New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill

I present a legislative statement on the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill.

SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website. I’d ask members leaving the House to do so speedily and quietly, with no conversations in the aisles.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I move, That the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill be now read a third time.

There has been considerable debate over this bill in proportion to the length of the bill and the size of its effect. To reiterate: the New Zealand Productivity Commission has for 13 years functioned as a Crown entity and a kind of quasi-Government thinktank, which has produced a wide range of advice on public policy matters—everything from strengthening global links through trade and investment, to building more homes, to improving the quality and quantity of regulation. All of those resources produced by the Productivity Commission, including one more report, expected to be reported back to the House on 15 February, will remain as public property, in the public domain, ad infinitum. For the rest of this country’s history, they will be available as a valuable asset. Many of them, I hasten to add, would be very beneficial if the Government implemented them.

We heard someone say that perhaps, because people are dying, we should stop medical treatment. Well, that’s not quite the right analogy for stopping the Productivity Commission—and it was James Shaw who said that. I think a better analogy is that, when we’re doing a bad job, it’s time to stop asking for more large reports on what to do and start implementing the advice that we’ve already got. In this particular case, we are going to stop giving around $6 million a year to the Productivity Commission to produce more reports. We are going to take that money and we’re going to establish a ministry of regulation, whose job it will be to uphold and enforce the quality of lawmaking in New Zealand and to review the red tape and regulation that stifles so much productive activity up and down this country, so that New Zealanders can get on with building their homes, their families, their businesses, and their lives without undue restriction from badly made laws. That is what we are doing.

One of the consequences of that is that a group of very good, intelligent, productive people who have been in the commission—some of whom are past people, such as the inaugural chair, Murray Sherwin, others who have been commissioners since, and those who are staff members—will no longer have employment at the Productivity Commission from the end of this month. This is something that has been signalled since the end of November and, as I assured members in the committee stage, one of the first things I said when we asked how we are going to go about this was I said to the Treasury officials—who have been responsible and, I think, have done a very good job of this policy process—we must make sure that we look after the current Productivity Commission staff. I have every confidence that that will happen. Of course, I’m not going to comment on the specifics, because there is a series of private matters there, but that has been one of our first priorities. That means that those people are being looked after, as best as can be hoped with a range of personal circumstances, as we go through this process.

What remains is two big opportunities. One is for the Opposition to actually read some of the fabulous work that the Productivity Commission has done, so that they will have some policy ideas to take to New Zealanders and show how they can actually make New Zealand a better place than they did last time. And, if they were to do that, they might start asking higher-quality and less back-bity questions at question time and start bringing along some ideas! The second is for the Government that is in place to use the proceeds that would have gone to the Productivity Commission in the next financial year to establish the ministry of regulation and start seriously improving the quality of regulation that New Zealanders up and down this country face, so that they can in a very real way experience and access tino rangatiratanga—the ability to use their own property, to live their own lives as they see fit, without following ridiculous, poorly made regulations, which, I would say, could be characterised as one of the worst manifestations of colonisation. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Thank you. Well, here we go. Don’t raise the ire of David Seymour now that he’s in Government or he will disestablish you. It’s a pity, really, isn’t it, that we’ve got a commission whose objective is to assist the Government in raising the productivity of New Zealand—as the Minister has identified, on its staff it has some really good thinkers and it’s developed some really good policy or proposals—and then he kills it. He’s criticised the Government over the years for not picking up these reports and implementing them. Well, now it’s his turn. Let him do exactly that. So I look forward to seeing those responded to in concrete and real ways.

The real tragedy, though, is that having recognised the usefulness of the Productivity Commission, as the Minister himself identified in his speech, this is going to be replaced with a bundle of bureaucrats looking at rules. Go and order the clipboards, David Seymour, your people are going to need them, because that’s, essentially, what we’ve got here—we’ve got yet another layer on the legislative and regulatory check. It’s not just Regulations Review Committee, Legislation Design and Advisory Committee, the Attorney-General, other select committees, ministry officials, the Attorney-General report, regulatory impact statements, departmental reports and statements; no, we’re going to have another one of those. We’re going to have the “David Seymour department regulation ministry review statement”. And I really can’t see that that’s going to add anything at all, other than employing a few of the public servants who other departments are laying off—I suppose that’s one glimmer of hope.

