Secondary Legislation Confirmation Bill (No 4)

Kia ora e te Pīka, and thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate on the Secondary Legislation Confirmation Bill (No 4). Now, this is not usually a bill that is exciting for people. However, that said, I would like to say that behind every line of this bill is an actual person, because there is a grower, a truck driver, a family, a pensioner—to name a few—that this bill affects. I would like to talk not so much about the clauses of this bill but about the people that the clauses of this bill will serve. I’d also like to explain why Labour’s support for this bill comes with a clear message that we can do better.

Let me begin with why this bill is important. When we pass laws here in Parliament, it often lets Ministers and Government departments fill in the details through Orders in Council or via regulations. For most things, that is sensible, but when the Government sets a tax, imposes a levy, or bans something at the border, Parliament has decided that we must be involved as parliamentarians. Those instruments must come back to te Whare Pāremata to be confirmed, and, if they’re not, they fall away and they can be treated as though they were never valid at all.

I want to clarify that this is not red tape. This is our democracy in action. It’s the principle that taxes and charges on New Zealanders are decided by their elected representatives, not by an order signed in an office. Labour will always defend that principle. That’s exactly why Labour is taking this bill seriously.

Let’s begin by taking us, theoretically, to Canterbury. If you can picture a wheat grower on the plains, out before dawn watching the sky, he knows that one bad hailstorm in the wrong week can wipe out a whole year’s work. However, one of the things that gives him some peace of mind is that the wheat industry, through United Wheatgrowers NZ, funds its own disaster relief insurance scheme. It is paid for by the levy that this bill confirms. If we fail to confirm this bill, that safety net goes away—so of course Labour supports this bill.

But here’s something that the House should be aware of. The referendum that backed the wheat levy had a turnout of 17 percent. Those who voted were strongly in favour—86 percent by number—but more than four out of five of those eligible growers didn’t vote at all. The Ministry for Primary Industries gives reasonable explanations: some growers only plant wheat now and then, and for many it’s a small part of their farm. I accept that, but the law sets no minimum turnout whatsoever, so we should look at whether the Commodity Levies Act should require extra justification when turnout is that low. That’s not an attack on our wheat growers. It’s about making sure that when the levy comes, every grower feels that it was genuinely theirs.

Now let’s compare that to our passionfruit growers. This is a small industry of mostly small, family-run operations growing fruit that some of us grew up with on the back fence. Their referendum turnout was 79 percent, and that’s what rural industry ownership looks like. If we look at the summer fruit growers, the orchardists of Central Otago and Hawke’s Bay who give us the cherries and the apricots on our Christmas tables across the country, they had 94 percent support.

These growers do the right thing: they organise, they vote, they invest together in research and biosecurity and pest control—the kind of work that no single orchard could afford alone. Yet both of their orders were made on 29 June, just one day before the deadline. They missed the bill entirely when it was introduced, and the Regulations Review Committee had to add them in. Levy orders run on a six-yearly cycle. Everyone knows when they expire. Growers who did everything right shouldn’t have the funding hanging on a last-minute scramble. We would like the ministry to plan these renewals well ahead so that the industries that turn out in force aren’t left waiting.

Now let’s see how this bill affects our truck drivers. The Secondary Legislation Confirmation Bill (No 4) confirms changes to road-user charges for 50 MAX trucks, high-productivity vehicles that now make up a big part of our freight fleet. Permit requirements for those trucks have been removed, and this change makes sure that charges they pay stay exactly the same. That is sensible—less paperwork for operators and no change for the road fund. But the instrument is called the fuel response regulations, and the committee describes it as “fuel crisis relief for the heavy vehicle industry”. The ministry’s own letter doesn’t even mention “fuel” once. It says this is about the land transport rules reform regulation programme. For a trucking operator, though, doing the sums during a fuel crisis, the difference matters. Was this relief, or wasn’t it? If the law carries the name, the Government should be able to explain it.

Now to our families and to a harm that many parents fear. This bill confirms the ban on importing nitrous oxide without a permit from the Director-General of Health. Anyone who has picked up those little silver canisters from a park or school car park knows why that matters. Customs has told the committee plainly that if this isn’t confirmed, the controls go and so does its inability to enforce them. Labour supports this without any hesitation.

The bill also confirms a new tariff concession allowing certain inherited goods to enter New Zealand duty-free. Think of a family who came from Tonga, India, the Philippines, or China. When a grandmother passes away back home, what comes across the ocean isn’t merchandise. It is her ngatu, her fala—fala fihu—her jewellery, her sewing machine, the pot she cooked in for 60 years. Up until now, grieving families could face a duty bill on their memories. This change says that grief shouldn’t come with an invoice, and Labour is proud to support that change.

