General Debate

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

Today, we’ve had the devastating assessment from the Reserve Bank, just at 2 o’clock, predicting that 150,000 jobs will be lost across this country over the next three months to September. That’s 150,000 families that will be affected hugely by the crisis that has been started by the COVID-19. We’ll be paying a very heavy price for that virus and our response to it. Lives will be capsized, a huge number of small businesses will fall over, and it won’t be because the owners of those businesses weren’t up to it, or that they shouldn’t have been in business; it will be because they’ve been told that they can’t trade—for 49 days now, seven weeks. They haven’t been able to open up and make a living—they’ve wanted to and they haven’t been able to—and there will be many, many families and businesses across this country under enormous stress, and that’ll be having an impact on their wellbeing. So we’re going a day before the Budget, at a time of real economic challenges for this country, and so there are two relevant questions that we should be considering. One is: are we making the situation worse than we need to be? And, secondly: how do we get out of it? Those are the critical questions that New Zealanders will be asking.

And so, on the first—look, we’ve supported many of the things that this Government has done in response to this crisis. The move to level 4 at the start was something that many New Zealanders supported, and the wage subsidy got cash into the hands of many businesses quickly and sustained many jobs at the start. But it quickly became very obvious, as we looked over each passing week and looked across the Tasman, where they didn’t stop many of their people working in construction, for example—a huge part of the economy carried on as normal—and it was quickly apparent that the outcomes in health terms were manageable; in fact, very similar. So there is a question to be raised about the speed and agility with which the Government responded. I was shocked—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: He’s got to dig his head out of the sand.

The Minister may grumble and complain, but I was shocked when I saw the papers from Cabinet on 14 April talking about whether to move out of level 4. There was absolutely no reference to what was happening across the Tasman. And that, I think, was a bit slow to react.

Secondly, it’s a question of effective support for small businesses. Like I say, there’s been very great success with the wage subsidy. Of course, most of that money has gone to workers rather than to the businesses, and businesses, when they’re being forced to shut down, have had to continue paying their rents—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: Who paid the workers? Oh, the business did!

Yeah, and they need to continue to pay their rents, and they need to continue to be able to pay all the many other costs that businesses have to face. [Interruption] And we’ve had a slight implication from this side of the House that it’s somehow the businesses’ fault that they can’t trade, but they have been told that they can’t, and that is why getting cash into the hands of those businesses has been essential. There’s been a number of rinky-dink schemes put together, with low interest rate loans—the Government sharing 80 percent of the loans through the banks—which have been a complete flop and haven’t worked. There have been others that have been slow to come about, and so we are hoping that tomorrow in the Budget there will be some more effective relief for those businesses.

The second question is about how we make it productive in this one-metre world, or the two-metre world, that we’re operating in, and if we get that overly rigid, it will be difficult. Even at level 2, which we’re going into tomorrow—and level 1, hopefully, which we’ll get to in a few weeks’ time—there are still many Kiwis who won’t be able to work, and they won’t be able to work productively. That will cost more jobs and make it more difficult for New Zealand families. So we need to respond quickly and effectively. Then, as we come out of this, we need a clear growth plan, and it can’t just be a Budget tomorrow to which the answer and the plan is simply spend, spend, spend, because that will help in some instances but the quality of the spending is critical and the delivery of projects that are announced is also critical. This Government does have a record of being very good at making a lot of announcements, particularly around shovel-ready infrastructure. And we’ve had Mr Jones wielding the shovel all around the country for a very long time and announcing things three or four times, maybe five times, and I, no doubt, anticipate on Monday he’ll be wheeling himself out into the regions and announcing a whole lot of projects again. But New Zealanders have to be aware that the delivery of this Government hasn’t matched the announcements, and that’s the critical thing.

So we want to see announcements about support for businesses in order to continue to save jobs, and we want to see projects that are actually delivered. And, most importantly, we need a Government that trusts New Zealanders—that trusts New Zealanders to make the judgment about how they and their family and their businesses can get themselves back up on their feet quickly. We don’t assume that the Government has all the answers, but the Government does its job in creating an environment where people feel confident to invest in their businesses—they know that they’re not going to be overtaxed; they’re not going to be over-regulated; that the rules won’t change all the time; that they can invest with confidence; and that they will be supported by a Government that invests in good quality infrastructure, such as the ultra-fast broadband that we invested in over the years. It’ll be interesting to see who comes up next from the Government. If they repeat the fake news that we heard from the Prime Minister today, that somehow people are suggesting swingeing cuts and austerity to essential services—there is not a soul on this side of the House that is talking about cuts to essential services.

Order! The member’s time has expired.

What New Zealanders have achieved over the last seven weeks is as humbling as it is impressive. We moved hard and fast as the COVID outbreak started to arrive in New Zealand. We moved into lockdown far sooner than other countries did, and, as a result of that, we didn’t just flatten the curve, we squashed it. All New Zealanders—all 5 million New Zealanders—who have made significant sacrifices over the last seven weeks can reflect on that period with a significant degree of pride. It was an enormous act of compassion towards one another, where healthy people stayed home—healthy people, in fact, offered up their freedoms and liberties, the things that they would normally take for granted, because they recognised that some who were less fortunate, some who were more at risk, needed their protection and that the way that they could protect them was to stay home and save lives. And New Zealanders did it, and they did it willingly, and the fact that we are in such a good position as we move into level 2 tomorrow is a reflection of the hard work and the contribution that all New Zealanders have made.