I found it difficult to listen to him pretending to be compassionate as he demolished the Productivity Commission and said, “Oh, and I said, ‘Look after the employees.’ ”, without once saying what he’s doing, without once saying that he’s giving them compensation for terminating their employment, without once saying that he’s making sure that they are transferred. So he’s got no care for those people whatsoever. And the bill that is drafted under his care has no provision whatsoever for respecting the employment relationship. It says, quite shortly, quite bluntly that the employment contracts are terminated. Ironically, leases aren’t terminated. Ironically, all of the other contracts held by the Productivity Commission are moved to the Treasury, but employment contracts are terminated—end of story—which really goes to show you what this Government is really about.

So, look, yet another piece of legislation from this Government which is destroying. This is not a Government that builds up; it’s a Government that tears down. And so far, all it’s done is tear down Labour policies and now, ironically, it tears down the ACT creation: the Productivity Commission. Look, one day, I hope we’ll hear in this House something about the ministry for regulation. I look forward to having the opportunity to scrutinise exactly what that’s going to look like. I’ve certainly seen the three different draft bills that failed in this House previously under the ACT Party’s watch, and I can only hope the same will happen for the next one. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. In his third reading contribution just now, the Hon David Seymour started by complaining, or apparently complaining, about the length of the debate on this bill relative to the length of the bill itself, which I find ironic, because the Government put this bill into urgency and then spent most of Wednesday evening filibustering it in order to make it go slower. So many of the contributions, especially in the committee of the whole House stage, were questions about words in the interpretation clause, which are pretty easily dealt with, and which, in fact, most of the people asking do, or ought to, know the answer to already.

Another of the ironies of all of this is that the Hon David Seymour says that he wants to disestablish the Productivity Commission in order to be able to then use the money to establish a ministry for regulation. He’s very concerned about the quality of regulation in this country, and so concerned is he about the quality of regulation that this bill has had no submissions and no select committee hearing, it was put through under urgency, and it has no regulatory impact statement attached to it. In other words, it is one of the worst examples of poor parliamentary process and governance and oversight that you can get in this Parliament, where the Government is using the urgency process, not because something is actually urgent, but because they just don’t want to take the time to have a proper regulatory oversight of the process. So that’s another of the many ironies that are attached to this bill. He may complain about the length of the debate, but I think he may have actually just let himself in for it, given the shoddy regulatory approach to this bill itself.

Part of the length of the debate, of course, has been extended by the fact that Mr Seymour and other members of the Government have spent much of the time talking about something that isn’t in the bill, and that is a proposed ministry for regulation. They’ve extolled the proposed virtues of this proposed ministry of regulation, which doesn’t exist. As far as we know, it isn’t on the—well, it’s not contained in the bill and there’s no reference to it in the bill, but they have spent a great deal of time talking about this thing that actually isn’t in the bill. All this bill does is disestablish the Productivity Commission, and so then the question becomes “Is it a good idea to disestablish the Productivity Commission?”, not “Is it a good idea to do something else with the money?” That is different: that is a budgetary process, rather than a process of deciding whether or not to disestablish the commission.

It’s obviously entirely legitimate for a Government to decide that they want to stop doing something and then use the money to do something else. That’s entirely fair and reasonable, and Governments do that all the time—they do it every year through the Budget process. But in order to justify shutting down the Productivity Commission, there have been some arguments made in an attempt to say that “Well, it’s a good idea to shut down the Productivity Commission.”, so let’s examine some of the arguments that they have made to do that.

The primary argument that I heard members on the other side make—because remember that they have continuously extolled the brilliant nature of the work that the Productivity Commission has done, and that does not appear to be in debate at all. They’ve said very clearly that they think that the work that the Productivity Commission has done is good work, and, under normal circumstances, if you didn’t need the money for something else, presumably that would then continue. But one of the things that they have said as a reason for shutting it down is that Governments don’t listen to the advice of the commission. Well, if you take that to its logical extreme, you would also disestablish the Treasury, and then so the bottom of The Terrace would sulk because every Government in history has continuously ignored the advice of the Treasury, and yet you don’t shut the Treasury down because you ignore its advice. I mean, it’s kind of de rigueur for Governments not to listen to advice from other parts of the Government. So that is a completely spurious argument for why you would close the commission down.

