Estimates Debate — Education and Workforce Sector (relating to immigration, workplace relations and safety, and employment)

Members, I understand the responsible Ministers are available to speak to the remaining Votes in the education and workforce sector volume (B.5, Volume 2). Again, the question is that Vote Education, Vote Education Review Office, Vote Labour Market, Vote Pike River Re-entry, and Vote Tertiary Education stand part of the Schedules.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s a real pleasure to take this call as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee and to summarise the evidence. In this part, we are focusing on the 2020-21 Estimates for Vote Labour Market. It includes ACC appropriations—that’s what we are focusing on—ACC appropriations, immigration appropriations, and workplace relations and safety appropriations. This is because we have already dealt with the education component earlier.

So the select committee had the opportunity to have the Minister before the committee. At that time it was the Hon Iain Lees-Galloway, and the Minister was in charge of all three portfolios—that is, workplace relations and safety, immigration, and ACC. The total appropriations, as noted by the select committee for 2020-2021, are just under $2.39 billion.

In ACC appropriations, if I quickly look through those appropriations, they include appropriations for claims on the Non-Earners’ Account and for claims by non-earners on the Treatment Injury Account. This is to cover the estimated cost of injury prevention, claim processing, assessment, payment services and case management, public health, acute services, medical services, elective healthcare, and contracted services. Appropriations also include appropriation for claims on the Non-Earners’ Account to cover the cost of income maintenance, independence allowance, and other compensation payments. It includes an appropriation for claims by non-earners—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Can I just interrupt the member. As the select committee chair, you don’t have to make another speech in this part, because you’ve already spoken in the first part. You’re most welcome to continue, but you don’t have to do another speech.

Thank you. That time I just covered education.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I know, but your time is counting out of your party’s—

Yes—yes. I understand. So that means I can ask questions in this?

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Absolutely.

Yes—thank you. So—yes, we will move on to questions. Thank you for that clarification, so I don’t have to summarise the report. The question that I have for the Minister is that I’m receiving a huge amount of correspondence—this is in regard to immigration—for people that are stuck overseas. I’m talking about people that are partners or spouses of New Zealand residents and citizens. So these people have the right to be here with their partner or spouse who is a New Zealand citizen or New Zealand resident. These people, some of them have gone overseas before lockdown. They got married in that country. They came back hoping that their partner or spouse would be able to join them here after their application is processed, but because of lockdown that person has not been able to come and join their partner or spouse here in New Zealand.

There are a lot of families in that kind of stress, and I would like to know from the Minister what his stance is on these people that are stuck overseas. I’m talking specifically about spouses and partners of New Zealand residents and citizens, because we have allowed New Zealand residents and citizens to come here but their spouses and partners, because they got married just before lockdown, are in a different country. They are not residents or citizens here yet, but their application needs to be processed. These people are already here. They cannot go back and join their partner or spouse back home, but they want their partner or spouse to come here and join them here, because this is the place they have chosen to live together. So it will be good to have some clarification on the plan that the Minister has to bring in these people that are stuck overseas. This is creating a lot of stress amongst a lot of people that are here that were hoping that their husband or wife will be able to join them as soon as they come back here and as soon as their application process will go through. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Can I thank the member for her question. The Government, obviously, understands that it’s a difficult time for the group of people that she has discussed in her contribution, but I think the starting point has to be that our border is our first and best line of defence in order to keep the COVID-19 virus out of our communities. As the member would appreciate, as well as the cohort that she is talking about, there are also groups such as temporary visa holders who are ordinarily resident here in New Zealand, who are also finding it difficult to come to New Zealand, but our borders are closed for a reason.

In amongst managing all of that is the management of the quarantine centres being undertaken by the Hon Dr Megan Woods as Minister of Housing. So while we are aware and understand the difficult circumstances that some of these cohorts of people who would like to come back to New Zealand to be repatriated, reunified with their families, we also have to understand (a) that the border is, essentially, closed, with a number of exemptions and exceptions. Obviously, for New Zealand residents and New Zealand citizens, coming back is fine, but it will take some time for us to work and stage through every visa category in order for us to think about how we might plan getting some of those people who have either got partners here in New Zealand, or who might ordinarily live in New Zealand, back into the country.