Level 4 and then, latterly, level 3 have been really challenging times for New Zealanders. I want to particularly acknowledge all of those who have had difficult domestic arrangements during the lockdown period. For people who have been in large families in small households, it will have had its challenges. For those who have young children at home—I can speak from personal experience that has its challenges. Families haven’t been able to rely on the things they normally would rely on. They can’t take their kids to the playground. They can’t even take a drive down to the supermarket with their kids in order to fill in a little bit of time. The sorts of things that families would normally do haven’t been on offer during the lockdown period, and that’s come at a significant cost to New Zealanders. I think the fact that we have survived through that, that we have marched through that with the spirit that New Zealanders have, with everything from the bear hunts—remember the bear hunts in the first few weeks of the lockdown?—to the Easter egg hunts, to standing at dawn at the end of our driveways on Anzac Day, shows, I think, that New Zealanders have embraced the spirit of the COVID-19 lockdown in a way that we can all be incredibly proud of.

But COVID-19 is not gone yet, and the risk of a further spike in cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand continues to be with us, and we have to remain vigilant, and we have to continue to do our bit. There will be some New Zealanders who think “Mission accomplished, job done.” My message to them is: don’t speak too soon. We’ve still got a way to go. And so, for some of those New Zealanders who were a bit gung-ho going into the lockdown in the first place and who are very gung-ho coming out of it on the other side, my message to them is: think about your fellow New Zealanders. You might not feel a great sense of risk to you, but, actually, there’ll be people around you who are still at risk, and we all need to take action to keep them safe.

Our restrictions at level 2 are significantly less than they were at level 4 and then at level 3. The move from level 4 to level 3 was a relatively minor one compared to the move that we will make tonight when we move from level 3 to level 2. We will get much, much more freedom now than we have had over the last seven weeks, and we all need to be responsible in how we use that. I do trust New Zealanders—that they are going to do the right thing.

In fact, to some extent, as the Minister of Education, I’ve got a little bit of a concern that New Zealanders are going to be a bit too slow in moving to level 2, and that there’ll still be quite a lot of kids kept at home for no good reason, because their parents are a little bit nervous. I can understand that, and I do think we’re going to need to take a little bit of a tolerant approach to that at the moment. It is safe for parents at level 2 to send their kids back into school and into early childhood education environments. The Government would not have made this decision if it wasn’t safe for them to do so, and we do need them to send their kids back, because it’s good for their learning and we need them to go back to work, because it’s good for the overall health of New Zealand’s economy and society. But I can understand their nervousness, and I think that we’ll need to show some tolerance towards one another as all New Zealanders adjust to the new realities under alert level 2.

I think that New Zealanders have shown over the last seven weeks that we do appreciate how significant the challenge of COVID-19 is. We’ve seen the headlines from around the world, and we have collectively, as a team of 5 million said, “That will not be us.” We need to keep that spirit alive in the coming weeks as we continue to make sure that we don’t see a big outbreak of COVID-19 here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I want to take a moment at the outset of this speech to acknowledge all of our doctors, our grocery workers, our teachers, and our nurses, who have been at the front line of COVID-19. I also want to take a moment to acknowledge our public servants. We are on the back of one of the most challenging events in our history, and, on this side of the House, we absolutely supported the Government to flatten the curve. We have done very well as a nation in flattening the curve and reducing the virus in society, but the huge debate—and that we are on the eve of seeing the true cost of this to our country—has been whether you go after the needle in the haystack, whether you eliminate or try to eliminate the virus to the nth degree, and then the cost to the country of that. On this side of the House, we do believe that there have been major issues in the Government’s response. We acknowledge that they have been dealing with a fast-evolving, difficult situation, but we have to continue to expect more of our parliamentarians and our Government than ever before at this time in our history.

So the first thing that we raise is that process matters. It matters if a lockdown is legal. We deserve, as a country, to know the answer to that, and there are many questions that are being asked about that. We also deserve more than 24 hours’ notice on a piece of legislation that is going to impact the freedom of New Zealanders, whether that is religious freedom, whether that is freedom of association. On this side of the House, we have said that, with a reduced media, with significant police powers, with a reduced Parliament, it is entirely appropriate to expect a larger lead-in time than that on a piece of legislation as important as this legislation. So process does matter, and we would say never more than in a national emergency is it important to get to the table with the Opposition and work that through. And what played out today—and we’ve seen a bit of a backdown from the Government—is that people in New Zealand said, “Hang on a second. We believe in reducing the public health impacts of COVID-19, but we expect you as leaders to be able to explain your public health rationale for restaurants versus schools versus funerals and tangi.” That is entirely reasonable. On this side of the House, we will continue to ask for maximum transparency around the decisions at a public health level, and that is what New Zealanders would expect from us.

So, tomorrow, we will see the extent and scale of the damage. We have reports coming out at the moment that indicate that we could have around 150,000 jobs as a result of this event. People are, naturally, looking at the OECD information and saying, “Why is it that Australia could have similar outcomes as New Zealand and could have such a larger-scale impact in terms of economic activity?” And that is a reasonable question. So, when the Budget is read tomorrow, New Zealanders will be asked to reflect on what would have been the normal course of damage as a result of a global pandemic versus what could have been the damage as a result of the Prime Minister’s decision to pursue elimination. Because of the impact on generations of New Zealanders, in terms of debt, it is entirely appropriate to ask the question whether my niece and nephew, whether those students at university, are going to be dealing with a $50,000 bill as a result of COVID or a $40,000 bill because of the time that it will take for generations, for us, to pay that back.