Another argument that was made was that it was felt that appointments to the commission were being politicised. Now, there have always been ministerial appointments to the Productivity Commission, and, of course, people on this side of the House were concerned about some of the appointments that the Ministers on the other side of the House made when they were in Government, and we felt that those were political. But that was the process; that was the system. Now, they didn’t feel that those appointments were political, because they agreed with the opinions of the people that they were appointing, and therefore it didn’t look political. Then some other appointments were made by the Labour-led Government when they were in Government, and the then Opposition said that they were political because they disagreed with the opinions of the people being appointed. This is a ridiculously reductive argument.

It’s very easy to make that problem go away: you set up an independent appointments panel. It’s at arm’s length from the Minister, and appointments are done on the basis of merit, the people who are appointed to the appointments panel are human resources experts and recruitment experts and not Ministers, and so on. So it’s pretty easy to solve that problem if you were interested in solving that problem.

So the arguments for disestablishing the commission are weak. The arguments for retaining it are actually quite strong. As has been said, the work that they have done is of very high quality. There have been cases where Governments have actually adopted the advice of the commission. There are very few other parts of the Government where this kind of independent economic policy analysis gets done outside of ministries, and we kind of know what happens to ministry advice.

Mr Seymour challenged this side of the House to maybe read some of the reports and to perhaps adopt some of the advice and recommendations in some of those reports as policy. Well, I would like to assure him that, actually, not only have we read those reports, we have adopted some of those policy positions, and I’d like to refer to one in particular.

In their very good report in 2018, which was commissioned by the Hon Steven Joyce, a National Minister at the time, the Productivity Commission produced the Road to Net Zero report, a very substantive, long piece of work. One of the many, many recommendations in there was that the Government adopt a “feebate” scheme to incentivise the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs). A “feebate” scheme is where a fee is applied to the more polluting vehicles, and that revenue is then recycled into subsidies for the less polluting vehicles. That was adopted by the Green Party in Government between 2017 and 2020. It was referred to as the Clean Car Discount, which was implemented in the last term, and it led to a more than 1,200 percent increase in the uptake of electric vehicles. It did exactly what the Productivity Commission—which at the time was run by people who had been appointed by the then National Government—had said in a report that had been commissioned by the then National Government, and those recommendations, in an entirely non-partisan way, were adopted by our Government.

Interestingly enough, the current Government is currently disestablishing the “feebate” scheme—which was recommended by the Productivity Commission when it was run by people who were theoretically non-political and who were appointed by the then Government—that was in a report that was commissioned by that then Government. So if Mr Seymour and the members of this Government want to make the argument that we should get rid of the Productivity Commission or that the people on this side of the House don’t pay attention to the reports and don’t put those things into place, then they actually just need to do a little bit of reading and take a little look at history—New Zealand histories, if you like—and see what actually happened.

There may actually be better ideas out there, by the way, in terms of how you increase EV uptake, but one of the primary reasons why the Government adopted that policy proposal was because it had been proposed by an independent Productivity Commission report. The assumption was therefore that it would be seen as non-partisan and political and that, therefore, it would endure, because that was the nature of that institution. However, that institution is about to be disestablished, and that side of the House will continue in opposition to their own coalition agreement statements that they will be guided by facts and evidence by disestablishing one of the leading organisations in this country that provides us with facts and evidence.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak on the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill. I think, while we can disagree, the Hon James Shaw and myself, it’s amazing how our perspectives change when we only move a few metres across the House. All of a sudden, the member is understanding the frustrations with the urgency process and the use of it which we spent a lot of time railing against only a few months ago. However, as I said, perspective matters.

The regulations ministry, which the Hon James Shaw referred to, as did the Hon David Seymour, will actually make a huge difference. Where the Productivity Commission wrote reports—and some of them were worthy; there’s no doubt about that—it really contributed little to our economy. We need to prune out the regulations that are not only extraneous but, further than that, are making so much more—

Hon James Shaw: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I was just wondering if we could invite the member to refer to the bill that is up for debate rather than to debate something that isn’t in the bill.

SPEAKER: Well, that’s true, but he’s only just getting started. I will listen to that, but I’ll call the member to keep it relevant to the bill. We’ve got a big day on here today.

STUART SMITH: Thank you, Mr Speaker, I won’t take up too much more time, because I covered some very good points on this bill. But all I can say is the time has come for the Productivity Commission to be disestablished, and the regulations ministry will take over and do a much better job. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill, third reading. So we’ve heard through the first and second readings and through the discussions that this has come to a point where we need to repeal. It’s this coalition Government that can see, on this side of the House, saving some money to put this money into a better place.

Hon Willie Jackson: Saving some money, is it? Oh, OK.

JAMIE ARBUCKLE: It will. The Minister has outlined where that will go.

So we know red tape is a problem, and we will be able to put this money to a better place and to a better spend. New Zealand First will support this. We commend this bill to the House.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. It’s really fascinating, sitting here and listening to members of the Government get up and repeatedly speak about something which is not in this piece of legislation—that is, this ministry of regulation or deregulation or red tape, or whatever it is. It’s a ministry of new bureaucracy, if you will. The reason, though, that I think that that’s a really important issue to, kind of, call to mind as we are working through this today is that, as the Hon James Shaw highlighted in his contributions, we here are working under urgency with this legislation through a process in which there has been no public consultation nor submissions. Yet members of the Government continue to proffer, in their contributions to this debate, about this hypothetical entity, of which we have no substantial detail, terms of reference, or otherwise.

I actually do think that’s it’s really worthwhile to actually point to the fact that this is very much in line with the pattern of behaviour that we’ve seen from this Government. Time and again, they have pulled out the shredder and said that they don’t like the direction that the country is headed in and decided to rip up that direction, that plan, that blueprint. And they’ve done so saying, “Just wait and see. We don’t know where we’re going. We’re not necessarily going to be clear on that, but we’ll revert to the status quo or business as usual until we figure that out. We have no time frame, no understanding of what the terms of reference are, nor the substance of what’s to come.”

I also think it’s really valuable, in my contribution, just to highlight the history of the Productivity Commission, as others have—albeit not members of the Government, in their very short contributions thus far. That’s, of course, to point out, as others have, and as the Hon James Shaw has in his earlier speeches and readings on this bill, that the Productivity Commission was originally an innovation of the ACT Party. Here, I have to point out that we have in the Chamber one Dr Don Brash. I do wonder what one Dr Don Brash, a former member and leader of the ACT Party may think about the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission—originally a baby of the ACT Party. The problem is we’ll never know because there was a circumvention of typical and conventional parliamentary process to have a select committee process and public submissions on this legislation before us today. Yet once again, we’re asked to just wait and see; to fly blind into this future that the Government has not given us any indication of what that looks like, but simply some bald-faced platitudes. That, I think, really goes to the heart of the statements, as put on the record by the Hon James Shaw yesterday and the day before, that this is Government by slogan.

So I think it’s also really important to point out that in the respective agreements that have cobbled this Government together—the Government of the “Three Scrooges”—what we have is a commitment to data and evidence in the founding documents of this Government. With regard to “data and evidence”—and this is a point made by the Hon James Shaw in his contribution just before—I have found that one of the most frustrating experiences that I have been part of in the last six years that I have been in Parliament, indeed, with a Labour-led Government, obviously, for the majority of that time, is that we have seen successive Ministers, Prime Ministers, Cabinets, Governments, and Parliaments commission advice, only to ignore it when it’s inconvenient. Then, there’s a lot of examples that I could give; there’s many, as the Hon James Shaw put forward, with regard to the Productivity Commission.

But here I just point out the likes of, for example, the 1988 Housing Commission report, which stated back in 1988: “New Zealand does not have the huge, insoluble problems of homelessness and substandard housing which confront many other nations.” That 1988 Housing Commission report happened to be the final report of the Housing Commission because it was disestablished, after being established about 50 years prior by Michael Joseph Savage as part of the instruments of Government to establish a premise of housing for all, obviously—as New Zealand is a signatory to human rights internationally—to underpin housing as a human right. And we had this Housing Commission exist to produce reports every five years to Governments of different stripes, to give them that data and evidence from an objective perspective to inform them how to produce a policy that was actually going to meaningfully result in housing being recognised as a human right.

What’s really interesting about the disestablishment of that Housing Commission, by virtue of its inconvenient advice, is that also in that final report from the Housing Commission, we had, and I quote here—or, rather, prior to quoting, just advice against the establishment of the accommodation supplement which we now see paid out to the tune of $2 billion a year. Mr Speaker, if I may take Te Pāti Māori’s call, with their permission.

Tākuta Ferris: Absolutely.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Ka pai.

SPEAKER: Well, hang on. With all due respect to the member on the other side there, when the Speaker’s asked a question, it doesn’t get answered from the floor. Nice work, though, and thank you, but carry on.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I quote here that the accommodation supplement would “add little to total housing supply while allowing private landlords and property speculators to make even higher charges for a non-expanding supply of housing … [raising] the purchase price of land and rented property.” Yet another example of advice that was ignored by the Government at the time. But not only did they ignore that advice, they disestablished the very commission that produced that inconvenient advice. We see, to this day, that the Government pays out approximately $2 billion per year in that accommodation supplement for a non-expanding supply of thousand. In fact, 1.5 million renters in this country tend to pay more of their money for lower quality, more overcrowded, and more mouldy properties.

There’s another classic example of this, actually, which the former National Government in 2014 commissioned, in the form of the Ministerial Forum on Alcohol Advertising and Sponsorship, which was chaired by Sir Graham Lowe and recommended, ultimately, a phase out of all alcohol advertising in sport. And guess what! We then saw then Minister the Hon Amy Adams saying that they didn’t want to progress with that advice from this panel that they themselves had appointed.

We then had, under the former Labour-led Government, a number of reports that were commissioned, and the advice was subsequently ignored when it became politically untenable as perceived by the mainstream. For example, we had He Ara Oranga, the mental health and addiction inquiry, and we had Turuki! Turuki!, the safe and effective justice review. The former recommended that we move towards a decriminalised approach for substances in this country in order to promote harm-based interventions—a health-based approach—in order to improve livelihoods and lives. Turuki! Turuki! actually went even further and recommended legal regulation of a few substances. This was seen as inconvenient, unpopular, and not something that Labour wanted to go out on a limb and advocate for, therefore it was shelved.

We also have a situation even more recently, at the end of last year, where the incoming Government once again did their favourite tactic of firing up the shredder with the Taxation Principles Reporting Act, and what they did, despite all of the evidence demonstrating—

Helen White: Point of order, Madam Speaker. We’ve had quite a long time without any reference to the Productivity Commission whatsoever.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Thanks for your help.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Thank you, Madam Speaker. So to the point of what I was saying with regards to the IRD tax principles bill and the general theme that we’ve seen under this Government of firing up the shredder and ignoring inconvenient advice and deciding not to follow advice where it may already be public, we saw the Minister of Revenue, at the end of last year, under urgency, deciding that the Government was going to repeal the IRD tax principles reporting legislation. Again, with all of the speculation, at that point in time, being that the Minister should have already had a draft report of that on his desk.

So, yes, all of that kind of leads us to this point whereby we have seen successive Governments decide to ignore data, evidence, and advice where it is seen as inconvenient. And I think that the Hon James Shaw made a really salient point when he said that, ultimately, this is a matter of the Government seeking simply to whip out the shredder, and we have to play this game of wait and see on what replaces it. So the Greens oppose this legislation, because we are very much open to, and invite, more data and evidence and informed policy. The Productivity Commission has produced a number of reports to this effect. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no idea where we’re going with this so-called ministry of regulation, deregulation, red tape, or otherwise. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I support this bill, the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill, and I think we’re kind of missing the point across the House a little bit, because this is about disestablishing the Productivity Commission, but it’s about driving productivity in this country and focusing on taxpayer dollars and spending them wisely and resourcefully—that’s what this is all about. If we’re going to focus on productivity, we’ve got to drive those sectors that produce, and that’s agriculture, that’s supporting our exporters, that’s supporting our businesses, and that’s supporting the places that are going to drive productivity in this country, and that is reducing red tape, reducing regulation, and reducing compliance. That is why I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I think it’s probably appropriate that Dr Don Brash is here to support this kaupapa, because, of course, this is yet another example of our far-right, race-baiting Government’s commitment to New Zealand. There’s no doubt about that—under urgency, cancelling the Productivity Commission so that David Seymour can fund his new ministry of regulation razor gang vanity project. This isn’t public policy; it’s social-good vandalism—I think we’re all agreed on that. And it’s hypocritical and extreme to be rushed through under urgency, with minimal oversight.

