companies a right of access to a market worth $2.3 trillion. With the World Trade Organization procurement model that we were able to get access to last year, our businesses have the right to access up to $2.3 trillion worth of opportunities—so many more orders of magnitude than they could possibly hope to achieve if they were only doing business in New Zealand.

Let us look at what happens when we start to favour New Zealand businesses in a way that threatens those treaties. The Opposition has this ridiculous proposition that if we do not buy from our foreign trading partners and instead we place rules to lessen the likelihood that we will buy from them, they will still buy from us. In the very connected supply chain that the modern world is, that is absolutely ludicrous. If we are going to put barriers up to our trading partners doing business in New Zealand, there is no way we can hope, let alone expect, that they will be seeking to buy goods or services from our companies. It is, quite frankly, just astounding that people might think it is possible.

But it gets worse—hard to believe, but it does. Mr Little, as he introduced this bill, gave the example of Boeing as some shining light as to how a country and a company can ensure that business and jobs are retained in that country. He held it up as some sort of a paragon that we could emulate. Well, it just so happens that this week it was announced that the World Trading Organization has found against—

💬 Hon Annette King: “Trading” Organization?

The World Trade Organization has found against Boeing for illegal subsidies. So Mr Little is proposing that New Zealand emulate Boeing, presumably with illegal subsidies, putting ourselves at risk of breaching our WTO obligations. Mr Little: you are absolutely reckless. You would be a disaster for this country. It is absolutely ludicrous. This is an atrocious bill. It should be thrown out. I do not commend it to the House. [Interruption]

Order! [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! That will do. I want to call the next speaker—James Shaw.

It is a real pleasure for me to stand up to support this bill, the Our Work Our Future Bill, in the House. I just would like to start by correcting a few of the statements that I have heard previously. When Mr Hudson said that it was incorrect that the new Inland Revenue Department project was outsourcing work to the Philippines, the reason why we know that it is, is that officials from Inland Revenue Department told us at select committee that they were doing that. So it is actually incorrect to say that work on that project is not happening in the Philippines. It would be much better if that work was happening here in New Zealand. The other thing that is incorrect is the idea that this would somehow violate our international treaties. If that were true, then the United Kingdom and Australia would both also be violating international treaties that we have with them, because both Australia and the United Kingdom actually have versions of this legislation in place at the moment.

In Australia, particularly in Western Australia, the Government has actually used its vast purchasing power to create whole supply chains built around Aboriginal communities that were previously displaced from the economy in its entirety. So the Government deliberately went out and used Government procurement to set up long-term supply chains, and got Aboriginal communities to start to put together businesses that would then supply the Government of Western Australia. That has led to a huge uptake—I hope you are listening, Mr Hudson; no, he is not, he is tweeting—in money going into those communities, in work, in skills, in livelihoods, and in breaking the poverty cycle. So the state Governments in Australia have actually used their purchasing power in very much the way that this bill proposes to do.

The other case is in the United Kingdom, which, by the way, is ruled by a Conservative Government. That Conservative Government has introduced a similar programme, and it is built around enabling exactly these kinds of supply-chain decisions to be made to ensure that skills and training requirements get built into contracts: the recruitment of non-employed people from within target communities, the provision of training that will increase the value that they add through their work, and promoting local businesses—those are all part of decision making in purchasing decisions of Government departments and of local authorities in the United Kingdom. So, Mr Hudson, please find those two countries somehow breaking the law in their international agreements.

One of the reasons why I am so interested in this bill is that it is actually completely innocuous. It is simply importing an idea that has been well used by our major trading partners. Australia, with which we still have the largest trading relationship—it is doing it. The United Kingdom, with which we still have a very important trading relationship—it is doing it. There is no particular reason why we would not also be using the vast purchasing power of our Government to support local communities, to bring people who are excluded into work, and to ensure that New Zealand’s small businesses have a go.

