Wednesday, 22 July 2026

Wednesday, 22 July 2026 The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m. Start of Sitting Day

Karakia/Prayers TEANAU TUIONO (Assistant Speaker) (14:00): E te Atua kaha rawa, ka tuku whakamoemiti atu mātou, mō ngā karakia kua waihotia mai ki runga i a mātou. Ka waiho i ō mātou pānga whaiaro katoa ki te taha. Ka mihi mātou ki te Kīngi, me te inoi atu mō te ārahitanga i roto i ō mātou whakaaroarohanga, kia mōhio ai, kia whakaiti ai tā mātou whakahaere i ngā take o te Whare nei, mō te oranga, te maungārongo, me te aroha o Aotearoa. Āmene. [Almighty God, we give thanks for the blessings which have been bestowed on us. Laying aside all personal interests, we acknowledge the King and pray for guidance in our deliberations that we may conduct the affairs of this House with wisdom and humility, for the welfare, peace, and compassion of New Zealand. Amen.] Visitors

Cambodia—Minister of Women’s Affairs SPEAKER: I’m sure that members would wish to welcome Her Excellency Dr Ing Kantha Phavi, Minister of Women’s Affairs of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and her delegation, who are present in the gallery. Presentation

Petitions SPEAKER: A petition has been delivered to the Clerk for presentation. CLERK (14:01): Petition of Ankit Gumber requesting that the House urge the Government to increase penalties and enforcement powers for illegal dirt bike use and resulting noise pollution. SPEAKER: That petition stands referred to the Petitions Committee.

Papers SPEAKER: Ministers have delivered 17 papers. CLERK (14:01): Climate Change Commission 2026 Emissions Monitoring Report Statements of intent for: Heritage New Zealand NZ On Air Radio New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and Television New Zealand 2026 Statements of performance expectations for: Broadcasting Standards Authority Creative New Zealand Fire and Emergency New Zealand Heritage New Zealand New Zealand Film Commission New Zealand Symphony Orchestra NZ On Air Radio New Zealand Tāmaki Regeneration Company Te Papa Tongarewa, and Television New Zealand. SPEAKER: Those papers are published under the authority of the House. No select committee reports have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation. No bills have been introduced. Oral Questions to Ministers

Finance Question No. 1 RYAN HAMILTON (National—Hamilton East) (14:02) to the Minister of Finance: What recent reports has she seen on the economy? Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance) (14:02): Two weeks ago, the Reserve Bank released its latest monetary policy review. This included a decision to increase the official cash rate (OCR) by 25 basis points, to 2.5 percent. Previously, the OCR had been at 2.25 percent for 7½ months. Ryan Hamilton: Was this OCR increase a surprise? Hon NICOLA WILLIS: No. The OCR rises and falls in cycles, and 2.25 percent was the bottom of the most recent cycle. In lay terms, the Reserve Bank’s accelerator has been flat to the floor, providing stimulus to the New Zealand economy. It was no surprise to the market or to economic commentators that the Reserve Bank decided to ease off the accelerator a bit, and since this move was already widely anticipated and priced in, there has been little or no change in fixed-term mortgage rates since the announcement. It is important to note, however, that the current OCR of 2.5 percent is still very accommodative, or stimulatory, with low interest rates continuing to provide stimulus to the economy. Ryan Hamilton: Why did the Reserve Bank decide to ease off the accelerator? Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Well, yesterday’s Consumers Price Index release showed annual inflation above the target band, at 4.1 percent, due to a spike in fuel prices from the Middle East conflict. That spike will pass, but the Reserve Bank remains concerned about potential second-round effects on other consumer prices. It also expects the economy to continue strengthening. For those reasons, it has decided to ease off the accelerator. The Reserve Bank’s job is to keep on top of inflation. Monetary policy’s contribution to longer-term economic growth and living standards is through price and macroeconomic stability, and that is to the benefit of all New Zealanders. We have seen quite recently, between 2021 and 2023, just how destructive high inflation can be, with prices rising up to 7.3 percent a year. Ryan Hamilton: What has the Government been doing to help limit inflationary pressures? Hon NICOLA WILLIS: The Government has been focused on not adding to inflationary pressure with large increases in discretionary spending, as happened in 2022 and 2023. Our responses to the fuel crisis have instead been temporary, targeted, and timely. Our new spending in each Budget has been very restrained. This fiscal discipline has helped limit any inflationary pressure from fiscal policy and, therefore, any additional pressure on interest rates. As a Government, we have also applied significant focus to addressing the underlying productive capacity of the economy and are advancing supply-side reforms to ensure a more productive economy and to limit price rises in the future, whether that be rates caps, work to accelerate the development of electricity generation, or work to ensure a more responsive housing system.