My understanding is if someone were to be in that situation, they would be able to travel back to New Zealand if they were travelling with their partners. Also, my understanding is that if they are not travelling with their partners, they are unable to re-enter the country. But, again, I will go back to my starting position, that the border, again—and we’re seeing, obviously, some sensitivities around it—is the best weapon, and especially the weapon that New Zealanders most want to see as secure to keep us safe from COVID-19.

It’s a privilege and a pleasure to rise in this Estimates debate. I want to change the focus today to WorkSafe, because as we know in New Zealand, we have an issue with workplace fatalities and workplace health and safety incidents, on the rise under this Government, and we heard from the previous Minister in select committee around what—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Sorry, sorry—sorry to interrupt the member. We are still on immigration.

Oh, Madam Chair, I’ve jumped the gun there—there we go.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It is a pleasure to rise to speak, actually, on immigration, and, in particular, on this line item that may have gone unnoticed by many but is incredibly important, profoundly important to those that it affects. That is the line item in the last Budget that affected the reunification of refugee families. It is a Green Party win that came out of our confidence and supply agreement with the Government. It affects the lives of refugee families that were separated from one another, often with the immediate family left behind in precarious situations, facing persecution, and facing war for years at a time. What we did in the review of the family reunification policy was not only to double the numbers of family members who would be reunified with their refugee family members here in New Zealand, but, for the very first time in the history of this policy, there is funding to support the reunification of refugee families. At a time in global politics when we see refugee families forcibly separated at various borders and children caged, New Zealand gets to stand as a counterpoint to the politics of prejudice.

We put in $21 million in the last Budget, in a time of pandemic. I couldn’t be more proud that we actually stood for the rights of people most downtrodden at a time where there is another crisis also facing the globe, which is the displacement of people, and it has been recognised by experts, by the United Nations, by anyone who can count, as being the biggest displacement crisis since World War II. So people fleeing persecution based on their race, based on their religion, based on their political beliefs, and those fleeing war are now displaced at such enormous numbers as to, per capita, be rivalling the crisis that the world faced when European Jewry had to flee World War II Europe.

New Zealand gets to stand for reunifying these families. We know that it’s, in fact, good for New Zealand when we stand for the rights of all of our communities, minority and marginalised communities included, and those who are just resettling here as new Kiwis. We know that within a couple of months of having their immediate family members being able to join them, refugees who are here alone will dispense with accessing mental health care, and so that’s incredibly profound. We know that each one of us has learnt what it feels like to be disconnected from our immediate family under the COVID-19 lockdown; and that’s what people are facing. You know, people are facing separation when their loved ones are ill, when there are birthdays, when there are family events, and when people pass away. We are putting resource into reunifying those family members so that that stress and that trauma, at least, can end for them.

So that is an incredible win. It is a historic win, and it will mean something to 300 more new Kiwis every year. They will remember that, and it will change their lives. I do hope that, having learnt with COVID-19 that the wellbeing of each of us is interconnected and inextricably linked to the wellbeing of us all, we will start to look at the prejudices in our systems and to address them when it comes to migrants.

The other aspect of our immigration policy that we do need to address is the parent category visa. We do need to acknowledge that there shouldn’t be a price tag attached to people being reunified with their immediate family member, their parents. Grandparents take care of children. That means that migrants can return to work, the families can function better, and that shouldn’t be a right that’s open only to those who can afford it.

The other thing that we are yet to address as a Government, and that the Green Party will continue to advocate for, is that migrant workers who are usually resident here, who are filling essential skill gaps, whether it’s in the regions, whether it’s in highly skilled jobs, whether it’s workers that we don’t quite even pay enough, will have access to the emergency benefit when things like the COVID-19 pandemic hit, because leaving anyone out is not really good for any of us. It is a weakness for us also. So standing for wellbeing I do celebrate the win for refugee families to be reunified. I hope that we continue to do that work for equality in our next Labour-Green Government.

I’ll just remind the member that this is no longer an opportunity for five-minute speeches that range right across areas that aren’t even related to the Estimates. This is an opportunity for question and answers of the Minister on the Estimates for 2020-21.

I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. I think the Green member has taken up most of the Opposition’s opportunity to ask questions of the Minister, so I seek leave for more time for the Opposition spokesperson at least to have a say on immigration.

Yeah, it is unfortunate. That’s one of the reasons why five-minute speeches are not desirable in the process, but it’s entirely up to the Minister in the chair, if he’s willing to take a couple of questions.

I know you directed the Green member to be a little more tight with her speech, but I just wanted to point to and acknowledge the Green Party member and just to give some details in terms of the Estimates, in terms of the changes in the appropriations, essentially, for the issues that she was talking about. In terms of family reunification, we’re seeing an increase of just a little over $7 million over the next three years in order to increase the capacity of that particular system from 300 to 600 families.

Just very quickly, while we’re at it, in terms of increased expenditure—there is now close to $3 million per annum to extend the pilot for the Community Organisation Refugee Sponsorship, which was something which up until recently was, obviously, a pilot, but now we’re also able to extend that funding. That is where community organisations are able to sponsor refugees over and above the quota in order to look after them and make sure that they land safely here in New Zealand. I think that, in the area of refugees, it is another good development within this Budget.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Congratulations, Minister Faafoi, on your new role; let’s hope you do a good job—better than the other one. Now, the latest data I’ve got is 3 July, but up until then 161 employer applications for critical workers—none had been approved, not one. Now, we are in the most dire economic times that we are going to experience in living memory, and may even exceed what occurred in the 1930s. So part of that recovery is going to be an economic recovery. We need our businesses to be able to recover, yet critical workers are not able to get into this country—

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: Employ New Zealanders.

—and those—well, they can’t employ New Zealanders, actually.

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: Then train them.

Well, I can give you an example, if the member is interested. There’s a construction company called Rebartec; they have some new equipment that’s come into New Zealand. They cannot assemble this equipment without the manufacturer’s expertise coming into New Zealand—two people come from Australia. They have not been given an exception to come into the country. That means 10 jobs gone—10 jobs. There are numerous examples of companies that all add up to hundreds of jobs. More importantly, giving businesses the confidence to invest to help our recovery out of this deep hole we’re in—it’s absolutely essential that we get these people in. Now, we’re not talking about bringing someone in to do a job that a Kiwi can be trained to do. There just simply aren’t Kiwis to do it.

So my question to the Minister is: what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to help our economic recovery and get these critical workers in here? They’re not applying to fill a role that someone else in New Zealand can do, because they can’t. There’s been very good applications go forward being dismissed by Immigration New Zealand and it’s quite shameful. So what are you going to do about it, Minister?

Can I thank the member for his questions, but not necessarily all his comments. Can I correct him, because I believe he may have said that no applications had been approved in terms of critical workers yet, and I’ll give him the numbers for that soon.

In terms of decisions for essential workers, which was pre - 18 June, Immigration New Zealand received 248 expressions of interest before 18 June. I can tell the member that 90 of those were approved, 123 were declined, and 35 are still on hand pending to be closed out. Post 18 June, when it became the critical workers regime, I can inform the member that 488 expressions of interest have been received to date, of which 64 have been approved, 159 have been declined, and a further 265 applications or expressions of interest are on hand.

The member asked an oral question, I think, late last week in terms of what the Government is going to do to deal with these requests from businesses around critical workers. The first and fundamental thing that the Government will do is make sure that we continue to make the right calls at the right time to keep our country safe. That, unfortunately, has put our communities and businesses and sectors in difficult positions. But I believe that the team of 5 million are still willing to go through some of those difficult decisions and those difficult times to ensure that what we see happening around the world, where COVID is growing and not slowing, doesn’t happen here in New Zealand.

The criteria for critical workers is now set out, and, as I said to the member last week, if he is aware of any sectors that do have real shortages, then I would suggest instead of blowing wind in this House he instruct those sectors to do a couple of things: find out the information and the criteria in order to try and bring these people through, but also work with them to change with the immediate times. That is, to make sure that if they do find themselves in a position where they do have shortages of labour, they do everything they possibly can to ensure that a New Zealander who can do that job fills that position.

The other thing that they should do is work with the Government or with others in the sector to start innovating around how they find skilled work or how they start training New Zealanders to do that work. I know it is difficult for sectors who have traditionally relied on migrant workers to fill a number of positions in a time when the border is closed, but the border is closed for a good reason, and that is to keep our country at the position where it is now, where our economy can function as close as possible to as normally as it can, and our community can function as close to normal as it can. And I would stress to the members to my left that that is a very privileged position in the world that we hold, and we have to start thinking outside the square to ensure that our economy can take benefit of the situation that we’re in.

💬 Erica Stanford: Madam Chairperson?

Is this still on immigration?

💬 Brett Hudson: No, we’re going to move on.

💬 Erica Stanford: Sorry—sitting down.

💬 Hon Kris Faafoi: OK.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): OK. Thank you, Minister. Thank you. We move now to workplace relations.

💬 Dan Bidois: Here we go—I’m ready.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Thank you.

I do want to take this moment to congratulate the Minister in the chair, Andrew Little, on his elevation to workplace relations. I want to start out this discussion—and I know the Minister wasn’t in select committee for this, but the former Minister we had in the select committee, and really good discussion around workplace deaths and workplace incidents, the record in the last few years, and what it’s going to take to actually get this improved. I think in the last couple of months there have been quite a few cases, in the media as well—reported in the media—around the way WorkSafe conducts its investigations. The Minister may be aware of the Gavin Jones report of last year. That was an independent report conducted by WorkSafe into the way it conducts its investigations, and that report found a significant amount of failings with WorkSafe in the way it handles investigations, a lack of staff, a poor culture, a lack of processes, a lack of training, a lack of focus, and outdated methods.

💬 Michael Wood: We’re not here to talk about the National caucus.

Ha, ha! Good on ya, Michael Wood. So my question is really in particular around the public nature of this. In the last few months, we’ve had a number of cases, and particular members of the public that have come out criticising WorkSafe and the way it conducts investigations, in particular in the last couple of days an investigation into the crash that killed two children. There were significant concerns around the way WorkSafe conducted its investigations. So there’s a deep public dissatisfaction with the way WorkSafe is acting in this area.

So I want to hear the Minister’s perspective on the report. What has been done since 2019? I know that this is an Estimates debate, so the key thing here is: how can you convince the public and therefore this House that the actions of your ministry and WorkSafe will in any way improve public confidence in the way WorkSafe conducts its investigations? That’s my question to the Minister, and I yield to have him answer this question.

Thank you to the member who posed the question, and I have to say, having been in the job now for a matter of a few days, I’m not right across the Gavin Jones report, what it had recommended. But what I can say, in the briefings I’ve had with WorkSafe to date, and my own interaction with them and knowledge of them, is that they do have a couple of critical functions they have to perform.

One is, obviously, investigating the notified accidents—and, particularly, serious harm accidents and fatalities—when they receive those notifications. They have to be thoroughgoing investigations, they have to gather evidence, and they have to make a judgment call about whether a prosecution is warranted. And just in the way elsewhere in the justice system has to operate, they have to work out levels of fault and culpability and distinguish those things that are, largely, the product of accident or oversight, as opposed to recklessness and abject carelessness, which will attract, if not a prosecution, a severe penalty. The other function they have to do is to work with employers or businesses, and, indeed, whole industries—through their improvement notification sort of processes, through educated processes—to lift the level of health and safety performance. So they’ve got to be able to do both. It’s not quite carrot and stick; it’s sort of big stick and small stick, I suppose, that they have to use to make that change.

Are we making improvements? The indication is that our health and safety performance nationwide has plateaued. If you look at fatalities in the last two financial years, workplace fatalities are pretty much the same—82 or 83. In the figures for the year ending 30 June 2020, the fatalities on Whakaari / White Island were counted as workplace fatalities, because it was adventure tourism, and that counted. So that inflated that level of workplace fatality. But, nevertheless, we are still pretty high, you know. I remember being very concerned when our workplace fatalities were running at roughly one a week. Well, we’re well ahead of that. So we have work to do.

There is no question that good workplace health and safety is a matter of workplace culture, and it needs leaders, not just in management but in the workforce as well. In order to achieve that, it requires a positive relationship between management and the workforce generally, and then it needs to allow leaders within each of those sides of the bargaining equation, if you like, to step up and provide leadership on health and safety. Somebody needs to say to the worker who has a poor health and safety habit, “Uh-uh, you ain’t doing that here.” And it’s not always the manager who’s the best person to do that. The most powerful and influential voice in the workforce, when it comes to behaviour change to achieve an improved health and safety culture, is your peers in the workplace—fellow workers. I think WorkSafe gets that. They’re working with both management and unions and workers generally to achieve that level of culture change. That’s what will achieve real change and ongoing improvement in workplace health and safety.

Thank you to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for that explanation. Look, even if you take out the White Island tragedy, the numbers that we’ve been supplied by your ministry have indicated that it is—I mean, you’ve said “plateaued”, but it’s actually still an increase year on year. But, that aside, what I want to know is—in your Estimates—in the next year how things will look different. So let me just take a step back.

We’ve had the Gavin Jones report last year that was published as an independent report from WorkSafe. That report found a number of failings with the way WorkSafe conducts its investigations. Then, fast-forwarding a year, you’ve had, I would say, at least six or seven public cases in the media that have been reported where members of the public have had a lack of confidence in your agency’s ability to conduct its investigations. So I think it is a reasonable question to be here in the Chamber tonight and to simply ask: what is it specifically that your ministry is going to be doing differently in the next year in order to supply the public with greater confidence that the way WorkSafe conducts its investigations will, in fact, lead to better health and safety outcomes?

So I know, absolutely, you have provided a good kind of framework around the carrot and stick. That’s great, that’s fantastic. But what is going to be different from year to year—well, this year versus last year—to help see a measurable improvement in health and safety? And I’d just like to end in saying that nobody wants to have their workers, or their loved ones, go to work and not come home safe at night. So this is a genuine question I have for the Minister, and I would really appreciate a more robust answer. Thank you.

Thank you again to the member Dan Bidois. I don’t think that anybody would suggest anything other than his questions are motivated by a genuine wish and concern to see improvement in the area that we all know, I think, and understand needs to improve. So I accept that. Let’s bear in mind that, at the moment, WorkSafe receives roughly 15,000 notifications of harm incidents in the workplace. Some of those are more serious than others, obviously, and there will be fatalities within that as well. All of those have to be triaged and considered, and considered for levels of investigation of varying degrees of depth.

WorkSafe mounts nearly 600 prosecutions a year; they have, roughly, as I understand it, about a 94 percent success rate. So they are certainly striving to achieve calling those to account who cause harm. A 94 percent success rate suggests to me that they are taking cases that have a reasonably high probability of success. Achieving at a lower proportion suggests to me that they are picking some of the harder cases, as well, but I’ll leave that at that point. In the short time I’ve been Minister, and having had briefings about their systems, I know that they are on a continuous improvement process in terms of their triaging of their processes, in terms of trying to make the optimal decisions on resource allocation to get investigations going.

The case that the member’s referred to now in his last two questions, that has hit the headlines in the last couple of days, was a road traffic accident. So there was a police investigation. It was a dreadful, dreadful tragedy for that family where they lost two young boys, and I’ve met the family, as, indeed, his colleague David Bennett has as well. Following the police investigation and a prosecution and subsequent conviction and sentencing, WorkSafe conducted their investigation. They applied four investigators to that investigation. Having investigated it, they drew their conclusions against the Solicitor-General’s guidelines of prosecution that they are bound by; they made the determination not to proceed with a prosecution. When they had the opportunity to review that after the coroner’s inquest concluded that there was arguably a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act, WorkSafe then reviewed it but still drew the conclusion that a prosecution wasn’t warranted.