We also believe, on this side of the House, that debt is an important argument to be had but that we do need to spend to ensure that we deal with—and the Prime Minister said—and address the significant blow for many families as a result of COVID-19. We believe that at the heart of that rebuild and recovery is our education system. What we expect to see tomorrow in the Budget is the Government addressing a range of things: dealing with the financial viability of schools, dealing with the financial viability of our international education sector, and ensuring that there is a reasonable plan to bring international students back to New Zealand. We do expect to see funding in the Budget to address, as I have said, the drop in international students and the real issues around fund-raising for our schools. We expect to see a large-scale skills plan for New Zealand, because we understand that the scale of job loss and displacement means that we need to have a very clear and comprehensive plan to upskill New Zealanders to deal with this significant issue.

Thank you to all of the New Zealanders who have been involved in the first response. On this side of the House, we will continue to put up positive plans to rebuild New Zealand.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I acknowledge the member who’s just resumed her seat, Nikki Kaye—her remarks—and she is correct: this has been a huge challenge to the country and particularly to this House and the members in it, on this side of the House and on the other side of the House as well—a challenge for Government to come to grips with a crisis that has afflicted the world and afflicted us too, as we try to predict and respond in a way that keeps ahead of the challenge that we’re seeing.

I don’t think it helps, actually, terribly to make a whole lot of comparisons to different countries around the world. This crisis—this virus—has hit countries at different times. It hit us at a different time. If you want to make comparisons, let’s acknowledge that, although New Zealand and Australia are reasonably comparable in the way the virus has affected us, actually, it’s not quite the same. Australia has had a higher per capita infection rate. It has had a higher fatality rate. Their pubs and bars are going to be closed for a lot longer than ours. They’ve got another month or six weeks to wait yet, and their Parliament is closed, would you believe, until August. Here in New Zealand, we’ve striven to keep a level of parliamentary accountability going with the establishment of the Epidemic Response Committee, chaired by the Leader of the Opposition, as well as a bunch of other measures.

The Government has been grappling with the need to put in place an effective public health response that protects people and saves people, as well as dealing with the obvious economic impact. There is going to be one question that, I think, New Zealanders will be asking at election time, and that is: “Did you keep us safe?”—did you keep us safe? And I think this Government and, indeed, this Parliament can say—because, as the Hon Nikki Kaye said, the Opposition did support the initial measures that the Government took—New Zealanders were kept safe by the response that this Government championed in the face of COVID-19; lives have been saved as a result. When you compare what’s happened to other countries, and you look at death rates, you look at infection rates, New Zealand has done remarkably well. And, as my colleague the Hon Chris Hipkins acknowledged, we didn’t just flatten the curve, we squashed it.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. This is the reality of this insidious bug—or, at least, this virus—that we are having to deal with: we don’t know fully what the characteristics are. We don’t know what might happen. Even with the 66-odd current cases that we have in New Zealand—even though we have another day where we report zero cases—we don’t know what is going to happen, because people can be asymptomatic and still be a carrier of the virus. People can return successive negative tests and then return a positive one—not just 14 days after potential contact but for a lot longer after that. So we just don’t know, and we have to be prepared, and we have to have a regime that allows us to adapt and adjust and be nimble and agile as we now face the next few months ahead of us. And that is what the legislation that is currently before the House allows us to do, because the blunt instrument that is the old 1956 Health Act doesn’t allow us to do that. It is too blunt and too unsubtle, and we will have the powers to do that.

As well as dealing with the public health measures to keep people safe, we’ve also worked on keeping people’s jobs in tact as much as possible and supporting business. So we’ve had the wage subsidy scheme—nearly $12 billion expended on that in the period since the end of March. We’ve had a $6.25 billion business finance guarantee scheme. We have an amazing tax refund scheme in operation right now, and the results of that have been phenomenal. And, indeed, with the Small Business Cashflow (Loan) Scheme, in just the first couple of hours that that scheme was available, 6,000 applications, and more than $100 million has been provided to businesses under that scheme. And, of course, we know that there is more to come. There is the immediate stuff and there is the long-term stuff, and that is why there is a specialist ministerial infrastructure group looking at the projects ready to go that will be the subject of good quality public investment.

We know that now we have a major job—this Government and this Parliament—to make sure that New Zealand pulls out of the impact of COVID-19 in better shape in the long term than when we went in it. This has been a challenge for everyone—everyone in New Zealand and many, many countries around the world—but New Zealand is clearly leading the way. New Zealand is looked upon by many, many countries as the country that has done it right and done it well and is going very successfully, and we should celebrate that, not pat ourselves on the back gratuitously but be thankful for what we have achieved.