One of the other things that I wanted to raise, in relation to what Mr Hudson was saying, is about access to international markets through the international treaties that we have signed, where our companies have access to, for example, massive supply deals with the United States or Australia, or China, or whoever. Of course, the thing that we fail to remember here is that the vast majority, 95 percent of—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. This debate is interrupted, and I shall resume the Chair at 7.30 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

—our businesses, are small businesses that have fewer than 10 employees each. So, to recap what I was saying previously, the point that was being made was that, theoretically, New Zealand businesses have access to this vast global market place of Government procurement in other countries with our major trading partners. But the problem with that is that the vast majority of our businesses—95 percent of our businesses—are so small they actually cannot, in reality, access those Government tenders in those other countries.

I used to work in the United Kingdom; I was there for about 12 years. I had a small consultancy operation over there, which, at its largest, got up to 22 people, and there was no way that we could win Government tenders. So the idea that, somehow, the loss of New Zealand Government business somehow makes up for international opportunities is completely incorrect. I commend this bill to the House.

I am pleased to stand and speak this evening. I acknowledge the member opposite whose bill it is. It would be obvious by now that we are not supporting the progress of this bill, the Our Work Our Future Bill, even though the sentiment of this bill is something that I believe New Zealanders would obviously understand and aspire to.

People will purchase products for themselves, for their businesses, and for others from that which is offered that also offers the very best value for money. It is important for us to understand the principle of competition. Competition is the process of rivalry between firms. Firms compete on the basis of price and quality to sell products to customers. The process of competition between firms drives firms to lower costs, improve quality, or develop better products. In a competitive market these benefits are passed on to consumers.

Although this bill proposes mechanisms that would enable New Zealand companies to have a stronger advantage in this process of procurement, we cannot move away from the principles of competition. We are living in a global economy where we believe that free trade is important, especially as we are in a country where we export 85 percent of that which we produce. So when we have competition, when we have open doors of trade, and because we are New Zealanders living so far from markets that we need to ensure that our products and our processes are of the very best in order to compete to overcome that tyranny of distance, what we need are open markets that we can engage with and transact with.

We have heard this evening, in different speeches, that New Zealand has joined the World Trade Organization Agreement on Government Procurement, guaranteeing New Zealand businesses access to bid for an estimated $2.3 trillion in annual overseas Government contracts. So if we seek to put non-tariff barriers in place as many other countries do, and we start to live in that world, increasingly what we will find is that the opportunities and the access that we have as New Zealand businesses—New Zealand manufacturers, which are full of New Zealand workers, will not have the same opportunity that this bill aspires to. So I believe that what we should do—and the Labour Party has said in the past that it is a party that does believe in free trade—is we must continue to develop those relationships with nations around the world, in order to see those opportunities come before us.

The New Zealand economy is doing far better than most other economies around the world, and that is a good thing to see.

💬 Andrew Little: Tell the people who can’t get a pay rise.

Well, the reality is that the OECD has said that New Zealand has the fourth-highest increase in the world around real wages. The OECD makes that comment; it makes that analysis. So things are better in this country than some would have us believe. We have interest rates that are at their lowest since the 1960s, we have a net external debt position at its lowest level since 2003, and exports are up $8.4 billion or 13.4 percent from 3 years ago. Our economy is doing very, very well. As I come to a conclusion in my next 9 seconds, I would say that trying to create mechanisms to change that in the way that is proposed will not serve us well. Thank you.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Our Work Our Future Bill. I have been sitting here in a bit of a quandary really. The bit of a dilemma that I have is how I am best to start my contribution for today’s speech. With all due respect and, of course, with admiration for the person who has proposed this new bill, I cannot help but draw the attention of the House to the remarks by the member whose bill this is—of course, that is the honourable member Andrew Little. He starts off by saying that this is a landmark occasion: this is the first time a Leader of the Opposition has brought two bills down, drawn from the ballot, in Opposition, to this House. But I have to say, in actual fact, one of those bills is a New Zealand First bill, so it is not actually two bills that he has brought to the House. I have to say that the reality is, if at the very—

💬 David Bennett: That’s true. It’s New Zealand First’s.

Mr Bennett, I will get to you in a moment. When you open your mouth, you make stupid look intelligent.

When you raised the question of this bill in the House, we, as New Zealand First, had been speaking about procurement—making sure that we procure in New Zealand and put New Zealanders first—but the member himself has come out and said that this is a policy that the Labour Party has come up with. He says it is about New Zealand, but he forgets a little point: to say it is about putting New Zealanders first. He goes on to say “It is putting New Zealanders”, and we would like to finish that sentence off by saying: “putting New Zealanders first.” The Our Work Our Future Bill is, at the very best, plagiarism, and, at the worst, an absolute rip-off—or a cheap imitation, if you like, of what New Zealand First has put through this House on numerous occasions in the past.

This is a situation where we have, over the past number of years, seen—time after time—opportunities where both sides of the House have taken New Zealand First policy and used it as their own. We have seen it with regard to our community wage, which was put in and taken out by the Labour Party and then just been recently brought back in to the House, trying to label it as its own policy.

Our immigration policy: this party over here that is now proposing that we need to tighten up on immigration—of course, that is something that we have been proudly saying for 23 years. Of course, we were called xenophobic and all sorts of racist connotations. And now, take our position on being nationalistic and having a pride for our country. Foreign ownership: now this party is against foreign ownership of our land and it is talking about stopping speculative buyers buying up more property—that is another New Zealand First policy. Our youth employment and training initiative—again, it is something that New Zealand First established, got up and running, and has a bill in the ballot box on specifically. The universal allowance has been in our manifesto since 1993.

In fact, perhaps, Mr Assistant Speaker, you could enlighten me as to the best way moving forward from here. At the end of my speech, would it be appropriate for me to make a point of order and table our New Zealand First manifesto just so the member could take a copy and have quick reference to the polices that the party regularly takes as its own? No—not appropriate?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): You can seek leave at the end and I will judge whether the material is relevant or not. But I do ask the member to come back to what this debate is about and not talk about a wide range of other policies.

Thank you. It is just as relevant. This gentleman truly is the salt of the earth and a true gentleman, and I feel that he would feel far more comfortable putting his name to a bill that was truly his if, in fact, he was part of New Zealand First. In fact, I was at a meeting just recently and after my speech I was asked a question by a member from the floor. They said: “Is it true that New Zealand First is looking to put candidates in every electorate?”. I said: “Yes, we are.” Then they said: “Is it true that Andrew Little is running for New Zealand First?”. I said: “What are you talking about? How is that relevant?”. He said: “Well, he is taking so many of your policies, I thought he might be becoming a member, so I thought it might be appropriate if we gave him membership so he could actually join New Zealand First. He would feel better about taking our policies if he was part of the team, if you know what I mean.”

This is a pragmatic bill, as far as looking after the benefits of New Zealanders is concerned, and I shake my head in disbelief when I hear absolute nonsense coming out of Brett Hudson’s mouth, saying that this is going to damage “New Zealand Inc.” I mean, Brett Hudson, to be fair, is the most disliked member of his own caucus by his own caucus members. But, to be fair, that just shows you the disconnect of that party when it comes to looking after the best interests of New Zealand and making sure that “New Zealand Inc.” and New Zealanders have got the jobs that they need. Thank you.

I am going to do something in this Parliament that I never thought I would do—and that is agree with New Zealand First that this is New Zealand First policy that the Labour Party has taken off it. This is the Labour Party members taking Winston’s home baking and trying to make it into their own. This is the Labour Party just going for electorate votes, not looking after the true principles that made that party the Labour Party it used to be.

💬 Hon Annette King: Oh well, you’ll enjoy Nick then.

People like Nick Leggett understand that the Labour Party has moved away from what it should be. This bill shows that the Labour Party members—just like their New Zealand First Party colleagues—are against trade, they are against immigration, and they are against an open and free New Zealand. They want to create more boundaries around New Zealand, they want to restrict Government and what it can do in its procurement, they want to stop New Zealand business trading, and they want to stop New Zealanders embracing the wide range of cultures that will come and make this country the strong place it will be in the future.

This is just another example of the anti - free-trade agenda that New Zealand First and Labour espouse in this House day after day. This is just another example of where the Labour Party does not want to engage with the rest of the world and believes that it knows best—that it can govern and it can decide and it can sell and it can buy and it can do everything to make a hunky-dory place for New Zealanders. It is New Zealand First and Labour thinking that they know better than New Zealanders. It is New Zealand First and Labour in their elite political establishments thinking that they are the ones who determine the future of the country.