Education Question No. 2 LAURA McCLURE (ACT) (14:05) to the Associate Minister of Education: What recent data has he seen on student attendance? Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Associate Minister of Education) (14:05): Wonderful news: in term 2, just finished a few weeks ago, regular attendance was 64.2 percent. That’s up 5.8 percent from term 2 last year, and it is the best term 2 in a decade. I should add a small caveat that 2020 was slightly higher, because, due to COVID measures, children were routinely marked present when they, in fact, were at home. However, had normal conditions applied that year, this most certainly would be the best in a decade. It is a tribute to New Zealand’s children and parents, who have been getting it done. We heard tremendous negativity at the start of the term that due to the fuel crisis, attendance would plummet, and it was all going to be Chicken Little. Well, Kiwi parents and Kiwi children do not share that negativity. They have set a 10-year record for school attendance, and that is a wonderful thing for our country’s future. Laura McClure: Were there suggestions early in term 2 that the price of fuel might negatively impact school attendance? Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I was just saying that, but I appreciate the member’s invitation to further expand on the matter. The interesting thing is that there’s always a certain type of negative person who sees success as an excuse for grievance rather than an example to follow. I’m talking about the leadership of the Post Primary Teachers’ Association and the New Zealand Educational Institute and the Labour Party, but I repeat myself thrice. Actually, in stark contrast to those negative attitudes, Kiwi kids and Kiwi parents got it done, because they see the value of education, and we’re proud to see that progress. SPEAKER: I’ll just take this moment to remind the House that it’s not appropriate for Government questions to be used to attack other parties. Laura McClure: Thank you, Minister, for clearing that up. What are some of the attendance initiatives this Government has invested in? Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Well, it is, I believe, in the first instance, the children that show up to school that deserve the praise, and the parents, who often save and make sacrifices to get their children educated. But it is also true that this Government has taken a range of initiatives, starting from just taking it seriously. We did not take school attendance seriously enough in this country in the years before this Government was elected. We started publishing the data every day, where previously the Minister responsible had got in trouble for refusing to release attendance data. Now you can see the data every day. We have given every school board an attendance action plan and implemented the stepped attendance response scheme, or STAR, which gives a different response at every stage of a child’s attendance journey. If their attendance gets worse, there is a new response. Every time they go down 10 percent attendance, we change the strategy to get them back. We have also put around $40 million extra into attendance, and we have re-contracted the attendance services up and down the country after an Education Review Office review found that those contracts were not performing. As a result of all of those actions, we have just set a 10-year record for school attendance in a winter term 2. Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does the Minister agree with the proposition that the best thing we can do to reduce youth crime is to ensure that our kids go to school? Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: It very much depends on the student. If the student is a naughty student and commits crimes at school, then it could be worse, as the member can well remember. However, as we can all imagine, the Hon Paul Goldsmith has the report cards to prove it—he was on detention at Auckland Grammar every other day. But if you have a student who is diligent and learns and gets the skills and the self-esteem and the qualifications to set a good path in life, then yes, education is definitely the best insurance against a wayward life afterwards later in life. SPEAKER: As the member asking the question can attest.