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. We’ve heard, I don’t know how many times over the last few weeks, the importance of flattening the curve, and I don’t think anyone would disagree. What we don’t need to do, though, is flatten the economy or flatten the country or, what we’ve seen in the last 48 hours, flatten Kiwi spirits. I think about the piece of legislation that is working its way through Parliament today; it is not the piece of legislation that any of our forebears would have considered when they made New Zealand their home. What they did think about were the things that are essential to a healthy democracy and to a strong civil society: the freedom of speech, the freedom of association, the freedom of assembly, of religion, and of movement. New Zealanders have been trusted to give up some of those freedoms to flatten the curve, and I think New Zealanders have done an incredible job. And, as any electorate MP would hear, the incredible hardship that individuals and families and businesses have gone through to flatten the curve. So I ask the House: why is it now that Labour doesn’t trust New Zealanders as we move into level 2? Why is it that Labour doesn’t trust New Zealanders to protect themselves and to protect others from this risk?

I think, in terms of Kiwi spirit, the thing that has flattened them the most in the last few days is this absolute horror that they can’t go to their chosen place of worship. A week ago, Thursday, the Prime Minister said gatherings of up to 100 people. There would’ve been a lot of people who then thought, “Fantastic, I can finally go back to my church, to my mosque, to my temple”—to wherever it is that they fed their soul, basically, and fed their spirit, but no. What’s worse than that: this is a Government who said, for funerals, you are restricted to 10 people. And to hear the stories from individuals—I spoke to a dad this morning who still cannot understand why you can have 16 sweaty blokes in a rugby scrum but he’s not allowed to have the people that fund-raised $40,000 for his wife’s cancer treatment. So I ask the Government and I ask Labour members: why do you not trust New Zealanders now? Yes, absolutely, New Zealanders have played their part in flattening the curve. Why is it that they are now not trusted, that the police now have the ability to enter someone’s home, business, or a marae? And that in itself—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume her seat. I’ve let the member run for quite a long time speaking about a bill which is going to be up quite soon. She is clearly anticipating a debate, and she may not do that. This is probably the worst case of anticipating a debate I’ve heard.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is also a general debate, and I have dealt with hundreds and hundreds of emails today from constituents, who I work hard to represent, who think it is an outrage that the Prime Minister announced on Monday that there is only a maximum of 10 people allowed at a funeral. This is a place of any place in this land where, as a member of Parliament, I have the right to speak freely. This is a general debate.

💬 SPEAKER: Order! I was letting the member run, thinking that she had resumed her speech. Was that not the case? Was that a point of order?

No.

💬 SPEAKER: Well, the member just reflected very badly on me, and I’m going to invite her now to get on with her speech.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I do so proudly as the member of Parliament for Taupō, because it’s my job to bring their voices to this Parliament. And I thought I’d share a couple: “I think there’ll be civil disobedience on the inconsistencies and emotional cruelty of the Draconian work and announcements the Parliament has”—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to speak in the House post-COVID, and as I came into Parliament yesterday—

💬 Hon Louise Upston: Unbelievable! I hope you’re allowed to speak freely. Or the Speaker might shut you down.

💬 SPEAKER: Order! The member’s had her five minutes. Mr O’Connor, please start again.

This is the first opportunity I’ve had to say a few words in this House. I came back to Parliament yesterday; on my desk was “23 March”, the diary for the last day that I was here. And, like many New Zealanders, we went away at that time into a period of unknown, not quite certain of what the next weeks would bring to us.

I think, like most New Zealanders, we are proud to be Kiwis. I would like to say that the efforts of each and every New Zealander—or the vast majority, with very few exceptions—over the past six weeks have been outstanding. What we have done to not eliminate but to get ahead of a virus which is ravaging the world has been outstanding—5 million Kiwis in isolation, which has given us an advantage, taking on a discipline and, I guess, adopting some practices: staying at home, like many Kiwis; long hair, a bit scruff; not too certain, many of them, of course, about their future in their jobs or their business; tough times for the vast majority of Kiwis, whatever way you look at it. Yet we’ve come through this to a point now where, if we maintain the discipline and the focus, if we can lock in the advantages and the progress that we’ve made, we will be acknowledged internationally, perhaps, as the first country to really get ahead of this virus.

I want to thank, firstly, my Prime Minister and her leadership. I want to thank my senior parliamentary and Cabinet colleagues for what they have done, in a team around here in Wellington, in making the tough calls—yes, as part of a team, but getting on and putting in a huge amount of effort—to move New Zealand into a position that, hopefully, will enable us to get back to some form of normality as quickly as possible. I’d like to acknowledge the essential workers across health, across healthcare, across the police, but also in the area of primary industries, where, early on, it was acknowledged that the production of food and the biological and seasonal cycles of agriculture and horticulture—we needed to get on and pick the grapes, pick the fruit, milk the cows, and continue to maintain the base of our economy and the biological systems that support that. That came at a huge risk. The people involved took on that challenge, maintained a discipline, made the changes, and have so far proven to deliver no major outbreak of COVID. Yes, there has been the odd case, but not in any way to contribute to a cluster. So thank you for producing the food, thank you for keeping law and order, thank you for looking after the people who need healthcare.

I’ve heard in the last couple of days in the House here, of course, reference to freeing things up, opening things up, moving on, as though we have beaten this—well, we have not. I guess, in the one area of freedom of religious expression—I’m a Catholic, probably not practising as much as my mother would like—but, like so many, I guess, having the privilege of understanding that there is a greater being out there, and I guess we don’t all go to a church or to a location every week, or maybe every month or every year, to acknowledge our religion and our religious beliefs. I think the people who have gone online or, through their own personal ways, shown their commitment to religion can continue to do that for another week or two to ensure that we stay ahead of this. This is not some restriction on the rights of New Zealanders. We trust New Zealanders as much as we trust them across all parts of our community and our economy.