Finally, the people who need this bill most. This bill confirms increases to benefits, allowances, and New Zealand’s superannuation. For a pensioner in Ōtāhuhu and Auckland in general, a sole parent in Hamilton, a disabled New Zealander in Christchurch, those increases are not abstract; they’re the difference between being able to pay a power bill or not. Labour will never put that at risk. But let me be clear: confirming this Order in Council doesn’t mean we endorse the Government’s choices about how benefits are indexed. When benefits are tied only to prices rather than wages, people doing it the hardest fall further behind the rest of the country. We’ll keep making that argument loudly.

How can we make this process better? The Regulations Review Committee did its work well and unanimously, and I’d like to thank all of the members of our select committee. However, every instrument in this bill should carry its proper legislation number, but as far as I know, four do not. The House should see in one table each instrument, its deadline, and why it deserves confirmation—and when Parliament writes to the chief executives of Government departments about taxes and bans, it is actually reasonable to expect those chief executives to respond to the select committee.

Labour supports this bill because behind it are growers, families, truck drivers, and pensioners who are counting on us, and because they are counting on us, we will keep asking the questions that makes the system worthy of their trust. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you so much, Mr Speaker. It’s obviously not common to see a bill that has such unanimous support throughout the House. I wanted to question, I guess, the timing of choosing to do it right now when last week, for example, we just had urgency to do things like move-on orders, which would have hurt our most vulnerable. I think bills like this one, which are so essential to pass before the end of the term, could have been debated at other times of the week to ensure that it actually passes, because the previous speaker is right: what this bill effectively does is it just simply confirms secondary legislation that continues providing a lifeline for people who may need it.

For example, I want to focus on the adjustments to benefits based on the Consumers Price Index—so this is the CPI. This bill confirms this, and this means that right now, beneficiaries are falling further and further behind in their living expenses. This is not just my reckon. The Ministry of Social Development’s income report shows that people on the lowest incomes are actually worse off now than they were a while ago and are less able to make ends meet.

What this bill does is it confirms the automatic adjustment of main benefits to the CPI, and there is a bit of history as to why we have chosen this measure. I think that if people are looking at this bill and they’re looking at the range of things that it confirms, they may be left wondering, well, why it is that we have chosen to index main benefits to the CPI and why it is that we’re just having to debate it in order to confirm this. Not that long ago, this Government chose to change how we index benefits. Previously, under the previous Government, the benefits were adjusted to wages. We said that it should be a formula that guarantees the largest increase, and so it should be the CPI or wages, whichever is highest. But, instead, this Government chose to take that back and put it to the CPI—which they were advised on. Even though we are confirming the secondary legislation today, what we are confirming today had advice from the Government that it would leave our poorest New Zealanders worse off over the medium to long term.

I think this is a really important distinction because while we support the bill and we support the idea of confirming something that will lead to some increase in main benefits, we know that the way that this has been, basically, formulated will still leave people worse off. So, again, this kind of legislation can sometimes feel a little bit innocuous—like we all say that we will of course support it because it just, effectively, confirms things that need to be confirmed so that they can continue existing—but I do think the politics behind some of these decisions really matters. It wasn’t like those machines one day woke up and decided that we needed to adjust, say, for example, income support to the CPI; it was humans on the other side of the House who decided that, actually, our poorest should have those benefit increases be lower than they could have been otherwise if wages were growing faster.

For a Government that claims that they want to lift wages and lower the CPI, what they’re, effectively, saying is that they want to lower the amount that benefits go up by and they want to grow the gap between people who are in work and people who are outside of work. I don’t want to sort of put aside the camaraderie and cross-party support for this bill over the political decisions that have meant that, actually, what we are confirming is decisions that in some cases are simply punching down.

So the Green Party does support this bill because, ultimately, should this bill not go ahead, some of these pipelines will just simply go away, but I really question the Government’s timing of this. To leave it, effectively, to the very, very, very last day of this sitting of this House on something that is actually so essential when we spent hours and hours on end last week debating legislation that was not essential puts the Leader of the House’s judgment, in my view, into question over what actually really matters to this Government.

Making sure that these lifelines continue to exist or criminalising homelessness, making sure these lifelines continue to exist or that we punch down on young people who actually need support as opposed to boot camps, and making sure these lifelines continue to exist or punching down on the Treaty—these are decisions that the Leader of the House made when actually deciding the kind of legislation that should be prioritised. So for any Government member who talks about how necessary this is, I implore them to have a chat with the Leader of the House—especially if she retains her role over the next term of Government—over whether maybe this kind of legislation should have taken priority over other legislation that actually and objectively causes harm to those that are the most vulnerable in our community.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. I’m very excited to speak on this important piece of legislation. It is actually really important that secondary legislation, like regulations and what have you, do come before this House because it recognises, essentially, the supervisory role of Parliament over the executive when they come to make this pretty wide-ranging series of orders and regulations and what have you, particularly in respect of levies.