Prime Minister Question No. 3 Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the Opposition) (14:11) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his Government’s statements and actions? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister) (14:11): Yes. In particular, our efforts on attendance and lifting educational standards. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Why did he tell New Zealanders in December 2023 that his 100-day plan had “a laser focus on bringing down the cost of living”, if bringing down the cost of living is, in his own words, as he told the House yesterday, “economic illiteracy”? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: In answer to the last part of the question, could the member provide the full quote, please, in the context it was given? Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Sure. If, as he claimed in the House yesterday, “falling prices leads to less spending. That leads to businesses not investing, and, as a result, the economy shrinks.”, why has his Government repeatedly promised falling food prices over the past three years, something they failed to deliver? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: No, no, what I was talking about was just helping to educate the member because, clearly, he led a very economically illiterate Government. The point I was trying to make to him was, look, you have high inflation, which is what the last Government created—7.2 percent; 32-year high; it was actually out of the band for 11 quarters. Too-high inflation is bad, right, because, actually, what happens is that prices go up and people’s wages don’t keep up with that and they fall behind. That’s the situation that that member created. But then what he started arguing was the flipside, the other continuum, which is called deflation, where he argues that, actually, we should have falling prices. When prices start falling, economists tell you that you get less spending. Less spending means business incomes fall, and then you actually get cutting costs, wages, and jobs. The extremes aren’t good, and so what you do is you try and get in the band of 1 to 3 percent. That’s what his Government failed to do. He doesn’t understand deflation. He doesn’t understand the impacts of high inflation. It was just an education lesson to help him out given the economic illiteracy on his side. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Mr Speaker— SPEAKER: No, just before you progress, the House needs to be a little more orderly than we’ve just seen from some sections while the last answer was being given. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: If his concern is that shrinking prices will lead to a shrinking economy, how has his Government managed to deliver higher prices and a shrinking economy? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: No, no. My deep concern was for the member’s economic illiteracy around an issue called deflation, because deflation—look it up in the economics books—isn’t a good thing, and that’s what that member’s been advocating for. What this Government has delivered is inflation at 4.1 percent in the middle of the biggest oil spike and crisis we have seen. If you strip that out, we’re at 2.9 percent, within the 1 to 3 percent band that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand sets in place. I’d just remind the member that under his record it was 7.3 percent, a 32-year high, outside the band for 11 quarters. It’s a special kind of skill to create that amount of illiteracy and poor economic management, but he has it in spades. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: If prices coming down is deflation and economically illiterate, why did Nicola Willis state, and I quote directly, “Prices coming down is exactly what we want to see”? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I would just put the member’s record of 7.3 percent up against our record of 4.1 percent—4.1 is smaller than 7.3. Do you get it? Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: So when did reducing— SPEAKER: Hang on. The House will just settle right down while questions are being asked. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: When did reducing the cost of living stop being his first priority and become economic illiteracy; was that before or after he failed to deliver it? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Look, I’m just going to help the member. I’m going to send you a book called Economics 101. It’s a great textbook. I got it in the sixth form at high school, and it highlights the dangers of what you’re talking about, which is deflation. That’s why we manage it within the band. Strip out the Iranian conflict and we’re well within the band, at 2.9 percent. We’re making progress. Here’s some other numbers for you, though, because you banged on about food inflation yesterday: it was 12.3 percent under a Labour Government; it’s 2.8 percent today. We have 0.5 percent rent inflation—the lowest in 25 years. That member drove up rents $180 a week. Rents are stable across the whole term of our Government, and as you can see by the Stats data, it’s up 0.5 percent—the lowest in 25 years. Your record doesn’t match with ours. SPEAKER: Some people on the other side of the House just need to calm down a little bit. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: If arguing for lower grocery prices is economic illiteracy, was Nicola Willis economically illiterate when she said—and I quote—“National is committed to Kiwis paying less for home-grown food at the checkout”? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: As I tried to explain to the member yesterday—but he doesn’t get numbers or do numbers—he had food inflation at 12.3 percent. Hon Kieran McAnulty: Keep it up—this is good. Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Food inflation today is 2.8 percent. Mr McAnulty might even understand that 2.8 is less than 12.3—this is the point that we’re making. We’re making good progress. Most importantly, the economy’s on an upswing. There’s lots of good information coming through the economy, but I just will help the member—I’ll send him that book. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: So, if he’d had no intention of bringing down the cost of living and lowering grocery prices, why didn’t he just tell New Zealanders over the last three years that actually what he was promising was grocery prices that just wouldn’t increase as fast? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Because we are focussed on lowering the cost of living for New Zealanders. That member had inflation at 7.3 percent, he had food inflation at 12.3 percent, he had rent inflation at 4.6 percent, and he had mortgage rates at 7.4 percent. Not only that, because his spending was so wasteful, he tripled the debt for goodness’ sake. We pay $9 billion worth of interest because of their economic mismanagement and illiteracy. I’m just saying to the member, I’m just trying to help him by educating him, because I look at that front bench and there is nobody with any economic management skills whatsoever. Just look at the faces— SPEAKER: That’s enough. [Interruption] Question No. 4— Hon Kieran McAnulty: See them—all their heads are down. SPEAKER: Mr McAnulty, you’re not called, so don’t speak.

RMA Reform Question No. 4 Dr VANESSA WEENINK (National—Banks Peninsula) (14:17) to the Minister responsible for RMA Reform: What recent reports has he seen on the Government’s reform of the New Zealand planning system? Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister responsible for RMA Reform) (14:17): As the House knows, yesterday we welcomed the Environment Committee’s report back on the Natural Environment Bill and the Planning Bill. As I think— Hon Rachel Brooking: It was Monday, not yesterday! Hon CHRIS BISHOP: On Monday. Hon Kieran McAnulty: You tell him, Brookie! Hon CHRIS BISHOP: You got me there! You got me—you got me! [Interruption] SPEAKER: Just a moment. That’s far too much, all right? Just calm it right down. You may enjoy your little quips, but people are trying to understand the answers to questions that are being asked properly in this House. Hon CHRIS BISHOP: On Monday, we welcomed the report back of the Natural Environment Bill and the Planning Bill. As I think all members know, there isn’t a corner of this country that hasn’t been affected by the failure of our planning system, and the new bills to replace that planning system will result in significant economic opportunities for all New Zealanders. I want to thank the Environment Committee for the improvements made to the bills, addressing a number of concerns by submitters. We’ve had a number of changes around renewables, agriculture, housing, and also the environment. Dr Vanessa Weenink: How have the bills been improved to drive infrastructure delivery and housing growth? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: There have been changes made to the heart of the system, which is the goal of the bills, to better focus and direct this sort of growth. We are for the first time writing into New Zealand law that our planning system should create abundant development opportunities, rather than the status quo of just meeting current and expected demand. When it comes to infrastructure, we are writing into law that the system should “enable” infrastructure, rather than just “plan” and “provide for”. These are subtle but very important changes because they go to the heart of many of the problems besetting the New Zealand economy, which is an infrastructure deficit, a housing crisis, and an energy system that has made it too hard to develop our abundant renewable resources. Dr Vanessa Weenink: What changes were made to enhance the environment? Chlöe Swarbrick: That is laughable—that is laughable. Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, in contrast to what the member for Auckland Central is saying around “laughable”, a new goal in the system is to support and enhance the natural environment, which has been added by the select committee, sending a clear signal that the planning system should value the natural environment, and, indeed, enhance it. Environmental limits, which are not a feature of the current Resource Management Act (RMA), have been retained. There have been changes made to clarify how those are set, to make sure they’re reflective of local context. Regarding climate change, decision makers will be able to consider the positive effects of activities associated with reducing the adverse effects of greenhouse gas emissions—for example, it will be easier to consent renewable energy generation and public electric vehicle charges in the new system. And the bills establish a dedicated wildlife approvals process to make sure that the Wildlife Act’s protective purpose and approach continues to be applied. Dr Vanessa Weenink: What feedback has he seen on the select committee’s report? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, there’s been a lot of feedback, some of it accurate, some of it less accurate. Some of the accurate commentary was from Liz Moncrieff from the New Zealand Planning Institute, who confirmed that the bills are likely to make attaining resource consents faster—that is a real problem in the current RMA. We’ve also seen DairyNZ say that the “job is not finished” but reported back that the “bills provided a much stronger foundation for a system that can deliver environmental improvement, greater certainty, and lower cost.” I was also confused by some of the criticism of so-called new ministerial powers that I’m apparently giving to myself. In the current RMA, the Minister has the ability to set national direction, national standards, and regulations under the Act, and, of course, those powers remain in the new planning system, but they will exist in a much more coherent and streamlined way. Mariameno Kapa-Kingi: Has the Minister seen reports that existing mana whakahono ā rohe agreements were negotiated to improve planning efficiency by enabling earlier engagement between councils and iwi? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Yes, I have seen those reports, and nothing in the new system will stop engagement between councils and iwi. In fact, it will be one of the parts of the new system—it will, in fact, encourage that as part of the development of spatial plans, which, again, is a new feature of the system that will be a real enhancement on the status quo. Mariameno Kapa-Kingi: What advice has the Minister received that abolishing those agreements will further improve planning efficiency, given the Far North District Council reported that its mana whakahono ā rohe agreement with Ngāpuhi would save time and money through earlier engagement? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: I would encourage the Far North District Council, once the bill’s passed into law, to develop an iwi participation agreement with Ngāpuhi, and there will be the ability for them to do that within the framework of the new legislation. One of the reasons we’ve abolished, or we’re proposing to abolish, the mana whakahono ā rohe agreements is that they were developed in the context of the RMA. We’re obviously changing the RMA and developing a planning Act and a natural environment Act, so it makes sense to have a system that reflects that when it comes to iwi participation agreements.

Education Question No. 5 Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) (14:23) to the Minister of Education: Has the Privacy Commissioner been notified about the SMART tool data breach; and if so, what advice has she received on this matter? Hon ERICA STANFORD (Minister of Education) (14:24): I’m advised that the Ministry of Education notified the Office of the Privacy Commissioner on the same day that the issue was verified. I’m advised that the ministry have followed the guidance of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and have followed their obligations under the Privacy Act. Hon Ginny Andersen: Over what period of time was the “unexpected access” able to obtain access to the information of 276 students? Hon ERICA STANFORD: I’ve been advised that there were two teachers who had access between 5 July and 12 July—the two issues, one happened on 5 July and the other two, with the other separate teacher, happened on 12 and 13 July. We became aware of the issue and verified it on the 16th and undertook the correct process, as outlined earlier. Hon Ginny Andersen: How were trial logins able to access 276 real student records? Hon ERICA STANFORD: I don’t have the technical knowledge of the back end of the system to be able to answer that question. What I can say, though, is that as soon as the issue was verified, all of the access was closed down immediately while the Ministry of Education worked to ensure that the proper process was taken—the identification, restricting access, and then notifying the correct people. All of those steps were undertaken and it has been found that it was just those two teachers between those periods of time. Hon Ginny Andersen: Was the final security accreditation for the Student Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting Tool completed before or after live student data was loaded into the system? Hon ERICA STANFORD: I don’t have that information on me. The member is going to have to put that in writing. SPEAKER: Question No. 6— Hon Ginny Andersen: No, no. I’ve still got one more, Mr Speaker. SPEAKER: I beg your pardon. Hon Ginny Andersen: I’ve got another supplementary. SPEAKER: Well, stand up and ask it. Don’t sit there waiting. Hon Ginny Andersen: Why did she push ahead with the Student Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting Tool when Treasury explicitly advised against it, stating that key processes for assigning and changing access permissions were yet to be developed? Hon ERICA STANFORD: Well, that information and advice from Treasury was through the business case process, which is a standard process. The advice was given, the ministry acted on it, and the business case proceeded as it would normally do. Hon Ginny Andersen: Why did she push ahead with the implementation of the Student Monitoring, Assessment and Reporting Tool when the Ministry of Education explicitly advised her that there was an active risk of a security breach serious enough to lead to complaints to the Privacy Commissioner and reputational damage to schools? Hon ERICA STANFORD: All the advice that I’ve had from my ministry before we went live is that the security of the system was robust and that they had confidence to go live.