It’s a shame all the ACT Party aren’t here; I would have liked to have addressed them. Even their leader has applauded the work of the Productivity Commission. I mean, yesterday, just for example, he said that the Productivity Commission has done some tremendous work—tremendous work—over the past decade or so and that the work will remain available as an asset or a taonga for New Zealanders, to be a guide for policy formation. In the next breath, he cuts their throat. He amputates them at the neck. With friends like David Seymour, who needs enemies? He just loves this commission, but we know what he’s done with them. If we’re being honest, he’d admit that in killing off the Productivity Commission, the reality is that he wants to—him and his ACT friends—take from the rich and give them tax cuts instead. I think that’s what’s driving this legislation; I think we all know that. That’s left him scrambling to, basically, cut anything he can. He’s robbing Peter to pay Paul and then using Paul to sack Peter. No doubt about it. It’s political desperation at its worst; it’s not a visionary nation as Mr Seymour talks about. It’s a shame they’re not all here; I would have loved to have seen them all here today.

If the cost being saved by ACT’s new vanity project was so easy to gain, then why can’t this new “ministry of blaming red tape” fund itself from all the cost savings they were supposedly meant to find? It’s a ministry of red tape to examine if there is too much red tape—that’s the reality with this. The ACT Party would cut public education, public health, and public housing if they could fund a vanity programme like this, because it gives them enormous power, as we all know, to damage the regulations that our capitalism is dependent upon.

I was listening to my colleague Duncan Webb, who’s done a great job on this. Yesterday, he attacked this bill as a needless virtue-signal that won’t achieve the promise claimed. He’s right, it won’t. But what I fear is that ACT will use this new red tape ministry as a razor gang that will seek to amputate as much as it can for their pure ideological glee.

Hon Member: Whose money is it?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Well, that’s the question. And who’s backing the ACT Party? I think that’s the big question. Who is this all for? Why gut the Productivity Commission, a respected voice in our political landscape, for this new ministry of regulation razor gang vanity project? Who’s interests—and I’m glad the question’s been raised—are ACT actually serving here by silencing the Productivity Commission? Well, if you’ve been reading, we’ve all heard about it: the Atlas Network, an international far-right thinktank whose extreme policy platform seeks to attack public servants, push for radical privatisation, dismantle regulation protecting workers and their environment, and champions landlords over renters. That sounds remarkably familiar and similar to a certain party in this House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Can the member refer to the Productivity Commission bill at some point?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: All right. I thought I was. Thank you for that, Madam Speaker; I thought I was. But I’m making an analogy, Madam Speaker, in terms of who is behind the ACT Party and this policy. I see a smile coming out because what we’re hearing is that the exact policy platform that is being articulated by the Atlas Network is being articulated by not just the ACT Party but by the Taxpayers’ Union and the New Zealand Initiative. The question is: who is pulling David Seymour’s strings? That’s got to be the question for New Zealanders. Axing the Productivity Commission for a vanity project razor gang that implements far-right, free-market Atlas Network wish lists, and Don Brash’s wish lists—good man, Don Brash, might I add, apart from his strange political affiliations—raises questions for New Zealanders in terms of where we are with support from overseas far-right thinktanks. I put that in front of you today, and I want to praise our team for—

Dan Bidois: Which far-right thinktanks, Willie?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: We all know the far-right thinktanks. I say, as I’m about to finish here, that New Zealanders should be worried. There’s a big week coming up next week, in terms of Waitangi, and it gets even worse from ACT as we look at what they’ve got in front of New Zealanders next week. We’re all looking to see how David Seymour is going to be welcomed at Waitangi. Kia ora, Madam Speaker.

We are already very clear that the New Zealand Productivity Commission is no longer serving its intended purposes. We need to seriously get to work and improve the quality of regulation and reduce Government spending. So stop wasting time. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. What has actually been really clear is that this Government does not care for public consultation or engagement in relation to important bills that come before the House. Once again, this is another example of this Government putting through legislation without the ability to have a select committee, because, if we took it to select committee, the select committee—basically, public submitters would have the ability to be able to answer this question: do you want an independent advisory expert group that was set up for the purpose of allowing public debate, or do you want a Government agency controlled by a Minister whereby you are not able to participate in the debate? That is what a select committee process would’ve allowed the public to have been able to submit on.

As I’ve said in the second reading of this particular bill, this is about control. It is about David Seymour being able to control the research and narrative that comes out from his own new agency, as opposed to being able to, again, allow there to be a high-level debate, which is why this commission was set up in 2010. It was Bill English who said it was about encouraging high-level debate. Productivity, we all know, is an issue for our country, and it should be something that all parties within this House are able to debate freely with the public, but how can they have that debate if it gets siphoned into a ministerial Government agency? I also look to Rodney Hide, when he spoke about when this Productivity Commission was first established. He said, “Establishing the Commission is one concrete step towards arresting New Zealand’s productivity slide.”

So then I ask the question: why is it really that David Seymour wants to remove the Productivity Commission? I think what it is is because it’s a personality issue—a personality issue. David Seymour was reported in a press conference on 5 September 2023 saying it had been “frankly hijacked” and that he wouldn’t have appointed the chair that it currently has. If that’s the case—you just don’t like the chair—change it. That’s your discretion as the Minister. Don’t, basically, remove the public debate, the high-level debate, which a National and ACT Government put into place.

So I do not support this bill. I do not support the process and the logistics in which this bill came to the House, which removes the ability to have a public debate, in the same way that the Productivity Commission being removed does not allow for a public debate.

This bill is about evolution. It’s evolution of how we as a country can improve the productivity that we so dearly need. It is a bill that is the result of our coalition agreement with the ACT Party, and obviously, effectively, repeals the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act 2010. This will affect the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission, because it is seen by this coalition Government as no longer serving its intended purpose. This Government sees a better way to cut red tape and improve the productivity that this country so dearly needs. It’s an outcome that will improve people’s lives, it will improve people’s lifestyles, and it will improve people’s livelihoods. And for that very good reason, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. I am going to ask a question of the Government, which is what are they afraid of? Because this organisation that is going to be disestablished today was an independent body that looked at our most important problem in this country, other than climate change, which was the productivity which underpins people’s incomes in this country.

I want to go back to an earlier person in charge of the Productivity Commission. There was a report done by a woman called Gail Pacheco, and I worked with her. She was an academic, she worked in workplace relations, and she looked specifically at pay gaps. I want to remind the people who are listening here that while we have heard from the National Party that this will be replaced by something which is an evolution, apparently, it doesn’t do the same job at all, because Gail Pacheco looked at the wellbeing of people, and she looked at what was going on in terms of breaking the cycle of persistent disadvantage. I ask members of the public to think—and, in fact, the Government—is a ministry set up to look at cutting red tape really going to support that end? Is it going to be able to look at the same issues? The answer is no. It’s comparing apples with pears. It’s simply not the same thing.

So I agree with the Hon James Shaw when he says that that’s a side issue. Let’s talk about that at some other time. Let’s talk about the merits of this because we have a productivity problem in this country. We have a whole lot of businesses which have under four fulltime-equivalent staff. We have small businesses that need the support of good knowledge and expertise. It needs to move away from political rhetoric. It needs to move away from an ideological commitment to actual evidence. What we have in a small country is we have valuable people, and those are the people that are disestablished by this law. That’s why the contracts are being broken, because those people’s employment contracts represent those people’s commitment in this area. And what they’re being told today is, “You’re gone. You’re not coming to Treasury.” You’re not adding to the pool of knowledge that we desperately need in this country if we are going to actually build a productive economy in a very challenging environment with climate change, etc.

If we want to build that kind of economy; if we want to support our small businesses, our little companies that make up most of what we need to build in order to grow; if we want to build better frontier firms, which are those big firms that bring in the research and development, etc., we are not going to do it all by something that we’ll talk about the merits of later—something to do with regulation and cutting it. That’s not the whole picture, is it?