Now, I think, in those circumstances, if that situation arose, my expectation would be that WorkSafe would have sent the matter off for external review, not just done an internal reconsideration as they appear to have done. That’s the way you’ve got rigour in WorkSafe’s system. So, while I’m the Minister, I’ll be certainly looking to see that their systems are not just about getting good systems on paper, and people complying with them, but looking at opportunities to improve their level of performance and delivery. External sort of benchmarking, external review, is a very important way of achieving best possible performance, and I will certainly be continuing to encourage them to do that.

Thank you, Mr Chair, for the opportunity to take a call in this Estimates debate. We’ve heard several times in the debate, of course, already that a strong health response was also an opportunity to provide for a very strong economic response, and that is a little bit of what I want to mention here; in particular, of course, our biggest and our earliest response to the crisis, which was the wage subsidy scheme. We are protecting jobs, with almost $11 billion in wage subsidies that we have already paid out to 1.6 million workers. That also includes our migrant workforce—there was a mention of that before. People that are here on temporary work visas had the ability to have their jobs protected, because, of course, their employers were able to apply for the wage subsidy. So it’s cushioning the blow of that impact of COVID and keeping people in jobs that gives us that real opportunity to kickstart the economy again.

That actually brings me to a question for the Minister. When we’re talking about kickstarting the economy, Minister, I wondered if you could tell us about the Treasury forecasting when it comes to unemployment levels in relation to the pre-COVID levels that we saw—so what the Treasury is telling us that we could expect as a result of that strong and hard response. Pre-COVID, we, of course, had those record low unemployment levels because of the programme of action that our Government was carrying out. Now, in workplace relations we have had some significant improvements when we’re looking at, recently, the improved provisions for parental leave, now having six months’ paid leave for new parents; lifting the minimum wage to $18.90, well on our way to $20 by 2021, and that will benefit more than 200,000 workers.

We’ve seen during the COVID-19 lockdown that it was some of our lowest-paid New Zealanders at the front line of our essential work that kept us going all through that crisis period, and so we’re hugely grateful to our supermarket workers, our cleaners, our security guards, our rubbish collectors for doing that amazing work that they’ve done over that same period. At the same time, COVID-19 has reminded us that health and safety is important, so that we are ensuring that people remain safe in their work. It has been mentioned before, and we have done a lot of work in helping New Zealanders keep safe.

Now, our next question to the Minister has been—[Interruption] Of course, it has been a very difficult time for anyone concerned about job security and for anyone losing their job. So my question to the Minister: why was it important in our Government response to COVID-19 to actually increase capacity in our programmes to make it easier for people to train and retrain and upskill coming out of COVID?

So then to just finish off, and I won’t take my full five-minute call because it’s rarking up the Opposition a little bit, hearing all of that good stuff that has gone on, on this side of the House. I will just finish by saying that Budget 2020 starts off rebuilding us together and continuing work to address the long-term challenges that we see facing this country. Thank you, Mr Chair.

There’s a couple of questions there. I just want to go back to a statement I made earlier which was incorrect. I said there were roughly 600 prosecutions; there weren’t. In the last financial year, there were 446 targeted engagements. The number of prosecutions was actually 59 and 55 were disposed of with a 94 percent success rate, so my apologies to the committee for getting that wrong.

The questions asked by the member who’s just resumed her seat, Marja Lubeck—she asked about Treasury’s forecasts for unemployment. It is true that at the beginning of the pandemic, and certainly at the beginning of the lockdown, Treasury’s forecast for unemployment was significant. It was up around 16 percent. Those forecasts have been modified ever since and the latest forecast was considerably lower than that. I don’t have the precise figure in front of me except to say that those forecasts are constantly under review, and the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update will be out in a matter of weeks, and that will have the latest and most reliable forecast for that. So I think we should look at that. What I think is very clear, however, is that the economic data is showing that the recovery for New Zealand has been happening a lot more quickly than anticipated and a lot better comparably than other countries around the world, and we can be thankful for that.