We know that the Government has gone through and, in fact, increased levies pretty much across the board, pretending that they’re not increasing costs on New Zealanders, but, in fact, they’ve done that not only in respect of industry levies but all kinds of other levies, whether it be ACC levies or what have you. The industry levies that we see here, though, are something of a different order in that they are aimed at promoting in one way or another the industries to which they relate, and it is pretty important. I have sat on the Regulations Review Committee and, essentially, caught out some industries that were over-levying. They were building reserves, which isn’t what levies are for. Whilst it’s appropriate to be fiscally responsible, it’s not, essentially, a way to gather revenue from industry members. It’s simply a way to do the job that the relevant legislation gives you, and that’s often marketing for the purposes of export, ensuring biosecurity measures are appropriate, and so on.

Of course, the other levy in here is to do with the Biosecurity Act and the commercial vessel levy, which is actually really important. We see commercial vessels coming in, and quite often they’ll be carrying water as ballast and they’ll discharge it, and one of the things that this levy is about is ensuring that when that water is discharged, it doesn’t have any foreign biohazard material in it, whether that be starfish—which we’ve seen invading our seabed—or other seaweeds, clams and all kinds of things. That’s an important part, as well.

We’ve got the road-user charges order, as well, which is reducing the excise. Of course, that does leave a hole in the Government accounts, and we’ll be interested to see how that gets filled.

Also there is the prohibition on nitrous oxide, which we support as well because we do recognise that that has been entirely inappropriately used. Whilst it has a legitimate commercial use, the fact is that by far and away the majority of it was being used as an intoxicating substance, and there’s no substantial loss in saying that if you want to use it as a propellant for your whipped cream, you’ve got to look elsewhere. We support that, as well.

Other members have spoken extensively on the superannuation and retirement income, and social security measures. It’s totally important that these are kept up. At the moment, wages are not rising fast, and so the dual measure that the Labour Government put in, where it was the higher of wages or the Consumers Price Index (CPI), wouldn’t have kicked in, I imagine, this term, but it is problematic when we do see wages leaping ahead and we’ve got only a CPI adjustment. But, having said that, as Jenny Salesa and Ricardo Menéndez March have pointed out, it is an increase and it is an absolutely necessary increase, given the huge costs that are going up, and we’ve seen that the cost of food is going up. One of the challenges, of course, with having a CPI adjustment is that it recognises a basket of goods, whether it be rates, insurance, food, electricity, and so on, but it doesn’t necessarily mirror the exact costs that any given person has, whose accommodation costs, for example, might be a large part of their income, and so it can be somewhat skewed. But, as I’ve said, it is going up.

Now, I know that the House has got important business ahead of it, and I won’t, therefore, take any more time, other than to say that it is important that the House does seriously exercise its supervisory jurisdiction. It’s good to see that the Regulations Review Committee has done a thorough job in examining these levies and, surprisingly for this kind of bill, it has made some amendments to it. With that, we are supportive of this bill in front of the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker, and may I compliment you on your very nice green tie.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Thank you—just for you, buddy, just for you.

It’s very nice to see the respect you show this House on the last day of Parliament.

Also, to my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb, I believe that’s probably your last contribution in this House, and so thank you for your nine years and your contributions and, I guess, you’re going out on a high note with this piece of legislation. It was riveting, and we thank you so much for your service.

We do support this legislation, and most of the things have been said, so I won’t say a lot. It gets everything from biosecurity to commodity levies to restrictions on some imported items, and adjustment to alcohol, tobacco, excise duty, road-user charges—the list goes on. The one I wanted to mention was around the biosecurity—biosecurity levies, imported goods, and commercial vessels etc. I was actually in Wellington International Airport recently, and got to see behind the scenes, to see the work that’s done there—everyone from customs, through to baggage handling, through to air-traffic control. I got to get an insight into biosecurity, and just the importance of biosecurity to our nation.

We are a small island at the bottom of the Pacific, and the gift that we have is our humongous moat around New Zealand. It protects us but is also a huge risk. We need to make sure that we are getting our protections at our borders right. It is only one mistake, or one lapse, or maybe one lack of funding to be able to provide the right border security, and the invasive species will get in, and we’ve seen those expressions time and time again over the years. This, to me, is a really important part of this legislation, around ensuring that those pests and diseases stay out of New Zealand, because we are lucky to be in the country we are and to have the natural beauty, and in natural species, etc., etc. Being at Wellington International Airport, seeing the staff and how diligent they were, seeing the work they do, not only at the airport but then to the port, etc.

Labour does support this. It is, as Ricardo Menéndez March said, it’s hard on the last sitting day, having to get it through as quick as possible, but we do need to do it, to make sure that secondary legislation is confirmed before the House rises for the election. The Labour Party supports this legislation.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading