Tuesday, 10 May 2005

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education): On 17 February I responded to questions in the House relating to Scholarship results. In one of my answers I said that an error had been made in my office in not opening an email on 17 January. It has now come to my attention that the email was opened by a member of my staff. However, as I have previously stated, the information was not passed on to me until 25 January.

Tabling of Documents

Objectionable Publication—Report by Chief Censor

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): Because one Jim Peron has some supporters inside and outside this House, I seek leave to table the report from the chief censor today, which sets out that Unbound, the publication by Jim Peron, is objectionable because it promotes the exploitation of children and young people for sexual purposes.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Questions for Oral Answer

Questions to Ministers

Immigration Service—Information from MPs

1. Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) to the Prime Minister: Did she say the following: “If Winston Peters had the interests of New Zealand at heart rather than just grandstanding he would be providing information to Immigration so things could be checked out. That’s what all our electorate offices do week in week out, where we see a problem we report it so it can be dealt with”; if so, on what basis did she make this statement?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK (Prime Minister): Yes, on the basis that it is better to sort out such matters behind the scenes and not give ammunition to refugee status claimants. I do appreciate that Mr Peters has raised other cases with immigration Ministers in the past and has not always had reports back on them. I invite him to sit down with the Minister, the Associate Minister, or senior officials to go through those cases.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why does the Prime Minister admit that today when she knew it yesterday, and can I give her a few examples of files—and these are just a sample, I might add—that close with the words back from the Minister: “I will notify you of the outcome of this investigation.”, dated July 2004, November 2004, November 2004 again, December 2004, February 2005, April 2005, and again April 2005; why, when she knows that her Minister has been advised, as was his predecessor, did she repeat that abject lie on TV?

Madam SPEAKER: The member knows that he cannot accuse another member of being a liar.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I did not accuse her of being a liar. I said that she must have known—because she confirmed it in her primary answer—that the Minister had numerous communications with me and on not one occasion did I ever receive a reply. Yet she went on TV and repeated what Mr Swain said.

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I have taken offence to the statement that a lie was told, and I ask for it to be withdrawn and apologised for.

Madam SPEAKER: Would the member please withdraw and apologise?

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I withdraw and apologise. Can I repeat the question?

Madam SPEAKER: Can we now have the answer to the question?

Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. We cannot have an answer to the question when the Prime Minister has objected to it. Surely he should ask the question again.

Madam SPEAKER: She objected to being called a liar. She did not object to the question.

Gerry Brownlee: That was the substance of the question.

Madam SPEAKER: That is not a point of order. Do you wish to repeat the question, Mr Peters?

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why did the Prime Minister make that statement yesterday on morning TV, when she must have known of the countless occasions on which I have brought files of information to the attention of that Minister, as well as to his predecessor; why did she then go and say that on national TV?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: The statement stands because I can find no evidence that the member wrote to the Minister about the cases that he has put in the public arena in the last week. I might say that the lawyer for Mr Khashaly has pointed out that the fear of persecution by his client arises from the publication of Mr Khashaly’s name by Mr Peters.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Given the track record of the Minister and his department of never replying, why would any member of Parliament bother writing to them, and why is she now repeating a statement by the lawyer that she knows is demonstrably false, in that, chronologically speaking, the man was described in this Parliament, although he was not named, after he had been to Ahmed Zaoui’s lawyers to lodge a refugee application; if she knows that that story is not true, why is she repeating it?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: What I have referred to continually is the chance of success of such applications being increased by names being put in the public arena. As to the issue of substantive replies, I know that a number of substantive replies have gone to the member, but there are other cases where he has not had them. I invite him to sit down with the Ministers and senior officials, and to go through them.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Could the Prime Minister now outline the number of substantive replies I have received from that Minister?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: If the member wants that sort of detail, he should ask the Minister. I have half a dozen substantive replies in front of me, from the research that has been able to be done since the question was lodged this morning. I also know that there are a number of letters where there has not been a substantive reply at that time, and there may be very good reason for that.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: If that is the case, what is the very good reason that I have received no details whatsoever on the case of a successful refugee claimant such as Asha Ali Abdille, who has a string of criminal convictions yet has attempted to bring 14 of her family members into this country; why have I not received a reply on that?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: The fact that the member has not had a reply does not mean that no action has been taken. If the member wishes to discuss the matter with officials, I have given him that invitation.

Hon Paul Swain: Can the Prime Minister confirm that following the claim on that particular issue, an investigation was carried out and information was released, but that action was not taken because issues around the severity of the prosecutions that had been made would not rule that person out as far as refugee status was concerned?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I am happy to take the Minister’s word for it.

Keith Locke: Can the Prime Minister recall the Government receiving any submissions from Mr Peters that are supportive of asylum seekers such as the one he has just referred to, or have all his submissions tried to cast doubt about those asylum seekers, even when they have been persecuted, imprisoned, or tortured in their home countries?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: Without having had the time to go through all of them, I suspect that most of them have the character of “dobbing in”. But I say to the House that it is important people do come forward with information if they feel that other people are trying to cheat the New Zealand authorities. [Interruption]

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Very shortly—laugh now, and cry later! They are nervous, are they not?

Madam SPEAKER: Would the House settle please, and let the member ask his question in silence.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Did the Prime Minister say: “I have been pushing Ministers of Immigration for the last 2 years to follow the Australian precedent and bring a lot of the offshore processing back to New Zealand. I think that would be much better.”; if she did, should the conclusion not be that she is getting nowhere and neither are the Ministers getting anywhere, so in that circumstance why would anyone on earth trust them with information?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: There would appear to be a number of non sequiturs in that question, but suffice it to say that I think I have finally been heard on this subject.

Hon Tony Ryall: Is the Prime Minister not aware that in some parts of Auckland there is a thriving market for doctored, forged, and falsified receipts, as in the case of a man who has smuggled in bags of blank receipt forms from the Middle East, which he sells to members of his community for false insurance claims in return for a cut from the payout?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I am aware that in New Zealand there are people who are citizens, permanent residents, and would-be refugee status seekers, and who try to cheat and lie to authorities. If the member has such information, he should please make it available to the police.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Has the Minister of Immigration appraised the Prime Minister of a complaint—on which, I might add, he has done nothing—involving 15 fraudulent documentation accesses to this country; and when is she going to take the security of this country seriously?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I do not ask for reports on each of the approximately 800 letters a year that the Minister gets, and the 4,000 that the Associate Minister gets. I say to the member that if he has evidence of wrongdoing he should come forward with it to the Ministers.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Would the Prime Minister not expect a Minister to raise the alarm with her when he learns of cases like that of one family whose whole documentation is false, but that has got access to and is living in New Zealand, and would she not expect the Minister of Immigration to say that that is not a one-off but shows a serious crisis; and should she as Prime Minister, instead of giggling and laughing, not do something about that?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: No, I do not expect the Minister of Immigration to brief me on every such case. I might point out that last week Mr Peters was in the media on the subject of two people—out of 2.25 million visitors we get a year.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Is the Prime Minister not concerned that even if one person was of enormous risk to this country, that would be enough; and how many weeks does she want to keep this Parliament going while we up the averages in respect of her incompetence?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I do not know of any country, Western or otherwise, that has yet found an absolutely foolproof way of stopping people from trying to cheat its border control systems. If we have evidence, we will act on it.

Childcare—Grandparents

2. JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: Is he satisfied that grandparents who provide care for their grandchildren receive adequate financial support; if so, why?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment): In most cases, yes. Grandparents and other extended family caregivers may be entitled to either a foster care allowance, an unsupported child’s benefit, an orphans benefit, or family support. In some cases they might also receive a family tax credit. I do acknowledge that some grandparents in receipt of New Zealand superannuation have concerns about the adequacy of financial support when they are raising a grandchild. I have therefore asked officials to consider what might be done in the future to provide more support for them, and I am certainly happy to consult with United Future when I receive that advice.

Judy Turner: Why, when the unsupported child’s benefit and child disability allowance are not meant to be means tested, have there been several cases of Work and Income staff in Rotorua and Christchurch requiring grandparents who provide full-time care for their grandchildren to state the source and amount of their income in order to receive that support?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: I am not aware of those particular cases, but, of course, if the member gives me the details of them, I will follow them up.

Georgina Beyer: What has the Government done recently to give more money to those providing valuable care to children who are not their own?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: Apart from a very excellent dancing programme, we have provided from 1 April this year, as part of the Working for Families package, a $15 per week increase in the rates of the unsupported child’s benefit and the orphans benefit. Those benefits provide a contribution to everyday living costs of children in long-term care, and are paid to people who are providing care to children who are not their own because the parents themselves are unable to do so.

Judy Turner: Does the Minister think it is acceptable, when the Government’s own policy is to place children who cannot be cared for by their parents with relatives if at all possible, that a recent survey indicated a disturbingly high proportion of grandparents in that situation who have found themselves impoverished and in ill health; if not, what changes does he propose in order to ensure that the Government’s stated priority and the level of support it actually provides to those grandparents match up?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: I do think it is sad to see what appears to be now a trend of family members, particularly grandparents, looking after children. We are now trying to find out whether indeed it is a trend and, if it is, whether we have to make extra provision for that particular group. In the immediate term we have ensured that we work closely with grandparents raising grandchildren through their organisations. Those organisations work with the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services and Work and Income to ensure that their members get their full entitlements. As I said, we are also now looking at whether we should be doing more.

Judy Turner: Does the Minister agree that caregivers should not be penalised in terms of financial support available to them by virtue of being related to the child; if so, when will he take action to ensure that the disparities between the total support received by Department of Child, Youth and Family Services foster carers and those grandparents who are providing exactly the same service and care are eliminated?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: As the member knows, these are complex issues. Firstly, many people care for a member of their extended family without ever coming anywhere near the State to look for support, and it is the case that people support that very much as being the way they should act. Secondly, we are in a situation whereby we need to assess exactly what the needs of people who are looking after children in those situations are. That is what we are trying to do and, as I have said, I will share that information with the member.

Police—Former Commissioner

3. Dr DON BRASH (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by her statement to the House, regarding claims that commissioner Doone had said: “that won’t be necessary”, that “I can only imagine that the reporter put those words to me and I would not have been in a position to confirm them, because they were not in the reports.”; if so, how does she reconcile this with her signed brief of evidence that states: “I am informed that Mr Alley states he put those propositions to me and I said words to the effect of ‘you’re not wrong’. I accept that this is correct.”?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK (Prime Minister): By reference to the following sentence in that paragraph in the brief that Dr Brash has chosen not to quote, which says: “I am certain that I drew attention to the issue that Mr Doone had disputed these details during the inquiries to which I have referred.”

Dr Don Brash: Can she tell the House which version of events we are supposed to believe: the version she gave the House last week, in which she denied confirming the words “that won’t be necessary”, or the version she signed in her brief of evidence to the court last month, in which she agreed that she had confirmed those words? Which version of the story are we supposed to believe is correct?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: The member’s submission about what is in the brief is not correct.

Dr Don Brash: Can the Prime Minister tell the House how the words “you’re not wrong”, which she agrees she used to Mr Alley, could possibly be construed to mean that she was in no position to confirm his statement, as she told the House last week?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: When a two-part proposition is put to one, and one laughs and says “you’re not wrong”, but immediately points out that the second point is contested, the facts are clear.

Rodney Hide: Does the Prime Minister deny to the House that the Sunday Star-Times in a phone call to her explained the gravity of her assurance by stating: “This is going to cost us a lot of money if we’re wrong.”, and does she accept that in a subsequent phone call the Sunday Star-Times editor read to her the opening paragraphs of the 16 June 2000 article so that the Prime Minister could confirm the accuracy of the detail before publication—which, indeed, the Prime Minister confirmed?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: No notes from any conversation with that editor have ever been made available to me. What is absolutely clear is that the substance of the story was always correct, and that was that Mr Doone intervened in a way that was inappropriate.

Dr Don Brash: If, as media reports suggest, there are tapes or transcripts of her conversations with the Sunday Star-Times, will the Prime Minister give her consent to the release of those tapes or transcripts so that we can judge for ourselves whether it is the version in her court evidence or the version she gave in the House last week that is correct; if not, what does she have to hide?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I know of no tapes. I know of journalist’s notes from Mr Alley. I know of no notes from Ms Chetwin. It seems to me that the Opposition’s role is to try to help Mr Doone, through questions in the House. The Opposition might also like to say whether its friends are bankrolling Mr Doone’s efforts.

Dr Don Brash: Did the Prime Minister state in her signed brief of evidence that she had received a phone call from the editor of the Sunday Star-Times, in which “Ms Chetwin’s purpose in calling me appeared to be to reassure herself that the paper had adequately checked and investigated the matter.”, and does she accept that it was only because she gave that reassurance that the paper ran the story?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: That probably was her purpose in calling. The point is that the substance of her story was always true. Mr Doone intervened. Dr Brash supports that inappropriate action.

Hon Richard Prebble: Does the Prime Minister recall accusing in February 1999 the then Prime Minister, Mrs Shipley, of “prevarication and evasion” regarding a private dinner between Mrs Shipley and Kevin Roberts; further, does she recall demanding that all documents be tabled, and issuing an election statement on 23 November in which she said: “Labour will drive a culture of change, starting at the top.”; if so, as she has admitted that she leaked confidential documents—for which any member of her administration who leaked them would instantly be fired—and as she has admitted that she anonymously confirmed a false statement, then allowed the newspaper to print a false statement on which she had “declined to comment”, is this what she meant by “a culture of change, starting at the top”; if not, will she take the advice she gave Mrs Shipley and resign?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I lost count after about eight questions there—

Madam SPEAKER: I am sure the Prime Minister can address those questions.

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I do, indeed, recall my comments at the time, and I make the following observations. No one was threatening to sue Mrs Shipley—that is the first point. The second point is that Mr Doone went precisely because this Government would not tolerate two standards of justice, one for the commissioner, and one for other people.

Dr Don Brash: Can the Prime Minister tell the House why it is that although her evidence to the court is littered with references to her inability to recall important details about her conversations with the Sunday Star-Times, she is now so certain on the one aspect of those conversations that suits her case, and can she advise the House whether this type of selective amnesia is going to be the characteristic of this administration in the future?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I can assure the member that conversations one has 5¼ years ago are not uppermost in one’s mind, but I can also assure the member that I was assisted by journalist notes made available to my lawyer, and I challenge the member to say that he can recall every aspect of what he said 5¼ years ago.

Rodney Hide: Did she tell the Sunday Star-Times after it had published the article that Peter Doone would not get a cent out of the Sunday Star-Times, because the Cabinet papers that she had seen would vindicate the Sunday Star-Times when they were released, and did she also state to the Sunday Star-Times that, anyway, Peter Doone was running out of money, having spent $40,000 fighting the Government to keep his job?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: The substance of the story was always true, and I challenge members opposite to say how Mr Doone is bankrolling his case—with support from their friends.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why, as the Prime Minister, was she having one communication, let alone five communications, with the media on this matter, knowing that there were issues yet to be settled, and is it not in line with the same performance with respect to Dover Samuels where, on 18 December 2000, it was reported that she said: “He could not be an effective Minister with allegations swirling around him.”, when she, in fact, was the person who was the chief swirler, who passed on a vicious, malicious, totally false allegation that saw him lose his job, and is that not a fact?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: There was a time when I used to pick up journalists’ phone calls; that time is largely now gone. One does learn from those experiences.

Dr Don Brash: I seek leave to table, for all members of the House and backbenchers of the Labour Party, the brief of evidence of the Rt Hon Helen Elizabeth Clark dated 13^th day of April 2005 for the High Court outlining the Prime Minister’s recollection of these events.

Madam SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection?

Hon Dr Michael Cullen: Is that in full?

Madam SPEAKER: A clarification—is that in full?

Dr Don Brash: Yes.

Madam SPEAKER: There is no objection. The document will be tabled.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Rodney Hide: Is there anything in the statement of evidence by Mr Oskar Alley or Ms Suzanne Chetwin about their interaction with her that she contests, and if there is, why will she not share that with the House?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: As I said at my press conference yesterday, there are matters in those briefs where no doubt content and context would be cross-examined if a matter ever went to court.

Research—Health

4. STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) to the Minister of Research, Science and Technology: What is the Government doing to increase investment in health research and strengthen the health research workforce?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Research, Science and Technology): I have today announced a $70 million health research package. Sixty-one million dollars more funding over 4 years for health research will provide a major boost to research, with the potential to address the specific health needs of New Zealanders.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: How many years?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: Over 4 years, I repeat for Dr Smith’s edification. I know the member is stupid but he should concentrate on the answer.

Madam SPEAKER: That comment was unnecessary. Would the Minister please withdraw that comment.

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: It was; I agree. I withdraw. Some of that funding will go towards providing more training fellowships for health practitioners who want to get involved in research. It is a $70 million package overall.

Steve Chadwick: How does this increase for health research compare with previous levels of investment?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: It builds on previous increases put in place by my predecessor Mr Pete Hodgson, including $19 million in last year’s Budget. Spending on health research has almost doubled over the last 6 years, rising from $27 million to $53 million, and that is without counting the new money to strengthen the research workforce. The new money this year is also the single biggest increase in health research since the Health Research Council was established in 1990. It may well be the biggest since the Medical Research Council was put in place. Health researchers have also benefited from the establishment in 2000 of the New Economy Research Fund, which now funds about $10 million of health research a year, increases in the Marsden Fund, and two health-related centres of research excellence.

Hon Peter Dunne: Does this increase bring New Zealand’s expenditure on health research up to the OECD average, or has the Government heeded Treasury’s advice that we should not aim to reach the OECD average; if it is the latter, why?

Hon STEVE MAHAREY: It is the aim of the Government to bring ourselves into line with that particular average, and these increases do a great deal to bring us there.

National Certificate of Educational Achievement—Scholarship

5. Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) to the Minister of Education: Did he make the following statement about New Zealand Scholarship in April 2003: “There will be no fixed numbers or proportions of students receiving the qualification. It depends on how many students meet the standard set in each subject.”; if so, why did the lack of cross-subject comparability in Scholarship allegedly come as a surprise to him?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education): I did expect that there would be intersubject variation, because the decision that Scholarship would be standards-based and that there would be no intersubject scaling was made by that member and his colleagues in 1998. However, like many others, I did not expect the extremes of variability that occurred.

Hon Bill English: Why did the Minister ignore all the following warnings about problems with Scholarship: correspondence from the Education Scholarship Trust, individual letters from a number of school principals, questions in the House last year, a select committee report tabled in this House that highlighted, in 2003, exactly the problems that his recent review has picked up, and also Professor Warwick Elley’s analysis of variability in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) 2004 results; and why does he not just own up to the fact that he was arrogant and complacent about this exam and that that is what cheated our students?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I would not regard students as being cheated when a significant number who did not pass according to the criteria have, as a result of the very generous approach of my colleague the Hon David Benson-Pope, been given a significant amount of money, anyway.

Hon Brian Donnelly: When the Associate Minister claimed: “More work will be done to minimise the level of variance between subjects for those sitting scholarship exams in 2005.”, exactly what sort of work was he referring to, and how will it reduce variability of results?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: It is my understanding that work is going on to put the results within bands, rather than having the extremes of variability that have occurred.

Deborah Coddington: What more evidence or advice does the Minister need, given that he now has the report showing the NCEA Scholarship to be a shambles, to get him to honour his commitment to students, which he made in this House on 10 February, to scrap the $30 reassessment fee for each subject; will he now confirm to parents and students that that fee will be scrapped and that parents who have already paid will be reimbursed?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I think that anyone who has read the report will see that that is not the issue—and no.

Hon Bill English: Does the Minister recall issuing a public statement saying that he first knew about problems with Scholarship results on 13 January 2005; and how does he reconcile that with the record of meetings in the report of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s internal review, which makes it absolutely clear that on 15 December 2004 he had a meeting with the authority in which they discussed low achievement in a scholarship subject?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I have always made it clear that PE was an exception.

Hon Bill English: Is the Minister now saying that all the statements he made—both inside the House and outside—about not knowing about Scholarship variability until 13 January were wrong, and that, in fact, he was discussing this issue on 15 December 2004; and why do he and his fellow Minister insist on tawdry cover-ups and half-truths all the time, instead of just owning up?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: The discussions on the 13^th were around overall pass rates, not about variability.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: What’s the difference?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: The member asked what the difference is—that just shows how thick he is.

Simon Power: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Are you going to allow the comment made by the Minister of Education at the conclusion of his answer? Because if you are, we have a new standard in this House, and that particular standard will be applied to questions asked as well as questions answered.

Madam SPEAKER: Well, as good was given in that interchange. Comments were made on both sides that I could have ruled as being unacceptable, but I could see that we were getting to the substance of it. But I will pull everyone up, both questioner and answerer, in future if that is what members wish.

Elderly and Disabled—Support Services Report

6. SUE BRADFORD (Green) to the Associate Minister of Health: Why, nearly six years after the Government took office, has the report of the Working Party on Support Services for Older People and People with Disabilities found these services to be chronically under-funded and suffering huge workforce turnover, with many providing inadequate care?

Hon PETE HODGSON (Associate Minister of Health): The working party report itself answers the member’s question. Page 6 lists the factors as including increased demand, higher expectation, inflation, and more employment opportunities for those working in the sector.

Sue Bradford: What advice can he offer a Waikato residential care facility that has had five of 14 registered nurses resign in the past month, and has been able to replace only one of them; and how does he expect facilities like that to retain staff when wage rates offered by aged-care facilities are up to 20 percent lower than those paid by district health boards?

Hon PETE HODGSON: My advice would be to remind those people, or, indeed, the member, that the Government has put into that broader sector around $50 million, outside the Budget cycle this year, and that next year’s Budget is next week.

Sue Bradford: Why does the Government not simply set minimum standards for workers’ wages and conditions, and any other appropriate matters, then allow providers and district health boards to enter genuine negotiations with each other, in accordance with local circumstances?

Hon PETE HODGSON: We do, it is called the minimum wage, and it has been raised annually ever since this Government came to office.

Marc Alexander: Will the Minister take seriously the report of the Working Party on Support Services for Older People and People with Disabilities by raising funding to a sustainable level for the aged-care and disability services sector, or is that just another report designed to fool people into thinking this Government is doing something simply by having a report, which will collect dust and translate into nothing of substance?

Hon PETE HODGSON: I regret to advise the member that he should have read the accompanying Cabinet paper that came out at the same time, which would have told the member over what period of time the issue of sustainable funding would be determined so that funding at a sustainable level could occur.

Sue Kedgley: Can he assure the House that any upcoming funding will provide pay parity between carers in the aged-care sector, who currently receive $10.80 an hour, and health-care assistants based in public hospitals, who receive $16.50 an hour; if not, how does he expect to put a stop to the mass exodus of experienced staff?

Hon PETE HODGSON: I do not believe that there is a mass exodus, although I do acknowledge that there is a very high turnover rate. I hope that Budget announcements to be made next week will begin to address that.

Sue Bradford: Will funding increases for the 45,000 residential and home-based caregivers be ring-fenced to ensure pay parity between all district health board - funded caregivers; if not, what compliance measures will the Government put into place to ensure that increased funding leads to increased wages for the workers—minimum wage controls being manifestly inadequate in that situation?

Hon PETE HODGSON: The member may be aware that district health boards that provide for the health of older people already have—at least, some of them have—a number of conditions in their contracts that ensure that wages flow through to workers.

Tertiary Education—Savings Provision

7. H V ROSS ROBERTSON (Labour—Manukau East) to the Minister of Education: What steps is he taking to encourage greater saving towards the cost of tertiary education?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education): The Government is seeking expressions of interest in providing a tertiary education savings scheme with individual accounts specifically for meeting the costs of tertiary education. This would enable families to plan ahead, and it would also complement the existing forms of student support. Tertiary education is a significant investment for many individuals and their families, and the Government is committed to keeping the costs as affordable as possible, ensuring that low-income groups are not shut out, and giving grandparents an opportunity to put something towards their grandkids.

H V Ross Robertson: What would be the major elements of a tertiary savings scheme?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: If the Government decides to proceed with the scheme, it is likely that it would be voluntary. Contributions could stop and start, depending on a family’s circumstances. The Government may make a contribution to encourage participation in the scheme. That could include an upfront payment targeted to encourage early enrolment in the scheme. Funds could be used only for tertiary education costs, and individuals would not be able to access a student loan until they had drawn down funds from their savings account. An individual’s account balance would not, however, affect his or her eligibility for a student allowance.

Bernie Ogilvy: Will the Government consider what will happen to those savings of individuals in this commendable and forward-thinking scheme who choose not to undertake tertiary education; and should the scheme not also allow young adults to use their savings for other useful purposes, such as starting a business or buying a home?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I thank the member and his party for their support of this scheme, and for the advice the member has given me over a period of time on the design of it. But I would like to make it clear that if an individual got to a certain age without using the savings, an appropriate approach would probably be for that person to transfer the savings to a superannuation scheme. I do not think it would be a good thing to have the Government contributions available for the general use of individuals, and I do not think we would want to be arbiters of what is good use and what is not.

Police—Former Commissioner

8. Dr DON BRASH (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Did she receive a phone call from the editor of the Sunday Star-Times, subsequent to the publication of its 16 January 2000 story regarding Mr Doone and following a statement from Mr Doone describing the article as defamatory, seeking an assurance as to the accuracy of information contained in the story; if so, what assurance did she give the editor?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK (Prime Minister): I have some recollection of a call at some point, but after 5 years and 4 months I cannot be certain of the content. One assumes it would have been similar to my conversation with Mr Alley, in which I drew his attention to the fact that what had been said was contested.

Dr Don Brash: Is she aware of the report in the Christchurch Press today that tapes of this conversation report the editor as saying: “This is going to cost us a lot of money if we’re wrong.”, to which the Prime Minister replied that the story was correct, and said: “I’d hang tough on this one if I were you.”; and will she confirm that statement to the House today?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: To the best of my knowledge that statement is a cut and paste, and the first statement that Dr Brash quoted was not from the editor.

Dr Don Brash: Was the editor lying in her brief of evidence when she said: “Ms Clark was very clear during this conversation that the newspaper had not reported any incorrect information. Indeed, she encouraged the newspaper to continue its investigation as the matter was reaching its critical stages.”; or does she now accept that that was an accurate account of events?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: I do not believe I encouraged the paper. It needed no encouragement. It had been running the story for 6 weeks by the time these first conversations took place.

Dr Don Brash: Was the editor lying when she said: “The Prime Minister’s statements were central to our reporting of the Peter Doone story. In particular, without her corroboration the Sunday Star-Times would not have stated that … Peter Doone had said ‘that won’t be necessary’.”, or does the Prime Minister now accept that this was an accurate account of events?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: As the lawyer for Fairfax has made clear, the Sunday Star-Times had a number of sources, and the Prime Minister was by no means an original source. I have consistently drawn attention to the fact that I drew the newspaper’s attention to the fact that what was said was disputed.

Rodney Hide: Why does the Prime Minister think it is acceptable for her to leak secret Cabinet documents, and the contents of a Police Complaints Authority report that was still privileged, when she states in her brief of evidence: “I recall that I went through some aspects of the information contained in the Police Complaints Authority report again.”; and is it acceptable for Ministers in Cabinet to leak the contents of documents before they have been considered by Cabinet?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: It is a matter of judgment for the Prime Minister how I use information from official reports. By definition, I cannot leak.

Madam SPEAKER: If members wish to hear the question and the answer, I ask them to be quiet.

Dr Don Brash: Was the editor lying when she said in her signed statement: “In the circumstances it is difficult to imagine a better-placed source. The Prime Minister was dealing daily with the issue, and we assumed that at the time she had access to more information and was better informed regarding the incident than almost anyone else.”; if not, why not?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: That is why more weight should have been given to what the newspaper was told, which was that what was said was contested.

Dr Don Brash: Will the Prime Minister give her consent to the release of the tapes and transcripts of her conversations with the Sunday Star-Times, or, at least, the release of the journalist’s notes, which she has just admitted exist, so that New Zealanders can judge for themselves whether it is the story that she told Parliament last week, or the story she told the court last month, that is correct?

Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: As I have said before, there is no evidence that there are tapes. There are journalist’s notes provided under privilege. I invite Dr Brash to tell us whether Mr Doone’s lawyers are drafting his questions.

Truancy—Reduction

9. LYNNE PILLAY (Labour—Waitakere) to the Associate Minister of Education: What steps has the Government taken to reduce student absenteeism in New Zealand schools?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE (Associate Minister of Education): I can advise the House that the Government has introduced a number of successful initiatives to reduce truancy, suspensions, stand-downs, and early exemptions in schools. On Friday I was given a presentation at Tauranga Boys College about its very successful suspension reduction initiative programme, which has resulted in a significant reduction in suspensions. Yesterday I visited Porirua College. Its suspension reduction initiative has reduced suspensions and stand-downs to zero.

Lynne Pillay: What other reports has the Minister seen on absenteeism?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: I saw a report on Saturday in the Southland Times about a youth forum organised at Southland Girls High School, where 400 students were expected. Sadly, only four students turned up. In the words of the Southland Times, “National Party leader Don Brash will be hoping for a better voter turnout …”.

Hon Brian Donnelly: Why is the associate minister threatening to prosecute parents who are sending their children to Ōrautā School, where the children are receiving a schooling, whilst at the same time he says that nothing can be done about the three families at Mōkau, whose children are receiving no schooling at all?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: Such situations as the two mentioned are clearly not in the best interests of the students concerned. The reason there are prosecutions proceeding at Ōrautā is that the statutory checks and controls on that situation cannot be exercised. However, that situation is much less serious than the Leader of the Opposition visiting such places and endorsing such breaches.

Hon Trevor Mallard: Can the Minister confirm, from his investigations of the reasons for absenteeism, whether the reason that the 396 students were missing was that the forum was organised by Bill English?

Madam SPEAKER: I am not sure what responsibility the Minister has for that.

Hon Trevor Mallard: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. We are talking about students who were missing from a school forum. There were 400 due. Four turned up, 396 were missing, and the forum was for Don Brash.

Madam SPEAKER: I do not know where the ministerial responsibility is for that.

Bernie Ogilvy: When does the Minister expect a national student database to be fully operational, in light of the fact that the Minister of Education has promised that for the past three elections—in 1996, 1999, and 2002?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: I anticipate that the electronic student tracking system, which will be of immense value to schools—particularly in enrolment and transfer situations—will be available from the beginning of the next school year. I seek leave to table an article from page A2 of the Southland Times of last Saturday, titled “Forum attracts four”.

Madam SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? Yes, there is objection.

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I heard several interruptions from Mr Brownlee and others during my seeking of leave.

Madam SPEAKER: Yes, the member did. I could not identify who interrupted. The rules have to be applied across the board fairly. Who interrupted that seeking of leave?

Hon Damien O'Connor: I confess I may have made some sound.

Madam SPEAKER: Well, the member will leave the Chamber.

Hon Damien O'Connor withdrew from the Chamber.

Gerry Brownlee: I was speaking to a colleague behind me, but if that interrupted Mr Benson-Pope, I am happy to leave.

Madam SPEAKER: The member will leave the Chamber too, please.

Gerry Brownlee withdrew from the Chamber.

Madam SPEAKER: Members will settle, please.

Education—Rural Areas

10. METIRIA TUREI (Green) to the Associate Minister of Education: Does he believe that isolated rural children are just as entitled to a quality public education as any other New Zealand child; if so, why?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE (Associate Minister of Education): Yes. The Government wants all students to achieve in schooling, and a number of measures are in place to support isolated rural schools. These include the Staffing Incentive Allowance and the Isolation Allowance, which are aimed at helping rural schools to recruit staff. Annual funding for 560 isolated rural schools increased by 12.5 percent to nearly $8 million a year through Targeted Funding for Isolation, which is a component of the operations grant. New funding of $19.7 million over 4 years has been allocated to give area schools more teachers, extra salary units to help recruit and retain staff, and increased operational funding from 2005.

Metiria Turei: Does the Minister support the decision by the ministerially appointed board of the Correspondence School to sack 35 of its staff, including 24 regional representatives; and does he agree with the Rural Women New Zealand spokesperson that: “In the past regional representatives have ensured the Correspondence School did a very good job in providing personalised teaching, targeting the unique situation of a child. Without home visits this will be more difficult.”; if not, why not?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: I am advised that recent decisions made by the Correspondence School board have been made in response to the changing demographic of its students. Under the new management arrangement, a new, dedicated 15-person national student liaison team will work in four regions: northern North Island, central North Island, lower North Island, and South Island. Their specific tasks will be to provide pastoral support and guidance to students, and to establish relationships with whānau and hapū. Currently over 4,500 Māori students are on the school’s roll. I also comment further that I have seen a report from the West Coast’s Greymouth Evening Star that quotes a local principal who talked about support mechanisms for Correspondence School students. He said that the school had already trialled protocols that had its staff—the local face-to-face school staff—acting as mentors to its students studying by correspondence. So he did not anticipate any great changes.

Jill Pettis: How many children attend the Correspondence School because of geographical isolation?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: Of the roll of around 18,000, only 1,200 students can be accurately described as geographically isolated students. Of those, around 700 are early childhood enrolments. There is clearly a need to ensure that the geographic distribution of Correspondence School resources matches that of the school’s changing roll.

Metiria Turei: What is the Minister doing to address the real problems in the Correspondence School, which were identified by parents as: “You can’t send kids who fail at school home to sit at a kitchen table with a booklet and expect them to catch up on their remedial reading by themselves. It’s not OK for the Minister to neglect the needs of our farm and rural kids in order to slap a band-aid on the supporting sore of urban school failure.”; and why is the Minister doing nothing to make the board address these issues?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: The Government is doing a great deal to support students who have special needs, and that is why, since 2001, there has been a 34 percent increase, I am advised, in the funding of the Correspondence School alone—from $32 and one-third million to some $43.5 currently.

Metiria Turei: Is the Minister aware that the loss of 35 pastoral care positions will mean that by the time of the next Education Review Office review the school is unlikely to be compliant with the National Education Guidelines, and will therefore once again be in danger of being closed down; and is that the real intent of the Government here—to force the Correspondence School to close?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: No, and I am rather surprised that the member thinks she can anticipate the result of a review yet to take place.

Metiria Turei: Why did the Government bail out the Modern Age English language school, the Taranaki Polytechnic, with $7.5 million, and Te Wānanga o Aotearoa with $20 million, according to yesterday’s announcement, yet refuse the $5.5 million to help the Correspondence School—a school that the Government has used as a dumping ground for 5,000 at-risk students, who are often not suited to this form of distance learning?

Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE: I am not sure what figures the member is using but I tell her that, in addition to base-line funding, $6.592 million of viability-funding support was made available to the Correspondence School in the 2004 calendar year. The Correspondence School drew $5.635 million against this funding to meet its 2004 deficit.

Te Wānanga o Aotearoa—Enrolments

11. Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) to the Minister of Education: Does he concede that the fall in enrolments at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa from 34,000 equivalent full-time students in 2003, to 22,000 equivalent full-time students this year, is in part a result of the elimination of alleged fraudulent enrolments following closer public scrutiny, and what reports, if any, has he received of questionable enrolment practices?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education): The fall in enrolments is a reflection of a number of factors. It illustrates that the rapid growth at the wānanga over the past few years was unsustainable, and that the marked changes in unemployment rates, especially for Māori, have led to a decline in numbers, as well. I have asked the Tertiary Education Commission to investigate a number of allegations, but as yet I have not received evidence of any large-scale enrolment fraud. The Tertiary Education Commission is continuing to investigate any cases reported.

Hon Ken Shirley: If the Minister is not prepared to rule out that fraudulent enrolments account for stolen millions of taxpayers’ money, will the Minister refer this matter to the Serious Fraud Office, particularly as the issues of both enrolment and course quality were specifically excluded from the Auditor-General’s terms of reference?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: At any such time as I get the evidence, of course I will.

Hon Bill English: Can the Minister confirm that over the past 2 years he has paid over $100,000 to a consultant, Mr Graham McNally, to be a watchdog in the wānanga, that Labour candidate Shane Jones was on the audit and risk-management committee at the wānanga, and that the Minister was briefed—sometimes weekly—over 2 years on the 25 audits and investigations of the wānanga; and is it not true that in spite of all that advice the taxpayer has now had to front up with $20 million because the Minister was too lazy and scared to do anything about it?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: Yes, yes, no, and no.

Hon Bill English: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Because of the noise, I do not think that anyone heard the Minister’s answer. I would like to hear him repeat it.

Hon Dr Michael Cullen: This is an interesting example of what one might call perverse incentives; the noise is because his own colleagues are barracking, and that is why he could not hear the answer.

Madam SPEAKER: In the interests of moving forward, would the Minister please repeat his answer.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: As far as I can now recall—yes, yes, no, and no.

Tariana Turia: Is it not true that the enrolments at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa are actually superior to the average for other tertiary institution organisations across the country; and can the Minister confirm that despite the adverse media publicity and the Minister’s comments, the wānanga’s enrolment and equivalent full-time student figures closely match those of 2004, and are on target to meet budget forecasts for 2005?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I am not sure what a “superior” enrolment is; and to the last part of the question: that is not my understanding.

Hon Ken Shirley: In view of the financial strife confronting Te Wānanga o Aotearoa resulting from reduced enrolments, will the Government now be funding the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education, known as the “WIPCE”, which is programmed for December, to be hosted by Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and being billed by the chairman as an extraordinary extravaganza; if so, how much funding is the Government providing for that extravaganza?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I have no intention of funding the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education.

Music—Government Support

12. MOANA MACKEY (Labour) to the Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage: What is the Government doing to support New Zealand music?

Hon JUDITH TIZARD (Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage): In 2000 we established the New Zealand Music Industry Commission and further funded New Zealand On Air to facilitate the growth of the New Zealand music industry. In 2004 we passed the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Act. The Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment programme also supports key New Zealand musicians, such as a number of the members of the band Goldenhorse. This month is New Zealand Music Month—the fifth celebration of New Zealand music and musicians, which goes on for a whole month. As a result of the Government’s support, New Zealanders are now hearing and buying more New Zealand music than ever before. More New Zealand musicians are making sustainable careers and contributing to economic and regional growth through record sales and royalties here and overseas, as well as developing our New Zealand culture.

Moana Mackey: What is the Government doing to promote the export of New Zealand music?

Hon JUDITH TIZARD: In April this year, as a result of the New Zealand Music Industry Export Development Group’s report Creating Heat, the Government announced additional funding of $5.4 million to support the export growth of the New Zealand music industry. That includes $2 million to the New Zealand Music Industry Commission over 3 years and $3.4 million to New Zealand On Air. This comprehensive package of support aims to build a strong, sustainable music industry with good access to export markets, representing significant Government support and the building of conditions for growth in the sector.

Points of Order

Jim Peron—Leave for Members to Apologise

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. In the interests of fairness, I seek leave, because of the attack made by Rodney Hide and Matt Robson on my integrity, for those members to have time to apologise to me on the issue of Jim Peron.

Madam SPEAKER: The member cannot seek leave for other people.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: But I should, should I not?

Madam SPEAKER: No. The Standing Orders do not permit that.

Urgent Debates Declined

Police—Former Commissioner

Madam SPEAKER: I have received four letters seeking debates under Standing Order 373. A letter from Rodney Hide seeks to debate the Prime Minister’s actions relating to Peter Doone. The Prime Minister’s actions occurred over 5 years ago, but this application results from the release of statements of evidence concerning the recent defamation action. I am not persuaded that the release of the statements overcomes the requirement that, for an urgent debate, the matter be a particular case of recent occurrence. That is not to say that with an existing situation there may not be a new development of sufficient importance to justify a debate—see Speaker’s ruling 153/5. But that is not the case here. In these circumstances I cannot accept this application.

National Certificate of Educational Achievement—Scholarship

Madam SPEAKER: Jim Peters seeks to debate “the failures that have crippled the NCEA scholarship system”. The way in which the member has raised this matter does not constitute a particular case of recent occurrence, and his application is also declined.

I have also received letters from the Hon Bill English seeking to debate the release of a report concerning the introduction of the New Zealand Scholarship qualification and from the Hon Ken Shirley about a Government decision to dissolve Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. With regard to the latter, I would point out that the Government has indicated that it has begun the statutory process of dissolving the wānanga’s council, rather than the wānanga itself. Nevertheless, I accept that with both applications there is a particular case of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility, and I would have been inclined to allow a debate on either. Standing Order 375 states that there may be only one such debate on the same day and that if more than one matter is raised that would justify a debate, the Speaker gives priority to the matter that, in the Speaker’s opinion, is the most urgent and important. I therefore have to make a judgment as a matter of priority on which of the two applications to accept. Urgent debates on aspects of the New Zealand Scholarship were held on 9 February and 30 March. No urgent debate has been held on events at the wānanga. An application on 1 March was declined. In these circumstances, it seems to me justifiable to give priority to Mr Shirley’s application, as it relates to a matter that has not recently been debated in the House. I therefore call on him to move that the House take note of a matter of urgent importance.

Urgent Debates

Te Wānanga o Aotearoa—Dissolution of Council

Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT): I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. The issue is the Government’s decision yesterday to move procedures towards the dissolution of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa’s council and the appointment of a commissioner, and the decision to approve a short-term loan of $20 million of taxpayers’ money to meet an immediate cash-flow requirement.

The Prime Minister, in her interviewed comments associated with this spending of a further $20 million of taxpayers’ money, was quoted as saying that she resents the payment of that $20 million. Well, those are hollow words. I put it to the House that what she actually resents is being caught out and being exposed for the inadequacy of this Government’s tertiary education policies.

If we go back in history—and we do not have to go back too far; we have only to go back to the start of this Government’s tenure—we learn very quickly that the wānanga monster was created by this Labour Government. It created the monster. Back in earlier years there was actually an application for a Treaty of Waitangi settlement from Rongo Wētere, the chief executive of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. The previous National Government declined that. Rongo Wētere was saying essentially that, based on equivalent full-time students, he should enjoy the same rate of funding for low-quality mass courses as universities. He was saying that to run a course in twilight golf or hip hop incurs the same cost per student as a chemistry or physics course at Auckland University, Otago University, or wherever else.

The National Government, to its credit, said that that was nonsense. It dismissed the Waitangi Tribunal’s recommendation. Michael Bassett, who served as a member of the tribunal at the time, said that it was one of the most foolish applications to have come before the tribunal, and that he was stunned that the tribunal recommended it be approved.

I might add that initially the incoming Labour Government also declined to approve funding for the wānanga at that rate. Then what happened? Do members remember the state of the nation address when everything was to be about closing the gaps? Everything was to be about closing the gaps and just throwing money at things Māori, irrespective of quality or targeting. That is what we can trace this back to. At that point the Labour Government changed its mind and said that it would meet Rongo Wētere’s request—it would give him almost unlimited funding on an equivalent full-time student basis; he would get funding at that rate for as many people as he wanted to enrol in those courses.

Look at the figures! Can members guess what the budget for Te Wānanga o Aotearoa was in 2000? How much do members reckon it was? [Interruption] No, it was $5 million in 2000. How much do members reckon that had grown to by last year, the 2004 calendar year? The answer is $239 million of taxpayers’ money. That is the thick end of a quarter of a billion dollars.

Dr Wayne Mapp: What happened to the money?

Hon KEN SHIRLEY: That is a very good question. Under this Labour Government there was no scrutiny. I have been told by people in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Tertiary Education Commission that, whenever they raised questions, they were told that the direction had come from on high—from the Labour Cabinet—just to keep throwing money at the wānanga and not to scrutinise the course content or look at the outcomes. The Government was not interested in outcomes—just in shovelling over the money. That is what the Labour Government did.

The Government claimed that it did not know. Do members remember when the ACT party exposed this story in February this year? The Government members said: “Horror, shock! We’ve got to do something.” But Bill English just made the point in question time that the Government actually had Mr McNally, its own appointee, to whom it has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be its stooge and mouthpiece at the wānanga. It was getting regular reports from him. In fact, when I broke this story in February, an internal email from Mr McNally was the damning point that exposed the culture of extravagance.

The Labour Ministers knew about it. [Interruption] Mr Maharey, of course. He was the real culprit. We know about Minister Mallard’s shortcomings. We all know those. But who was the Minister who oversaw this all through last year? It was Minister Steve “Smarmy” Maharey, and he did it—

Jill Pettis: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. All members are honourable members, and the Minister’s name is the Hon Steve Maharey.

Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member knows that he must refer to members—

Hon KEN SHIRLEY: I withdraw the reference to “smarmy”.

Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member knows quite well when he is called on a point of order to withdraw or to withdraw and apologise. He does not repeat the message.

Hon KEN SHIRLEY: I withdraw and apologise. The point is that, as the whole House knows, the Hon Steve Maharey was the Minister dishing out that money. He was receiving the reports from his own stooge, Mr McNally, about the wānanga.

And who else did the Government have there? Obviously, it was getting concerned—it set up an audit and review committee at the wānanga. And who did it put on that committee? It appointed Shane Jones—who is way up on Labour’s list, its new star. So was he not telling the Government either, perhaps? I think that he probably was. The Government knew all about it. And what did it do? It did nothing. It tried to hide what was happening. It tried to disguise it.

Actually, one cannot say that the Government did nothing, because—knowing that things were so bad—it kept shovelling the money out. It kept dishing out the taxpayers’ money.

Stephen Franks: Buying Tainui loyalty.

Hon KEN SHIRLEY: Buying Tainui loyalty—and is that not the issue? We know that this particular fiefdom, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, is actually immersed in the chieftainship of Tainui. One has only to look at the governing council. Is it not obvious what the Labour Government was doing? It was getting concerned about the emerging Māori Party—and so it should—and it thought that it had better shore up Tainui, at least. I do not think that that has worked for the Government, because Tainui are now so angry that they were led along by the Labour Government, which signed a deed of settlement back in 2001 and promised them money. And now Minister Mallard is saying that he will give them another $20 million loan!

But hang on—let us go to the back page of the deed of settlement signed by this Labour Government in 2001. It outlines a schedule for a $40 million payment. That payment was part of accepting the treaty claim that the previous Government had initially refused and said was a load of nonsense—as it was—but that this Government, under its “closing the gaps” policy, said was the vehicle and that it would sign. Not only did the Government give the wānanga the equivalent full-time student funding—which, as we know, amounted to $239 million of taxpayers’ money last year alone—but on top of that it gave the institution $40 million in loans.

I have here the loan schedule. On 7 November 2001, $25 million was handed out. Another $15 million was to be given, but the Government actually withheld it. The Government signed a deed of settlement, and then withheld the money. How honourable is that? Even if one thinks a deed of settlement is nuts and disagrees with it—as I do, and as I think this side of the House does—one honours it after one has signed it. But Minister Mallard and others have been withholding that money. I put it to members that the $20 million the Government is giving to the wānanga now will really just be payment of the $15 million that was promised—

Stephen Franks: Plus five!

Hon KEN SHIRLEY:—plus $5 million—back in 2001.

I have a wonderful cartoon here from a month or so back, drawn by Tremain, who is a great cartoonist. For those who have not seen it, I will walk them through it. Minister Mallard is at the rostrum—a big public rostrum with a microphone—and the caption states: “If the wānanga has been ripping off taxpayers, we will endeavour to get the money paid back”. The little bubble to the side states: “Yeah right!”. There are two little pigs down the bottom, and they are saying: “And we’re prepared to take off”. So I think that that $20 million loan will be written off. Who else thinks that the Government will write off the money? Members should put their hands up. The Government will certainly be writing that money off. It is gone—“outski”!

I hope that Minister Mallard will take a call in this debate. I hope that he will explain this situation to the House. I put it to him that surely it is time that he exposed his predecessor, Minister Maharey, who, members may recall, is the same Minister who got us into so much trouble with the community education grants. Everything that Minister Maharey touches turns to custard. Of course, he is the champion of this Labour Government’s third way. He is the Government’s think tank in a single person! He is its visionary, and everything he touches turns to custard.

Again, the ACT party exposed just yesterday that the Community Employment Group, which ran the hip-hop tour and blew that incredible amount of money, did one final thing before it went out of existence—it organised a big bash for itself at Rotorua. It ran up $32,000 worth of debts on airplane tickets, hotel accommodation, meals, and all the rest of it. That was its departing gesture to the taxpayers of this country. Who was responsible for that?

Stephen Franks: Christine Rankin.

Hon KEN SHIRLEY: No, it was not Christine Rankin, it was Minister Steve Maharey.

The “Gumboot Minister”, Mr Mallard, has now been brought in to try to clean up the mess at the wānanga. He is doing his best but, as we all know, that is not good enough. In many respects he is just digging a deeper hole.

I do not want to see the wānanga close. I want it to provide quality courses that are targeted at what is a desperate need in this country—to address the failures of our education system for those who have slipped through the net of the compulsory sector and who lack basic literacy and numeracy skills. The failure of our State education system is a scandal. But who believes that a State wānanga is the answer to that? I certainly do not believe that. But that is where we are heading, because this Government will end up with a State wānanga.

Sure, there were serious shortcomings with the Rongo Wētere fiefdom at Te Awamutu, but what the wānanga actually did, using taxpayers’ money, was destroy private tertiary education providers in this country. It has destroyed them up and down this country. No one can compete with the State. When those providers were providing the best courses they could in a competitive environment, and providing innovation in the tertiary sector, the wānanga came in with bucket loads of taxpayers’ money offering free courses.

Anyone who knows the Auckland market knows that schools teaching English as a second language schools have been closed, one after the other, and that Te Wānanga o Aotearoa has taken them over. It has sacked those good teachers and put in second-rate teachers, and has trebled the class sizes. It has destroyed what was a very valuable provision by the private sector to tertiary education. We know of the Labour Government’s philosophical hatred of private providers in tertiary education. In a way, it has used the wānanga firstly to destroy those providers—by unfair competition using taxpayers’ money—and now it will use that bad example as an excuse to close them down. That is a dreadful outcome.

In conclusion, I make the point that I have no confidence in the Auditor-General’s inquiry. That is principally because the terms of reference specifically exclude any examination of the integrity of the enrolments and any examination of the course content. Surely that is the basic problem. No one was examining the quality—the outputs—of those courses, so we had a proliferation of very low-quality courses, and no one was taking responsibility to ensure that the outcomes were to a standard that we should expect. Coupled with that, the wānanga was driven by a “bums on seats” philosophy. People were being enrolled while waiting in queues for a hamburger, as we know—that was happening all around the country on a massive scale. This Government has failed. The wānanga monster is its creation.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education): Some of us can remember—some time ago, I think—that member describing Donna Awatere Huata as the best thing that had happened to education in New Zealand. I think his judgment has not changed much since that time.

Hon Bill English: It was you!

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I am the best thing? Thank you! That is the first time Bill English has admitted that.

Tariana Turia: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I do not think this Minister has any right to cast aspersions on anyone else in this House. [Interruption] She may not be in this House, but this debate is about Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, not anyone else.

Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: I will rule on that, but before I do I just warn members and the chief Government whip that that was a point of order and there will be silence during points of order. The point the member raised is a debatable point.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I am not at all surprised—

Stephen Franks: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. It is a point of clarification. The first point of order was raised on the basis that aspersions were being cast on another member of this House. I do not know whether you accepted it or did not accept it, but I wonder which person in this House was having aspersions cast on him or her.

Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: I have dealt with the point of order.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: Without wanting to refer to the point of order, and I will not go back to it, I am certainly commenting on the judgment of the Hon Ken Shirley. He has been consistently wrong over a number of years. Even today he talked about the possibility of the wānanga becoming a State wānanga. Well, it is a Crown entity—it is a Crown entity now. It has been a Crown entity ever since National funded it—when it started it. It has been a Crown entity all the time.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: What’s the difference?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: The member is right. What is the difference between a Crown entity and a State wānanga? I say it is nothing.

Hon Jim Sutton: You could call it the “Don Brash Memorial Wānanga”.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: In fact, I think it is the “Nick Smith Memorial Wānanga” in this case, or maybe he was only a junior Minister at the time the funding flowed into it.

Hon Brian Donnelly: It’s the “Lockwood Smith Memorial”.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: Lockwood Smith was certainly the senior Minister, but he had a number of little assistants over the years. I thought Nick Smith was one of them, but maybe he was not one of Lockwood Smith’s little assistants who worked closely with him over a number of years.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Keep to the issue. Where’s the accountability?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: The member does not like it. Nick Smith is tweeting again, like a little sparrow—away he goes.

This wānanga is being treated as any other Crown entity institution would be treated. Any other institution in the same circumstances, unable to—[Interruption] Tariana Turia, on one side, says I am discriminating, and other people, on the other side, say I am being soft. I think maybe there is a point of balance, and we are taking a reasonable approach.

I want to acknowledge that this wānanga, over a period of time, has made an enormous difference to a lot of people. There was an enormous backlog of people who, through the 1990s and probably the 1980s, and in some cases back to the 1970s, never got jobs. They had been on the scrap heap for years and years, and this wānanga made a big difference to the lives of many of them. What has happened? Those people have jobs. They are employed. They are working. They are paying taxes. Some of what was the role of the wānanga has now disappeared. Given the fact that that has happened, a certain discussion is to be had, going forward, as part of a charter and profile exercise, as to the shape of this organisation.

I want to make it clear, as I have on previous occasions, that we will not support any inappropriate use of taxpayers’ funds, and investigations are going on in that area, as members are aware. Until we get the results of those investigations, I think it is better to wait and not show the prejudice we have seen about things Māori from the ACT party over recent months.

The Government wants the future focus of the wānanga to be on Māori students and on the quality of programmes offered, rather than on straight volume growth. This wānanga received a Treaty of Waitangi settlement. After there was acceptance from National that there would be a settlement, the wānanga received a settlement on the basis of the need of the Māori students. To shift the whole emphasis to Pākehā students and immigrant students is, I think, in breach of the terms of that settlement. It certainly means that the wānanga does not meet the conditions for the suspensory loan, and that has been discussed with it. There is a difference in points of view, but that is certainly my view.

As I indicated, the Tertiary Education Commission is renegotiating the charter, to make sure it is focused on its core role. The Auditor-General is investigating allegations of the inappropriate use of public funds. I think there is a two-tranche investigation. We have not yet had the results of tranche one. The Government has appointed Mr Roche to be a Crown observer and, with the agreement of the council, that observer has assumed the role of Crown manager and has taken over the finances of the wānanga. It has become clear, as part of that process, that the finances are not in good shape. We knew they were in bad shape, but it is clear that they are in worse shape than we previously contemplated, especially around short to medium term cash flow.

Like many organisations, income does not always match expenditure and there have been periods right through this year when an overdraft has been required—especially because of the high levels of need through to 31 July, and to avoid the sort of fire sale that members opposite would complain about. This organisation has over $100 million worth of assets. If it went to a fire sale and if there were any question of selling to its mates, or of quick deals, then members opposite would complain. I want to see an orderly set of arrangements, and the Crown manager is the person who is able to focus on that.

I thank the Crown appointees to the council of the wānanga. I make it clear that any contemplation of the appointment of a commissioner is not a reflection on them—

Hon Bill English: What is it, then?

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Why did you fire them?

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I think it is fair to say, with Wira Gardiner having been there for only about a month, or maybe 6 weeks, that it is a bit hard to blame him for everything. I know that National Party members like attacking their own former members and their own former vice-president. They do not like Wira Gardiner very much, and I understand that, but Wira Gardiner is a straightforward person. I want to indicate that this appointment is not a reflection on some of the people who have been working very, very hard to recover the situation. It has become clear that it is unlikely that that can occur. I want to make it clear that although there is an authority for a Crown loan, it is not yet done and dusted. I have to be satisfied that the arrangements are in place before that loan occurs. I am not yet satisfied that we are in a positive situation in that I can give assurances to Cabinet Ministers around the security of the loan—[Interruption]—notwithstanding cartoons. I think Tremain is a very good cartoonist. I have not seen that one, but no doubt I will try to have a look at it.

I want to make clear to people that there are two ways of the Government securing the loan. One is against the assets of the wānanga. They are very large assets and they are relatively unencumbered. The other way is against the income stream to the wānanga—the majority of which, of course, still comes from the Government. So I tell members not to panic around security for the loan. We will get the best shape of wānanga, going forward—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: It’s done great over the last 5 years! Done a great job!

Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I want to thank Nick Smith. He has admitted that I have done a great job. On that note I think I should end. If he says that, I do not need to speak any more.

Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland): Well, that speech fizzled out with a whimper, as it should from a guilty man. What does that Minister think the public make of the Government coughing up $20 million more for the wānanga, when last year it gave it $234 million? Trevor Mallard is the man who is mainly responsible for the problems that the wānanga has. I think all parties agree that the wānanga is an institution that has done some real good in a community. It is an institution that has had some issues and some problems, but Trevor Mallard is the Minister who has been too lazy and too complacent to do anything about the vast amount of information that he has been given over the last 2 years, whereby he could have avoided spending $20 million this week to keep the wānanga afloat. Twenty million dollars is a lot of money. Twenty million dollars would solve a whole lot of problems for special-needs children. It would double the increase that schools received in their operations grant last year. Any member could think of any other priority, and this House needs to know that there is only one reason that the Government has to cough up this $20 million, and that is Trevor Mallard.

I have asked the Government for the official information about just what interaction it has had with the wānanga over the last 2 years. Well, I got about 2 inches of paper from the Government setting out an enormous range of interactions between the Government and the wānanga, and Trevor Mallard and his smarmy mate the hopeless Steve Maharey were there at just about every one of them. Their fingerprints are on dozens and dozens of documents and briefings over the last 2 years about the wānanga. The ACT member is right—the only reason that anything happened about the wānanga this year is that it is an election year, and Labour was caught out having done nothing when it knew everything. The other reason, of course, is that it wanted Pākehā voters to see that Labour could kick something Māori, and it is just going to keep kicking till it goes down. Rongo Wētere got a bit too big for his boots in Māori politics, and the Government is going to nail him, no matter what. Even if it has to jack it up, it is going to nail him. So this is a combination of mismanagement from Trevor Mallard and the problems the Māori Party is causing the Labour Party. That is why Mr Mallard’s response was so pathetic. So what has been happening? Well, star Māori candidate Shane Jones was on the audit and risk subcommittee of the wānanga committee for the last 2 years.

Hon Parekura Horomia: What’s wrong with Shane Jones?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Let us say there is nothing wrong with him and that he is as competent as Labour thinks he is; that means he would have been telling Trevor Mallard, and his good mate Helen Clark, about every second week, how big the problems were. So if he was competent, Trevor Mallard must have known about all the problems in the wānanga, and if he was incompetent, well, that must be how he got so high on the Labour list.

Mr Graeme McNally is one of the most experienced tertiary consultants in New Zealand. He has overseen the financial unviability of many institutions. Wherever there is trouble, he is there. He is up in Taranaki now. That institution has gone broke. He has been there for a year; it has gone broke. He was at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa for 2 years; it has gone broke. The Government spent $120,000 paying Graeme McNally to watch the wānanga go broke. He knew what was going on. He was telling Trevor Mallard all the time what was happening. But Trevor Mallard did nothing. Maybe the Government is going to use the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) excuse. Maybe it is going to say: “Well, yes, there was information around, but it wasn’t flagged; it didn’t have a red alert on it. They didn’t tell us precisely what was wrong.” Well, they did. For a period of about 6 months Trevor Mallard and Steve Maharey were briefed weekly—weekly. I can tell the House that Ministers get briefed weekly only about things that really, really matter.

The chief executives of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, the Ministry of Education, and the Tertiary Education Commission met fortnightly for 2 years to discuss the wānanga—and the wānanga only. But nothing happened. Nothing was done. I shall quote the comment of one official: “I am tired of going to large meetings, which are drawn out, and everyone agrees but no action comes, at all.” That sums it up. Here is the question that the House needs an answer to: why did two of the most competent, amazing Ministers the New Zealand Parliament has ever seen—Trevor Mallard and Steve Maharey—knowing everything they knew about the wānanga, do nothing? The reason is that they were scared to do anything, and they lack the competence to do it. It is in the Official Information Act paper; they state that officials were telling Ministers that if they did anything, relationships with iwi would be affected, and that they should not shut down outpost enrolments because that would affect relationships with iwi. They knew that Te Wānanga o Aotearoa was popular among Māori. They knew that the Māori Party was getting up and going, and getting some traction. They knew that if they laid a finger on the wānanga, it would give the Māori Party just the kind of rocket boost it needed.

Well, what happened was that the ACT party laid a finger on the wānanga, and then the Minister decided to do something, and then the Māori Party did get the rocket boost it deserved. So this is a Labour nightmare, because now it is seen by the Pākehā voters to be pouring good money in after bad, and it is seen by Māori voters as having kicked the institution that drove Labour’s unemployment figures down—by putting 30,000 of them on the roll. It is lose, lose, lose. The man who has overseen it all, the man they call “Runner” because he does Helen Clark’s errands, is Trevor Mallard. He has made a political botch of this that will cost Labour the Māori vote, and he has made a financial botch of it that has cost the taxpayer millions and millions of dollars.

The problem lies with the Minister—Trevor Mallard. He knew everything that was going on. He knew, for instance, that the retention and completion rates quoted were wrong. The Ministry of Education has these retention and completion rates. The only way one can show that one has not completed a course—in any tertiary institution, actually—is by lodging a formal withdrawal. If someone just drifts off and never finishes a course, then the person is counted as “completing”. Unless those people officially withdraw, they are still in the course. We know that tens of thousands of students just walk, and not just from wānanga courses but from a whole lot of other courses. That is just one little example of the mess in tertiary education.

I think the wānanga is, to some extent, the author of its own problems. But to a significant extent it is the victim of a lazy, incompetent Government that has left a trial of wreckage through tertiary education. The snooty, smarmy Steve Maharey, who had the nice word for everyone, blew hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars—that he never expected to be spending—on a tertiary system churning out qualifications for students who were sucked in by what they thought was a State guarantee of quality. But it was no guarantee of quality while this Government was in charge. This is yet another example in education, alongside NCEA, where this Labour Government with its arrogance has trashed the aspirations of thousands of New Zealanders, and it is Trevor Mallard’s fault.

Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First): I start by saying that there is a really delicious irony in this whole issue over Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, in that the wānanga actually represents everything that the ACT party believes is good in tertiary education. It is a model of ACT’s philosophy of education. It is a model of the market model. It is a most successful institution, based upon ACT’s philosophy of education. All we have to do is ask about ACT’s philosophy of education; it is about the market model, meeting clients’ needs, getting enrolments, and getting bums on seats. It was the model that was established through the 1990s, and now, here in 2005, a successful institution, which started off in a garage next to a dump in Te Awamutu, is the largest tertiary institution. By the way, there is no minority report from ACT in there, at all, which points out that everything was hunky-dory.

We have to recognise the fact that this institution has grown rapidly, and it has grown rapidly, as far as we know at this point in time, within the rules that have been established under the market model—as far as we know at this particular point in time. No one has come along from the Audit Office or anywhere else and said that it has not been working within the rules, and the rules have been established for all institutions. We will have to wait—and the Minister was correct to say so—and see just exactly what comes out of the audit report. There may be some shortcomings in the terms of reference. But as far as we know, this is the most audited tertiary institution in New Zealand, and we have not got one hanging offence, so let us wait and see whether the accusations made by Ken Shirley are well-founded.

What we do have to recognise is that that institution grew within the rules, as far as we know. It started off in a shed in Te Awamutu and grew all the way to being the largest tertiary institution in New Zealand under, as I said, those particular things—under the elements of entrepreneurialism, innovation, penetrating market research, and the efficient delivery of systems. We know well that one of the reasons why it was able to cream so much money was that it was able to have very, very high levels of student-teacher ratios—much higher, obviously, than the funding architects had ever considered, because they packaged up all those programmes. So it is very efficient in terms of efficiency as measured by the ACT party and its economists, and the people who believe that our whole society can be organised upon the Adam Smith model. Nevertheless, we still think that it moved too fast.

Ken Shirley has fingered one of the key issues, and it is not the rubbish he has been talking about; it is the issue around the Treaty of Waitangi money. That is one of the keys to the financial problem the institution has got into, and I want to give a little bit of background to that. During our time in coalition Government an application was made to us—for $10 million, I might add—along those particular lines. We had all the Māori members, and we were fairly keen on looking at that. But when we actually analysed it, this is what we came to a conclusion about: in 1993, when the private training establishment became the wānanga, under Locksmith Smith, under National, and became a State institution, it agreed to accept equivalent full-time student funding, like other tertiary institutions, and the policy was that the capital funding would be in equivalent full-time student funding. So if we were to give it a Treaty of Waitangi claim because it claimed a capital shortfall—it was not about operations, it was about capital funding—in fact it was already getting the capital funding, and all that funding it was getting from the time it was a wānanga.

New Zealand First said that that was double-dipping and that it was not fair. Why should other institutions not get the same sort of double-dipping? Northland Polytechnic started off with terrible buildings, so why should it not get the same sort of capital injection that a Treaty of Waitangi claim was able to give to this particular institution? So we did not allow it. But the moment the coalition broke down, the National Party immediately started working on giving that money to the wānanga. When Labour came into Government, it just could not wait to throw the money at it and say: “Here’s a gift from the Labour Party. Go and close the gaps.” So an agreement was made for $15 million. The wānanga then started to purchase buildings on the expectation that this money would flow through to it. That was quite a reasonable expectation—a deed of settlement had been signed.

Then the Government reneged on that settlement deed, and therein lies the problem. Suddenly, the wānanga did not have the money to be able to continue, along with other things that were going on, for example, the capping of the funding that went through—the 5.1 funding—and the other funding there. That cap was put on and that put pressure on the wānanga. Other factors—and I think the Minister is right; some of the unemployment factors, etc., meant that its enrolments reduced at the very time that the Government was reneging on the issue over the Treaty of Waitangi money, which it should not have been given in the first place. Then, of course, it said: “Look, we can trade ourselves out of this.”, but the way to trade out of it would have been to sell off those properties, and they would have been at fire-sale cost. Quite rightly, the Government has said: “Hang on a second. We don’t want this. We don’t want that pub on the road just out of Hamilton sold at fire-sale cost. If it has to be sold, it should be sold at a decent level so that the money can be returned to the State institution.”, which the wānanga is, and as I say, for that both National and Labour have to take some blame.

The member from ACT Ken Shirley mentioned that the Education and Science Committee did a financial review. I have to tell Mr Ken Shirley that, unfortunately, that review was of the year prior to the year we are looking at now, when the wānanga got itself into financial problems. I also have to mention—and this is an excuse for the member—that ACT did not put in any minority report to suggest that there was any financial mismanagement or financial problem in the wānanga up to that particular point in time.

Hon Ken Shirley: And you were the chairperson.

Hon BRIAN DONNELLY: I was the chairperson, and that is why I will stand by the fact that we did not get any evidence of financial mismanagement during that financial review. I want to make that public, and people can read it in the report we made to the Parliament itself. But I have to make mention of one particular interaction during that review. I refer to the occasion when we went up to the wānanga and interviewed, and all the programmes that were going on were explained to us. Let us face it—there has been real innovation in the delivery of programmes there. There has been very real penetration of a part of the educational market that has been very, very resistant to penetration by any of our other institutions. Those things have to be recognised, and whatever is occurring here in the decisions the Government is making, those things cannot be lost. As a Parliament we have to ensure that they are maintained.

Rongo Wētere made this particular comment to a question asked of him when they were putting out some of the problems that were occurring with the funding flow, etc. Someone asked him: “What could be done to help you out?”, and his comment was: “Get rid of this Labour Government.” Am I correct! Maybe that piece of information went back to the Minister of Education, and maybe that has created some of the turn of events since then. There has been a lot of talk about the $239 million, but that $239 million has come from the funding streams from the policies that were set in place during the National Government. If National—[Interruption] Oh yes, certainly. But the funding policies were put in place at that particular time, and endorsed by ACT, I might add. If Labour can be criticised, it would be because it has done nothing about it. In fact, the Associate Minister Steve Maharey, whilst recognising that there was a problem with the “bums on seats” policy, did not do anything about it. He put in place the levers but never pulled any of them. Therefore, this Labour Government does have to take responsibility for the financial problems that occurred.

In the last Parliament we put through a tertiary education reform bill. The reason we put it through and changed the way in which things were done was so that there would be early signals when there were financial problems. So much for the early signals! This is not the first institution that has had to be bailed out by National or Labour. There is one in New Plymouth that is still in that particular process, so it is not unique in itself. But the tertiary education reform legislation was supposed to give more timely information to be able to act. This particular situation has not been acted on in a timely fashion. In fact, it has been frustrated by some of the deliberate measures made by the Government itself around Treaty of Waitangi money and about capping funding.

METIRIA TUREI (Green): Typically, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa is suffering a much greater level of scrutiny that any other similar institution would in similar circumstances. It is absolutely no surprise that the ACT members have attached themselves to this issue. Te Wānanaga o Aotearoa is, after all, a Māori institution that provides a critical and an enormously successful service to Māori communities and Māori students across the country—a service that all other providers have effectively failed to provide with anywhere near the success that this one has.

We do not have requests from ACT for urgent debates about the millions of dollars that universities spend on advertising, for example. Although student fees are still increasing and tertiary staff are finding it more and more difficult to get the pay rises they need to do their work, the universities are spending millions of dollars every year on advertising to attract people in our small country. We do not have urgent debates about what is happening with regard to the Taranaki Polytechnic, which has had a $7.5 million bail-out. Te Wānanga o Aotearoa is a huge institution worth hundreds of millions of dollars; in comparison with its size $20 million is a reasonable amount of money in the circumstances. Yet we do not have the same claims of mismanagement and terrible foul play against Taranaki Polytechnic that we are hearing from ACT about Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Nor do we hear the same complaints against the Modern Age Institute of Learning, a private provider that also received assistance from the Government. This is clearly a race-based attack, in my view.

It is really important that we do not lose sight of the purpose of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, which is to provide education services to Māori communities—communities that have missed out and been failed by the State system of tertiary education provision, and indeed by the State system of compulsory education. Te Wānanga o Aotearoa has massively increased Māori involvement in tertiary education—much more successfully than anyone else has been able to do. One of its real successes has been the establishment of small outposts in far-flung parts of our country so that small communities of Māori, and other people who live there as well, can get access to tertiary services they would otherwise never have had access to. The institution has been committed to providing and supporting whānau into tertiary education. That is an enormous success, and it must not be underplayed. The institution has made tertiary education accessible where other providers have failed to do so.

In fact, the real scandal here is actually that Māori adults are now having to get student loans and go into debt in order to obtain the education they should have got for free when they were young. Part of the increase in Māori student numbers is the increase in adult students: people returning for second-chance learning, for basic literacy and numeracy education, and to do the training they should have had when they were still in school. The State system completely failed to meet their needs at that time, and now they are going back to tertiary institutions to get that education and having to pay fees—and sometimes enormous fees. One of the real successes of the wānanga is that it has provided a number of courses for free, making sure Māori are not doubly penalised in their desire to obtain the education they were entitled to in the first place.

There is no doubt that the wānanga has made some mistakes. Part of that was due to massive expansion; it is always difficult for a provider like that to expand so quickly. But the Hon Brian Donnelly is completely right: the wānanga has done all that within the rules and the frameworks provided for it by the Government. If there is a problem here, it is with the Government policy that has not done anything about the equivalent full-time student system that allowed this situation to happen from the beginning—partly, I guess, because the Government wanted the wānanga to be a little flagship for its education policies. Now that the Government is losing support in the Māori community, perhaps it is letting the wānanga go. Maybe it is quite justified to make that accusation against the Government. But either way, it is the Government’s responsibility to have in place policies and frameworks to ensure these problems do not happen to State-funded institutions.

But that said, a $20 million blowout is, comparatively speaking, not as bad as the $800 million blowout by Air New Zealand all those years ago. That was a huge amount of money going to what was, effectively, a private institution that provided services for a very limited number of New Zealanders. Yet here we have quibbling over $20 million for an institution that provides services to people and to communities that otherwise miss out completely.

In terms of the wānanga, the Greens believe that it should be supported and assisted to provide the services it is designed to provide, that it does a fantastic job of providing those services to Māori communities, and that the scrutiny it is suffering is a race-based scrutiny. We do not shy away from the fact that mistakes have been made. It is not a particular surprise that there are financial difficulties in an organisation of the wānanga’s size and with the level of expansion it is undergoing. We urge the Government to continue to support this institution, not to let it flag, and to remember it provides a critical service that this Government’s other institutions have not been able to provide. We should not let Māori communities suffer for this Government’s failed policies.

BERNIE OGILVY (United Future): Yesterday the Minister of Education, the Hon Trevor Mallard, gave us a message that I do not think any of us are pleased about, and that is why we are here today debating this wānanga. This particular institution is on the brink of insolvency. There is no great joy in talking about this. Some of us, in talking about it today, have indicated some of the concerns that exist. Those concerns are not being swept undercover as they have been over the last couple of years.

I want to talk about just two or three things that have struck me. I was on a visit to the institution in Te Awamutu with the Education and Science Committee some months ago, and what impressed me—and had already impressed me over the years that I have understood this institution in its short existence—was that it has played a huge and significant role in encouraging Māori, in particular, and those who are at the wrong end of the socio-economic club, as it were, to get back into education and to learn to read and write. That is so fundamental to all of us sitting in this institution called Parliament that we take it for granted, but, as has been pointed out, those people need a second chance, because the education system, as it was in their time, failed to deliver educational outcomes for them. This institution—this wānanga—has proved beyond peer and beyond doubt, in my mind and in the mind of United Future, that it has done amazing things. We will not forget that.

However, the cost of quality assurance and accountability procedures is the nub of the matter. As a policy, United Future has no problem whatsoever with funding being focused on students, but it does have an issue about funding being for a particular provider. That, of course, has allowed a variety of options to exist. That is why this wānanga has existed and has done such a wonderful job in terms of providing education and in making available what we call second-chance education for those who missed out through failure or from not being interested in the mechanisms of education when they were going through either primary or secondary schooling many years ago.

Yesterday the Minister announced that he will dissolve the council and appoint a commissioner. That is a very unusual step, and as a result I think that this debate has great significance.

I want to touch on something that others have alluded to but did not emphasise—that is, the spectacular growth in any organisation requires scrutiny and other things to be put into place, no matter what the institution. I think that that is why we are in this predicament today. Quality assurance and accountability over a wide range of issues has not been managed correctly. We have been very much alerted to the fact that financial management problems exist. Originally there were governance problems, as was previously discussed by the select committee. Low-quality courses have been produced, and the quality of education has not been assessed correctly. All those things add up to there having been a lack of scrutiny while the organisation grew out of all proportion to anything else, with so many tens of thousands of students coming on board for the first time to learn and to contribute to our society. And they are contributing—they can now read, write, and do the things they want to do. They are studying as well as being in the workplace, and I think that they are part of the success story of this country. I would like that never to be forgotten.

But I want to address the associated issue of who is really to blame for all this. Is it the institution, which we have heard one or two people berate? It is partly the institution. Is it the Minister and those around him? Or is it the system that has been inherited, as others have indicated? Those issues are all part of the problem, and I would like to focus on one or two of them.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority and, certainly, the Tertiary Education Commission have really failed. In the last few weeks in this House there has been no end of concern about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It has failed to come up to scratch in respect of the exam system that replaced School Certificate, university entrance, and scholarship exams. We have heard time after time that the National Certificate of Educational Achievement has not come up to scratch. Who is to blame? It is the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. The Tertiary Education Commission was put in place by an Act of Parliament in my time. It was set aside, purely and simply, to monitor and bring quality assurance to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand, including this sort of organisation, and it has not done so.

I put on record today that we in United Future, and many of us sitting in Parliament, have concluded that the real blame goes beyond the noise of what has been printed in the media. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Tertiary Education Commission have not performed correctly. They should have brought their signals to the Minister. Some people have said that the Minister was informed, but that he did not take on the advice. I am not sure about that; I do not have that evidence. But I do know that as an auditing body, the Tertiary Education Commission has been ineffective. That charge is writ large all over this case.

The commission and the authority failed to identify problems that emerged with some private training establishments—I note that those problems came as a result of very, very quick expansion. A lot of private training establishments have gone under because of the same issues. All we have here is a State sector mirror image of the whole thing. United Future is not happy that we have to debate this in the House, when the lesson should have been learnt by the Tertiary Education Commission and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority when they dealt with the private training establishments and the growth they underwent in this country.

It is a shame that this is before us but, at the same time, if we as a Parliament and as a country learn from this, we will be ever so much stronger and more able to go forward to help the education of all students—young and old—in this nation.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA (Associate Minister of Education): Te Wānanga o Aotearoa is being treated the same as any other tertiary education institution in the same situation would be treated. As members know, other tertiary institutions have been treated the same. We acknowledge that the wānanga has made huge gains for Māori in education. Thousands of learners who were previously marginalised by the education system are now engaged in learning. The Government wants to look into the institution’s positive gains while also addressing the pressures that have been created by rapid growth. We are committed to addressing any inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money, and there is certainly tension around in relation to allocating this loan to the tertiary institution.

The wānanga has a very important place in the tertiary sector. In the sense of its roll and its rapid expansion, the wānanga lends itself to a whole lot of issues that arise 200 years on from our being a settled society. It is important that the member who was blabbing on about this being a special deal for Māori looks at it in the context that pervades. It is important to understand the intergenerational adjustment that is going on for Māori at the moment.

If he wants to huff and puff about what this Government does not want to do for Māoridom, I will tell him that 91 percent of all Māori who want to work are in work. Is that bad for Māori? No. There are 18,000 Māori on the unemployment benefit and that figure is tracking down. It is the lowest unemployment rate for Māoridom in 29 years. Is that bad? Is that indicative of a Government that has not done enough for them? People pretend that this Government is on a different mission. Forty thousand more Māori have gone into work in the last 2 years. Is that negative? No. There are 23,500 Māori in Modern Apprenticeships. We know that a lot of the modern leaders who are 60 or 70 years old did two things. They either went to Māori trade training, or they went into the armed forces. That means they were in a skilling framework that set them up for the rest of their lives. That is the better part of what the wānanga has done—it has re-entered our people into education.

A lot of institutions never saw the market in doing that. They never saw the different demographic, compared with Pākehā and non-Māori demographics in this country. The average age of Māori students enrolled in the wānanga is 22, which means that it has played a principal role in the development of those students. Twenty percent of all qualifications in this country, albeit there are wobbly bits in the system, are gained by Māori. I tell my colleague Mr Shirley that in 1968 only 16 Māori came out of university.

Hon Ken Shirley: How many went there?

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: Not many, because neither the institutions nor the Governments in those days made an effort to put them in there. I remind my friends in Opposition that the baby-boomer Māori—and although I never went to university, I understand that the baby-boomers are from 40 to 60 years of age, and that that is different from the Pākehā baby-boomer—

Jill Pettis: No, we’re 50, I hate to tell you.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: I do not know, but at the end of the day, for the last 150 years, when Pākehā children have sat down at the dinner table—whether they be 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15—they have heard good talk from their parents and their uncles and aunties. Because those adults have been to university, have been managing businesses, and have been telling their kids about the Māoris who work for them. Being a 50-year-old-plus Māori, I tell the House that my generation is the last generation of children of manual labourers—that is true of 99 percent of us. If one of our parents was a teacher or a nurse, that was a rarity. That is who we are—99 percent of the parents now are children of manual labourers. It was a great life, and Māori were loyal workers.

The wānanga found a market and picked up a people who were not used to going into tertiary education. That is what the wānanga did. I believe, and I will say this even though some people in Opposition and some of my own colleagues may disagree, that the wānanga has a role now and it has a role in the future. If we want to huff and puff about being good to all New Zealanders, then we should make sure that the education journey has relevance, and that the continuum of it is not just a snapshot in time where people choose or narrow their view on a people who are still developing.

Hon Ken Shirley: There has to be quality.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: There has to be quality. But quality is certainly aligned with demographic experience, and that is what is happening in Māoridom. It is no deep science that due to the intergenerational adjustment, we do not have many old people on the marae, because in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s a lot of our people moved from their rural and traditional roots to cater for the labour-market need. That member in the ACT party knows about that—about generating wealth and about corporate nuances.

Who were the manual labourers? Who were the people who had one of the quickest transitions in the world, in 10 years, from being a traditional-based—a marae-based—people, to being city-based? It was Māoridom. I can tell members that whether or not they like it, this is not about wasting funding. It is about a Government having the courage to address the situation. We know that the labour market, and everybody else, needs those Māori people. We also know that there is a shortage of skills.

I remember standing in Taumarunui 20-odd years ago, when Buck Nin was there, and I remember people talking about starting the wānanga. I certainly know what journey Māori people, or indigenous people, need to take in the economic climate that we have at the moment. I say that Te Wānanga o Aotearoa has played a critical role. But there have been mistakes. Again, the differentiation between governance, management, and tutorage to the pupils is something that we have to differentiate. At the end of the day, it is political fodder for people with blinkered views to say how bad it is but to not take into account the situation.

I ask members to imagine it: 99 percent of the parents of the people are children of manual labourers. When one talks about quality education, or better quantities in education, how can one achieve that suddenly? Pākehā parents and Chinese parents are generally well ahead. So in that sense I defend the wānanga. I defend the need to keep it in this country and to keep it alive. I defend it from the perspective of a treaty right. I defend it from the perspective of the right of doing the right thing for the people—for the young kids in this country and their parents. I do understand intergenerational adjustment. I do understand a minority population against a majority population. Of most Māori parents now—50, 60, or 70-year-olds—99 percent never went to university. They never had the privilege of going to a tertiary establishment. That is what we are trying to do. If there is nonsense in there, we will sort it out. If there is nonsense and misuse in the management, we will sort it out—

Hon Ken Shirley: We’ll do it properly—hip hop!

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: That is right, and that is what we have done. Hip hop is a nonsense in that sense, but, by Jove, the people in that member’s party have made a lot of money out of the hip-hop business, because it is a big business in this country.

Hon Ken Shirley: Name one.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: The music industry has exploded. The member understands that. We can huff and puff about the negatives. We can beat the poor old Māori up again. We can make believe. But we should be honest about what we want to be, and give Māori a chance. Māoris do want to be on an equal footing. I can tell members a deep secret about Māori. Māoridom is going forward. Māori are doing better.

Jim Peters: How are you going to change it?

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: We are going to change it by due process. We are going to make sure that Māori compete. We are going to make sure that their assets and their enterprise are utilised better. We are going to make sure that they understand that the days of the Pākehā managing it for the sake of it may be past, that 99 percent of them never went to university, that they can manage their own business, that they can be there, and that they can be better leaders.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4)

Instruction to Committee

Hon RICK BARKER (Associate Minister of Justice): I move, That it be an instruction to the Committee of the whole House on the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) that it take the bill part by part.

Motion agreed to.

In Committee

Part 1 Alcohol Advisory Council Act 1976

LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako): I want to talk in general terms about the process with regard to Statutes Amendment bills, although I know that Part 1 of this bill is about the Alcohol Advisory Council Act. I do not intend to take a call on each part. When we debated the second reading of this bill, it became very evident at that time that the Government was introducing Supplementary Order Papers at the eleventh hour that we did not have a chance to debate. We had read the bill, talked to our various spokespeople on the issue, and gone to the Government Administration Committee, but, subsequent to that, a number of Supplementary Order Papers were tabled. I made the point very strongly during the debate on 5 April that that was unsatisfactory, and that the process needed to be streamlined. I have had an assurance from the Minister that that will be the case in the future, and we are happy to support Supplementary Order Papers 342 and 349 as we go through the process on this bill.