In the end, we need laws for the few people who would not choose to adhere to what we would call the conventions of our lives. That’s what making the law is about—protecting us from them, them from themselves—and the few people who might not want to adhere to the social distancing, to the preventative measures that we have in place now, may be the ones that contribute to another cluster or outbreak of COVID-19, and we don’t want to return to a level 4 situation. So maintaining the progress, locking that in, and moving forward, while not restricting unnecessarily the rights of New Zealanders, is the objective of this Government, and we’ll continue to work collaboratively and collectively to achieve that goal.

I’d like to begin by sending fond greetings to the great people of New Zealand’s most desirable city, Hamilton. I’m very fond of them; some of them have been remarkably tolerant of me over the years. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge the constituents of Hamilton West, and I say that with some seriousness, because over the last 12 years I’ve been used to seeing thousands of them at regular intervals—at community events, at festivals, at different ethnic functions, in my constituent appointments, and so forth—and this has been an extraordinary time, when we have been separated. I’ve got to know my own neighbours remarkably well, and what a delightful group of people they are. We live on the edge of a park, and so I’ve seen many of them as they’ve walked past with their dogs. In fact, I’ve seen some exhausted dogs and some very fit ones, who, I think, have had more exercise in the last two months than they had in the previous two years. But always I’ve been impressed by how positive people have been, by the team spirit that has been evident, and I am very grateful. That has served us well, and all New Zealanders deserve our acknowledgment and our thanks for what they have sacrificed, in many cases in very difficult circumstances, for a collective effort in getting on top of COVID. We’re not entirely there yet, but we’ve done well, and we should acknowledge that progress.

I want to join other MPs in thanking the essential services, whether they work in the healthcare or the emergency services area, the cleaners, the drivers, the farmers—you name it. All of the people who have continued to work so hard deserve our acknowledgment, but so too do those who’ve worked at home and who have managed to keep small businesses going, doing whatever they can. It’s been difficult and, in many cases, it’s put businesses under unbearable pressure, and we understand that; that’s why I hope tomorrow’s Budget will recognise that, in particular the small-business owners who desperately need more wage subsidy assistance. But we do have much that we can build on. The important thing is that we get back to work; so I’m so glad that we are finally moving into level 2 tonight.

I was very glad to be able to run an art competition within the Waikato region for primary and intermediate schoolchildren to be able to thank the essential workers, and some of the schools in the area really got into it. I would love to mention all of the results. The first three year-group winners were published in the Waikato Times, or their pictures were in the Waikato Times, on Monday of this week, and year 4 should be published any day now. I will say that Kawena Daniels was highly commended in year 4 for her picture of the Prime Minister and Dr Ashley Bloomfield at their press conference, and it is an absolute delight. I do hope it’ll be published. I sent it to the Prime Minister and to Dr Bloomfield, and boy, I was impressed that Dr Bloomfield wrote back to Kawena and thanked her and told her how thrilled he was with that picture. Considering how busy he was, I thought that was pretty classy—so well done.

I want to thank the public servants who’ve worked so hard. I mentioned them in a debate last night; now it’s more appropriate for me to do that. Whether they’ve been in the Ministry of Social Development, where they were really swamped, particularly with wage subsidy issues but also a large number of issues to do with extra numbers going on to benefits—boy, they stepped up, and it was difficult, but they deserve our acknowledgment. So too do the officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I had to contact them on several occasions, because, like all constituent MPs, I had constituents who were trapped abroad, sometimes in extraordinary places—islands off the coast of Ecuador, and that sort of thing. It’s not easy to get people home from those places in the circumstances that we’ve faced. But I have been so impressed by all of those public servants. I want to give a big shout-out to the unflappable Alma and Sam, who’ve been at the other end of the elected officials email and phone line for MPs. I’m so glad we had that, because there were so many issues that we had to deal with that; without their help, we’d have really been in trouble. So they and all of the people who helped them deserve our collective thanks.

Constituents kept us incredibly busy. I have to say that, in 12 years as the MP for Hamilton West, at the local electorate level, I have never been busier. I’m actually quite glad that Parliament was adjourned, because we couldn’t have coped with the parliamentary demands given the bewildering array of issues that we were having to deal with, many of which were deeply distressing, such as relatives who were unable to be with dying members of their family; those who were unable, unfortunately, to leave to be at funerals for those who had died; those I’ve already mentioned who were needing to access the wage subsidies; and there were thousands of businesses, including in my own area, many of whom came to us for help; those who were helping to feed the homeless—and my heart goes out to those people at any time, but I am so grateful that there were wonderful people helping to feed the homeless.

So there were great demands, but it’s always a great privilege to be an MP, particularly an electorate MP, never more so than in the last few weeks. I want to thank in particular also my executive assistant, Claire Barlow, my electorate agents, all of whom have worked incredibly hard.

E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. A pleasure to rise and speak after Tim Macindoe—the Hon Tim Macindoe?—after his contributions with regard to his constituency. There have been a number of MPs and Ministers across this House who have shouted out to their constituencies. I, as one of the younger members in this Chamber, am actually amongst a constituency that a number of members of all age demographics are engaged in, and that is one of students.