Prime Minister Question No. 6 Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON: Ngā mihi e te Māngai. [Interruption] SPEAKER: There is one person asking a question, and the people who have repeatedly started to give their opinions to the House while someone else has the floor won’t be staying any longer. Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green) (14:27) to the Prime Minister: E tautoko ana ia i ngā kōrero me ngā mahi katoa a tōna Kāwanatanga? [Does he stand by all of his Government’s statements and actions?] Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister) (14:27): Yes. Hon Marama Davidson: Does he accept that successive Governments, the courts, and Parliament have recognised Treaty-based obligations in environmental decision-making for decades, and, if so, why is his Government weakening a mechanism designed to give practical effect to those obligations? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Well, in answer to the second leg of the question, what we’re doing is we’re making sure that any agreements are in the context of the new Resource Management Act (RMA) legislation going through this House. Importantly, any agreements are held at a high level to deal with issues like spatial planning. Quite rightly, I think most Kiwis would understand that it’s important to protect important culturally significant sites and to uphold Treaty obligations. But, equally, at the individual level, we want farmers to be able to crack on and build farmhouses on their own property without having to have endless engagement with lots of others. Hon Marama Davidson: Can he confirm that mana whakahono ā rohe agreements, which have been around for almost a decade, have not once transferred council powers, created a veto, or established any form of co-governance? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: My point and our point is that we actually want any agreements to be in the context of the newly developed RMA legislation. Hon Marama Davidson: What practical problem is solved by scrapping mana whakahono ā rohe agreements if the Government still intends to provide for iwi participation agreements under the replacement resource management legislation? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Well, as I’ve said to the member, we’re transitioning from an old piece of legislation that’s broken and doesn’t work to a new one. We’re in a transition period, and while we are, we’re just encouraging everybody and saying, “Let’s get with the right law framework and the legal context, which is the new RMA laws, and put it in that context.” Hon Marama Davidson: What advice has the Government received on whether removing mana whakahono ā rohe agreements could increase disputes, litigation, duplicated consultation, decision-making delays, or Treaty breaches? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Well, again, the point and the principle of the decision is actually to make sure that any agreements that are struck are done within the context of the new RMA legislation. That’s as simple as it is. Hon Marama Davidson: Does he accept the concern raised by former Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations that scrapping mana whakahono ā rohe agreements is doing “untold harm” to the Treaty relationship? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Sorry, could the member repeat the question. Hon Marama Davidson: Does he accept the concern raised by the former Minister for Treaty Negotiations that scrapping mana whakahono ā rohe agreements is doing “untold harm” to the Treaty relationship? Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I don’t know which former Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations she’s referencing.