However—and I bring it up now, because I think it is important—we were notified last week that there will be, once again, a Supplementary Order Paper comprising pages on the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 5), which is currently before the Government Administration Committee, and on which I spoke during the first reading debate. Given the point I made during the second reading debate on the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) about late Supplementary Order Papers being unsatisfactory when the support and the agreement of the whole House is necessary, and given the fact that the Government has flagged that there will be substantial changes to the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 5) that will add other significant requirements, one has to ask whether there needs to be a Statutes Amendment Bill (No 6) to cover those points. So I say to the Minister in the chair, Rick Barker, that the points I made when we debated the second reading of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) are still relevant to the progress of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 5), which is currently before the select committee.

As I said, National members will not be taking calls on all parts of this bill. We have thoroughly vetted them. I will make a couple of points as we go through the bill.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): In relation to Supplementary Order Paper 349 in the name of the Hon Rick Barker, I signal the Government’s objection to Part 1 standing part.

Part 1 objected to and struck out of the bill.

Part 1A agreed to.

Part 2 Conservation Act 1987

GERRARD ECKHOFF (ACT): I do not specifically object to the clauses in this part, but I think there is a question surrounding the Department of Conservation’s role in its wider advocacy, if you like, on behalf of conservation. Of course, live aquatic life is very much a part of that. But there appears to me to be a significant conflict of interest within the Department of Conservation when we realise that it has not just an advocacy role, not just a management role, and not just a governance role, but all three roles. I am at something of a loss to understand why that is still the case. Whether it is to do with live aquatic life, which this particular part of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) refers to, or whether it is to do with the wider conservation field, it is widely accepted by any of us who have some experience of the Department of Conservation that the combination of all three of the department’s roles is totally inappropriate. We know that in any corporation or organisation each role is absolutely independent—absolutely separate one from the other, and one accountable to the other. For example, in the role of governance, the role of a board of governors or of the board in control is to set the rules, and it is for management to apply those rules and get on with the job of managing the organisation.

But in this part the department has an advocacy role, as well as a governance role. Anybody with any modicum of understanding of the business world and of best practice knows that one cannot combine all three roles. I think that has caused significant problems for the department, as well as for those who have land neighbouring the conservation estate, the sea, or whatever it may be. Tragically—and I say this genuinely—the department is becoming known as the neighbour from hell.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Clauses 5 and 6.

GERRARD ECKHOFF: I hear I am being pointed back to the particular clause about the transfer or release of live aquatic life. But if there is an application to transfer some live aquatic life, say, from the North Island to the South Island for a farming purpose—and we are increasingly moving into aquatic farming—then it appears to me that there is a conflict immediately. The department has the role of ensuring through its advocacy that the purity, if you like, of that life stays the same in the North Island, but if it is shifted to the South Island there is the question of whether the strains would remain pure, and so on. It seems to me to be totally inappropriate for one department to be able to have that sort of overarching control of that wider area. I say again that the issue is not just about live aquatic life; it is reflective of life right throughout the spectrum. But that certainly is an issue, and it is one that we will no doubt hear a lot more of in future.

DAIL JONES (NZ First): I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I take it we are looking only at Part 2 on its own, and that Part 2A is a separate part that will be looked at separately.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Yes, it is—most certainly.

Part 2 agreed to.

Part 2A Constitution Act 1986

DAIL JONES (NZ First): The procedure, as I understand it, on a Statutes Amendment Bill is that we agree to everything because we have been briefed in advance by the Minister, so there is really no cause for debate. This part, of course, is slightly different, because a Supplementary Order Paper has been put forward. Discussions took place on the Supplementary Order Paper, and my understanding was that section 20(1)(a), substituted in clause 6C, would be redrafted to differ from this particular draft. Am I correct in thinking that, and will an amendment be moved?

Hon Rick Barker: There is an amendment.

DAIL JONES: There is an amendment?

Hon Rick Barker: Yes, there is.

DAIL JONES: We have not seen it—

Hon Rick Barker: It is on the Table. If you give me a chance, I will speak to it. You beat me to it.

DAIL JONES: Is it on the Table?

Hon Rick Barker: Yes, it is.

DAIL JONES: Thank you very much.

Hon RICK BARKER (Associate Minister of Justice): The honourable member Dail Jones is exactly correct: Supplementary Order Paper 349 is on the Table. It has been agreed to by the Standing Orders Committee and discussed with the Clerk, and there is unanimity. One small contextual change has been made to the Supplementary Order Paper, and there is an amendment in my name on the Table to that effect. If people look at section 20(1)(a), substituted in clause 6C, they will see a semicolon and the word “but”. The amendment deletes the semicolon and the word “but”, and replaces them with a colon. That has been agreed to, and I understand that with the inclusion of this amendment there is now unanimity on that particular provision.

The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Rick Barker to proposed new clause 6C set out on Supplementary Order Paper 349, in his name, be agreed to:

to omit from paragraph (a) in section 20(1) the word “; but”, and substitute the expression “:”.

Amendment to the amendment agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment as amended set out on Supplementary Order Paper 349 in the name of the Hon Rick Barker to Part 2A be agreed to.

Amendment as amended agreed to, and Part 2A as amended agreed to.

Parts 2B to 4 agreed to.

Part 5 Fire Service Act 1975

GERRARD ECKHOFF (ACT): I would like to take a brief call on Part 5, “Fire Service Act 1975”. That is an issue. I agree with the changes made, but I want to draw to the attention of the Committee the huge significance of the National Rural Fire Authority throughout—naturally enough—rural New Zealand. Some real concerns are being expressed, by those of us who live in the hinterland, over the powers that the National Rural Fire Authority has been given. When those powers are exercised appropriately, there is no problem, but we tend to be finding a little bit more, especially in the dry regions of the South Island, that the responsibilities of the authority, which indeed can often involve the Department of Conservation—members will note that that department rears its head in a lot of places—are being taken to the extreme, in so far as when a controlled fire takes place, too often the panic button is pushed for the fire authorities to come in with their bright, shiny new gear and put out a fire, as often as not at huge cost to the landowners concerned.

That is a real problem that really does need to be addressed, yet so far as I can see, it has not been. As often as not, those fires are caused by that thing called an unexplained cause, and as often as not it can be a passing tramper, a cigarette butt, or whatever. But if the fire is put out on rural land it is the responsibility of that landowner, and that is where the cost falls. So, of course, that requires a very significant insurance policy, which in terms of the premium is increasing on a pretty rapid basis as those fires become more and more expensive, and as helicopters are used as the primary tool, if you like, to put those fires out. That cost is falling back on the rural landowner.

Many of us are starting to ask, if the cost is to fall on the rural landowner, then why does the cost of putting out a fire in a city not fall on the owner of that particular house? That would be deemed to be rather unfair in the urban arena, and we deem it to be so in the rural arena, as well. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, the Department of Conservation is a fire authority and it is inclined to push the panic button far too soon and go in with massive resources. As soon as the resource goes in, so too does the cost.

Many of us in rural New Zealand would say that a timely fire is a hugely appropriate way of controlling potentially devastating fires in the future. As we have learnt from other countries such as Canada, America, and Australia, a timely burn is highly appropriate as long as the area is not burnt every few years. But I would like to see the responsibilities of the National Rural Fire Authority or the fire officer curtailed somewhat by ensuring that the key local land groups, for example, in the regions are consulted before the fire authority hits that button. This is a hugely important aspect for most of us, especially in the drier regions of the South Island.

I do not have much more comment to make, other than to say that I think we will be addressing this issue in the not too distant future, especially when we talk about the fire safety margins in clause 25. I see that the Department of Conservation has a responsibility to ensure that they are kept in a state, if I can put it that way, to ensure that a fire does not carry from a private property through the safety margin and on to the Department of Conservation estate, where, as often as not, very significant flora and fauna may exist. So my question really is how on earth will the Department of Conservation control the massive number of margins that exist right throughout this country? Nothing in this bill indicates how that responsibility will be carried out.

Part 5 agreed to.

Parts 6 and 7 agreed to.

Part 7A Government Superannuation Fund Act 1956

LINDSAY TISCH (Junior Whip—National): I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I seek some clarification on this part, particularly of clause 33B. The Minister does not need to make a speech about it; he can just nod in agreement or shake his head. I understand that the provision here is directed at police officers who, to get their money out at the age of 50 years, will perf in order to get their superannuation, but who then cannot be re-employed. I do not know whether that is correct, in fact, and I ask whether the Minister, if he is able to, could shake his head or nod in agreement to confirm that the changes that are being made will allow members to access their funds and receive a lump-sum payment, without being disadvantaged. Am I correct in that assessment of what Part 7A, and specifically clause 33B, is about?

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Is there any objection to any of those clauses?

LINDSAY TISCH: I just wondered whether the Minister could give me a nod about that. I ask whether I am correct in that assessment.

Hon Rick Barker: I just want the member to repeat the question.

LINDSAY TISCH: The situation, as I understand it, is that when police officers turn 50, they will be able to access their funds. Rather than being able to do that at present, they perf in order to receive their superannuation, but then they cannot be re-employed. I understand this clause will allow members of the police to access their funds, so that they will not be disadvantaged. All I want is clarification about that point.

Hon Rick Barker: My officials advise me that that is correct.

Part 7A agreed to.

Part 8 agreed to.

New Part 8A Judicature Act 1908

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 349 in the name of the Hon Rick Barker to insert new Part 8A be agreed to.

New Part 8A agreed to.

Parts 9 to 11 agreed to.

Part 12 Motor Vehicle Sales Act 2003

PAUL ADAMS (United Future): United Future will be objecting to clause 67 in this part, concerning the requirement to supply a supplier information notice card (SIN card). Traditionally, when a transaction has happened between motor traders, it has been accepted that a SIN card has not been required. Therefore, we have no problems with anything in the bill, except when we come to section 14 (1A)(b) and (c), in clause 67, because now we have the case whereby a motor trader that may be an insurance company—in fact, the request for this provision came from an insurance company—sells a vehicle that is still registered to a wrecker, the insurance company maintains that it causes extra compliance costs for the trader to have to provide the SIN card.

But the problem we have is that we are fostering another great black hole for the recycling of cars that have been substantially damaged or written-off, without having any checks and balances on their repair. For example, if an imported motor vehicle comes across the wharf and has any form of damage, that vehicle is flagged. It is not that the vehicle cannot be repaired, because it can be repaired, but it must go through the correct process and have engineers’ reports etc., depending on the damage, before it is called “complied” and issued with an MR2A form to allow it to be registered. An insurance company that is also a motor trader does not have to supply a SIN card under the current regulations, provided that the vehicle is deregistered. If a vehicle is deregistered, sold to a motor wrecker, then purchased by somebody who decides to repair that vehicle, it can be repaired. But, again, it must go through the correct procedure to make sure all the repairs are done correctly before it is reissued with an MR2A form and comes on to the market as a reregistered vehicle.

Unfortunately, paragraphs (b) and (c) allow insurance companies to sell damaged cars while maintaining their registration. Therefore, nothing stops those cars from being repaired without any checks and balances, then being sold to the unsuspecting public as cars that have been substantially damaged and repaired in New Zealand.

United Future supports the idea that a transaction from motor trader to motor trader should not need to have a SIN card. However, we do not accept that in the case of a trader that is selling, as in paragraphs (b) and (c), to somebody with a licence granted under the Secondhand Dealers Act or the Secondhand Dealers and Pawnbrokers Act “who buys, in the course of that person’s business as a secondhand dealer, motor vehicles for wrecking or dismantling by that person;”, because we maintain that is just another step in the process to allow cars to be recycled.

So we welcome the new Motor Vehicle Sales Act coming up for review, but we also flag the significant concerns in the industry over the SIN card issue. This would be a retrograde step, a bad step, and an indication in the wrong direction, so United Future will be objecting to clause 67.

Hon RICK BARKER (Associate Minister of Justice): On the basis of that objection to clause 67, I object to clause 68, as clause 68 cannot stand without clause 67.

Clauses 67 and 68 objected to and struck out of the bill, and Part 12 as amended agreed to.

Part 13 agreed to.

Part 14 New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 349 in the name of the Hon Rick Barker to Part 14 be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to, and Part 14 agreed to.

Parts 15 to 18 agreed to.

Part 18A Sale of Liquor Amendment Act 2004

LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako): I am not objecting to this new part, but I do note that it is quite ironic that the commentary states: “As from 6 April 2004, section 37 of the Sale of Liquor Act was amended … to alter certain conditions of off-licences to provide for sales of wines from wineries on Easter Sunday,”. It is interesting that last Easter a number of wineries that one would have expected to take advantage of this decided not to open. I was in Queenstown at the time, and it was publicised there that, because of the Holidays Act, wineries were not prepared to open. I just make that point. This part will alter certain conditions of off-licences to allow sales from wineries on Easter Sunday, but, interestingly enough, this probably will not happen to a large extent, because other criteria—namely, the Holidays Act—will make it uneconomic for those places to open.

Part 18A agreed to.

Parts 19 and 20 agreed to.

Schedule 1 agreed to.

Schedule 2

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 349 in the name of the Hon Rick Barker to schedule 2 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to, and schedule 2 as amended agreed to

Clauses 1 and 2 agreed to.

The Committee divided the bill into the Armed Forces Discipline Amendment Bill (No 2), the Conservation Amendment Bill (No 3), the Constitution Amendment Bill, the Defence Amendment Bill (No 3), the Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2), the Evidence Amendment Bill, the Fire Service Amendment Bill (No 2), the Forest and Rural Fires Amendment Bill, the Geneva Conventions Amendment Bill, the Government Superannuation Fund Amendment Bill (No 5), the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Amendment Bill (No 2), the Judicature Amendment Bill (No 4), the Land Transfer Amendment Bill, the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill (No 2), the Medicines Amendment Bill (No 4), the Motor Vehicle Sales Amendment Bill, the National Parks Amendment Bill, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Amendment Bill, the Patriotic and Canteen Funds Amendment Bill, the Racing Amendment Bill, the Radiocommunications Amendment Bill (No 2), the Reserves Amendment Bill, the Sale of Liquor Amendment Bill (No 4), the Telecommunications Amendment Bill, and the Trade in Endangered Species Amendment Bill, pursuant to Supplementary Order Paper 342.

Bill reported with amendment.

Third Readings

Hon RICK BARKER (Associate Minister of Justice): I move, That the Armed Forces Discipline Amendment Bill (No 2), the Conservation Amendment Bill (No 3), the Constitution Amendment Bill, the Defence Amendment Bill (No 3), the Electoral Amendment Bill (No 2), the Evidence Amendment Bill, the Fire Service Amendment Bill (No 2), the Forest and Rural Fires Amendment Bill, the Geneva Conventions Amendment Bill, the Government Superannuation Fund Amendment Bill (No 5), the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Amendment Bill (No 2), the Judicature Amendment Bill (No 4), the Land Transfer Amendment Bill, the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill (No 2), the Medicines Amendment Bill (No 4), the Motor Vehicle Sales Amendment Bill, the National Parks Amendment Bill, the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Amendment Bill (No 2), the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Amendment Bill, the Patriotic and Canteen Funds Amendment Bill, the Racing Amendment Bill, the Radiocommunications Amendment Bill (No 2), the Reserves Amendment Bill, the Sale of Liquor Amendment Bill (No 4), the Telecommunications Amendment Bill, and the Trade in Endangered Species Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I thank the chair of the Government Administration Committee, Dianne Yates, and all the other members of the select committee for doing an outstanding job on this legislation. I also thank the Committee of the whole House for its help and its suggestions for improving the bill. The Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) is a unique bill. It is an omnibus bill, it can pass only with leave, and it is constrained to being about technical and non-controversial matters. That does not mean to say that there is not sometimes controversy on such bills, but it should not be the case.

I want to respond to the point made by Lindsay Tisch in the Committee stage about Supplementary Order Papers coming in on this legislation. I note that the select committee’s report on the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) states: “… we were continuously confronted with requests to have included in the bill further amendments to Acts.” It went on to make the point that this process could, in fact, erode good will. I took the committee’s comments very seriously. I have now changed the process for Statutes Amendment bills so that the amendments that can be expected to such bills can be corralled on to a single Supplementary Order Paper. From time to time departments and ministries find they want amendments made, and on the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) we found they were putting in their requests for Supplementary Order Paper amendments individually and separately. People had a flutter of paper arriving on their desks—day after day and week after week, it seemed—requesting new Supplementary Order Papers. I have told them that we were not going to have that, that we were would put up a Statutes Amendment bill, and that if any subsequent amendments needed to be considered they would be on a single Supplementary Order Paper. I have signed that out in respect of the subsequent Statutes Amendment Bill (No 5), and Mr Tisch and members of the committee will find that a single Supplementary Order Paper will come to them, not requests for multitudes of Supplementary Order Papers. Anything not on that Supplementary Order Paper will have to wait for the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 6). So I have taken the committee’s words of caution seriously. I have acted upon them—

Darren Hughes: A smart, interactive Government!

Hon RICK BARKER: The member’s quick! I will make sure that the process flows more smoothly. I just reassure Mr Tisch that I had read the Government Administration Committee’s report and have acted on it, and I think members will see an improvement in the process. Lastly, I thank the Committee of the whole House for its assistance in passing this legislation.

LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako): I thank the Minister for his assurance over the process for Supplementary Order Papers. I have been quite critical of the process, especially with the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4). But as I mentioned at the beginning of the Committee stage, at the Government Administration Committee the other day we were told there would be a huge Supplementary Order Paper related to the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 5). The question asked by all members on that select committee, including Labour members, was simply this: if it is so important, why is it not included in the amendment at the time? Why are these eleventh hour amendments coming through by way of Supplementary Order Paper?

We were informed that the Supplementary Order Paper that we will be debating shortly, without the scrutiny of a first reading in the House, would be quite comprehensive. If it is so important, one would have thought the Minister and the ministries would be incorporating that in the Statutes Amendment Bill at the time that it was tabled in the House, and it would be debated at the first reading before it goes to the select committee. So we will be monitoring that process very closely as we go through.

I do acknowledge the Minister’s comments about reassurance, and I would hope that the process will be carried through and streamlined, because this is about goodwill of Parliament. It is about all parties agreeing with the process. The changes to the provisions are in the main technical, and we do not want to get into lengthy debate on those. So if the Government wants the goodwill, then we would ask quite clearly that this provision of Supplementary Order Papers be taken seriously so that we can progress what we also believe to be important changes to legislation.

GERRARD ECKHOFF (ACT): This is just a brief call on the third reading of this bill, and I recognise, of course, that a Statutes Amendment Bill is not the place to debate the wider, substantive part. But I would just make the point that there are a number of bills in this amendment bill that both myself, and I am sure the ACT party, would love to debate in a much more wider sphere than we are debating in this limited sphere—bills such as the Conservation Amendment Bill (No 3), the Trade in Endangered Species Amendment Bill, the Forest and Rural Fires Amendment Bill, and the one that, I think, has a huge amount of relevance in Dunedin right at this time is the Patriotic and Canteen Funds Amendment Bill. The funding of our veterans—the last of the World War II veterans, most of whom, I guess, are still surviving well into their 80s—in Dunedin, especially, is a hugely topical issue, and I would have to say that the Government is negating its responsibility to those veterans. They need a paltry $2 million to ensure that they can live out their lives in their twilight years with some dignity and respect, and not have the worry or concern of having to shift from this home to that home as the funding for these brave individuals appears to be drying up.

I think it is outrageous, quite frankly, that funding is not fully available to look after essentially a very small number of men and women left who have done this country proud, over the years. It would not, as some members of the Government seem to suggest, set a precedent in rest homes right throughout this country if the Government stepped in and helped out at the Montecillo Veterans Home and Hospital. I think there would be—well, I guess there are always some—a very small number of people, a very, very tiny minority, who would suggest that the war veterans should be treated exactly the same as our other older citizens. I think they deserve a little bit of special treatment on behalf of those of us who respect and understand the sacrifices those people made.

I say again that I think it is outrageous that those people in their twilight years should have to go through the anxieties that they are obviously facing at this time as to where they will spend their final days. I take this opportunity to call on Minister Hodgson and Minister Benson-Pope in Dunedin to actually make even stronger representations to their Cabinet colleagues on behalf of the remaining few, and ensure that they can rest and have their final few years in dignity and tranquillity, and not have this question of money, and lack of money, surrounding their futures.

I have just returned from America on the Speaker’s tour, and to see the way in which—with dignity and reverence—the American people treat their dead and, indeed, those who are still alive to this day, was something to behold. I note that the Australians have the same attitude and, indeed, so do the Canadians. Why do we not have that attitude in New Zealand? Why do we not treat those who still remain with the reverence and respect they deserve? It is not about setting precedents, it is about doing the right thing to a very, very small number of people who have given their all for this country.

Bills read a third time.

Climate Change Response Amendment Bill

First Reading

Hon PETE HODGSON (Convenor, Ministerial Group on Climate Change): I move, That the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I will move that the bill be referred to the Commerce Committee for consideration, that the committee present its final report on or before Thursday, 28 July 2005, and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions and during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 191 and 194(1)(b) and (c).

This bill deals with two issues. Firstly, it amends the Climate Change Response Act of 2002 in respect of the function of New Zealand’s Kyoto Protocol registry. Under the Kyoto Protocol, New Zealand is required to develop and maintain a registry to ensure the accurate accounting of emissions units. Emissions units are defined as the various types of units specified under the Kyoto Protocol that the Crown may offset against New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions during the first commitment period of 2008-12. Several domestic climate change policies, and the clean development and joint implementation mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol, will require the Crown to transfer emissions units to New Zealand businesses and individuals. Units are awarded in recognition of activities undertaken by individuals to mitigate climate change. This bill will allow individuals to hold accounts in the registry and to trade in emissions units.

Under the Projects to Reduce Emissions policy, the Government has already offered contracts that are expected to result in the provision of 10 million units for around 40 projects that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases beyond “business as usual”. Further, by allowing individuals to hold accounts and trade, the Government is providing the opportunity for individuals to participate in the international market for emissions units for speculative or other reasons. Allowing broad participation is consistent with supporting the development of the international market and encouraging the creation of opportunities for new business activities, such as brokering. The bill also provides for the accounting of two new types of emissions units in the registry, which were created by international decisions taken in 2003, and makes several amendments to provide for the official administration of the registry.

Secondly, the bill enables the establishment of the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative. Forests absorb carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases associated with climate change. The Kyoto Protocol recognises that by allocating forest sink credits for forests planted since its benchmark year of 1990. Permanent reforestation creates forest sinks of enduring value. Part 2 extends the regulation-making powers of the Forests Act of 1949 in order to enable the establishment of a mechanism to allow landholders to access the value of carbon sequestration created under the Kyoto Protocol. Regulations will establish the policy details of the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative and will provide for contracts between the Crown and landowners. There is no compulsion on either party to enter those agreements. To enter the sink initiative, the land must be eligible to earn emissions units under the Kyoto Protocol. That means the land must not have been covered in forest as at 31 December 1989, and that the new forest must be “direct human induced”.

The Permanent Forest Sink Initiative is a business opportunity that has been created by the Government’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The initiative has the potential to attract many millions of dollars of investment into the New Zealand economy. The initiative would allow landowners to make better economic use of their land, particularly of isolated and erodible land not suitable for agriculture or commercial clear-fell forestry. The initiative is likely to produce positive environmental outcomes in terms of biodiversity, soil and water conservation, water quality and flood protection, funds for natural forest restoration, diversification of forest timber species, the development of a special-purpose timber supply, and the reduction in agricultural emissions through displacing some marginal pastoral agriculture. As a further incentive for reforestation, owners will be able to harvest some timber from their forests, but only after 35 years and only on a continuous canopy basis. Earlier harvesting or clear-felling of the forests would incur penalty payments.

Under current law, the tax treatment of the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative income and expenditure is uncertain. In order to remove that uncertainty, the Government proposes to amend the tax legislation to deem any business that primarily involves earning forest sink credits under the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative to be a forestry business. That will ensure that the existing forestry tax provisions also apply in that situation. Those amendments are expected to be included in the first tax bill following the tax bill scheduled for introduction in May 2005.

I commend the bill to the House.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): This bill illustrates the serious pickle the Labour Government has got New Zealand into, with its premature ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. It is piecemeal law that will create some quite perverse incentives in terms of the proposed carbon-trading market. What is particularly bizarre about this bill is that if people go out and create productive forestry, if they plant a new area of Pinus radiata for commerce, despite the fact that that will have equally a gain in terms of the protocol, they will be able to register their credits only if it is unproductive forestry. It seems somewhat bizarre but when I really think about it, not unusual from Labour—that it would want us to encourage unproductive activity but discourage productive activity.

Russell Fairbrother: We don’t encourage unproductivity.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I would like the member opposite to explain it to me. Why is it that if people go out and plant trees for non-commercial purposes, they will be able to register it and get credits from this Government, but if they do this to create wealth, to earn income for this nation, the Government says no? It is truly bizarre. It really does illustrate the muddled mind of the Government, with respect to this whole issue of climate change. It is part of the folly of this Government’s desperate bid to be cleaner and greener than anybody else on the planet—without rational thought as to the implications for New Zealand, for our economy, and for our environment, of going ahead of the pace.

Just last week the Government announced a new carbon tax that will impose an extra $300 million or $400 million on New Zealand homeowners, on New Zealand businesses, and on New Zealand farms. It is interesting to note what the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper said last week about the Government’s announcement. It said it was going to be an interesting experiment for New Zealand. Well, an experiment is something with high risk. While the rest of the world will be watching New Zealand with great interest, this Labour Government has no right to play games of experiments with the livelihoods of the key industries and the families of New Zealand. It should be an embarrassment that the Government is experimenting with the New Zealand economy.

It is interesting that the Europeans, the ones whom Pete Hodgson and the Government are so keen to trot out after, in the 1990s abandoned any idea of a Europe-wide carbon tax. It is high risk, it will have a negative impact on the New Zealand economy, and it will be for negligible environmental gain. How many members of this House really believe that the 4c a litre carbon tax will result in any less petrol or diesel being used in New Zealand?

Hon Ken Shirley: None at all.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Ken Shirley, quite properly, says “None at all.” Labour members are silent because they know in their heart of hearts that it will make not a dot’s worth of difference. They know. They have twice already put up the petrol tax. When they put up the petrol tax in 2002, was there any reduction in the amount of petrol used?

Lindsay Tisch: No.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Not at all. Will there be any reduction since 1 April this year, when Labour again put the petrol tax up? So why is it that Pete Hodgson and the Labour Party want to impose this extra carbon tax on New Zealand business and on New Zealand households, when they know that it will not work? I say to Pete Hodgson that the carbon tax will be as successful as the “fart tax”, and it will not be long before this Government is scurrying off into its hole and apologising for getting this one wrong, as well.

The real difficulty the Government has got itself into with the Kyoto Protocol is going so far ahead of our major trading partners. It is National’s view that New Zealand needs to move in parallel with our most important trading partners, and it was a mistake in 2002 for this Government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, when neither Australia nor the United States was part of it.

I point out to Darren Hughes, who is trying to interject, that New Zealand’s emissions amount to less than 0.5 percent internationally, and per head of population our emissions are about half that of Australia’s and the United States’ emissions. So why are we going to impose costs, and impose controls, and impose red tape on New Zealanders when countries like China, India, Singapore, Australia, the United States, and Canada do not have restrictions on them?

The devil of this bill will actually be in the detail. Because in that continuum—from a national park forest that is fully protected, all the way through to the production forest—where does this bill strike? The answer is that we do not know. We do not know, because, in fact, it is the regulations that will flow from this law that will sort out who is in and who is out. But I can bet one thing: this Government has no intention of providing the credits for those forest planters since 1990, who are eligible for Kyoto credits. Why will it not do that? Is there some great ideological reason? Is there some reason why, if it is indigenous forests, the Government will provide the credits, but not if it is plantation forests? Is there some rationale for the distinction that the Government is making in this bill, to give out credits to some but not to others?

It is very simple. The reason is that without the forest credits, this Government’s policy is absolutely naked. Without confiscating those forest rights from those thousands of Kyoto forest owners, unless the Government has those, it is seriously in the pickle. I ask Government members opposite, why should those who have this forest mechanism get credits, but not plantation forest owners? Why do those who use the cleaner development mechanism—say a wind farm—get the credits but not those that plant pine forests? Why are those who meet the requirements of the joint implementation mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol able to get their credits and to trade with them, but not the forest owner? Why is it that the forest owner who has planted Pinus radiata, in good faith, is out but these guys are in? I say that it will provide some very crude and wrongful incentives for all the wrong sort of behaviour.

This is all part of Helen Clark’s rushing in to get the cute photo opportunity without thinking through all the implications of New Zealand’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. It is National’s view that when we move to a point of this agreement being truly international—that is, when we move to a tradable emissions permit system, and this is a very big “but”, we need to move with everyone. We cannot pick just some. We cannot say to those plantation forest owners: “We’re going to grab your credits and nationalise them.”, and say to those who have an indigenous forest that has been newly created, or even, I understand, an exotic forest: “Your forest is not to be harvested; it is to be put into canopy.”, or that somehow they will be treated differently, and that if they have a cleaner development mechanism they will be treated differently.

National’s view is that we must treat all of those equally, we must move to a comprehensive emissions trading permit system—or none at all. We say that it is either all or none. Picking only some will cause all sorts of distortions. The Government’s Kyoto policies are in a mess. This bill will not work. It will only create more problems. The correct thing for the Government to have done was to hold back, wait until Kyoto becomes truly international, and then move all players into a tradable emissions permit system.

Hon MARIAN HOBBS (Minister for the Environment): I rise to support the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill, and I am very much aware that the previous speaker has just said that the Government is in a pickle. No, the Government is not in a pickle; the earth is in a pickle. For too long we have had people like Don Brash actually saying in October last year: “I am one who thinks the science is still debatable on this issue.” That really concerns me, because I have just been over in New York listening while scientists, going up in the lift in the same hotel that I was in, brought out even newer, more recent evidence about how serious the situation is with regard to climate change and the fact that the issue is man-made climate change.

The member asked what the bill will do. The bill will allow individuals to hold registry accounts, and to trade in emission units. Several domestic climate change policies award emission units to individuals in recognition of activities undertaken to mitigate climate change. Yes, that is creative. Yes, we are out there leading, but is that wrong? I suggest that members of the House would be well advised to take up the most recent—probably 2 weeks’ old—copy of The Economist. I was reading it on the plane, and it actually discussed the fact that several party leaders—and I apologise to one of the other parties in this House—of Green parties throughout the world were relooking at how they actually managed behavioural change and change of attitude on things like nitrates, as well as on carbon. The Economist raised the question in the article that it had been the line of most parties to talk about rules and regulations to change people’s way of behaviour, when in actual fact there are market policies, as we are looking at around Lake Taupō, where one actually sets nitrate caps and says that one trades in the use of nitrate within that cap. That is what this bill is about. It is a creative way of trying to change people’s behaviour. I think that if members read The Economist article on that, they will find it is a very worthwhile way of thinking. That is what this bill is about.

I think this bill is a way forward for us, as a country. It is clever; it is innovative. However, I do not think there is terribly much innovation in saying we should wait until others do things. That has not been the New Zealand way. It is not the New Zealand way on things like nuclear policy, and it has not been the New Zealand way on disarmament policies. It has not been the New Zealand way on many issues, when we have gone out there and stated quite clearly where it is that we want to be. But the trouble is that the National Party must be a very broad church party, because there is Dr Brash saying: “I am one who thinks the science is still debatable …”, and then we have Guy Salmon saying: “Pete Hodgson remains on track with a consistent vision of a sustainable energy future. His Kyoto policy is being implemented. King coal has been held at bay. Electricity crises have been effectively managed without a loss of credibility, and wind farms are going ahead at an encouraging pace.” That is what we are about. We are actually trying to manage the process, not standing there without any leadership at all and trying to say the issue does not matter, so we will wait to see what the Europeans or somebody else do.

This bill is about trying to change behaviour in our own country, and for that reason I strongly support it.

DAIL JONES (NZ First): In considering this bill, one must ask the question: will this bill, or, for that matter, a carbon tax, improve our climate in New Zealand? The answer is no. There is nothing in this bill that will improve our climate. There is nothing in a carbon tax that will improve the climate in New Zealand, or, for that matter, the rest of the world. As we know, the major emission problem we have is the flatulence that comes from cows and sheep. They are responsible for more than half of our total greenhouse gas emissions.

If we bear in mind that our proportion of all of this is 0.2 percent, and if the rest makes up more than half, then we are less than 0.1 percent in world standing. Whereas it could be said that a country could lose 0.2 percent in some countries’ roundings, most countries would not even recognise a loss of less than 0.1 percent. As far as this particular legislation and that concern affect New Zealand, those facts are absolutely irrelevant to us. This bill does nothing to reduce the flatulence of cows and sheep. I ask the next member who stands to speak in support of the bill to tell me how it does just that, because that is our problem. It does nothing to affect that.

As far as New Zealand First is concerned, we made it clear we would proceed with the implementation policies for the Kyoto Protocol that are aimed at reducing certain greenhouse gas emissions only in order to ensure they are in harmony with those of our major trading partners and once a coherent plan has been formulated to allow the appropriate targets to be reached. Well, this bill is no coherent plan. As we all know, our major trading partners do not support the Kyoto Protocol, and they have not finally ratified it. In referring to our major trading partners, I am referring to the United States, China, and Australia. They are not bound by the protocol. China is not affected by it at all, and the United States and Australia have not given their final ratification.

The Guardian stated—and I take issue with the Guardian’s headline; it had better be more careful—“New Zealand first to levy carbon tax”. New Zealand First is not levying any carbon tax, but I take the Guardian’s point—“New Zealand first to levy carbon tax.” The Guardian makes it clear that it is an experiment and that the rest of the world will observe us as we experiment our way through that particular solution at great cost to the New Zealand taxpayer, damaging small business, and suchlike. As the Guardian correctly states, we produce about 29 percent of our electricity from gas or coal-fired power stations. What will that do to the cost of electricity when these things are introduced?

Just where in this world is New Zealand situated, and just what effect does anything we do have in so far as gas emissions are concerned? If we look at our little globe, we see that New Zealand is at the top of the world. Some people call it the Southern Hemisphere, but we are at the top of the world. I ask my colleague to hold up for members a map of the world. How many countries south of the equator are bound by the reduction of emissions in line with the provisions in the protocol? How many countries south of the equator are bound by the protocol? Only New Zealand is. How many countries in Africa are bound by it?

Hon Ken Shirley: None.

DAIL JONES: Which country in the entire Americas is bound by it?

Hon Ken Shirley: Canada.

DAIL JONES: Only Canada. Mr Shirley can move to the top of the class. Which country in Asia is bound by this particular protocol?

Hon Ken Shirley: Japan.

DAIL JONES: Only Japan. Those are the only countries. No country in Africa is, or in the Americas, except Canada. No country in Asia is, except Japan, and, of course, one might add the Asian part of the Russian Federation. That is all. And we are binding ourselves into something like that! What effect does our less than 0.1 percent have on the rest of the world, after one takes out the flatulence aspect of it? Absolutely none whatsoever.

Here we are again, wasting time on legislation that the Minister obviously cannot understand. She is losing her cool once again. We are wasting the time of the House on something that will have no effect at all on the world’s climate. It will, of course, help Prime Minister Helen Clark’s standing in relation to her next job at the United Nations. It will move her up in standing, and when the Labour Ministers go overseas and have their cups of tea, etc. with other people, and when job applications are on the way, they will say: “Yes, we’ve really signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, and down there in little old New Zealand our efforts will reduce emissions right throughout the world.” Our emissions will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the rest of the world. We have less than the roundings of other countries, which would not even take into account the amount we have to offer in that respect. We should, of course, try to reduce our emissions, and New Zealand First is concerned that any action taken should ensure an improvement. But this bill gives no example of how anything can be improved for the benefit of the environment. Of course, we must not forget that we live in the roaring forties, that New Zealand is one of the windiest countries in the world, and that our various emissions tend to get blown away into the ocean, where I am sure they cause no particular damage.

It was interesting to read the recent report from the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change that stated: “A relatively small number of countries produce a large majority of global greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, these countries tend to also have large economies, or large populations, or both. Indeed, most of the largest greenhouse gas emitters also rank amongst the most populous countries and those with the highest gross domestic products. An analysis of emissions change over time underscores the importance of population and GDP drivers of emission growth. The significant diversity among the major emitters is to be noted, and the group includes almost an equal number of developed and developing countries, as well as economies in transition. There are 25 countries with the largest of GHG emissions, which account for approximately 83 percent of global emissions. They range from the United States, with 20.6 percent of global emissions, to Pakistan, with 0.8 percent. If the European Union is counted as a single entity, it and four other largest emitters, the United States, China, Russia, and India contribute 61 percent of global emissions.” I shall just pause at that point.

So the European Union, the United States, China, Russia, and India contribute 61 percent of global emissions. Which of those five are part of the Kyoto Protocol treaty? Only the European Union and Russia are. The United States, China, and India are not. China is now very close to being the second most polluted country on our planet, just a short way behind the United States. China is one of our major trading partners, as is the United States. Here we are giving more and more opportunities to those other countries to out-trade us. India is not far behind. As the Vegetable and Potato Growers Federation stated just the other day: “This type of legislation, and the tax, is likely to see some growers forced out of business, particularly those within the greenhouse industry. The overall legislation, and especially the carbon tax, will do considerable harm to small business.”

The legislation achieves absolutely nothing in so far as the forestry sector is concerned. Looking at it from a Māori viewpoint, it is a contemporary Treaty of Waitangi claim. That is what this Government has created. It is taking away Kyoto interests of Māori incorporations in forests, selling them off, and doing what it cares to do with them, just as a typically socialist Government would do. We have covered that in the first reading. So here is a contemporary Treaty of Waitangi claim coming up in this type of legislation.

We cannot possibly support legislation that has no benefit to our environment. It damages our economy and, in the long run, it damages small business. New Zealand First opposes this bill.

Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT): It is beyond doubt that climate change is a reality. The point is that the planet has always been undergoing climate change—sometimes quietly, sometimes very dramatically; periods of change in climate tend to be quite dramatic. We have had huge variations through the ages, and evidence is overwhelming for that. So to say that it is climate change is not the point; the issue is what is the anthropogenic impact—that is, the human-induced climate change—and that debate is very much alive and unproven. The Minister for the Environment said she is just back from New York where she spoke to a few scientists, but there are thousands and thousands of scientists who fiercely debate that the anthropogenic effect is minimal. The overwhelming evidence would suggest that solar variations, principally caused by varying orbital patterns, with the Milankovitch cycle and others that we could go into in depth, are the real drivers of periods of climate change.

Be that as it may—we can debate that—we then come to the Kyoto Protocol, which is the UN kind of response mechanism. The ACT party’s position on the Kyoto Protocol is this: it is fundamentally flawed. It is unfair; it will not achieve its stated objective; and even the proponents of it, and the key scientists, say that after 100 years of full implementation it would make only a 5 percent difference. So it is an instrument that does not achieve its stated objective, and is grossly unfair for the reasons we have just heard, with only a very few countries having any obligation whatsoever. And here is New Zealand, thanks to this Labour Government, putting on the thickest hair shirt, and saying: “We’re going to save the planet!”. What absolute and utter nonsense!

Of course, last week we had the new carbon tax that Labour has trotted out, and it is another round of retro-socialism. I would like to go through some of the aspects of that, because we have heard in this debate that it will put an additional burden of $300 million to $400 million of costs on New Zealand and New Zealand businesses. But the Minister dressed it up as a market instrument. Unfortunately, retro-socialists do not really understand the market. She referred to The Economist—I am pleased that she is at least reading The Economist—but the article was actually on global environmentalism. It virtually stated that Rachel Carson, the Silent Spring author of a few decades back—the 1960s, I think—has to meet Adam Smith, and I could not agree more. Rachel Carson does indeed have to meet up with Adam Smith.

I support market instruments. In fact, I was a member of the Government’s Working Group on Carbon Dioxide Policy back in the 1990s, with Bill Falconer, Keith Turner, and Guy Salmon, which wrote the durable response report on how to set up a tradable carbon regime—and I actually believe in it. But the purpose of a market instrument is to put out incentives and disincentives to change behaviour. Let us examine this retro-socialist Labour Government’s market instrument. It thought: “Oh yes, carbon credits in forestry! The sequestration of carbon! Fast-growing trees sequester carbon.” If one believed that, one would leave the credit there to encourage the behaviour—that is, the planting of more pine trees to sequester more carbon. What did the Labour Government members do? As good socialists, they nationalised it. They said: “We’ll take that.” So there is no incentive to plant more trees.

At 6 o’clock I am going to the farewell function for Rob McLagan, who is retiring tonight as the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Forest Owners Association. He, of course, took my former job—the job I had before I came back to Parliament. I will be reporting back to the executives of the forest industry there just how bad it is. They know they have had their property right stolen by this retro-socialist Labour Government. It has nationalised the carbon credits and destroyed the market instrument.

Let us look at the other side of the ledger. It then imposed a carbon tax. But it will have these negotiated greenhouse gas agreements. Having confiscated the property right, the Government will dish out largesse to selected industries. If one lobbies, politicises, and comes knocking on the door of the Government, the Government—at its pleasure—will dish out dispensations, shall we say. Again, the market instrument is destroyed. Neutrality is destroyed. The energy-inefficient will be subsiding the energy-efficient. How smart is that, if one truly wants an economic instrument to work? It is pretty dumb. It is not Rachel Carson meeting Adam Smith. No, it is Rachel Carson meeting Stalin, or Karl Marx. It does not work. It fails. It will not work at all.

Let us look at the electricity market. The Government is going to slap a big tax on electricity based on the carbon component. But how does the electricity market work in New Zealand? We have 200 nodal offtakes, and every half-hour we run an auction, and the highest bidder sets the price for everyone else. Contact Energy runs the Huntly power station, which is based on coal. A lot of the time, particularly when our lake storage is low, it will bid the highest, and will set the carbon tax, and all the hydro operators—the non-carbon emitters—will pay the same price. So all consumers will be hit with this tax, irrespective of how much carbon is emitted. Of course, the non-carbon emitters, the hydro operators, will then get a super-profit by that amount. Let me think who the main hydro producers are in this country. There is Meridian Energy, there is Mighty River Power, and there is Genesis Power.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Who owns them?

Hon KEN SHIRLEY: Who owns them? The Government of New Zealand. So they get big fat dividend payments back on super-profits that have been gouged out of poor, struggling New Zealand businesses and poor, struggling New Zealand households. I ask the Minister how smart that is. It sounds pretty stupid, does it not? But that is her Government’s policy. It is not a market instrument, and how dare this Government come to this House masquerading it as a market instrument. It is a complete failure. All that it is is nationalisation of the economy and an excuse for the Government to get its hands on the levers of control. Industries now have to lobby and politicise to get dispensation. The Government is taking hold of the levers of the economy. We know that energy drives the economy, and under this Government’s application of what it calls a market instrument it is taking control of all of the market instruments and all the levers of the economy. It is doomed to failure.

The position of the ACT party is quite clear: we should scrap the Kyoto Protocol. It does not achieve its stated objective. It is grossly unfair. The National Government should not have signed it in 1997. Simon Upton was just as eager to sign it, and wanted to rush to ratify it just as keenly, although he might have understood the market instrument a wee bit better. But it was fundamentally flawed from the outset. I attended several of the working-group preparatory committees leading up to Kyoto in 1997 and I was aghast at the politicisation of the process. It is a UN process out of control. It is all about bureaucracy. There are thousands of the so-called scientists that the Minister spoke to in New York last year. All of their funding is dependent on their perpetuating this story. They swan off around the planet, flying in jets, depleting the ozone and using up great amounts of energy, to attend conferences every other month that are just hot air and garbage, where they reinforce their views. They ask: “Where is it spring next month? We’ll move there for our conference next month.”

The Minister tags along like a little patsy lamb, and they wind her up and tell her that it is humans who are causing all of these problems. It is utter nonsense. The Minister should go back to the basic science. There is 50,000 times more carbon dioxide in the oceans; if we take total carbon, there is 50,000 times more. We know that temperature changes the solubility of carbon. It is change in temperature that is driving carbon out of solution and into the atmosphere, as it has done for millennia. It is change in temperature—because of changes in orbital pattern, and changing solar radiation—that is increasing atmospheric carbon; it is not atmospheric carbon increasing temperature. Thousands of scientists around the world have come to that conclusion. This Labour Government has missed that basic point because it is so wound up in its UN committees. In a way, it is just an excuse to apply this control, to apply this movement towards a command economy.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green): We have heard the knockers, as we always do when the Kyoto Protocol comes up in this House. It is not surprising that ACT is challenging this, because ACT does not believe that climate change is real. [Interruption] Except, it has changed its position. It has changed its view over a very short time. [Interruption]

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order!

Hon Ken Shirley: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Standing Orders are quite clear. When a member in his or her speech deliberately misrepresents what a member has said—which, through implication, Jeanette Fitzsimons has done—then a member has a right of reply, and certainly a right of interjection.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): No, if the member considers that he has been misrepresented, then he should look at Speaker’s ruling 35/3. I also point out to him Speaker’s ruling 57/5. When a member is speaking and other members sitting close by on the cross benches interject, it muffles the microphone. Members know that it is a longstanding convention that that is out of order.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS: I have sat in the House many times and heard ACT party members argue that the climate is not warming. They base this stance on satellite records that state the temperature is not warming 1 kilometre above the Earth, therefore we can discount what is happening on the surface of the Earth. They state that the science is all wrong. But ACT cannot carry on that line any longer, because the evidence is becoming incontrovertible. So now, all of a sudden, its members say that the climate is warming after all, but it is not humans who are causing it. I wonder how long ACT will be able to sustain that argument. However, we cannot expect a Plan B from ACT, because it is not prepared to engage with the issue, at all.

The National Party, however, does not claim that climate change is not real, but once again it has opposed the Kyoto Protocol and opposed, as it always does, any measures that anyone has ever suggested. Whether it be energy efficiency, renewable energy, low-energy transport, or any other measure for tackling climate change other than the protocol, the National Party says no. We have not seen it come up with any positive alternative to do something about the problem.

New Zealand First does not believe in collective action. If reducing our emissions or absorbing more carbon here will not help our climate in New Zealand, it does not believe that we should be part of any collective, international action to do something about it on a global scale. Of course, nobody’s emissions affect just their country’s climate; it is only if we all act together that there will be an effect. The Kyoto Protocol is a very flawed instrument but it is the only one on the table.

We had a nice geography lesson from New Zealand First with a map of the world. But the member neglected to say that it is quite simple: countries that are part of the OECD have the highest emissions over history and have caused the problem, and therefore they are required to take action first; those countries that have developed more recently or are still developing, and do not have a long historical record of changing the climate, will join in later. So we have had denial of the problem, denial of any alternatives, and denial of collective action.

The indications that climate change is proceeding faster than anybody predicted have been accumulating over the last year. Arctic sea ice has melted at a rate that has staggered the scientists working on the models. There is the risk that the exposure of dark ocean instead of pale ice will increase heat absorption and accelerate warming, even if we were to miraculously stop emissions. Huge shelves are carving off the Antarctic ice sheet into the sea at a faster rate than anyone predicted. Glaciers are in retreat around the world. The incidence of unusual floods, storms, droughts, and heat waves has increased—none of which can be proven to be directly attributed to global warming, but the pattern is consistent with that predicted by the climate change models.

Carbon credits in this country have got wind power going. The Government’s policy on carbon credits has got the best new source of clean and renewable electricity off the ground. We have several wind farms up and running, and quite a lot more being built. This is a new industry that needed some help to get going, but that can now stand on its feet. It will not continue to need carbon credits. I think that is a victory. Although there is much I disagree with in the Government’s energy policy, I congratulate it strongly on that move.

The Greens support the provisions for reforestation that this bill makes possible. We need permanent forest sinks. It is too risky to allow people to claim carbon credits for planting a forest that they intend to clear-fell in 25 years, when nobody will be able to force them to take responsibility for the emissions caused when the forests are clear-felled if they are not replanted. We need to encourage permanent forests, and this bill does that. There are so many reasons why we need to establish more permanent forests, particularly of indigenous species, although that is not the only thing that this bill allows. These reasons include soil conservation, water conservation, flood control and protection, erosion prevention, biodiversity, and landscape. We have ranges and ranges of bare hills around New Zealand that have lost their forest cover. The farmland that has been provided through that loss of forest is in many cases of very low value, but it is too expensive to replant the forest. This bill is a mechanism by which that can happen.

We need a regular supply of New Zealand indigenous timbers from forest that is planted, because we have so little of the original forest cover left that we cannot afford to hack into old-growth indigenous forests to supply timber. But it will be a shame if future generations have to get all their furniture just from pine or, worse still, from imported old-growth timbers from other countries, which is what is happening at the moment and which the Greens very strongly oppose. The provisions in the bill for the forests that get the credits not to be logged for 35 years, and then only to be logged selectively under a closed canopy system, gives us the opportunity to recreate what we could once have had in this country if we had stopped logging soon enough—that is, some sustainably managed indigenous forests for timber.

The Minister for the Environment said that the bill is about markets and not regulation. Then ACT told us that markets are all good and regulation is all bad. That is a totally false dichotomy. Therefore economic instruments cannot achieve environmental goals without putting them in a regulatory framework. That is what the Kyoto Protocol does. It is a “cap and trade” system. The trading is the market bit; the cap is the regulatory bit. The trading of emissions that the National Party suggests will not achieve anything at all without a regulation setting a ceiling to those emissions. This system is supposed to work in the fishing industry, where everyone talks about individual transferable quotas being the great thing. They are the trade part of the system, and are of no use at all in sustaining fish stocks unless there is also a total allowable catch, which is the regulatory bit of the system. So we should stop getting hung up on ridiculous arguments about regulation or market and accept that we are a mixed society and that a mixed system works best. Regulation is used to ensure the environmental goals are met, and markets are used to ensure the goals are met in the most efficient way by those who can most easily meet those goals.

LARRY BALDOCK (United Future): I rise on behalf of United Future to speak on the first reading of the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill. It gives us an opportunity to outline United Future’s position on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, and to list the reasons for which we oppose, as we have always opposed, the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. It is a flawed instrument—even the leader of the Green Party admitted that it is far from perfect. Why on earth would we sign up to something that we know to be flawed? The idea that the world will be able to work, through that instrument, to achieve its ends is ridiculous.

I will outline the reasons why United Future has taken that position. The first one, as has been mentioned earlier, is that to join up with something that our major trading partners have not joined is ridiculous. It is unwise and places a greater burden upon our own industries than they would otherwise have as they try to compete in a global market. That is the first reason that we have considered it unwise to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

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

LARRY BALDOCK: Before the break I was outlining the reasons why United Future has been opposing the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. I had covered point one, which was that our major trading partners have not joined it. Point two is that despite the plethora of media articles that we encounter about the scientific evidence for global warning—and, in fact, for the human-induced cause of global warning—there is still considerable uncertainty amongst many well-informed, credible scientists and meteorologists, who cannot seem to get their view presented in the media. We can ask questions about why that is, and about the influence of the environmentalists’ lobby in the media, but that point is clearly made. Many scientists are not convinced of the science as yet, and have opposing views.

Point three is that even if the theory were correct, the chances of achieving worldwide targets are questionable, to say the least. The ability of the Third World and the developing countries to come up with any commitments into the second commitment period is very questionable. I lived in the Third World for 15 years—in the Philippines—and I spent a considerable amount of time travelling throughout Asia. The idea that Asian countries will be able to meet the targets imposed upon them by 2012—or begin to meet those targets—is absolutely ridiculous. Those nations need a lot more in terms of basic infrastructure before they will be able to think about the effects of carbon dioxide emissions. Point four is that even if the targets were met, the effect on so-called human-induced climate change is very debatable—it is negligible. The figures of the UN itself state that if all targets are met, by 2100 the reduction in temperature that could be achieved by meeting those targets would be only 0.14 percent of the warming effect. So even if we are successful, the chances of us making any lasting change to global warming—if it is actually coming from human-induced effects—are negligible.

It makes no sense to impose a carbon tax on our businesses and economy, in the light of the points that I have just made. The money could be much better spent on things that will benefit not just our country, regardless of the protocol, but also the Third World, instead of pursuing the ideology that is behind the protocol. Research and development investment is to be welcomed in our nation and around the world, in order to find alternative sources of energy and to find energy efficiency. We could do a lot more by spending money on improving the age of our vehicle fleet in New Zealand, and shifting, as soon as possible, to hybrid cars. That would help to reduce emissions—if those emissions have an effect on our climate. Because we do not know for certain what is causing climate change or how long it will last, it would make a lot more sense to spend money on mitigating any effects of climate change, than to try to play God and stop it.

The Climate Change Response Act was bad legislation, and United Future opposed it. This Climate Change Response Amendment Bill makes that bad legislation a little better and a little more business friendly, so in United Future we have had to ask ourselves what we should do about this bill. If, in the future, a new Government was to come into the House that wished to withdraw New Zealand from the protocol, United Future would be prepared to support that move. But at the moment New Zealand is committed to the protocol. We have ratified the treaty, and it is not an easy process to extract ourselves from treaties once we have committed to them. It is important to United Future to make sure that, at least in the first commitment period, the commitment to the protocol does not end up costing New Zealand a whole lot of unnecessary money, resulting in New Zealand having to buy carbon credits from nations like Russia, for example, that are not doing any more about addressing carbon dioxide emissions than we are, but that have simply benefited from certain historical circumstances. It would be ludicrous if we had to buy carbon credits from Russia.

We have had to ask ourselves what we will do about this bill. It makes bad legislation a little better, and we have therefore concluded that we will support the first reading of the bill and send it to the select committee, in the hope that more discussion and more debate in the select committee will lead to a better response in the end. I believe that this bill is an indication that the Government does not believe in the protocol as much as it says it does, and that it is beginning to have some serious doubts about whether it has been the right course of action. Hopefully, as further submissions from the public come to the select committee and as the legislation is debated further in the House, we may be able to see a further change in the Government’s policy.

We welcome the provision in this bill to extend the regulation-making powers of the Forests Act in order to enable the establishment of a mechanism to allow landowners to access any value the protocol creates for carbon from newly-established permanent forest sinks. That will be achieved via a contract between the Crown and a landowner, and will encourage the planting of new forests by landowners. The one thing we know we could do in New Zealand in order to address the concerns about carbon dioxide emissions is to plant trees. One of the ways to encourage that is to give people the benefit of the carbon credit and the carbon trading mechanism that is to emerge from planting trees.

There are other reasons, not just for the sake of carbon credits—because anybody who invests money on that basis would be shooting in the breeze somewhat, particularly with the potential for Governments to flip-flop around on their policy—to plant trees. It is good for us to reforest areas in New Zealand. We face incredible challenges to do with our water quality, and it would make a lot of sense to plant riparian strips around every river and lake in New Zealand, so that we could filter a lot of the nutrient runoff that comes off our land, goes into our waterways, and causes us so much difficulty. One of the best things we could do would be to plant a 10 to 20 metre riparian strip of native bush around our waterways wherever possible, and to provide nature’s best solution to that problem. Also, as a by-product of that, we would achieve further carbon credits from the planting of that new forest. We will pursue the issue at the select committee to make sure that the bill enables some benefit from that planting to pass to the landowner, so that there is an incentive to pursue that course of action.

We will support the bill through its first reading and its referral to the select committee, but we make very clear United Future’s position on the protocol and on the principal Act, which we consider took New Zealand in the wrong direction.

DIANNE YATES (Labour—Hamilton East): I rise to support the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill. I point out, as the Minister has done, that it deals with two issues. The first one is the amendment of the Climate Change Response Act in respect of the function of New Zealand’s Kyoto Protocol registry. I am sure that Simon Upton, a former Minister for the Environment, would be very pleased with this legislation. His work on it is coming to fruition. The second thing the bill does is to enable the establishment of the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative. I would like to reiterate a very good part of the Minister’s speech. He said that under the current law, the tax treatment of Permanent Forest Sink Initiative income and expenditure is uncertain. To remove that uncertainty, the Government proposes to amend the tax legislation to deem any business, which includes farms, that primarily involves earning forest sink credits under the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative to be a forestry business. That is what Federated Farmers have been lobbying for, and I am pleased to see that the Minister has acknowledged that. It will ensure that the existing forestry tax provisions also apply in that situation. Those amendments, as the Minister said, are expected to be included in the first tax bill following the tax bill scheduled for introduction in May.

I commend this legislation to the House. I think it is forward-thinking, and it does show what New Zealand is all about. I also commend farmers who, as has been mentioned, are planting riparian strips and who are responding to measures such as the ones Environment Waikato has encouraged through the sustainable farming awards—the carrots rather than the sticks that are working in that regard. There is also the amount of money that the Minister of Local Government has allocated for clean water. Those matters are linked, as the previous speaker mentioned. In particular, I think the initiative around the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative is a good one, and I look forward to farmers being involved in that area.

JOHN KEY (National—Helensville): I rise on behalf of the National Party to give the good news to the people of New Zealand—that is, the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill is a load of rubbish and the National Party will not be supporting it, for very, very good reasons indeed.

I want to start off with a broad-ranging discussion, if I may, around the Kyoto Protocol and the absolutely nonsensical road that this Government is taking New Zealand down. I know we have a Prime Minister who is very confident, and all the rest of it, but maybe she would like to step out of her office on the 9^th floor and realise which planet she is on. She is on the same planet, she may be surprised to learn, as India, China—

Hon Ken Shirley: And Mugabe.

JOHN KEY: And Mugabe, yes—and a lot of other countries out there that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. And why would they not, because they have absolutely no requirements on them, whatsoever. Yet here we are down in New Zealand, a very little country with about 0.2 percent of the world’s emissions, putting a self-imposed straitjacket on our businesses, and waving a huge flag that says: “Foreign investment, don’t come anywhere near us. Australia is over there—the West Island. Go over there to pour your dollars in.” To the Chinese we are saying: “Come in and buy as much coal as you like from our West Coast. We’ll sell it to you and you can burn it without a carbon charge—but, by the way, to those back here in Aotearoa New Zealand we will be slapping on a carbon charge and you won’t be able to operate.”

This is a complete and utter hoax, if I may say so. The impact of the Kyoto Protocol, even if one believes in global warming—and I am somewhat suspicious of it—is that we will see billions and billions of dollars poured into fixing something that we are not even sure is a problem. Even if it is a problem, it will be delayed for about 6 years. Then it will hit the world in 2096 instead of 2102, or something like that. It will not work.

Let us have a look at the Government’s response to the Kyoto Protocol. Our friends in Australia said they do not want a bar of it. They do not want to know anything about it; neither do our friends in America. I saw George W Bush, the President of the United States of America, talking about the Kyoto Protocol on CNN one night. George Bush is not necessarily known as the most eloquent speaker in US history. He is a fairly straight shooter, but he is not necessarily seen as being one of the great orators of all time. I plugged in the TV set, turned it on, and what did I see? There, on CNN, late at night, at about 11.30, was George Bush saying that America would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, because it is not good for jobs and it is not good for the American economy. I understood that. I got it. Then I saw John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, addressing the Australian people and saying the same thing—that it is not good for jobs and it is not good for the economy. So when I turned to New Zealand TV and found out that we not only would be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol but in fact would be the first country in the world—that is right—to be blazing a trail to put on a carbon tax, I was somewhat astounded.

Now, I should not have been quite so worried, because when we questioned the Convenor, Ministerial Group on Climate Change last week, he said not to worry. He said that the carbon charge was not a tax increase; it was a tax shift. I was beside myself, as members can imagine, because I just could not understand it. So the next day I asked the Minister of Finance to point out to me what the discernable difference to the average New Zealand worker would be when they received about $400 less from an average, run-of-the-mill tax increase. I might add that this Government has had about 35 of those in the last 6 years, but that is another debate that we will come back to. I asked him what the difference would be between the $400 less they will get because of a tax increase and what they will get from a negative tax shift. Dr Cullen is no slouch in the House, is he? He is no slouch in the House, but he gave a sort of garbled response. We raised a point of order and he had another bit of a go at it, but that was a complete and utter failure. Then he came out with the real doozy. I said to him: “You know the carbon charge that you’re telling us will cost the people of New Zealand $200 a year, based on carbon prices of $15 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, or whatever? Well, actually, you have given yourself provision for it to be $25 per tonne. That will actually double the cost to about $400 per household, especially when you add in all the second-order effects, because supermarkets are going to have higher prices for its electricity, and more for a sink.” “No!”, said Dr Cullen. “You’re wrong!”, he said to me. I asked the Minister of Finance, Dr Cullen, what role he played in devising the carbon charge. He replied that he was responsible, along with the convenor. Well, that is very good. I thought to myself that a new member like me could possibly be wrong—I mean, I do not want to question the Minister of Finance, after 30 years—

Jill Pettis: Yes.

JOHN KEY: Exactly! I tell the senior Government whip that that is what I thought the case was. So I scurried up to my office, got the transcript of the questions and answers, came back to the House, and took a point of order. Questions and answers are a sort of fancy term for “small print”. I read out what he said: “Oh, well. Actually we may allow the carbon charge to go to $25, because we are not quite sure what rate it will hit at internationally.” I said that it happened to be trading at about €17 that day, which, with the New Zealand exchange rate, was about $30 to $35, and that would mean the price would double. Dr Cullen looked at me, smiled, and acknowledged the fact that I had understood that. He sort of nodded quietly, and away we went. That is a tax shift. So if any New Zealanders are feeling in any way better off today, it is because of that tax shift.

That sort of tax shift, recycling—all that sort of stuff—would not be quite so bad, I suppose, except for what we are doing to the public of New Zealand. What are we doing to the consumers and businesses of New Zealand? We are putting a tax on them. I could understand that if the Convenor, Ministerial Group on Climate Change was coming to the Chamber and saying that every single dollar would be spent on reducing emissions in New Zealand—every single dollar. But no, that is not the case. At the International Fiscal Association conference, where the Minister of Finance was speaking on the previous Friday, he said that his fringe benefit tax cuts—yes, he wanted some business tax cuts, because business confidence was collapsing around his ears, and he therefore needed to prop up that vote a little bit—would be partly funded by the carbon charge. Very good—that is a good one, is it not?

So the consumers of New Zealand are now paying an additional tax shift—it might be negative in their case—to prop up the failing business confidence that has been caused by the Government making such an atrocious job of managing the economy. All of that is actually happening while the Government has a $7 billion surplus. Now, excuse me, but George W Bush, at 11 30 at night on CNN, is starting to make a hang of a lot more sense than the Convenor, Ministerial Group on Climate Change when he tries to tell me the difference between a tax shift and a tax increase. So my prediction is that that will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The public are sick and tired of paying additional taxes for all sorts of crazy ideas. They have heard the message from that promising Opposition spokesperson on finance, when he told the public—

Simon Power: Who is that?

JOHN KEY:—John Key, apparently—that $50 billion worth of additional taxes have been imposed in the last 5 years. And on top of all that—and with a $7 billion surplus—they have to pay a carbon charge. It will be paid for by consumers so that other businesses, which have absolutely nothing to do with emissions, can have a tax cut.

I want to make one last point before I sit down. I remember that about a year or so ago Pete Hodgson said on radio that this first commitment period would be free money for New Zealand—worth $500 million. What sort of idiot, he asked Larry Williams, would rip up a cheque for $500 million, as the National Party would do? What sort of idiot would do that? Well—hello, Minister! I do not know whether he has noticed, but forests are being chopped down around his ears. In fact, the first commitment period will, at best, probably be very close to flat, and could even be negative. So the $500 million is a typical Labour Party cheque, if I may say so—it is bouncing all the way back to the bank.

This is not a good idea for the people of New Zealand. This is not the best thing for the planet. If the Prime Minister of New Zealand wants to get out there and convince the Prime Ministers of India and Australia, and the Presidents of China and America, to sign up, then I will be with them all the way to the bank. But the last time I looked, we were part of the same planet. New Zealand going it alone has not worked in the past; it will not work on this issue, either.

JILL PETTIS (Labour—Whanganui): That was Mr John Key. He used to be good, but he is not any more, and it is a sad misfortune that has befallen such a young and promising man. He talked about George Bush at 11.30 at night. George Bush is not awake at 11.30 at night, and we have that on authority from his wife, Laura Bush, who described herself as a “desperate housewife” because George retired at 9 p.m. at night. So I think Mr Key is a bit mistaken.

His views, while almost Neanderthal in their approach, are sad coming from a young man who showed such promise when he first came into this House. I am proud to say that this Government’s position is based on environmental integrity, whereas the Opposition’s position is opportunistic, and inconsistent with its earlier stance. We have flip-flops all over the place. The jandal award is being dusted off yet again, because Nick Smith—that “blue-green” spokesperson—said at one stage that National would opt out of the Kyoto agreement at the first chance if countries like the US and Australia did not sign up. Well, we know that our good friends in Australia mine uranium in a national park, which is something that we would never do in New Zealand.

Nick Smith went on to say that eventually climate change and issues associated with it would—in his words, not mine—“…stuff life on earth. New Zealand can’t ignore the problem. New Zealanders must do their bit.” That is representative of National’s position on this issue, or rather its total lack of position, because those members change their views. They do not give leadership. They do not send a very clear and unequivocal message to the public of New Zealand, who are incredibly interested in this issue.

Guy Salmon has spoken positively about this Government’s environmental policy in this particular regard. So I am pleased to say that this bill actually extends the regulation-making powers of the Forests Act to enable the establishment of a mechanism to allow landowners to access the value of carbon sequestration that is created under the Kyoto Protocol.

Hon Ken Shirley: Absolute rubbish!

JILL PETTIS: That is absolutely a fact, and this Government is sending a very clear and unequivocal message to the people of New Zealand. We are a country that has a proud record on the environment. New Zealanders from all walks of life want to look out for the environment, and this Government is very happy to be a partner in doing that.

SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country): Those who were listening on the radio to the soon-to-be former member for Whanganui must have been absolutely amazed at that speech.

I want to pick up on a number of areas in the bill. Firstly, it does absolutely nothing—sum total zero—in terms of the environment. Secondly, it does nothing to enhance the economy of New Zealand or the welfare of its people with regard to jobs and suchlike.

John Key: It makes it worse.

SHANE ARDERN: It makes it worse. It imposes yet another tax. I do not know whether it is new tax No. 36. My colleague John Key said that we were up to No. 35, so I suspect that this is tax No. 36. Guess what? Dr Cullen is supporting this bill, only because it increases taxes. He does not believe in the concept, at all. In fact, he does not believe in the notion of global warming. I have seen evidence of that in his body language in this House when there have been questions from the Green Party. I have watched Dr Cullen crouch down at the thought that he may have to cuddle up to those members at some time in the future for the numbers. He ducks down behind his seat and pulls his papers up. I do not believe they are saying this in an open democracy like New Zealand, but they are.

But it gets worse. Our good friends in United Future are supporting this bill tonight, even though they have campaigned up and down the country saying there are too many taxes. Those members have parroted on about the McLeod report on taxation, yet tonight they will roll over. They will agree to send this bill to the select committee. There is only one possible reason—that is, they signed up on confidence and supply with this socialist Labour Government, so they have no option but to follow along because they have been whipped into line. I ask United Future and the Minister to show us the evidence that New Zealand has a carbon deficit.

I have looked at some figures that I received from the Parliamentary Library. They say that agriculture has had an increase in carbon emission of 15 percent—from 31.9 percent to 36.8 percent. But the question that has not been answered, and there certainly is no science around this matter, is how much of an increase have we had in plantations on areas that would traditionally be described as farming areas—that is, riparian margins that are carbon sinks. That is the increase in pasture growth, which is an activity of photosynthesis—some members will understand that well—and a carbon sink.

I cite the example of my own farm. Some 20 years ago it grew 8,000 kilograms of dry matter per hectare per year. Last year it grew 14,000 kilograms of dry matter per hectare. It increased from 8,000 to 14,000 in 20 years. That is a massive increase in carbon sink. I put this question to the Minister. He said that it is cyclical and that it happens very quickly, so therefore I have a negative sum gain. I do not believe that, because when we grow trees we cut them down. Exotic forests are cut down. I say to the Minister that if we put that wood into leaky homes, the homes are rotten within 5 years, the emission is back in the environment, and we have a zero sum gain. It is just that the cycle is quicker. That is the only difference. It is every 30 days instead of every 5 years, or it might be every 40 days instead of every 5 years. What is the difference? There is no science yet that I have been able to study or that anybody has been able to explain to me as to where that difference lies.

The third point, which certainly has not been raised to any great extent as far as I can tell, is that the bill actually picks on forest owners. It isolates them and says that they will give up their property right and their carbon sink, and the State will take it from them and there will be no compensation for that, but then it turns round and puts a tax on all other industry. I say to Government members that if I am wrong, they should take a call and explain to me why I am wrong.

Further, when we look at our good friend Tony Blair in the UK, who has just become Prime Minister for the third time, we see that the Brits are saying—this is what the papers there have reported—that the Kiwi carbon tax is an experiment. That is what those papers are saying. It was reported in the Guardian this week that the carbon tax is an experiment that will be watched by the bigger countries around the world to see how it works out, because they cannot believe that a small trading country like New Zealand would enter into such a mind-numbing, brain-dead tax before its major trading partners the US and Australia, and a range of other countries as well, and before the science is robust and before there was a proper reason to do so.

I say to the previous speaker, the member for Whanganui, that she should go back to Whanganui and tell people that the Government is slapping yet another 4c per litre on their petrol because it will save the environment from all those rural people who have to travel up and down the Whanganui electorate all the time to go about their business. She should tell them that another 4c on their petrol will not hurt them and that it will somehow or other save the good folk of Whanganui from disappearing under the sea. They will not buy that explanation, and I remind her that Chester Borrows is knocking on the doors as we speak. This issue will be the final nail in the coffin for that member.

I say to the Labour members and to the Minister in the chair that if I am wrong, they should take a call and tell me why I am wrong. I have seen no science at all that can demonstrate to me why Dr Cullen should be able to introduce yet another substantial tax increase and put it on to every hard-working Joe Bloggs, yet be selective in what he takes from forest owners and from other parts of the community. How can he explain to those people that, at the end of the day, this will be in any way helpful in reducing greenhouse gas emissions? It is just another socialist tax grab.

The other question that has to be asked is where the Hon Pete Hodgson got his information from, because nobody has been able to trace that, either. There is a substantial amount of evidence that Peter has been making it up on the hoof. Dr Cullen has been saying to him: “Look, we’ve only got a $7 billion surplus. We need to get some more tax from somewhere else. Pete, we need you to come up with another innovative idea on how we can get more tax.”

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): The member will use the Minister’s full name.

SHANE ARDERN: The Hon Pete Hodgson—I thought I had said that. I am pretty sure that the Hon Pete Hodgson is the name I used. I will check the Hansard afterwards, but I am confident that that is what I said. The Hon Pete Hodgson has no evidence at all to back his argument. I ask that Minister why he believes that placing another tax on energy users—on our household power bills—will save the environment, when the Resource Management Act is stopping the development of major hydro activity and a range of other power-generating activities in this country, which somehow will be beneficial to the environment. Coal-fired power stations are being built, because hydroelectricity cannot get consent. There is a simple piece of logic that has not been answered in any of the debate tonight.

Why was the first step not to shift the roadblocks in terms of developing renewable energy and removing the need to use non-renewable energy sources such as coal as the back-up in the case of an energy shortage, when we could thereby have achieved as much carbon emission saving as we could potentially get from anything we might do in the short term? Why does the Minister not answer that question? Why does New Zealand, a small island nation at the bottom of the South Pacific that represents 0.2 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, feel the need to blaze a trail and be the first in the world to introduce yet another tax—a tax that has no science to back it up and on which a whole lot of questions need to be answered and none have been answered—when the Government could do so many other things to reduce the amount of carbon being used?

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 70

New Zealand Labour 51; Green Party 8; United Future 8; Progressive 2; Māori Party 1.

Noes 49

New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 9.

Bill read a first time.

Hon JUDITH TIZARD (Associate Minister of Transport), on behalf of the Convenor, Ministerial Group on Climate Change: I move, That the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill be referred to the Commerce Committee for consideration, that the committee report the bill by Thursday, 28 July 2005, and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 191 and 194(1)(b) and (c).

A party vote was called for on the question, That the motion be agreed to.

Ayes 62

New Zealand Labour 51; Green Party 8; Progressive 2; Māori Party 1.

Noes 57

New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 9; United Future 8.

Motion agreed to.

Evidence Bill

First Reading

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I call the Hon Philip Goff.

Hon Members: Ha, ha!

Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Justice): Thank you for that formality, Mr Speaker. I move, That the Evidence Bill be now read a first time. It is my intention to move that the bill be referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee. This bill brings together in one place the common law and statutory provisions relating to evidence. The bill will replace most of the existing law on the admissibility and use of evidence in court proceedings. Evidence law is largely judge made, comprising decisions made in response to a particular set of facts before the court. The statutory provisions dealing with evidence are contained in a number of statutes, and have been reformed over a long period of time on a piecemeal basis. The resulting complexity and inconsistency of the law of evidence results in undue legal argument, expense, and delays in proceedings in order to accommodate arguments over the issue of admissibility. The bill brings the current mosaic of statute and case law into one comprehensive scheme.

The bill has its origins in 1989, when the Law Commission was given terms of reference by the then Minister of Justice. The purpose was to make the law of evidence as clear, simple, and accessible as is practicable, and to facilitate the fair, just, and speedy judicial resolution of disputes. With this purpose in mind, the Law Commission was asked to examine the statutory and common law governing evidence to proceedings before courts and tribunals, and to make recommendations for the reform with a view to codification.

The Law Commission was thorough. It spent a decade reviewing aspects of the evidence law, publishing discussion papers, and seeking the views of those involved in the justice sector, including a wide variety of community groups, academics, officials, and members of the legal profession and the judiciary. In 1999 the Law Commission published its report on evidence and an evidence code amalgamating the various aspects of the law of evidence.

The proposals in this bill are generally based on the recommendations of the Law Commission and on the provisions of the evidence code. The purpose of the bill is to help secure the just determination of proceedings. It sets out to provide for facts to be established by the application of logical rules. It aims to promote fairness to parties and witnesses. It protects rights of confidentiality and other important public interests. It seeks to avoid unjustifiable expense and delay.

The bill’s fundamental principle is that all relevant evidence is admissible unless there is some policy reason to exclude it. Evidence must be excluded if it is irrelevant, if its probative value is outweighed by its prejudicial effect, or if it would needlessly prolong a proceeding.

The bill is over 200 clauses long and covers a wide range of matters. It deals with rules of admissibility, including matters such as admissibility of hearsay, opinion evidence, improperly obtained evidence, and propensity evidence. It deals with privilege and confidentiality, including various types of privilege such as that enjoyed by legal advisers and ministers of religion. It also includes the privilege against self-incrimination, and provides a protection for confidential information. It deals with the trial process, including compellability of witnesses, support persons, and rules around questioning witnesses, as well as alternative ways of giving evidence. The admissibility of documentary and machine-generated evidence is also covered in the bill. It deals with overseas evidence. The bill covers the rules for giving evidence from overseas to a New Zealand court, and evidence given in New Zealand to be used overseas.

The bill is generally consistent with existing trends in the law, and clarifies the existing law by addressing ambiguities and inconsistencies. It does, however, fundamentally change the current law in some areas. There are some matters in the bill where the arguments for and against are finely balanced. In recognition of this, I invite the select committee to seek submissions regarding those matters, and I anticipate that those expert in evidence law will make submissions. Changes to the proposals may be considered after the arguments have been fully canvassed by the select committee.

I now want to refer to three areas to which further consideration may be given by the select committee. The first relates to the reform of the hearsay rule in relation to a defendant’s out-of-court statements being admissible against co-defendants. Currently, the common law provides that one defendant’s statements cannot be used to implicate another defendant. Juries are directed to use evidence for one purpose, but not for another. This gives rise to a jury direction, which may seem illogical to the jury—that is, one can use the evidence in respect of one defendant but not for a co-defendant even though it seems relevant to the jury. The bill proposes that evidence in this regard will either be admissible against all defendants or none at all. Arguments against admitting prosecution evidence include oppression, unreliability, or improperly obtained statements. If the defence leads the evidence, then arguments against admitting it include the rule against hearsay and the previous statements’ rule. The effect of this rule will be that statements that previously were not admissible against co-defendants will be.

The second area is the proposed truthfulness rule, and the subsequent abolition of the collateral issues rule. The truthfulness rule provides that evidence of truthfulness will be admissible if it is substantially helpful in assessing that person’s truthfulness, with additional special rules for the defendant. The collateral issues rule is abolished by not being included in the bill. The rule applies when cross-examination is directed to a matter that is not a fact in issue—usually questions about a witness’s truthfulness. The rule treats answers given by a witness as final, and prohibits evidence intended to challenge those answers. I invite submissions on the abolition of the rule.

The Law Commission states that the policy behind the rule is essentially one of efficiency and that the court’s attention should not be needlessly diverted from the main issues. It goes on to state that although this reasoning is sound the rule can result in excluding helpful evidence, if it is applied too rigidly. Further, the Law Commission considers that other rules, such as the relevance requirement and the general exclusion rule, will operate as a restraint on offering evidence of truthfulness that has little value.

The third area covers changes to the law of self-incrimination. The privilege against self-incrimination permits a person to remain silent when required to provide information, on the grounds that the information would incriminate that person. Currently, the privilege is available where a reply may lead to prosecution for any criminal offence or to liability for a civil penalty. The Law Commission proposed that the privilege should be restricted to incrimination for crimes punishable by imprisonment. The bill provides that privilege should be available where the information required would be likely to incriminate the person in relation to a criminal offence, not just those punishable by imprisonment. That is because the stigma of a criminal offence justifies the retention of the privilege for non-imprisonable offences.

The need for reform in this area is long standing. The terms of reference were given to the Law Commission in 1989. In 1999 the commission published its report. Following from that report, this bill, which generally follows the recommendations of the commission, is being introduced. I look forward to the bill being thoroughly considered before the Justice and Electoral Committee and the ultimate passage of this bill as the culmination of a long process of consideration of a complex, but important area. I commend this bill to the House.

Dr RICHARD WORTH (National—Epsom): It is a pleasure, on behalf of the National Party, to speak in support of the Evidence Bill, and National will support its referral to a select committee for the processes of public submission and consideration. It is also an opportunity to follow Philip Goff, who I do not think will be the Minister of Justice when this bill is enacted. It seems clear to me and to my colleagues on this side of the House that there will be a change of Government, and Philip Goff will, no doubt, seek more remunerative employment in other fields of human endeavour.

I would like to talk about some aspects of the bill, perhaps more in a preliminary way, in the context of what the law of evidence is all about. But before I do that, I would like to pick up on a comment that Philip Goff made, and I would just like to say that the pressure to see this legislation advanced to its present position has come from a variety of sources, and one of those pressure points has been the media. I would single out for special mention the commitment to a new Evidence Bill of the business weekly magazine Independent, and the unflagging efforts of one of its very senior editors, Denise McNabb, in that regard.

What I want to say about the law of evidence is this, really. It is a set of rules by which judges determine what testimony and exhibits may be accepted, and how they may be used. It is central to the day-to-day operation of New Zealand’s administration of justice. It affects, obviously, every piece of evidence given by every witness in every court, so its rules must be clear, principled, and readily accessible. The problem has been that in its present form the law of evidence is really a patchwork of disparate elements that have never been coordinated and whose effect is frequently disputed by experts. I see Mr Fairbrother is in the House. He has had substantial experience in the criminal law, and I am sure he will agree with this. The problems result from ancient rules of the judge-made common law that themselves are often not really precise and often not readily accessible, and they have been met by ad hoc statutory reforms that have, in turn, presented difficulties both of construction, and, I would also say, of scope.

A good example of that would be the Evidence Amendment Act (No. 2) of 1980, which responded to an over-narrow expression of the law of hearsay in a case well known to lawyers and law students alike—Myers v the Director of Public Prosecutions. So it was a good move when in August 1989 the then Minister of Justice, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, gave the Law Commission an evidence reference, and the terms of that reference were to make the law of evidence as clear, simple, and accessible as practicable, and to facilitate the just and speedy judicial resolution of disputes. In that reference the commission was tasked to examine the statutory and the common law governing evidence in proceedings before courts and tribunals with a view to making recommendations for reform with a view to codification. That is what this bill is all about. It draws together the common law strands and the statutory strands, primarily based in statutory terms in lawmaking in 1908—some significant period ago—to produce the now Evidence Bill.

I think it is also relevant to say something about the adversarial system. New Zealand and other common law democracies, particularly Western democracies, have a system known as the adversary system. The guts of it is that the parties present evidence to a judge, if the judge is sitting alone, or to a jury if the judge is sitting with the jury. They make decisions, after applying the relevant law to the facts. The fact finder must first decide what the facts are, by assessing the evidence offered by the parties. According to one scholarly evidence text—and huge amounts of material have been written on the law of evidence—evidence of a fact is information that tends to prove it.

I would like to speak about the operation of the adversary system, because when the Justice and Electoral Committee considers this bill it will have to look carefully at whether what we are doing is consonant with the main features of that system. I would say that there are probably four factors of that adversary system. The first is that the judiciary plays a passive role in dispute resolution. One need only to look at what goes on in the French courts, which have an inquisitorial system, to see that their system operates on a very different basis. But here, under our adversary system, the judiciary does not actively seek out cases or embark on investigations. The judiciary reside in our courthouses, and is only activated when litigants bring cases before them. Even when adjudicating, our judges should not archetypally move from passivity to activity and interfere with counsels’ development of cases.

It has been said in the past that the judge who speaks too much is “no well-tuned cymbal” and also that a judge who descends in the arena is liable to have his vision “clouded by the dust of the conflict”. [Interruption] I cannot hear the interjection that is coming from the other side but I can assure Mr Fairbrother, who is making troublemaking noises, if he has read widely on the law, that these are direct and well-sourced quotations. So the judiciary is not only to be passive; it is also to be neutral. It is not to pursue some particular theory of a case. It is to allow counsel to put their separately formulated cases before the court.

The second point is that counsel bear the burden of actively prosecuting clients’ cases before the courts. So their obligation is to put as strongly as they can their client’s case, and to diminish their opponent’s case to the greatest extent possible, and this is the linkage of the adversary system with the old system of trial by battle. The lawyer is the champion of the client. I remember the words of Lord Denning: “In litigation as in war, no holds are barred.” The third point is that our adversary system is accusatorial. The accuser, the party who asserts some cause of action against an accused, bears the express burden of proving his or her case to a high level of certainty in criminal cases. The fourth point, in particular reference to criminal cases, is that our adversary system employs the institution of the jury. In jury trials the judge is the trier of law, and the jury is the trier of fact. So the jury injects this lay assessment of the evidence in the law into the trial.

So our rules of evidence—and they are particularly relevant in the context of this Evidence Bill—are framed because we have chosen as our system of law this adversary system. So what is this bill about? Philip Goff has made some comments about it. The public can judge whether those comments are helpful. I choose to judge them as not particularly helpful, but I would say that the bill covers such matters as rules of admissibility including things like hearsay, opinion evidence, improperly obtained evidence, and propensity evidence. It deals with questions of privilege and confidentiality. It deals with the trial process—and that is why I spoke about our adversary system—and then, perhaps less significantly, it deals with rules for giving evidence from overseas to a New Zealand court, and evidence given in New Zealand to be used overseas.