The second question related to further or additional investments in capacity and programmes, particularly active labour market programmes, job assistance and retraining, and what have you. And, yes, that has been absolutely vital. We knew that as a consequence of lockdown, in order to keep New Zealand safe—every New Zealander safe—some businesses would struggle, some businesses would have to shed labour, and some businesses might even have to close completely. We could anticipate that that was going to happen. What we needed to be sure was that the programmes were in place to pick people up who needed assistance and help in the labour market to be redeployed, to be reallocated as quickly as possible, and, where additional skills and training were needed, where they could get access to those sorts of programmes. And that’s what we’ve been doing.

Fortunately, because we are a very prescient Government—we have been a very prescient Government and a far-sighted Government, I think I would say objectively—we’d already started a range of programmes, including the Reform of Vocational Education, or RoVE, as it has become known. That had already meant that we were embarking on measures to improve accessibility to programmes and, of course, we’d already commenced an investment programme, particularly around infrastructure so that a level of economic impetus was already being prepared for before we even contemplated issues like lockdown in response to the pandemic.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I appreciate the call. In the select committee report on this particular Vote, sneakily right down the end, is progress of the Equal Pay Amendment Bill. So I’d like to ask the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, given that there was an extraordinary—and it’s reported in the report—13-month delay from when we reported back from the select committee to the House for the second and third readings for this particular bill, and the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that the Government tabled, which was rather large and lengthy, and was referred to by several Ministers that it was important and was aligning aspects of the Employment Relations Act to the Equal Pay Amendment Bill—given that 13-month delay, does he regard the content of the SOP—did that warrant the 13-month delay? That’s my first question.

The second question is in regards to the $1 million that the 2019 Budget set aside to implement the framework for pay equity for the new bargaining scheme. Could it be available—will it be available—for what I’d call a claim navigation assistance scheme? The reason I ask for that is that you may get a scenario where there is a multi-employer and a multi-union claim, a large claim, that gets quite complex. What support regime will there be? Could that particular appropriation of $1 million be set aside to give support to businesses who may find themselves in a large multi-employer claim but, as a business, are not a large business? What assistance is going to be available for them to navigate what could be quite a complex scheme, and has that been addressed by the Government in this particular round of Estimates?

Thank you, Mr Chairman, and thank you to the member who has resumed her seat, Denise Lee. In relation to the first question, about the Equal Pay Amendment Bill—was the 13-month delay warranted or justified—I think, bearing in mind that part of that delay was because of COVID-19, and the reality is that lawmaking stopped for a period of some weeks, yes, it was warranted. When the bill was reported back from the Education and Workforce Committee, it was apparent that there were issues that the Government, with the benefit of its advice, thought could be improved, could be made better. And, indeed, the social partners had come to the Government and said, “Actually, there are some things in there that we think could be dealt with better. We’ve got some ideas about how that can be done in a better sort of way.” So the Supplementary Order Paper reflected that, and that came back. Now it has been, fortunately, debated and concluded.

I think the whole objective of the exercise was to make sure that the scheme that is available now for workers and workforces to achieve pay equity is a much more accessible scheme—not the convoluted sort of process that has been around up to now and, indeed, contemplated in previous proposals for legislative change. So it might have taken a little longer, and some people may have felt a little frustrated about that, but the reality is, I think, everybody agrees now—reflected in a unanimous vote in the House—that we have a law now that I think will go a long way, much more quickly, to improving pay equity outcomes for New Zealand workers.

On the second question, which is about the scheme, I’d just point out to the member that $750,000 is available for implementation of the scheme this year—$250,000 was spent last year in preparation for it. So it is expected that assistance and advice will be required for participants as they go through the process to achieve and negotiate pay equity. That support and assistance will be—

Members, that concludes the part on workplace relations. We now move to employment, if there’s any questions.

I seek leave to correct a response that I gave during the immigration Estimates.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.

In response to a question from Dr Parmjeet Parmar, I would like to clarify that response in terms of partnership visas. Partners of New Zealand citizens and residents are able to travel by themselves to New Zealand if they hold the appropriate partnership visa. This also accrues to dependent children of citizens and residents if the children have a dependent child visa. That corrects the answer that I gave during the Estimates to the question from Dr Parmjeet Parmar.

Vote Education, Vote Education Review Office, Vote Labour Market, Vote Pike River Re-entry, and Vote Tertiary Education agreed to.

Environment Sector