RMA Reform Question No. 7 HANA-RAWHITI MAIPI-CLARKE (Te Pāti Māori—Hauraki-Waikato) (14:30) to the Minister responsible for RMA Reform: What negative impacts, if any, will his Government’s RMA reforms have on iwi-Māori rights and interests? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: That’s not actually the question. But anyway, Mr Speaker— Hon KIERAN McANULTY: Just answer the question. Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister responsible for RMA Reform) (14:31): I’m happy to. I’m pleased to say the new planning system will provide for more certainty around how Māori rights and interests are provided for. It will address the uncertainty created under the Resource Management Act (RMA) by vague Treaty provisions that did not specify what was required of decision makers or iwi. The efficiencies created by the new system will significantly benefit Māori. We are committed to supercharging iwi development. In fact, it is in the goals of the system. Iwi have suffered as much as anyone from the complexity of the RMA, and the new system will support iwi groups to use their land and natural resources for their own benefit. To give you one example, Ngāi Tahu have emphasised to me how much of a barrier overly complicated consent processes are to them actually using and realising the benefits of the aquaculture settlement areas that are provided for under the Māori Commercial Aquaculture Claims Settlement Act 2004. This is extraordinary, and it’s important for the House to hear it. To date, no consent has been granted for a gazetted aquaculture settlement area. After 22 years. That to me is a contemporary Treaty breach and we are fixing it through the new planning system. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: How many Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements—[Interruption] SPEAKER: Questions—and I don’t know why the House has to be reminded so much today—are heard in silence by everybody other than the questioner. Please start again. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: How many Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements in Hauraki-Waikato will be removed by his Government’s RMA reforms, if any? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: I don’t have the specific number in relation to Hauraki-Waikato, but if the member puts it down in writing, I’m happy to look at it. What I can say is that when the bills were introduced there were eight in existence. There have been three agreed since the bills were introduced; four short-form agreements were agreed in 2025; 27 have been initiated since the bills were introduced, and I’m advised that councils have advised them of approximately 50 that have been initiated since the bills were introduced. They will have to transition into the new system. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: What assurances can he give to the people in places of Ngāti Tara Tokanui Trust, Ngāti Pāoa Trust Board, Ngāti Hotu Tipuna Trust, Ngāti Tumutumu Trust, Ngāti Tamaterā Treaty Settlement Trust, Ngāti Hauā Iwi Trust, Raukawa Charitable Trust, Te Kawerau Iwi Trust, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, that their relationship with their local councils will be enhanced by the removal of Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements, and not diminished further? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: They will have the ability to negotiate with their council new agreements once the bills come into effect, and I’d expect some councils to do that, and some iwi and other groups to do that as well. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: If iwi decide to seek justice through the courts over the removal of their Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements, can the Minister assure them that the Government will honour those decisions? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, the Government is of course subject to the law; that is a core principle of the rule of law, which is part of New Zealand’s constitution. However, what I would also say is that the Government is moving to change the law specifically to create a new legal regime for iwi participation agreements. I want to stress that it is important, in the system, that there is the ability for iwi to have influence at the spatial-planning level, but we are determined to get out of the system the idea, at an individual resource consent level, that you have to go and talk to every man and his dog around the country in order to get permission to use your own whenua to do something in this country. That is part of what’s held this country back, so we’re keeping things at a spatial-planning level and, as the system funnels down to an individual resource-consent level, we expect far more freedom for people to do things, unless they affect other people. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: How does the Minister expect mana whenua in Hauraki-Waikato to have confidence in this Government when decisions continue to be made that are inconsistent with Te Tiriti and the commitments made to them? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, that’s just completely incorrect. I mean, for starters, this Government has agreed to transition over the variety of Treaty settlement arrangements in Hauraki-Waikato into the new regime. It’s a core coalition commitment that Treaty settlements entered into by the Crown in good faith, after many years of injustice, are honoured, and that remains as part of the new regime and will continue as part of the new regime. I’m in constant and regular dialogue with many of the iwi in Hauraki-Waikato about those very matters. Hon Tama Potaka: To the Minister: how will Māori primary sector organisations have better opportunities to contribute more to export growth as a result of the RMA reform? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: One of the points that is often made to me by many of these groups is that the RMA has been a massive stumbling block to the development of primary sector exports or forestry or aquaculture, as I alluded to in the primary answer. There is the great ability in the new system for much greater export growth and development of our natural resources, as a result of the planning changes and environmental management changes that we are making.