The bill has several purposes, and I will conclude on this point by saying that it is to help secure the just determination of proceedings by, first of all, providing for facts to be established by the application of logical rules, promoting fairness to parties and witnesses, protecting rights of confidentiality and other important interests, and, finally, avoiding unjustifiable expense and delay. It is technical legislation, and appropriately is referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee. National supports this bill.

Hon JUDITH TIZARD (Minister of Consumer Affairs): It is always a pleasure to follow the member for Epsom, who, with his indomitable determination to wring every last word out of every issue, must have cost his clients a great deal over many years. In his own words he is “no well-tuned cymbal”; however, I think he is a symbol of much that needs to be changed in the legal system. It is probably good that he is in Parliament, bringing his undoubted experience in the padding and obfuscation of the law.

It is a great pleasure to follow my colleague the Minister of Justice, the Hon Phil Goff, who is bringing in yet another profoundly researched piece of legislation, following a great deal of work done by the Law Commission.

It is absolutely vital that New Zealanders have access to the law in the simplest, most accessible, and cheapest way possible. Yes, many cases are extremely complex, but it is unconscionable that so many New Zealanders do not go near courts because they fear the cost and they fear the complexity—often, when they have a very good case. Every electorate MP worth his or her salt will have any number of cases where constituents have come to them with perfectly just cases that should have been resolved in our courts but have not been, because of the complexity, the inconsistency, and the cost of almost every case.

This is a vital piece of legislation that has been reviewed over many, many years by the Law Commission. Indeed, more than 10 years have been spent researching and consulting on this legislation. I think we all recognise that although common law is one of the great strengths of the Westminster system, it is also very piecemeal, and legislation has to bring it up to date and reconcile it on occasions. I am delighted to follow my colleague Phil Goff, who has yet again demonstrated his profound interest, and rigorous approach.

I think the Justice and Electoral Committee will be able to call for submissions on this. I am sure there will be many interminable submissions on the lines of Dr Worth’s recent peroration. I look forward to this bill coming back to the House, representing an improvement that will clarify existing law by addressing ambiguities and inconsistencies. It does fundamentally change the current law in some areas, so it needs to be well examined. The bill is the next step in a lengthy process, and I do hope it will result in better access to, and clearer understanding of, the law and the right to justice for all New Zealanders

DAIL JONES (NZ First): New Zealand First will be supporting this legislation. The law of evidence is probably the cornerstone of our legal system. How evidence is presented is the crux of a case, in my view. One can be as academically clever as one likes, but if one is incapable of presenting one’s case in a court, one may as well never have gone to law school. So how we set up our laws of evidence is very important. Of course, the reverse is also the case. One may not be terribly bright academically but one can make a very good court lawyer, many times, if one is quick on one’s feet, knows the rules of evidence, and can deal with people. The Evidence Bill is extremely important legislation.

I was amused by the Minister of Justice, Hon Phil Goff, adding yet another of those lovely Labour phrases. This bill, as we were informed, went to the Law Commission in 1989, and he told us the commission was “very thorough”, and now 16 years later we have this bill. We can add that Labour homily to the Labour phrase for sex change—“gender reassignment”. We seem to have these lovely expressions from the Labour Party. Another example is a tax increase becoming a “tax shift”. We are going to have a list of as many of these wonderful phrases from this Labour Party as we can possibly get—possibly even more than there have been tax increases!

However, I pick up on one point made by the Labour member for Auckland Central, Judith Tizard. She talked about cost, and, of course, one of the reasons we have costs with court proceedings is that the Labour Government increased the cost of civil proceedings from a filing fee of about $100 to $1,000. That is why we have costs. That is why people cannot afford to go to court.

But let us put those things aside. I am not going to make a long speech. This is very important legislation. I am sure the Law Society, and lawyers generally, will pay very close attention to it. We have a great responsibility as a Parliament to make sure this legislation is right when it comes out of Parliament.

STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT): First, I want to dissociate myself from what I thought were some slightly churlish comments made by a member whose words I usually listen to extremely closely—Dr Richard Worth. I felt that the introduction to this bill by the Minister was one of the most workmanlike, sober, and respectable addresses I have heard in introducing a bill. There were no exaggerated claims to a new millennium for criminal justice, and I thought he gave us a good survey of what the bill is about. So on this rare occasion I feel I cannot adopt Dr Worth’s position that it was, in so many words, a “useless speech”. I do not think it was useless, at all.

This is, of course, a bill that has been lurking about in gestation for a very long time. About a year ago I was sounded out as to whether I wanted to be part of what might have been a legislative experiment for the Government, to go through a draft so that the kinds of questions that might be raised at select committee by members could be flagged or explored in advance. I thought that was quite a useful idea, because, as is undoubtedly the case, once the Government has introduced the bill, even if it is on areas that are regarded as lawyers’ law, where there should not be—or it is not expected there be—major political divides, it is nevertheless still not easy for a Government to see a Government bill dramatically changed, because people will tend to say that it must have been a muck-up in the first place.

I was interested to see that the Government had not slavishly followed the recommendations of the Law Commission. Clearly, an independent view has been taken of a number of the issues. But it does not seem to me that it truly matches up to the claims to be a codification. I do not think the Minister used that term in his introduction, and the precise words are not used in the explanatory note that the Government has attached to the bill, but certainly the claim to be simplifying a complex morass of case law is the usual description of codification. The word “fake” is far too strong, but, some of this gives the appearance of codification when, in fact, all it is doing is listing the factors that judges look at, without making the likely outcome any more obvious than before to the lay reader or the reader who is not a specialist in the area.

For example, I wanted to see whether we were going to have more or less encouragement to a kind of Miranda Law developing in New Zealand—that is, trials whereby the primary effort of the defence is to attack the legality of the evidence, so that the whole trial turns into a trial of police practice, instead of a trial of the guilt or innocence of the offender. So I look at clause 26, “Improperly obtained evidence”, hoping to see strong guidance to judges that the overall importance is whether the offender is guilty. Instead I find, in subclause (3), a long list of the kinds of things that judges probably weigh now, and no real indication of where the balance should lie. Will we have a relatively automatic exclusion of improperly obtained evidence, or will we not?

This is an area where the Government should have, in fact, taken a view, or at least have indicated that the judge’s consideration should be primarily on the defendant—because the defendant should be judged on guilt or innocence, and that might well be best determined on the basis of the improperly obtained evidence—but instead of on whether excluding the evidence is essential as a disincentive to future improper investigatory practice. In other words, what is not there is a focus on the reason why evidence should be excluded, not because it is wrong for the particular defendant, but because we have a set of rules and it is wrong for them to be disobeyed, and the judges are presumably deciding that disciplinary procedures are not as effective as simply making the evidence useless. At the same time, of course, they may be causing grave offence to the victims of the particular crime, and the select committee should do quite a lot of clarification on matters like that.

I am concerned also that I see nothing in here to deal with the so-called right to silence. It is possible that I, not being an expert in these matters and not having practised in the courts for many years, have not seen this dealt with, but I have been through the bill and I think eliminating the right to silence is a long-overdue reform.

Murray Smith: No, it doesn’t. It retains it.

STEPHEN FRANKS: I thank the member. That is an interesting one. Judges—I do not like to use the term left or right—from a conservative and from a radical bent of mind, like Justice Thomas, Justice Williamson, and various others, have in print called for the end of the so-called right to silence, because it actually is inimical to justice. The so-called right to silence does not mean a right that protects people from being forced to say something, but means it is difficult, or is not appropriate, for a judge or jury to draw conclusions from the failure of the accused to give evidence.

We have situations that really affront lay people, and obviously affront some judges, such as the Marlborough Sounds case. In that case the defence counsel could cross-examine on all kinds of fanciful theories about what might have happened, postulating alternative explanations for the facts, when the one person in the court who actually knew—who must have known—what the real facts were, could choose never to put himself at risk of being cross-examined on the theories advanced by his own counsel. That is wrong, and it should go.

I am concerned also that there is not a clear repudiation of so-called cell-mate confessions. I think cell-mate confessions have brought the criminal justice system into disrespect. Although they may have secured convictions for some deserving criminals, the loss of confidence that many have in it, and the fact that it encourages groups to form around offenders and to assert their innocence, means that it has been a very expensive victory in some cases. There are references to co-offender confessions, but I do not think they rule out cell-mate confessions in the way they should.

I am also concerned that there is not the reform I would have expected about children’s evidence and what used to be called—as lawyers listening will know—section 23G, which were the misguided changes made by Sir Geoffrey Palmer in 1989. There is change, but I do not think the bill is as clear in this area as the Court of Appeal has been very recently. In some senses it is a shame that the bill has not caught up with the courts. This is no longer a codification; this would actually take the law back from where judges have now tried to steer it. Having decided that that rush of blood to the head in 1989 left our law in a dangerous position, with some ancient rules of evidence that protected against improper convictions abandoned, judges decided that it was time to go back. Children’s evidence has particularly been a problem in sex offender cases, and some theories of child molestation, and in this decade and the last part of the last decade we have seen a horrified realisation of miscarriages of justice all around the world.

Finally, I am concerned too that the penalties for perjury have not been dealt with in a way that I would have hoped. The provisions about witness anonymity and protection of witnesses are a substitute, basically, for the creation of a system where it is simply not worth trying to pervert the course of justice. That is the reform we would have liked to see signalled. We look forward to trying to improve this bill in the select committee.

METIRIA TUREI (Green): The Green Party will be supporting this bill to a select committee for further consideration. We are very pleased to see the work on this bill come to fruition. The fundamental presumption that evidence is admissible unless it is determined otherwise is a very sensible approach and we are pleased to see that the complex provisions that have been developed over time are getting some clarification and a degree of simplification.

One of the things we are pleased to see, although I confess I am not 100 percent aware of some of the previous legal situations in terms of children’s evidence, is that it seems from the bill that the way children’s evidence is considered will be given some real consideration. Serious concerns have been raised about the way children’s evidence has been managed—those concerns particularly arising out of the high-profile civic creche case, but in other cases as well—and there does need to be better management of the way children’s evidence is dealt with. The proposal in this bill that seems to ensure that there is a judicial conference before the matter goes to hearing, in order to work out how to manage how that child complainant’s evidence is given, seems like a very good provision to have.

On reading the Law Commission’s report, I note particularly for the House that the Law Commission said that children do have a very good capacity for detailed and accurate recall of events and things that happen to them. The commission did a lot of analysis and research with experts on child psychology and other areas of children’s evidence and it was very concerned that the previous situation where judges were required to give directions to juries that children’s evidence was to be considered with caution, because of their natural tendency to fantasise and fabricate, was not an appropriate way to approach children’s evidence. The Green Party completely agrees with that. Children’s evidence should not be dismissed as an immediate approach, as a presumption.

The commission goes on to say that it is not the evidence of the child that needs to be given special particular consideration, but that scrutiny is needed of the manner by which that evidence was obtained from the child—the way the child was questioned and the circumstances that have led up to that child’s evidence. We think that is a very, very important point and still deals with only part of that matter, because, of course, it can deal only with evidence in court and the judicial process. But the commission’s approach is about the process by which that evidence is dealt with and the process by which the evidence is brought out of the child. It needs to be a very clean process and one that does not involve any kind of influence from others. It is very difficult to do that with children, not to influence them, because they are very, very receptive to emotional states, particularly of the adults around them.

So we are very pleased to see that there seems to be a tendency in this bill that it is the manner by which evidence is obtained from a child that is as much under scrutiny as the evidence of the child itself.

In the select committee we will be looking at the changes to the provisions about the defendant’s right to silence in criminal and civil cases. We are not particularly happy with what looks like the narrowing of the right to silence. I have to say that I am very surprised at ACT’s position on that. ACT’s position, by arguing that a defendant’s decision not to give evidence should be, or could be, used as an inference of guilt on his or her part, goes directly to the question of whether we have a justice system based on the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty. ACT seems to be saying that if a person makes a decision not to give evidence, then that implies that person’s guilt.

If we are to go to a position of a justice system—which would certainly not be a justice system, it would be a legal system—where a person was presumed guilty until he or she was able to prove his or her innocence, then we are completely transforming the system that we have and going in a direction that is not appropriate in this country and in this day and age. I do not understand how Stephen Franks could have come to that position on that issue. In fact, the right to silence is a very, very important right and privilege that defendants have, and they need to be able to maintain that to the greatest degree possible. Certainly, we should not be proposing any legislation to narrow that, without extremely good research and evidence as to how it will enable and better the legal and justice process to do so.

We are also concerned about the use of cell-mate confessions in criminal cases. Cell-mate confessions are highly prejudicial and of extremely dubious reliability. In the bill it appears that the judge is enabled to make a decision on the reliability of those kinds of confessions on the balance of probabilities. We are concerned that that is not a high enough test. We would like to see greater consideration given to those provisions.

We look forward to hearing from submitters about those provisions. As much as some of us have been lawyers, and perhaps even been in practice for many, many years in this area, after having spent some time in this House it is certainly true that we have got a bit rusty and we need to hear from practitioners and people who are involved daily right now in the court process, criminal and civil, to get a full and clear picture of what is needed in the courts at the moment.

We note the provisions about anonymous witnesses, which look as though they are just carried over from the existing law. However, it does bring to mind the issue raised last year of women who wore the burka, and their right to give evidence wearing a burka. The courts finally ruled that, no, they could not wear the burka and give evidence, and they were required to expose their faces. The Green Party can certainly see the arguments on both sides—the rights of the accused to adjust process, and the ability to assess the veracity of the evidence against him or her, versus the cultural, religious, and human rights of the women who, for whatever reason, feel they are necessary. We can certainly see those two competing interests, so we look forward to some information being brought to the select committee to see what people have to say about that, and whether something about those issues in terms of evidence should also be specifically included in the bill, or whether the provisions in this bill can be modified to deal with that situation as well, in a way that meets those competing issues if at all possible.

We are looking forward to seeing how this bill pans out in the select committee. We very much look forward to hearing from the submitters and we will be supporting this bill at its first reading.

MURRAY SMITH (United Future): This bill is only 3 years short of modifying a law that is 100 years old: the Evidence Act of 1908. Although over the course of those 100 years there have been amendments and a bit of tinkering to certain areas, we are still left with a justice system that is effectively a 19^th century justice system. If we needed any convincing of that, it was to be found in Dr Richard Worth’s speech tonight, which was a speech that could have been given to this House in the 19^th century. He referred to the four cornerstones of the adversarial system: the importance of the judiciary’s passive role and of it not descending “into the arena”, the counsel’s burden of putting the client’s case, the counsel as the “champion of the defendant”, and he discussed other things in the “accusatorial system”. Those are all 18^th and 19^th century concepts, and it is time we brought our justice system into the 21^st century. In order to do that, we will have to make somewhat more of a radical change to it than we do in this Evidence Bill.

Insofar as evidence is at the very heart of the justice system, I am disappointed that although the bill makes some improvements—in particular, a degree of codification and modification of the existing law in what I see as a positive fashion—it does not go nearly far enough to provide a justice system that New Zealanders can again have confidence in. New Zealanders lack confidence in our justice system for the very reasons that Judith Tizard seemed to think this bill was going to address—namely, the cost and complexity of it. This bill will not solve those problems, and until we look at a fundamental change it will not happen.

I was pleased that the bill enunciates the principle that all relevant evidence is admissible unless there is a policy reason to exclude it. That starts to go down the path that United Future would like to go down, whereby evidence is brought in and maximised, rather than being excluded for all sorts of wonderful reasons. The United Future members believe that the sorts of principles that should be at the foundation of our justice system are, firstly, that as far as possible it should determine the truth, secondly, that it should punish those who wrong other people or society in general, thirdly, that it should promote the reconciliation of the offender and the victim, with a view to the restitution of physical damage and the restoration of the relationship between them, and, fourthly, that it should promote the restoration of the offender as a positive and law-abiding member of society. The civil justice system, similarly, should focus on determining the truth, and then assist the parties to reach agreement on the outcomes necessary to resolve the conflict between them, promote the reconciliation of the parties, and restore their relationship.

Until we get a justice system that is focused on determining the truth, instead of on a semantic game—which is what our system has been for hundreds of years—we will not get a justice system that delivers for the people of New Zealand. It is astonishing that when I say that our justice system is not primarily focused on finding the truth, people are horrified. But that fits in with their experiences. We need to make some changes in order to ensure that the truth is at the forefront of our evidence, and of our criminal justice system. One of the ways we could do that very easily is to require a defendant to give evidence. At the end of the day, what defendants say in answer to the charges brought against them is the most helpful evidence to a jury, and to a judge, in terms of determining the truth.

It was interesting that the Greens talked about not removing a right to silence. Well, there is no right to silence. In fact, the history of the so-called right to silence just demonstrates the 19^th century situation we continue to have. In British law up until the end of the 19^th century defendants were not allowed to give evidence, because it was considered that they would be self-serving in their evidence and could not be trusted. Therefore, their evidence was not considered fit to be heard in a court of law, which was meant to uphold truth and justice. New Zealand was at the forefront of the Commonwealth in the 1880s in extending that provision to state that although defendants could not be compelled to give evidence, they could do so if they chose. So the change was made from defendants not being allowed to give evidence to New Zealand leading the way by stating that defendants could give evidence if they wanted to. We have not progressed any further than that. It is time we progressed into a situation of requiring defendants to give evidence or, if they do not get on the stand and answer charges themselves, allowing an adverse inference to be taken. Clause 26 retains the anachronistic provision that no adverse inference can be taken if a defendant chooses not to give evidence. The defendant should be required to give evidence.

The second thing we should really look at changing, if we are to make a fundamental change to the system that is determined on the basis of the truth, is the whole area of admissibility—in particular, with regard to improperly obtained evidence. We have a situation now that if the police stuff up in terms of their obtaining of evidence, the truth is chucked out so that the police can be punished by the evidence not being allowed to be admitted. Therefore, we abandon what could be critical evidence in determining the real facts in a situation, because we feel we need to punish the police in order to make sure they do things right. I say that we can have our cake and eat it, too. I say that we could admit the evidence, albeit wrongly obtained, on the basis of other sanctions against the police, and against the Crown if necessary, in order to deter them from improperly obtaining evidence. But why should truth and fairness suffer in a court because one party—the police; those who are prosecuting—get things wrong and do not provide the evidence in the correct fashion? What that tells us again is that our system is all about the police versus the defendants—it is a game. It is, as Mr Worth says, an arena, a gladiatorial contest, and a championing—champions are pitted against each other, in the vain hope that the truth will emerge from the centre of it. Instead, it tends to be just a bit of a bloodbath.

We get ridiculous situations such as the Barlow case arising from the Thomas murders. Mr Barlow was able to give his version of events in the newspaper and to find other people to give his version of events. Then, when the police came up with more evidence, he came up with a different story that was contradictory to it. Then, when the police came up with more evidence, he changed his story yet again. By the time the case got to trial Mr Barlow had given three incompatible versions of the facts, but he elected, despite all the publicity that he himself had undertaken, not to give evidence at the trial. As a result we had two hung juries, and it took a third jury before he was actually convicted of the murders. That would never have happened if Mr Barlow had had to give evidence, because as one Queen’s Counsel said to me at the time, if Mr Barlow had had to give evidence he would probably have come up with a fourth story—another story that was incompatible with the other three—and the jury would have seen straight through him.

Another thing we should look at curbing is the law against self-incrimination. If a person is charged with an offence, it is reasonable that we should, under our criminal justice system, require that person to answer the offence in person. If that means that people incriminate themselves, well so be it. If people have committed an offence, they should be punished for it. If our system is based on truth—on finding the truth, convicting the guilty, and acquitting the innocent—then the fact that people may incriminate themselves if they give an answer should not be a barrier.

We should also allow judges far more latitude in terms of their questioning and calling for evidence. In this bill we make some leaning towards a greater allowance for bringing in evidence and for judges to be involved. I think that what we should have, but do not have, in this bill is a provision for judges to call for evidence. We need to have stronger provisions so that if a judge sees a situation whereby clearly the truth of the matter will be determined by the evidence of such and such a person, and if the judge considers that that evidence is critical to the case, he or she can ask whether the prosecution or the defence will call that person. If nobody calls that person, then the judge should be able to appoint a lawyer to assist the court in calling that evidence. It is important that evidence is heard when it is central to determining the issues in the case. That is the sort of approach we should take, whereby judges are proactive in terms of determining where the truth lies in a situation instead of being passive, as Mr Worth likes to state it, and simply acting as the arbiter in a gladiatorial contest.

Those are the sorts of changes that I would like to see. I am not overly confident that the select committee process will be sufficient to make such radical changes to the bill, but if we are serious about getting a 21^st century justice system that people can have confidence in and that delivers results, that is the sort of thing we need to see changed. However, United Future will support the referral of the bill to the select committee, and we will see where we go from there.

LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East): I will take just a brief call to say how pleased I am to see the Evidence Bill finally in front of the House, with the recommendations of the Law Commission picked up. The Minister gave a clear message that the Law and Order Committee has a task before it: it can look at the issues and address them based on the evidence presented to it.

I will speak briefly about a matter of particular concern to me—spousal immunity. Anyone who was at my wedding will know that my husband’s wedding speech was predicated on the basis that the only reason he was marrying me was because of spousal immunity—and, of course, this legislation does away with that. He knew that he would be able to come home, weary from being on his motorbike, and be able to share his guilt with me in the knowledge that I could never be compelled to give evidence against him. This legislation allows for the removal of spousal immunity.

When I spent a period of time as Associate Minister of Justice, I managed to persuade officials to come up with an alternative that would allow spouses, and other partners very close to the individual concerned, to be excused by a judge from giving evidence. So the bill still allows for a little bit of immunity in order to ensure that the relationship is protected and, more important, that the veracity of the information being given to the court is protected, because that is what evidence law is all about.

I welcome the bill. I look forward to its coming to our select committee, and to the very hard work that we will do on it.

Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore): As my colleague Dr Richard Worth, an eminent lawyer in Auckland—and I could say a good deal more eminent than some of the other lawyers who have spoken in the proceedings tonight—has said, National is supporting the first reading of the Evidence Bill.

I am concerned to hear that the party that consistently supports the Labour Government, United Future, has such a poor understanding of our civil liberties. One of the reasons why we have these protections, of which Murray Smith seems to be unaware, is precisely that the State is powerful and that people acting for it sometimes abuse their authority. Perhaps it is done with the best of intentions, but they nevertheless do so. Therefore, the law provides citizens with protection. Mr Smith would just throw those protections away with indifference, unaware of the lessons of recent and past history. So when he said: “Let us bring the justice system into the 21st century.”, it was code for: “Let us give more power to the State.”, because that is essentially his plea. I say that we should be very careful of that approach, because our democracy is built on the basis that the rights of citizens are protected. That is literally the foundation of Western democratic societies, and Mr Smith would apparently cast that foundation aside somewhat heedlessly.

One of the other things that comes to mind is the rather unusual reference by the Minister of Justice to the careful deliberations of the Law Commission. I guess he was referring to himself in that as well, because this bill has had an extraordinarily long gestation. In 1989 the Law Commission started work on it. I recall reading its numerous briefing papers and preliminary reports as they came out. The final report was in 1999—10 years later. It is one of those situations that we have become used to with the Minister—he announced things some years ago and then they were announced again, he issued press releases saying that he was getting around to it, he put it in the Queen’s speech, and all of that sort of thing. That is the Minister’s habit. Finally, just a couple of months out from the election, he introduces the bill. I guess that he will have the dubious pleasure of being in retirement during its progress, because a new Minister will be able to consider the deliberations and results of the select committee. He will not be there to do so.

I turn to a couple of particular points within the legislation: hearsay evidence and privilege. One of the things about giving evidence in court is that it is intended to establish the facts from each party’s perspective. By definition, facts are things that people know, which is why we do not rely on hearsay evidence. In a case, a person testifying cannot give a statement of fact. They can give a statement of opinion, but they do not know what actually happened.

One situation brought to mind is the Prime Minister’s statements in the House today. Apparently, she cannot say what happened in relation to what was said 5 years ago. At best she can only say what she believes happened. So there is the odd situation of her putting her reputation on the line and the public being asked to judge it, not on the basis of what she knows she said—she cannot remember it and she has admitted that—but rather on what she thinks she might have said. That is a pretty unreliable situation. Interestingly enough, in that situation—and we are talking about evidence—the evidence actually exists in the form of tape-recordings and contemporaneous notes. I say that, on the basis of evidence, she should produce the contemporaneous information so that this nation knows the truth. It is something that, apparently, United Future wants to know. It is a fair claim.

We deserve to know the truth, particularly from the most important constitutional position in our country, which is that of the Prime Minister. Surely, as a nation, we should be able to know what is true and what is not, and that can be done. So that is a pretty important issue. When we are talking about evidence legislation, we should be able to rely on the truth of what is said, and the Prime Minister needs to understand that.

That matter brings me to the issue of privilege. Legislation protects many of the traditional privileges. One of the privileges, of course, is parliamentary privilege. Members can say pretty much what they like and it will not be challenged. Today the Prime Minister said—with no evidence—that the National Party paid for the Doone’s lawyer. Surely that was an extraordinary abuse of privilege. So when the issue of evidence is being looked at, we expect senior members of the Government to follow those fundamental principles.

I turn to some other issues in the bill. I was intrigued to hear the Green Party talk about the burka. That was an issue on which I had something to say at the time. In giving evidence, it is fundamental that people be able to assess the character of witnesses. Even the judge admitted that. Yet I understood from the Green Party that its belief is, on the basis of cultural sensitivity, we should allow people to give evidence and, in a sense, for that evidence not to be tested.

If one were to take the view that the whole purpose of legal proceedings is to seek the truth—and a fair argument can be made about that—then, surely, the demeanour of the witness is one of the things that both the judge and jury ought to be able to assess. I think that the judge made the correct decision by ruling that the person could not wear the burka. I personally think that the witness should not have been behind a screen.

I conclude on the point that the purpose of this legislation essentially is to codify the law, and to bring into the legislation a series of propositions and positions that have been held in case law and now need to be put into the legislation. That was the purpose and the intent of the Law Commission’s report. It disturbs me that we take so long to implement important Law Commission reports of this nature. This was an important report from the Law Commission. The commission did a huge amount of work on it over a long number of years. I read many of its reports during that time. Yet we do not have a procedure in this Parliament that would properly advance the commission’s important work.

As someone has pointed out, the current Evidence Act is from 1908. For 20 years now, that Act has been the subject of a review. For the health of the law of this land, we need to have a system in this Parliament that would enable Law Commission reports on issues that are certainly not fundamentally party political or in dispute to be passed into law for the health and effectiveness of the law.

Stephen Franks: Where is your sense of mystery? This one shouldn’t be passed until 2008.

Dr WAYNE MAPP: That is an intriguing interjection, but I think that it would not be good for the development of the law. This is something that the House needs to pay attention to. We need to find a mechanism, as exists in both Britain and Australia, whereby non-contentious but important legislation can be passed so that we keep the legal tool kit in good repair.

LYNNE PILLAY (Labour—Waitakere): I am very pleased to rise and take a very short call as a former member of the Justice and Electoral Committee.

Darren Hughes: That powerful committee!

LYNNE PILLAY: That is right. The need for this bill has been anticipated for a very, very long time, and its passage will be the culmination of a lengthy process.

I want to acknowledge the Law Commission, which was very thorough. It spent a decade reviewing aspects of evidence law, publishing discussion papers, and seeking the views of those involved with the justice sector, including a wide variety of community groups, academics, officials, members of the legal profession, and our respected judiciary.

I will close by saying that this bill brings together decades of decisions and reforms of statutes. It is common-sense, practical, forward-thinking, and visionary—just like this Government.

JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon): I rise on behalf of the National Party to support the Evidence Bill. I am concerned that we have not yet heard from Mr Fairbrother, who was previously a criminal lawyer. He had a lot of experience in criminal law, and he acted for all sorts of people. It is important, when we are dealing with an issue like evidence, that Labour put up speakers who might know something, rather than speakers who contribute the nonsense we have just heard.