What we had here was actually what we call a quango. We have something that’s got independence. Maybe it wasn’t perfect. I, for one, during these debates, have learnt that perhaps what we needed to do was actually further depoliticise. We probably needed to move to a model where the person appointed was not appointed by the Minister and we probably needed to move to a model where those reports came to Parliament and we looked at them and we had to respond to them so we all focused on the wisdom of what is the great knowledge out there in our community—the great goodwill out there in our community from people who have headed these organisations and worked for them. That would have been a good thing. That would have been a good, decent tweak.

I remind the public: this Productivity Commission came up under ACT. It was ACT who thought about it. It was ACT who thought about that first iteration. Now we have ACT saying, “I’m not interested in listening. I don’t want to know what the experts have to say. I don’t want to know about productivity if it doesn’t fit my incredibly narrow frame. I want to stay in control of the whole picture up there.” So the public are being denied the whole picture. They’re being denied the help of good, hard-working, expert New Zealanders who would have contributed further value in this area we desperately need.

So don’t bark on to me about how you are helping hard-working New Zealanders when you are cutting them off at the knees and you are cutting off all the voices out there that you disagree with. That is my problem here, because we are not going to solve the problems in this country by simply allowing the Minister, who is bringing in a ministry of regulation, David Seymour, to rule the roost.

And it is very important that the National Party and New Zealand First think for themselves and think about that critically, because we have always had that tendency for a tail to wag a dog, and the Government is mainly not made up of the ACT Party. It is time, very early on, to recognise what is arrogant, what is shutting the ears and eyes to anything other than thinking that one person knows best. That is what is going on—an ideologically driven, one-person-knows-best solution from the Minister David Seymour. And everybody who’s in the Government ranks and each of these parties participating is ignoring their better instincts, because I know that New Zealand First had some really good ideas around productivity. They were responsible for a lot of the support of the Government getting in behind and helping seed good products and businesses in rural areas where they had had really devastatingly low economic environments and really low incomes. And that all is part of a productivity story.

And all of that is being blocked out—all those stories are being blocked out by a narrow ideological commitment to just cutting out people. That might make things more profitable sometimes, but it’s not going to make New Zealanders better off. It’s not going to help our wellbeing. It’s not going to help the wellbeing of the people that Gail Pacheco was looking at in the fair chance report. It’s not going to break the cycle of persistent disadvantage which is actually the reality for the majority of New Zealanders. What it is going to do is cut a whole lot of safety and regulation which, in fact, annoys big players—really big players. Yes, they might benefit, but are hard-working New Zealanders going to benefit from getting rid of one of those truly independent organisations we have—all those voices that we lose when we lose an independent group which were doing good work? It wasn’t un-well-meaning. It wasn’t wasting its time. It didn’t cost that much money. It was something that was adding value in this country where we desperately needed it.

We have one of the lowest productivities in the world in terms of who we are. We desperately need to get this piece right in a country that’s changing rapidly. And this Government today turns its back on the chance to involve all of those people in it, and I am ashamed of that happening today. So I ask you to consider that and I do not commend this bill to the House.

I just want to acknowledge the Hon Willie Jackson there. I’m quite new to the House and I learnt some good material there. “Razor gang vanity project”, “social-good vandalism”, and “overseas far-right thinktanks”. There’s some awesome material there that I can use. Thank you for that productivity—the art and science of doing more with less. Not spending more and doing less like we’ve seen over the last three years, but doing more with less, more efficiently.

As has been well canvased over these readings, the Productivity Commission has done some really fantastic work, particularly across the housing affordability, social issues, and identifying regulation constraints that, if removed, would enable us to be a much more productive people and therefore nation. In terms of construction costs, we are in the bottom 10 percent of the OECD—the Infrastructure Commission’s told us that. Lots of agencies, NGOs, and laypeople can tell us the problems. We don’t need the Productivity Commission anymore; it’s the end of a season. So let’s take those learnings and the learnings of the Productivity Commission over the last 13 years and now implement them in a more integrated and efficient way. I commend this bill to the House.