RMA Reform Question No. 8 Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin) (14:37) to the Minister responsible for RMA Reform: Is it correct that the regulatory relief provisions in the Government’s planning bills could impose costs of $1.99 billion on councils, and will ratepayers ultimately bear the burden of these costs? Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister responsible for RMA Reform) (14:37): There’s a range of estimated costs, as I think the member knows, to implement the regulatory relief provisions. The member’s chosen the upper end of the scale from the MartinJenkins report, but the MartinJenkins report also says it could range from $7 million to as high as $1.99 billion—so she’s technically correct, but it’s unlikely to be like that. One number is 284 times larger than the other. The bills provide councils with a range of options in how relief is provided, including rates relief, development rights, land swaps, reduced fees, access to grants, and cash payments. That is all to be worked out in due course. Hon Rachel Brooking: Can councils afford the regulatory relief provisions in these bills, without passing on the costs to households by increasing rates? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, the member should have listened to my primary answer: I mean, I just gave a range of different ways in which they will be able to reach the regulatory relief, if indeed it is required. It’s worth just pondering why it exists: we are trying to deliberately tilt the system or introduce some greater tension in the system towards private property. The reality is, if someone has a piece of land that is private property and a council turns up and says, “Well, it’s now subject to significant heritage restrictions.”—or a significant natural area (SNA) that takes 80 percent of the land or at least renders 80 percent of the land unusable, or an outstanding natural feature or landscape, or something that is of high natural character, those are legitimate roles in the system. The system should protect things like that, but they also have an impact on someone’s private property, to the point where there might be a diminution in the value of that property. I don’t want to live in a country in which councils can just do that, willy nilly. I don’t want to throw out planning entirely but I also want to introduce some tension into the system so that those costs on individual landowners actually bite somewhere. If the effect of that is that councils think hard about whether or not something is actually heritage or whether or not something is actually a significant natural area, then that is actually a feature of the system; that is what we are trying to accomplish. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Hon Rachel Brooking: So is there a risk that councils will put off introducing protections for biodiversity, heritage, landscape, and sites of significance for Māori because of the risk of having to provide monetary compensation for that protection? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, as I’ve just said, one of the goals of the system is to make councils bear some of the cost of those restrictions which are imposed on private landowners. That is what is allowed in the status quo at the moment. Talk to the farmer who owns a piece of land and finds that the council turns up and says that 85 percent of the land is now a SNA and you’re not allowed to farm on it and you’re not allowed to do anything on the land. Well, I’m sorry, that is not acceptable. That is currently allowed, and there are examples that members on this side of the House can point to up and down the country. Or the individual landowner in Wellington who happens to own an alleged, so-called heritage house because it was designed by some architect in the 1950s who has found that you can’t add a second storey to the house, can’t even change a lightbulb, barely, inside the house because the council has decided it’s a heritage house. Well, I am sorry, I stand on the side of the landowner who is subject to those restrictions. It’s not to say that councils can’t and shouldn’t do that, because we do need to protect heritage, we do need to protect significant natural areas, we do need to protect areas of significant biodiversity, but there is a cost to that, and the question before the House is, “Who should bear that cost?” Should it be the poor, long-suffering private landowner, or should it be councils? And I say: councils. [Interruption] SPEAKER: Just one person asking a question; that’s all. Hon Rachel Brooking: Does he agree with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment who said the bill effectively reasserts a right to destroy biodiversity? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: No, I don’t agree with the Rt Hon Simon Upton in relation to that. Hon David Seymour: Not until he apologises for the RMA. Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Ha, ha! My colleague the Deputy Prime Minister says, “Not until he apologises for the RMA”. That’s slightly mean spirited! I don’t agree with him, but what we’re trying to do—firstly, we’re not getting rid of zoning, we’re not getting rid of the concept of SNAs for heritage, and in fact, the threshold for when regulatory relief will kick in is a significant threshold. It’s not any heritage restriction or any biodiversity overlay, or anything like that. It’s a significant threshold, and it’s a tilt towards the idea, as I’ve said a couple of times now, that private property matters. It is the foundation of a modern, market economy. We believe in it on this side of the House, and we want to introduce greater tension into the system. I get that the member doesn’t like it, but it is a core element of the reform and what we’re trying to accomplish. If the member wants to stand up for the untrammelled power of councils to impose restrictions on private property, she can. SPEAKER: Questions are required to be relatively brief and concise; answers should be as well. Hon David Seymour: Could the $1.99 billion figure that some allege, in some scenarios, councils might have to pay for reducing the value of people’s land also be seen as an indication of the size of the cost that councils can put on people when councils restrict people’s right to use their own land? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Yes, indeed, that is an alternative way of looking at that, and it is definitely true that councils, at the moment, impose costs on individual landowners that are borne by the landowner, when, in fact, they are social public goods that should be borne by everybody else. Hon Rachel Brooking: Does he accept that these reforms could force councils to choose between protecting the environment and protecting households from higher rates? Hon CHRIS BISHOP: No, I don’t accept the false binary that the member has put forward. There are a variety of different ways for councils to think creatively and laterally—which I realise is sometimes a challenge—but they will need to think creatively around how they give effect to the rules. It doesn’t necessarily need to be about compensation; it could be remission or things like that. It could also be the exchange of development rights somewhere else on a property in exchange for impositions on another part of the property. There is a variety of different ways, and if you think about what other countries do, they do that now. We are providing greater tools for councils to think about how they give effect to regulatory relief.