That is not the way that New Zealand is determined. It is determined by the businesses and people out there going out and competing against other businesses and delivering the best products. Why should the New Zealand Government not get the best products available for it? Why should we not trust New Zealand companies to go out there and beat foreign countries to it in selling to ourselves? Why should we not trust New Zealand companies to go out there and beat other countries’ companies to sell to their Governments?

Labour does not trust New Zealand businesses, does not believe in New Zealand businesses, and does not want to give them that opportunity to compete on a level playing field. Labour believes that New Zealand businesses need to be in an environment that is controlled by 20 or 30 people over there, and by one person over there. That is what the New Zealand First - Labour vision of trade is all about. That is against the principles of what New Zealanders want.

What is going to be the next limit? Just say you have two New Zealand companies competing to deliver a product for the New Zealand Government. Is it going to be the one that has more union membership that would get the contract? Is that how Labour is going to do it next? What is the next stage of their test for New Zealanders?

💬 Hon Annette King: Why don’t you talk about the bill and stop talking nonsense?

You get Annette King being very angry over there beside her leader, because she is very defensive of him trying to take a New Zealand First Party policy and put it in a Labour wrapping and sell it to the community today.

I wish the Labour Party would actually support New Zealanders and support New Zealand businesses rather than to say that New Zealand businesses are not good enough to compete and not good enough to succeed. That is what they are saying in this bill here tonight. It is partly New Zealand First policy—which we always expect and we know that it is going to come from them; we know that they are against trade, we know that they are against migration, we know that they want to go back to the 1950s, and we know that they are just not for the future of this country—but the Labour Party has stooped to that level. The Labour Party has given up its traditions of a free and open New Zealand. The Labour Party has joined with the New Zealand First Party at the hip. And I say to the New Zealand First Party that in your agreements—or whatever you are doing with the New Zealand Labour Party during the election—make sure you get some copyright clauses in there, because they are taking your policies, they are taking them off you—

💬 Hon Member: Plagiarism.

—and it is plagiarism of the highest degree, as that member says over there. That is a disgrace from the Labour Party members in this Parliament.

💬 Hon Members: Eight, seven, six, five—

Yes, they are counting down. We do not want a Fortress New Zealand; we want a New Zealand that is open, free, and innovative, and we do not need Labour Party and New Zealand First politicians to tell us how to run our country.

💬 Hon Members: Sit down!

That is not necessary—he can see the screens, and I am standing. [Interruption] Order! I am going to call Barry Coates.

I would like to speak to this bill—the Our Work Our Future Bill. It would be nice to get beyond petty political point-scoring, because a lot of companies out there really care about these issues, and I commend Labour for introducing this bill. I think it is an important bill, and we support it. The aim for procurement policy should not just be to get the cheapest product. We all know that in our own procurement, when we buy stuff from a shop, we do not necessarily go for the cheapest price—we do not even necessarily go for the cheapest cost on a long-run basis. We go for the best value, and that is what this bill is about. It is about getting the best value from procurement for the New Zealand economy. I think, to that extent, it is exactly the direction that our procurement policy should be going.

We would as a Green Party go a bit further. There are different dimensions to this procurement policy. The first is a kind of strategic procurement approach, and that helps small New Zealand businesses to get a foothold. Contracts can be structured in ways that will enable New Zealand businesses to compete for them—or not. That is one of the things that this bill aims to do. It aims to break contracts down to the level that allows New Zealand businesses to be able to compete on a fair footing for a procurement contract. From that perspective, it is sensible policy.

Secondly, a procurement policy based on value allows the incorporation of the value to the local economy and the local jobs and all of the spin-off benefits that come from local value added in the economy.

Thirdly, it allows for the consideration of issues of sustainability, and, of course, that is important for the Green Party, because we should not be undertaking procurement contracts that do not respect the environment and do not respect social issues for workers and for communities.

Finally, procurement should be fair—it should be fair to all parties. This is where, I think, the current policy has got severely offside. As Oscar Wilde said, where we are going down a track with procurement under this Government is to know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. That is exactly the policy that is being followed at the moment by this Government.