There are a number of members of Parliament across this House that are actually currently engaged in a post-graduate course at Victoria University of Wellington. I see my colleague Kiritapu Allan over there, looking incredibly stoked about our class later tonight. But, to get to the core point that I’m really hoping to put across in this very brief speech today: fundamentally, I think that all of us in here can agree that education is a passport. It is an opportunity or a pathway to social mobility, to travel, to future opportunities, and to contribution. The Greens strongly believe that it is the right of all of us to be able to access that education in this country entirely unencumbered and barrier free. Everybody should have the opportunity to unlock that passion, that potential, that talent that exists inside of all of us regardless of the backgrounds that we come from, and to walk into the future with that education, unencumbered by the anchor of debt around their neck.

This is an entirely possible reality, because, in fact, student debt was only introduced in 1992. It was a choice to do that. Since then, student debt in this country has ballooned to $16 billion. The New Zealand university students’ association actually held a “sweet 16”, kind of lamenting exactly that fact earlier this year. The average balance for all of those who have student loans around this country is, on average, more than $22,000 per person. That is an immense amount of money for younger people in particular but also those who have lost their livelihoods and who are seeking to retrain to carry into the future as they seek to contribute. And nowhere has this commodification of the education system—the higher education system, the tertiary education system; heck, even in apprentices and in polytechs—been more obvious than in the commodification of student accommodation. It is an issue that has been brought to light, particularly in the mainstream media, over the past few weeks.

I have to say, as one of the members across this House—and I’d like to acknowledge, actually, my colleague the honourable Dr Shane Reti, who as well has decided to throw his weight behind supporting students who are seeking to not have to pay for accommodation they are not using—that the more that I have dug into this situation, as a member of Parliament, with, supposedly, all of the resources that are open to us, all of the doors that are supposed to be open to us, I have found how un-transparent, how unaccountable, and how precarious a house of cards the current situation is with student accommodation in this country. I have found out that there is an absolute patchwork of approaches not only in the eight university institutions across this country but also in the polytechs. We’ve discovered, for example, that the two provided private institutions by way of the Auckland University of Technology—otherwise known as AUT—actually is sold on to investors, which are able to use that accommodation in a kind of time-share type of way. They are, essentially, being guaranteed yield by those who are selling it on as investment, with students, again, being those who end up holding the bill in situations of turmoil.

Students who are in the student accommodation also are unable to access regular consumer protection. They don’t have recourse to the Tenancy Tribunal. In fact, the only avenue that is available to them as a form of protection is the recently passed interim domestic pastoral care legislation, which came into effect on 1 January this year, and even that has proved ineffective. Fundamentally, that is the tip of the iceberg, but it proves that we need massive reform in this sector. We need to do massive changes in terms of increasing investment in our future.

Tēnā koutou katoa. I join with the other members of the House in acknowledging the sterling efforts of our neighbours, our communities, our children, and our families in showing the resilience to go through the different phases of the COVID lockdown. We went with great rapidity into this lockdown phase and we are moving with the best of health advice and pragmatic political judgment in withdrawing from it. But I must say, in this general debate, it’s very disheartening to watch the member from Taupō bring sad cases and try and improve the delivery of her speech by using them, I would say, for political purposes. I think it lowers the tone of the debate. I think it lowers the tone of the House.

And there’s an awful habit that seems to have been developed by the Leader of the Opposition, who, quite frankly, is the political version of the Lonely Hearts Club, desperately seeking for companionship, looking for affirmation. Just look in the mirror. Kiwis are not wanting to see petty point-scoring; Kiwis are wanting to see the politicians bind together and work to create momentum so we come out of the COVID economic coma into a rapid ascent to better economic outcomes. So I’m very disappointed that we’re actually seeing members on the other side of the House trotting out these stories. I’ve no doubt that there are a host of Kiwi families who have had some very sad experiences, and I happen to know a few of them, but it would never occur to me to use those stories in an attempt to hold the Minister of Health or the Leader of the House or the Minister of Justice personally responsible for that outcome. It is wrong and it will not work on 19 September.

The model that we had taken for granted in relation to economics has been inverted. There will be no more international education in the form that was developed by the last regime. International education is, obviously, very important for our secondary schools. I think it enriches the lives of the school community. It certainly opens up the eyes of fair dinkum Kiwi kids as to how their peers think, live, and relate to each other around the world and when they see it in action in their school. I took advice from Derek McCormick—the second time I’ve used that man’s name in the House. He gave some very solid advice as to what ought to be the blend to enable universities to continue to offer a competitive menu to attract university students here.

But I give fair notice: this notion that we are going to uncritically breathe life back into the private training education sector, where young students were abused, young students were ill informed, their parents overseas went into inordinate levels of debt, and they came here desperate to achieve citizenship through courses that, quite frankly, wouldn’t have matched up to third-form woodwork at St. Stephen’s School in 1973—not that I excelled in woodwork; I was more interested in debate and oratory and other such matters. Although I must say, I have become something of an expert in woodwork over the break. I turned my attention to building a gardening box for my mother-in-law and my wāhine. I did avoid doing one particular thing: asking the shadow Leader of the House, Mr Brownlee, to judge said gardening box, not only because he is a genuine expert—and I don’t mean that in any petty way—with building but I didn’t want to ever give him the opportunity of saying, “Your tongue might be active, but your eye cannot cut a straight line.”