Tonight I will speak about something quite wide ranging. One of the areas I want to deal with relates to the law of hearsay. There are several reasons why the Law Commission might have taken a decade of taxpayer funds to sit around talking about the law of evidence. One of the reasons might be that it is a very difficult matter and maybe it wanted to get it right. I would like to think that is one of the reasons it took so long. We do not go into the area of evidence, and look at a mass of changes in it, without some fear and trepidation.

The National Party does not subscribe to the concepts of Mr Murray Smith from United Future. I am sure he would rather we had trial by ordeal than trial by jury. If we ever needed to have evidence as to what trial by ordeal might be like, then my goodness he gave it to us tonight. Has anyone heard anything like his contribution? It was one of the most out-of-this-world, 17^th-century contributions on the law of evidence one could ever hear. Evidence is very, very important. That is why this bill will go to the Justice and Electoral Committee, and that is why, I hope, the Law Commission took a decade to review the area. However, that does not explain why the Minister of Justice has sat on this matter for the last 5 years. I can only think that it was not nearly as important as the Civil Union Bill, or the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill, which stated that marriage, civil union, and de facto are all the same, and which a lot of United Future members supported.

Murray Smith: I didn’t support it.

JUDITH COLLINS: If the member does not know it, his leader supported it.

One of the areas of evidence, relating to the Family Court and the Employment Court, does not seem to be covered in this bill, as far as I can see. I have thought for a long time that some of the evidence that goes into those courts is a load of garbage. I have seen affidavits put in that are absolute twaddle—a technical term—and nonsense, and I am appalled that some lawyers could take affidavits with that rubbish in them. I have had people to come to me on behalf of other lawyers, bearing affidavits that stated they were frightened of their husbands. When I ask why they were frightened, they reply that they were told to say that at Women’s Refuge. That is the sort of thing that passes for evidence in the Family Court today, and that is wrong. In this country people’s situations can be unfairly prejudiced because of what we would call false “evidence”.

Again, in the Employment Relations Authority, an awful lot of garbage is put in as evidence. I know that the Minister, Rick Barker, as a former trade unionist, might hate to hear it, but the sort of rubbish that passes for evidence in the employment area can be, for example: “So and so said such and such to so and so, and then they told me …”—and that is supposed to be evidence. In situations like that, with that sort of nonsense, it is very difficult for employers or employees to defend themselves—which is something that people like Peter Doone and his wife are having to think about today, as they have been so badly libelled in Parliament.

In relation to the burka, I think it is absolute rubbish to say that we have to have cultural sensitivity in the case of a person who comes here, makes accusations against someone, and then hides behind a veil so that the accused cannot see the accuser’s demeanour. Yet the person who was accused could well have gone to jail.

We tamper with the law of evidence at our peril. I do not view the State as a benign, wonderful State that is there to find the truth; I view the State as an all-powerful, very deadly machine that can be used against individuals at our peril as a free society. I see that that is, in fact, a view held by many of those who have previously practised criminal law—and I see that Mr Fairbrother agrees with me. The State comprises lots of different people, many of whom have abused, and will continue to abuse, their power, whether they be in various bodies of the legal profession, in the police, in the Customs Service, or in any other authority. The fact is that people are people, and some people will abuse their power. We tamper with rules of hearsay and of evidence at our peril.

However, it is very important to note that there are some good, positive parts in the bill. I am very pleased to see that attempts have been made to deal with issues like video evidence and the area where sometimes someone is unavailable as a witness. Privilege is an area that gets quite a lot of mention in the bill. That, of course, relates to the privilege between a legal adviser, or counsel, and his or her client, and also to religious confessions. It does not extend to doctors—a fact that they never believe until they are in court and are told they have to say what happened.

One of my concerns is about complainants in sexual cases. I am very pleased to note that the Government proposes to keep the restrictions on using the previous history of complainants in rape cases—for instance, their previous sexual history—against them. Once, when I was the tender age of 18 and in my first year at law school, I attended a rape trial. I did so at that stage thinking that one day I might like to be a criminal lawyer. Experiencing one rape trial, and seeing what happened under the old law—before the law on evidence in sexual cases was changed—was sufficient for me to know that I could never, as a lawyer, do that to another woman. The way in which that particular woman was treated, and the fact that she was not a virgin at the time of the rape, meant that she had her reputation sullied and muddied in open court, and it said to me that the law had to change. It was, of course, not her previous sexual history that was in doubt; it was the actions on a particular night that needed to be looked at.

Another of my concerns relates to children’s evidence. I do not share the fantasy of the Greens that children do not fantasise. I think that the Greens fantasise, and also that children do. It is very important, as any parent will tell us, that children enjoy fantasising. It is a natural and healthy part of being a child. Some of them still believe in Santa Claus—as I am sure the Greens do.

Peter Brown: Pigs passing by the window.

JUDITH COLLINS: Mr Brown thinks I am not being fair. I think it is very important that we look at the rules in relation to children and the giving of evidence. I am very concerned about the evidence that has been put to the Justice and Electoral Committee in relation to the trial of Peter Ellis. I am also very concerned about the fact that, again, screens are being used, and not only that they are being used, but that sometimes evidence is being given by people in relation to matters in respect of which it does not always mean that fairness reigns.

The administration of justice is a very, very imprecise science. It is something that does not come easily in a lot of those cases. Sometimes the most awful crimes have been committed, and people want to find the perpetrators. They want to know there is closure on those crimes. Everybody deserves a fair trial in this country, no matter how revolting and heinous the crime. I know it is not a great vote-winner to say things like that, but unfortunately it is the truth. Everybody, even the most despicable person, needs a fair trial.

RUSSELL FAIRBROTHER (Labour—Napier): I have listened carefully to the speeches tonight, and I think that the lawyers who have spoken have indicated that this debate will be a positive one for the Justice and Electoral Committee. Those who are familiar with the art of practising law are aware of some of the subtleties, and they have been expressed tonight.

For example, in relation to the debate about truth being an absolute in the courtroom, it was picked up by Dr Wayne Mapp and Judith Collins that in the criminal law, where the State is the prosecutor, we are really not in a battle about truth but in a power relationship. That is a valuable thing to understand, because that imbalance of power underlies many of our rules on the law of evidence, and most of those rules will still be carried forward in this new Evidence Bill.

That takes me, of course, to the suggestion by Mr Murray Smith that this is a radical change. I do not see it as a radical change to the law of evidence; I see it as a sensible evolution in rules that have been changing gradually over time, piecemeal and bit by bit, both by change in the law and also by thecommon-sense development of the common law. We see the Family Court, which has been applying rules of common sense, when it comes to evidence, for a long time, despite the evidence code. We see the employment and disputes tribunals, which adopt their own rules of evidence. We see the development of the criminal law on propensity; we see the development of the criminal law on documentary evidence; we see the development of the criminal law on reputation. All those matters are carried forward in this bill. Reputation is now related to the truthfulness of the witness, which is an area that has been difficult in the criminal law—ill-defined, and with conflicting decisions as to how the evidence of a certain witness may be attacked on the credibility or the truthfulness of that witness. Those are all dealt with in the bill, and I refer particularly to clause 33, which brings a clear set of rules when assessing the reputation or reliability of witnesses, whether they be for the defence or the prosecution.

This bill expands what is a very good Law Commission report. In Part 4 the bill adds all the evidential rules relating to foreign judgments and foreign laws. Those have not been considered by the Law Commission, but I think the select committee will find that their incorporation in this bill is a sensible extension of that. The bill also adds clauses 104 to 116, which deal with the present laws relating to undercover officers. That practice is well established now, and it seems to be accurately reflected in the bill.

I think this bill is a very positive advance in the practice of law, and it should turn into sensible law. But I urge the select committee to make constant reference in its report to the Law Commission report, so that when the courts come to consider some of the changes in the bill they can go back to Parliament to ascertain its intention, and can hope that Parliament’s intention will reflect that of the Law Commission.

The main test we have now is in clause 7(3), which defines what is relevant: “Evidence is relevant in a proceeding if it has a tendency to prove or disprove anything that is of consequence to the determination of the proceeding.” Of course, clause 8 is very important, and it is the current law—that a judge may exclude any evidence that is unduly prejudicial to the outcome of the proceeding or that will needlessly prolong the proceeding.

The Law Commission, I think, identified the real issue here. I refer to page 3 of its report, where it states: “The Code relies”—and the code is its draft code, which this bill very much reflects—“on the common sense of the triers of fact and the wisdom of the judiciary who will give them guidance on how to approach the evidence in a given case.”

I think that those who appear in court would accept, as Ms Collins did when she described justice as a science, that it is probably more of an art form. One can apply the rules and the evidence, but the application in each case depends upon a number of factors, including the competence both of counsel appearing and of the judge. It is my hope that the select committee has sufficient time to hear the evidence fully and to listen to all parties, because if this debate tonight has been indicative, then the report that emerges from a select committee that has sufficient time to consider the bill clause by clause will be a substantial report, and one that this House can embrace with some pride.

I conclude my remarks tonight by again going back to the Law Commission report. On page 3, at about line 10, the commission states: “The significant reform proposed by the Code will not achieve its purpose unless it is accompanied by a change in approach by practitioners and the judiciary.” Essentially, the Law Commission is stating that Parliament can change new laws. But unless the law profession rises to the challenge and reads these provisions of the bill, or the law that emerges from the bill, and reads it with the intent and purpose; unless we have judges who are prepared to establish a new culture in the courts, taking heed of some of Ms Collins’ comments about some of the terrible affidavits that are filed in the Family Court and in the lower employment jurisdictions; unless judges are prepared to give some leadership on what really is relevant and what really should be included; and unless lawyers exercise some common sense when dealing with clients—unless that is tackled—then this law will lead to greater litigation while our appellant process sorts out the problems at first instance. But if our Law Society is sufficiently re-educated, and if our judges take responsibility for the culture in their courtrooms, then the moving of this bill into legislation could be significant for New Zealand. I hope it is.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee.

Land Transport Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN (Minister for Transport Safety), on behalf of the Minister of Transport: I move, That the Land Transport Amendment Bill be now read a second time. I thank the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for its work on this bill; it has given it thorough consideration. I note that the committee is recommending a number of amendments, which the Minister supports.

I take this opportunity to remind the House briefly of what this bill contains, and to discuss some of the select committee’s recommended amendments. This bill is not the result of a single comprehensive review but of a series of specific reviews. The intention of the bill is to improve the safety and security of road users in line with the objectives contained in the Government’s New Zealand Transport Strategy.

The bill can be summarised under three headings: the improvement of road safety by the provision of better enforcement options, the better alignment of existing law and regulation governing commercial transport with other transport legislation, and the updating of general transport provisions to account for changing technology. The bill will improve the safety and security of road users by making the enforcement, operation, and administration of land transport safety law more efficient and effective.

The Government has identified a number of areas where the legislative framework that sets out the responsibilities of road users, traffic offences and penalties, and the driver’s-licence system needs improvement. In addition, the Government has identified a number of problems with land transport legislation that frustrate its spirit and make it difficult to administer and enforce. The bill fixes those problems.

With regard to serious traffic offenders, it is clear that alcohol and excessive speed are the two biggest contributing factors to road crashes in New Zealand, together accounting for about 40 percent of fatal crashes. Such crashes are unnecessary and come at enormous social and personal cost. The bill gets tough on the most serious traffic offenders by reducing the speed and alcohol thresholds imposed for immediate driver’s-licence suspension, and by increasing the range of penalties for repeat drink-driving, including immediate vehicle impoundment at the roadside.

The bill introduces a “three strikes and you’re out” approach for any drink-driving offences, whereby a first-time offender will face the current court-imposed penalties for a first drink-driving offence. A second offence committed within 4 years of the first offence will carry immediate licence suspension for 28 days on top of the court penalties, and a third or subsequent offence within 4 years of the first offence will result in immediate vehicle impoundment for 28 days and extended disqualification of licence, which will also include a requirement to resit and pass the theory and practical driving tests. That is on top of the court penalties.

The bill will make the law around driver licensing clearer and more user-friendly. It will do that by allowing a temporary driver’s licence to be issued when a person’s licence has expired or been revoked. That will allow a person to drive for assessment purposes. Secondly, the bill will require a driver’s licence to show the original issue date rather than the date that the licence was last issued. That will assist New Zealand driver’s-licence holders who wish to drive or hire a car in other countries.

The bill will allow for the immediate suspension of a driving instructor or a testing officer in the interests of public safety, and it will prohibit driving instruction for financial or commercial gain when the instructor does not have a current driving instructor endorsement. I note that the select committee is also recommending an amendment that would require the licences of suspended drivers to be surrendered. I welcome this amendment, as it will address concerns raised by the police and the hospitality industry that superseded learner and restricted licences are being used to assist minors to gain entry into licensed premises.

In 2001 the Government reviewed the transport operator licensing system. This bill contains amendments to transport operator licensing in line with that review. It simplifies and clarifies licensing requirements, thus helping to reduce compliance costs for transport operators. At the same time, it puts in place measures to improve commercial driver standards through the rules programme. Those include enhanced accountability of taxi organisations, and strengthened offences and penalties.

I note and endorse the select committee’s recommended amendment to require approved taxi organisations to provide company details in Braille inside taxis. That step should enhance the security of visually impaired taxi passengers, and their ability to bring any deficiencies in driving or service to the attention of the taxi company or of Land Transport New Zealand.

The bill also prohibits persons convicted of serious violence and sexual offences from being passenger service drivers. That will address the risk to public safety of having convicted sex offenders and other violent offenders in a one-on-one situation with passengers. I note that the select committee recommends that the scope of that provision be extended to cover offences committed prior to the commencement of this bill. I support that amendment, but note that the select committee in its report unanimously suggested further consideration be given as to whether some individuals should be able to apply for reinstatement. My officials are currently examining how reinstatement could possibly work in very limited circumstances, whilst excluding the most serious offenders, and I expect to table amendments to address that issue.

With regard to driving hours and logbook reform, I tell the House that following consultation with the transport industry and the general public, and in line with the review of the driving hours and logbook system, the bill retains prescribed driving hours and logbooks for commercial drivers, in order to manage the risks to road safety from driver fatigue. However, the bill simplifies the driving hours and logbook system, and introduces a new, simpler definition of work time.

Additionally, it alters the current penalty system, in line with industry concerns, to a graduation of penalties according to the seriousness of the offence. It introduces a new “chain of responsibility” offence to ensure that employers and other industry participants are held accountable if they knowingly allow or cause driving-hour breaches. The select committee has recommended that “chain of responsibility” offences also be created for load security and overloading offences, and for speeding where commercial vehicles are involved. Those are positive measures, and by making the likes of consignees and consignors equally liable when they have knowingly contributed to an overloading or speeding offence, it will help to improve the safety of commercial transport services. The bill also provides for alternative fatigue management schemes to encourage operators to take greater responsibility for managing commercial driver fatigue.

There are currently defects in land transport legislation that frustrate its spirit and make it difficult to enforce or administer. The bill contains a number of common-sense amendments to address those concerns. They include: empowering police to serve at the roadside a notice of licence suspension on a driver with more than 100 demerit points, where the director has been unable to serve the notice; ensuring driving offences involving injury and death apply both on and off the road; and updating the definition of motor vehicle to exclude vehicles powered by very small motors. I support the select committee’s recommendation that the maximum power output for low-powered vehicles be increased from 200 watts to 300 watts, or higher for specified classes of vehicles, like electric bicycles for instance. That will better cater for small powered scooters and bicycles, which are increasingly being used by commuters and for recreation.

During the debate on this bill, United Future raised the issue of excessively noisy vehicles. Officials are looking at ways to strengthen existing sanctions and tools available to enforcement officers in order to deal with excessively noisy vehicles, including the possibility of assigning demerit points for vehicle noise offences, and an increase in fines. I also expect to table amendments on that matter.

This bill, as reported back from the select committee, proposes a large number of positive changes to the legislative framework underpinning land transport safety. Not only will the legislation improve safety and help save lives; it will also reduce unnecessary complication and business compliance costs. I thank the select committee and the officials for their work, and I commend the bill to the House.

Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore): I guess it is evidence that the Government has finally run out of steam when the only things it can bring before the House are the mundane, the ordinary, and, indeed, some might say, the dreary. The kind of legislation it is dealing with does not speak of any grand agenda for the country. Here is a Government that is looking for a third term. Does it have any sense of an agenda to put to the country, or is its greatest concern whether a bicycle could have a 200-watt electric motor or a 300-watt electric motor? Is that the only thing it can think of? Ms Lianne Dalziel’s great concern was stationary engines. We even had a video to that effect. So this is the sense we get of the agenda of the Government.

There actually is a big transport issue out there, and it is not addressed by this bill. The big transport issue is whether the motorway system in Auckland will be completed. Will the western motorway—the one that could run through the current Prime Minister’s electorate—be completed before 2020? That is the big issue. Does the Government have any sort of plan for a second crossing across the harbour? What plan do the Government members from Wellington—the junior whip, for instance—have for Transmission Gully? Has that member even thought about it? Has he told his voters what he thinks about it? Does he have a plan to do it? Is there any sort of plan for Tauranga, the issue of great concern to the leader and deputy leader of New Zealand First? Instead, the Government is presenting to us the minor, the trivial, and the technical, and that tells us everything we need to know.

This Government has run out of steam. The bill, after all, is all about technical amendments, and the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, which has not had before it the bills that deal with the big issues, spent months and months hearing evidence on things like bicycles—the electrical power of bicycles—and stationary engines. I guess one has to ask what sorts of priorities the Government has. What kind of agenda does it have for our country? If this is the best it can do and if the Evidence Bill is the best it can do, then, frankly, it is time for the Government to go so that the nation can have a Government with a real agenda. There are, however, a couple of particular technical points—well, one of them is not technical. One of them is quite big and important—it is a pity the Minister just glossed over it—and it is the protection of the public in relation to taxi drivers.

It is clear that the Minister had not actually read the report of the select committee, because if he had, he would understand that this is quite a significant issue, and I know that the leader of New Zealand First and, indeed, other members of the select committee, will be dealing with it. The question is whether members of the public should have an absolute assurance that taxi drivers today—those who currently have licences—have not previously committed violent offences. These include very serious sexual offences and offences like murder—literally—or manslaughter, at the serious end, aggravated assault, and a whole variety of sexual offences. Should the public be protected from such a person holding a P endorsement, as it is known, a bus driver’s licence, or a taxi licence? The select committee heard evidence on this. It was not in the bill that came before us.

Lianne Dalziel: Yes it was.

Dr WAYNE MAPP: It did not deal with current licensees who have committed those offences. We concluded by consensus—it was the unanimous view of the select committee—that the answer was yes. The Green Party would have allowed so many exceptions that its answer was effectively no, but for the rest of us the answer was yes.

The first issue is, of course, protecting the public. The second issue is this question: are there any people in that class who perhaps for 30 years have been safe, notwithstanding the violent offence, say, 30 years ago, and could nevertheless be permitted to drive? On balance we actually said no. There are too many examples of serious violent offenders assaulting women in particular. In a taxi one should be able to feel safe. One should be able to have an absolute assurance that the person in the vehicle does not have a prior serious conviction. There is one issue, however. Should there be any discretion—any system—that would enable a review of that proposition? Other parties in the House—and I will not speak on their behalf, because they will do so themselves—say yes. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and this is why I was a bit disappointed in the Minister—did not even refer to the issue. The select committee concluded that all members of the committee recommend that further consideration be given to the issue of whether there should be some form of appeal procedure. The Minister did not actually acknowledge that fact. So that was a little bit disappointing. I can understand that he was essentially standing in for the actual Minister, so I note that particular point.

Lianne Dalziel: You weren’t listening, Wayne.

Dr WAYNE MAPP: Well, if I missed it, then I did miss it.

So that is probably, in terms of this particular bill, the single most important issue. The other issues, as I said, are fundamentally technical. They will not materially change the land transport industry in New Zealand and, indeed, neither should they.

I have to come back to my initial proposition. For the last several weeks this House has not had before it any bills that speak of some large agenda that the Government might have—some indication of where it might take the country. So the only thing one can conclude is that the Government is going to say: “Trust us, because we’ve administered the country for the last 6 years.” That is, in essence, the Government’s claim to govern the country for the next 3 years; just on the basis of what it has done in the last 6 years. Well, we have news for the Government. We will actually deal with the big issues, especially around transport, and it is not about log books. It is about the roading system of our country—

Darren Hughes: And the tunnel!

Dr WAYNE MAPP: —and the tunnel. I will reply particularly to that point. I have this to say. There is a huge transport crisis on the North Shore. The motorway is jammed for hours and hours at a time. I have simply put to the country, and to the citizens of the North Shore, the proposal of Transit, which is for a harbour tunnel from the northern abutment of the bridge to the southern abutment of the bridge. There is a way to pay for it, and it would be self-funding, by an average of a $3 toll. Is there a way to do it? Is there a precedent? The answer is yes. In Australia—in Sydney and Melbourne—that is how they solved their problems. New Zealanders know the reality of that. Aucklanders know the reality of that. Citizens of the North Shore know the reality of that.

I have polled the residents of North Shore, and let me tell the interjectors on the other side of the House that 80 percent of all people polled are willing to pay a toll to solve their transport problems. That is a simple fact. Eighty percent are willing to pay a toll to solve the problems, to get a second crossing. What do I hear from the Government? Objection. Do I hear a solution from the Minister with responsibility for Auckland Issues? No. Do I hear complaints? Yes. That, I guess, says it all. Labour is the party of complaints, National is the party of solutions, and the public will be able to test that at the coming election.

LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East): I want to take a call on the second reading of this bill to record a tribute to the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, the Hon Mark Gosche. I have to say that he is one of the most competent chairs of a select committee whom I have ever had the pleasure to work with. His determination to go through this bill with a fine-tooth comb ensured that all interests were able to be balanced fairly—that is, to meet the concerns of road safety; to deal with the issues of accountability through new chain of responsibility offences; to deal with professional drivers, both self-employed and employed, in terms of their hours of work and logs required to be kept; and to look also at the wider interests for those employed in the industry and at public confidence in the road transport and passenger transport industries. I want to place on the record how satisfying it is to work on a select committee under the leadership of someone who knows the issues and is not afraid to test advice.

I guess this is a good point at which to acknowledge the officials, who were set very challenging time frames but who always delivered to the select committee. We are very grateful to the officials for that.

I also want to place on the record my congratulations to all elements of the industry, both those representing the interests of the workforce and those representing the road transport industry and the passenger service industry. All of them were willing to work with us as a select committee, both through the submissions process and also directly with officials, as we progressed through this very important legislation. I think that this bill as introduced was a good bill; I now believe it is an excellent bill.

But there is an amendment, as Dr Wayne Mapp mentioned during the course of his speech. He did not listen to the Minister’s speech and completely overlooked the fact that the Minister said that officials were drafting an amendment as we speak. The committee said unanimously that we would welcome this amendment by way of a Supplementary Order Paper from the Minister—I repeat that we decided unanimously.

The amendment relates to the prohibition on passenger service drivers having convictions for serious violent and sexual offences. In that regard I want to put on the record my congratulations to Deborah Coddington, who came to the select committee to argue that particular position. It was readily adopted by the committee. I think that all members of the committee respect Deborah Coddington for the contribution she has made in that regard.

We did ask for advice on prohibiting people from being passenger service drivers based on their having obtained very serious sexual or other violent convictions in the past. Once we had received that advice, we were unanimous in our recommendation to alter the bill to include prior convictions. We made the point that this is not only about passenger safety—it is about public confidence in the passenger service industry. Everyone is entitled to know that he or she is not getting into a taxi whose driver is a murderer or a rapist. Nothing will change that. The Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper will not extend any appeal rights to murderers or rapists.

However, as a committee we felt that there should be an opportunity to allow those who have been convicted in the long distant past of less serious sex offences to have a tightly framed appeal right. We could not do that as a committee in the time available to us. I take it from the Minister’s comments in his speech that such a provision is being drafted, and I welcome that.

In conclusion, I believe that this bill will make a real difference in terms of making the legislation more workable at an operational level and more effective in promoting road safety. I too commend the bill to the House.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First): I would like to comment on the last point that Lianne Dalziel made. If she reads the commentary on the bill, she will find it is quite different from what she has just said in the House. It states, and this refers to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee: “We gave serious consideration to whether those convicted of serious offences before the commencement of the bill should be able to appeal against the prohibition from holding a passenger endorsement. While a prohibition from carrying passengers rules out this form of employment, they will be allowed to undertake other employment involving driving.” There is no mention of an appeal there, thus far. The commentary then goes on to state: “The majority believes public safety is of such importance that it is essential that people convicted of very serious offences should not hold passenger endorsements.”

Lianne Dalziel: Read the last two paragraphs.

PETER BROWN: If the member—who was once a Minister—just listens for a minute, I will get to that little bit.

Lianne Dalziel: All members of the committee.

PETER BROWN: Yes. Further on, the commentary on the bill states: “New Zealand First is concerned there is no appeal provision whatsoever for current drivers including those who might have been driving for many years and have subsequently led a responsible life and their crime is known to the public.” When that was inserted, the members of the committee would not consider appeal rights at all. That part of the commentary concludes: “All members of the committee recommend that further consideration be given to this matter.”

Lianne Dalziel: That’s right.

PETER BROWN: Well, that is quite different from the way the member explained the situation.

Let me just explain New Zealand First’s position on this aspect of the bill. We are not a party that wants to defend murderers, rapists, and other people who have committed serious crimes—not for one minute. But the officials told us we may be talking about as many as 200 people in this category, who have been driving for some time. We were told at the select committee that if this bill goes through as currently worded, the police could go along one night, stop a cab, and say to the driver that they are sorry, but cab driving is over for him or her. That could happen, whether or not the person had been driving cabs for 5 minutes, 15 years, or 30 years.

Lianne Dalziel: Do you think rapists should be allowed to drive taxis?

PETER BROWN: Now the member has changed her mind.

Lianne Dalziel: I have said no to murder, and no to rape.

PETER BROWN: Well, I have not seen a Supplementary Order Paper. The Government has not had the courtesy to show us even the glimmer of a Supplementary Order Paper.

Lianne Dalziel: So New Zealand First thinks it’s OK for rapists and murderers to drive taxis?

PETER BROWN: If the member over there on the Government benches would take a deep breath and listen for a moment, it would be of some assistance. We say that an individual who may well have been driving a cab for a considerable number of years may, in his or her youth, have been guilty of one of the lesser of the serious offences, and should have the right of appeal. It is not right to take away a person’s livelihood. That individual—

Lianne Dalziel: We have always agreed with that.

PETER BROWN: She agrees now. She did not agree at the select committee. Let me make that quite clear. Some individuals do turn their lives round.

Lianne Dalziel: What about rape and murder? Answer the question.

PETER BROWN: I will answer any question the member wants to put to me, but I wish she would put it at a more appropriate time. I am trying to outline New Zealand First’s position.

Lianne Dalziel: You agree with rapists and murderers?

PETER BROWN: No, I do not agree with rapists and murderers—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich): Order!

PETER BROWN: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I do not agree with rapists and murderers driving cabs, but the bill has it right in terms of rapists, murderers, and goodness knows what else being prohibited from getting a passenger endorsement if they go for one. But we are talking about a person who maybe 20 or 30 years ago committed a serious offence, and who has led a responsible, blameless life since. We are saying, not that that person should drive a cab or do anything else, but that he or she should have the right of an appeal. It is not right that nanny State comes along and just takes away his or her licence.

Lianne Dalziel: We agree.

PETER BROWN: That member now agrees with me, and I am thankful for that. We have very persuasive powers in New Zealand First. Let me just say that such a cab driver may well, at this point in time, own several cabs. That person may be a successful business person in his or her own right, and may drive one cab and have drivers for other cabs. It is not right that we just withdraw that person’s livelihood, without a right of appeal. So New Zealand First is fighting for those individuals to have the right of appeal.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.