This bill would help us to understand the value of procurement in a deeper way. It is within the longer term and wider context. It is within the context of the manufacturing sector in New Zealand being torn apart. It was torn apart previously, but increasingly it is also being torn apart under this Government. The Green Party recently released its policy for a ministry of manufacturing. We showed that 17,500 manufacturing jobs have been lost under the National Government. That is a tragedy for this country because they are good jobs, they are well-paying jobs, and they are vital jobs for the future of our manufacturing and our exports.

So what are we talking about with this bill? We are talking about contracts that allow New Zealand companies to compete on a fair basis. Is this agreement in accordance with current trade obligations? The other side of the House, the National members, would say: “No, this bill runs afoul of our existing trade commitments.”

There are two issues here. Firstly, that our Government has been lightly entering into trade commitments that it should not have been entering into, because they will constrain sensible policies that are for the benefit of the New Zealand economy and in the New Zealand interest. It is a good thing that the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is not going ahead. Secondly, there are already flexibilities within these agreements that would allow us to be able to do what this bill proposes: to be able to structure contracts, not so that we are paying inflated prices to uncompetitive New Zealand firms but to give New Zealand firms a fair chance to get a foothold, to get a start in manufacturing and services, and to be able to establish a base so that they can then go and compete with imports and compete internationally. Thank you. We commend this bill.

I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. I never thought when I came to Parliament that we would debate such basic economic fallacies that I read about years and years and years ago and thought that this Parliament would have left behind. But today and tonight we are debating them—brought to this House by no less than the Leader of the Opposition.

You have to ask yourself what is so wrong with giving a bit more money to New Zealand companies. Well, the beginning of the problem is that, actually, money that the New Zealand Government spends on overseas procurement is not lost to New Zealand. The way it works, in the case of the trains that were bought, for example—which sparked this bill and, apparently, the interest of the member in charge, Andrew Little—is that the New Zealand dollars disbursed by the New Zealand Government to purchase equipment from a foreign provider end up being somewhere offshore. The thing about New Zealand dollars being offshore is that there is only one place in the world that they can return to where they can have any value. So the money that the New Zealand Government spends, whether it spends it here or whether it spends it offshore, eventually becomes an opportunity for some other New Zealand business, be it domestic or be it an exporter, to sell more goods and services.

We know that the money spent on those trains was eventually returned to New Zealand and spent by foreigners on New Zealand exports. So the choice that the Government makes—or would not be able to make under this particular bill—to spend the money on a New Zealand provider is really money that is taken away from competing New Zealand exporters. And why would this bill be necessary? Well, it could only possibly be necessary because the New Zealand provider in question was less productive than the competing companies offshore. So, first of all, we lose the opportunity for a New Zealand exporter to reclaim those New Zealand dollars circulating in the international economy; second of all, we choose a less-productive New Zealand firm to produce the goods. Where that ends is that, eventually, you end up with a New Zealand fortress economy filled with businesses that are not productive and that cannot compete on the global stage, and they find themselves sheltered, uncompetitive, and unproductive—and eventually New Zealand goes broke.

We see Annette King and Ruth Dyson here in the House tonight. They remember disassembling precisely the sort of protectionism that led New Zealand to lose hundreds of thousands of people offshore as Kiwis fled to Australia and further afield because the fortress economy simply did not work. You can actually understand the problem by looking at the wording of this bill: it does not say that the Government’s procurers have to choose a New Zealand company, it says that they have to consider the number of jobs that are created by procuring a certain contract. The only result of that is that we end up procuring things not because they are the best deal, not because they are produced as productively as possible—

💬 Clayton Mitchell: We’re not talking about buying tanks from Russia, apricots from Indonesia, or pencils from China.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Look, I am hearing a very incoherent rant from New Zealand First, and it is against the Standing Orders to offer a running commentary.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am the judge of that. David Seymour, continue.

The fact of the matter is that if you have a policy that deliberately chooses a higher level of employment over productivity, the long-term outcome is that New Zealand becomes a less productive place. So when we hear the Opposition members complaining about declining productivity in New Zealand, they have only themselves to blame when they put about policies that purposely choose the least productive supplier for a particular procurement contract.