The line that we will cut will be revealed tomorrow in the Budget. The Prime Minister has identified that jobs are central to ensuring resilience and stronger outcomes for all of our communities. And we will wait for our senior colleague Grant Robertson, who has clearly said there was the 1935-38 applied Christianity approach of the Savage Government; then, nigh on 50 years later, came the form of Roger Douglas and a host of other reformers; and now, 35 years later, Grant Robertson will have the chance tomorrow to show there is a new blend, new hope, and new momentum.

It’s an interesting time that we’ve all just lived through, isn’t it? Every single day I, like every other member in this House, undoubtedly, am inundated with reflections of members of our community about how these last seven weeks, in particular, have impacted upon them. As we look to this evening, when we transition from level 3 to alert level 2, I want to acknowledge all of those parents who have had to manage juggling children and work calls and Zooms. I want to acknowledge all of those essential workers that have every single day donned their gloves, their aprons, their masks, their PPE gear to ensure that each of us could, in the best way possible, survive—or get through in the safest way possible, I might say—these extraordinary circumstances that we have all collectively walked together.

Now, I in particular want to make a couple of acknowledgments in respect of correspondence I and, undoubtedly, many members in this House have received over the last 36 hours, particularly. As we transition and as we move from a state of response to COVID-19 and we transition into the much-needed kick-starting of our economy, we have had to ensure that we have the right regulation and legal framework in place to ensure that all of us are very clear on what the rules require, that we don’t have to sit in a state of emergency, and that we can, indeed, start to conduct ourselves in a life a little more closer to normal tomorrow. And with that has come the introduction of legislation in this House, which has—and rightly so—attracted a lot of commentary from all walks of life, whether that be parishioners of churches or mosques, whether that be folks concerned about civil rights and the rule of law and ensuring that law is made in the right way, or whether that be many of my friends who are actively engaged in protecting the mana motuhake and rangatiratanga of their marae, their whānau, their hapū, and iwi.

I want to acknowledge that, over the last 36 hours—and I want to say this directly to those that have, in particular, been very concerned about the role that the State has historically played in its interaction and its abuse of its powers against Māori, in particular. Today, I have heard from many, many commentators and folks who are concerned at the legislation that is passing through this House, that enables law enforcement officers to, essentially, do what they can do right now, but expressly imbues those powers into legislation—that there is significant concern. We all stood here in this House when we had to extend our apologies to those who were impacted by the wrongful and misuse of power by the State against those from Parihaka, or against those in Maungapōhatu, Ruatāhuna, with the persecution of our prophet Rua Kēnana. And it is not a light duty that sits on any members of this House’s shoulders when we look at the legislation that is going through this House. It isn’t without due consideration.

I want to acknowledge, in particular, my Māori electorate MP colleagues, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, Kelvin Davis, Peeni Henare, Willie Jackson, Meka Whaitiri, Tamati Coffey, who I know, over the last 36 hours, have worked tirelessly to ensure that there are adequate protections in the legislation that is being passed through this House that uphold the mana of our whānau. In particular, right now, in another room in this House, is an announcement being made that addresses the provisions around tangihanga and funerals. I want to acknowledge that that is at the behest of many voices that have expressed their deep felt concern about the practice to mourn and mourn our loved ones. So it is not lost, and these ears are not deaf to the cries of our people. There was a reference to marae being included in legislation. That was removed this morning by Supplementary Order Paper 497 under the name of the Attorney-General, the Hon David Parker, at the behest of my good colleagues the Hon Peeni Henare and senior Māori members on this side of the House—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have just recently been texted by my son, who said, “Please make sure when you speak that you talk about how excited the Muller family are that level 2 kicks off tomorrow.” And I will acknowledge that the Muller family are excited. The eldest is keen to go to the mall, my son is keen for basketball with his mates, and my youngest wants to have a sleepover, and my wife, quite different to Chris Hipkins’ assessment, can’t wait till Monday, when Aquinas College opens the doors. I do need to add to that that our family and, indeed, many families across this country do acknowledge the job well done of this Government, of the health department and its senior officials and health workers, and of an Opposition which asked the right questions through the process. It has been a collective achievement that we are all rightly proud of.

But tomorrow we walk into a new New Zealand: a country with no international tourists, a country with a massive challenge that sits in front of us. We are in a moment which historians will look back on as a crisis of this generation in terms of the scale of the economic costs that we now have to deal with as a country: 500,000 small businesses teetering on survival, a thousand people a day unemployed, and Treasury saying that that will continue for the next 150 days. Tomorrow we will see the Government’s response to that crisis. It is their day; we will have numbers bandied around that are so eye-wateringly large that, perhaps, their impact will actually be lost for a moment. But there will be a sea of deficits sitting in front of us—debt incurred by this generation and the next and potentially the next.

The great test that will sit in front of this Government is: now that the country has broadly held the view that you have got us through, collectively, this health crisis, do you now have the capacity to get us through the largest economic crisis of a generation? They will fail the test. The reason they will fail the test is there simply is not enough capacity in this Government to create an economic and commercial coherence in terms of their response. You simply need to look at Cabinet. There are three or four heavy lifters and 15 empty seats, and that is what the country sees. That has been the amplification of the last few weeks. They smile and laugh, but they know it’s true, because there is a complete lack of commercial experience that sits behind this Government. And we will see it tomorrow when they look and present to us their prescription for New Zealand. There won’t be, at the core of their focus, a deep understanding of what those 500,000 small businesses need. They see it through the lens of expanding the Government support in terms of more debt. There’s no understanding that what they needed throughout the last few weeks was cash, and cash now, and support—and not only support but a vision and a capacity to articulate a future that gave them confidence.