The bill is really an attempt to take us back to the 1950s and the 1970s, the times gone by, when, in actual fact, New Zealand was not an open, vibrant, and competitive country—it was quite the opposite. It was a country that lost hundreds of thousands of people as the Government protected unproductive businesses at the expense of the productive ones. And the ACT Party says: “We ain’t never going back there.” Thank you.

The enjoyable thing about hearing from members on the other side, particularly Mr Seymour and particularly Mr Bennett, is that if anybody is confused about how Brexit happened and how Trump happened, those members illustrate it. They illustrate it. You see, they still live the life of 1980s voodoo economics, where productivity is not about the skilled labour we can create and is not about the value we can create; it is about being cheap. They live in the world of cheap.

You see, those members think—they still think—that people believe wealth trickles down. You just have the rich and the wealthy. They will pick and choose the cheapest, and they will go wherever they like. You do not have to worry about communities in New Zealand. You do not have to worry about skilled, clever, talented people in New Zealand. You just trickle down—and we have been waiting 30 years.

They waited 30 years in the UK, they waited 30 years in the US, and now we are seeing the result: people have had enough. They want Governments and politicians and leaders who are committed to the country they live in and committed to the people who pay their taxes to that Government. They want Governments and leaders who want a decent country, with decent jobs and decent incomes.

Here is the problem with Mr Seymour’s B-grade economics degree: he does not understand productivity. Productivity is not about being cheap; it is about the multiplier value. You see, a dollar spent in New Zealand has a multiplier value. In the manufacturing sector, the multiplier effect is about five—four and a half to five. If that work on the KiwiRail carriages had been done in New Zealand, that money would have been filtered through the community several times over. If you spend it overseas, that is it—it is gone, and you have got to support the people whose jobs are being lost.

Those members on the other side never got that. ACT never got that. David Seymour does not get that. David Bennett does not get that—he does not even care that the Waikato Expressway went overseas to get cheap steel, and now the good people of the Waikato are going to be driving on unsafe roads. They are going to be driving on unsafe roads because David Bennett did not have the gumption to say: “Look, when you are putting in my expressway, which is going to get me re-elected, can you at least make sure we have good quality New Zealand steel?”. New Zealand steel means that you can drive safely and that we will keep jobs here.

The truth about the National Party is this: it has become absolutely crystal clear—absolutely crystal clear—that it does not care about New Zealanders being in work. That is why parties like Labour have to come and champion the cause. I am very flattered by the honourable member Clayton Mitchell, who laid out all the common ground between Labour and New Zealand First, and I look forward to those coalition negotiations because we clearly now have plenty to talk about. The one difference between us, of course—there is a difference between us—and the one thing we in Labour absolutely stand for, is changing the Government. When New Zealand First comes out and says that that is what it is committed to, we will have even more fertile ground for those coalition negotiations.

This is a bill that is about New Zealand. It is about supporting New Zealanders and their businesses. It is about supporting the talent, the intelligence, the smarts, and the creativity of high quality, highly talented New Zealanders. That is all it is about. It is a chance for a Government that understands what leadership is about in the economic sphere to give Kiwi businesses a chance.

We gave the examples here. You look at companies like Fletcher Building. It started off contracting to the Government. It happened to be a Labour Government at the time, admittedly, because Labour Governments through the history of New Zealand have supported New Zealand businesses creating jobs here in New Zealand. Fletcher Building was one of them, and look: it is now an exporter around the world. It is an exemplar—one of the best companies in New Zealand.

What about Hills Hats? Oh yes, Hills Hats. It made all the army gear they had on their heads, and now it exports around the world. You see, that is what having the opportunity to contract to the Government and supplying the Government does for a good quality, talented New Zealand business and New Zealand business people.

That is what this bill is about, and I urge those members opposite, who now have seen the light, who have realised that their trickle-down economics of the 1980s does not work and is a failed experiment—they have the chance in a few seconds to support New Zealand and to support New Zealand businesses by voting in favour of this bill.