When you have 50,000 tourist operators standing up and saying, “Where’s the leadership? Where’s the leadership? Where’s the vision? Where’s the ability to be able to partner with us as the small businesses of this country and help us to get up off the canvas?”—there is no capacity for this Government to do this. Look at their track record. The idea that you would hand to Phil Twyford, a man who is synonymous with the failure of housing, the failure of transport—that he now is the face of economic development in this country when we are in the greatest crisis of a generation is absurd. The fact that Willie Jackson, whose contributions to this House are often rambling and personal, has the ability to grip the fact that, from an employment Minister, we have a huge challenge in front of us in terms of lifting people’s assurance and confidence and skills and resilience—it is a whole-of-Government, a systemic approach that is required. And on every test apart from empathy, on every test apart from kindness, on every test around competence and coherence and commercial progress, this Government has failed, and we’ll see it again tomorrow.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. I te tīmatanga ka noho au ki Te Reo Māori, ka mutu ka huri atu au ki te reo Pākehā. Tuatahi māku, ka tangi mōteatea ki ngā mate huhua o te wā. Ki roto i ngā wiki me ngā marama kua pahure ake nei kua rangona e māua ko taringa i te tini kua riro atu ki te pō. Nō reira, kotahi tonu te kōrero ki a rātou, haere mai, haere. Ka whakahokia mai ngā rārangi kōrero ki a tātou me tō tātou Whare e tū nei. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[Greetings, Mr Speaker. I will begin in Māori and then deliver in English. Firstly, I mourn tears of sorrow to the many who have passed on. In the weeks and months that have passed, word has reached my ear about the many who have gone to the night. Therefore, I say only one thing to them, return in spirit but go in peace. I will now bring my speech back to us, to those in our House. Greetings one and all.]

As I often do in this House, I like to start my contributions in Te Reo Māori, and my contribution, given its being the first since the lockdown—so it’s been a number of weeks, or a couple of months, since I’ve had the opportunity to speak in the House—I want to start fittingly by observing a farewell to those who have passed on during this time. I want to acknowledge just how hard it has been for whānau right across Aotearoa during these particularly unknown times in our country. I myself: my father’s sister passed away during this time, and we stuck to the guidelines. She passed, sadly, on a Monday morning unexpectedly, and she was buried Monday afternoon, robbing my family and I of the opportunity to express our love, our gratitude, and farewell her appropriately while also supporting my cousins and our whānau during that dark time. So I want to acknowledge the whānau across the country who are enduring times like this, and I want to say to them all: we’ve heard them.

In the past half hour, we’ve made the announcement that we have reviewed the tangihanga and the funeral guidelines. We have heard the voices of the many people across Aotearoa New Zealand who have expressed how hard it has been for them. We have spoken to funeral directors in the past 24 hours. We have spoken to iwi leaders in the past 24 hours. We have spoken to many whānau as individual MPs in this House, and I think we’ve made the right decision that, with strict guidelines and strict health rules around the ability to mourn for a loved one, we can continue to proceed to have 50 people attend a funeral. We’ve worked closely with funeral directors to make sure that those guidelines are very clear to our whānau so that they are able to mourn for their loved one who has gone on to the night. This, of course, proves rather difficult in some instances—for marae, who I want to congratulate for doing a fantastic job at responding during COVID-19 to the needs of our people while keeping them safe. But, for somebody like myself in the electorate of Tāmaki Makaurau, many of those whānau will take their loved one home. So I want to make sure, to those whānau, that the guidelines are very clear, and myself and my colleagues on this side of the House—and indeed, no doubt, across the House—on such an important issue will continue to communicate those guidelines to our constituents and our people right across the country.

On this side of the House, I am proud. I’m proud of the work that this Government has done with our coalition partners, New Zealand First; our supply and confidence partners, the Greens; and the stewardship that we’ve been able to lead our country on. We have navigated dark times for our country. We have now come to a point where, in the words of my grandfather, we have come too far not to go further and done too much not to do more. It’s important that we remain vigilant, and I believe that the work that we’re doing on this side of the House not only continues the good work that we’re doing but also has an optimistic outlook for the future of our country. The other side of the House will continue to say that this is doom and gloom; on this side of the House, we say: we have a plan. I’m proud to be working alongside my colleagues of all three parties on this side of the House. I’m proud to work alongside the Māori caucus, the Māori Ministers, and their members who, in their regions, have worked hard to make sure the voices of their people have come to the fore in decision making and in the pathway that we carve ahead for ourselves.

I do want to acknowledge our whānau at home. I, myself, have received some criticism that I haven’t been here to voice the concerns of my electorate of Tāmaki Makaurau. In order with your guidance, Mr Speaker, you made it very clear that the rules in this House require only a certain number of MPs and Ministers—I’m happy now to say that I’m here. Their voices, while even in my absence continued to be heard during the decision-making process, will now be heard even louder in the corridors of Parliament.

In conclusion, once again I remember those who have passed on and, in my final words, say: let’s do this Aotearoa; we’ve come too far not to go further and we’ve done too much not to do more.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.