Agriculture Question No. 9 GRANT McCALLUM (National—Northland) (14:45) to the Minister of Agriculture: What recent report has he seen on the effect of the Government’s RMA reform on the primary sector? Hon TODD McCLAY (Minister of Agriculture) (14:45): The Environment Committee’s final report on the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill was released on Monday. The Government welcomes the report, as it is a significant step forward for the primary sector and our farms, as have many farm leaders. For too long, the Resource Management Act (RMA) has added cost, delay, and uncertainty for the people who grow and produce New Zealand’s food and fibre. Replacing it with a system that is practical, proportionate, and focused on outcomes is good news for farmers, for the environment, and for the wider economy. I’m pleased to see that the select committee has taken on board many of the suggestions from the wider farming community, including the wool sector, and I thank the committee for its hard work. Grant McCallum: What are the intended benefits for farmers from these changes, and will it include getting Wellington out of farming? Hon TODD McCLAY: Across the country, farmers and growers have been held back, as the RMA has failed them. It has been burdensome, it stifles productivity, and that is exactly why we’re replacing it. Key changes that will help farmers and growers include adding a reference to food and fibre production to the goals of the bills. It will mean fewer unnecessary rules; the new system removes rules that aren’t needed. Regulation focuses on real environmental risks, not minor or low-impact activities. Consistent rules nationwide—planning processes will be simpler and more predictable, with clear, consistent national rules that support long-term investment in the rural sector. They focus on what matters. Farmers will only need to manage effects on farms that are more than minor, unlike the current RMA. Clear environmental limits for natural resources like air, water, land, and indigenous biodiversity will be set and monitored to protect people’s health and the environment. Finally, farm plans will mean fewer consents but more environmental achievement. Freshwater farm plans will be flexible and farmer-led, and they’ll help farmers identify environmental risks on their farms and then plan practical actions to manage these, reducing costs and driving better environmental activity— Chlöe Swarbrick: Say it like you believe it. Hon TODD McCLAY: Well, OK, I’m going to start again, because I really do believe it. SPEAKER: No, no—definitely don’t start again. You’re in the terminal zone as it is. Hon TODD McCLAY: I can only believe it slightly more because it is so good. The change we’re making is going to help farms and going to help farmers—absolutely. Grant McCallum: What is the Government considering on Waikato Plan Change 1 (PC 1)? Hon TODD McCLAY: The Minister responsible for RMA Reform and I recently held a public meeting in the Waikato to discuss PC 1. PC 1 was developed more than a decade ago and has spent the intervening years in court. It is no longer clear, from those we heard, that it is fit for purpose or that it will achieve many, if any, of its original intentions. It doesn’t make sense to have a new national planning system adopted by Parliament, but Waikato farmers and growers are sentenced to rules that were developed under an old system. Waikato farmers are committed to improved water quality, but they need modern planning rules to achieve this, not ones that were developed 15 years ago. The Government is committed to addressing this as we move the RMA reforms through Parliament, so that all areas of New Zealand are treated equally and treated fairly. Grant McCallum: What are the foreseen benefits for the country? Hon TODD McCLAY: We have a primary sector we all can be and we all should be proud of. This year, it will export a record $62 billion to the world, forecast to grow to $70 billion by 2030. Our farmers and growers and others in the primary sector are responsible for 360,000 jobs. Exports are how we grow the economy, and our producers are delivering. The world wants New Zealand’s high-quality, sustainable, trusted food and fibre. The RMA replacement will see increased productivity, reduced costs on farms, and better environmental outcomes. It will allow local communities to make fit for purpose decisions, including around land-use change, and reduce heavy-handed regulatory burden. As it drives up production whilst meeting environmental obligations, it will mean more jobs, higher wages, and greater exports for New Zealand.

Building and Construction Question No. 10 ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa) (14:49) to the Minister for Building and Construction: Is he satisfied with the state of New Zealand’s construction workforce; if so, why? Hon JAMES MEAGER (Acting Minister for Building and Construction) (14:50): Not entirely, because we know that the construction sector has experienced significant pressure in recent years. However, activity levels in the sector are building, with recent data showing an 18.5 percent increase in consents for the year to May. This activity is being supported by the actions of this Government to speed up consenting through fast track, reforms to the building consent system, and overhauling the Resource Management Act (RMA). These reforms will increase activity and mean more growth, more jobs, and higher wages for Kiwis. Arena Williams: Have any of his regulatory changes kept even one of the 75,000 workers who left construction in the year to May 2026 in their jobs? Hon JAMES MEAGER: The regulatory changes by this Government have seen an increase in the number of employees in the construction centre by 0.7 percent over the last 12 months, so I think that demonstrates good progress. Arena Williams: Why has he not done more when one-third of new construction workers are leaving their job six months in, and only one in five lasted a mere two years? Hon JAMES MEAGER: Well, the Government has done quite a lot in this space. We are reforming the RMA, we are fast-tracking large numbers of housing projects, we are speeding up consenting and allowing granny flats to be built, we are increasing access to building products, we are introducing self-certification for builders and plumbers, we are speeding up inspections, we are improving liability rules, and we are fast-tracking consenting for residential buildings for solar generation. This all adds to a growing construction sector. Arena Williams: What precipitated the drop in building apprentices by 30 percent on his watch, down from 40,000 apprenticeships and trainees in 2022 to just 28,000 in 2025? Hon JAMES MEAGER: That drop was precipitated by years of borrowing and spending by previous administrations, which drove inflation through the roof, interest rates through the roof, which caused a slowdown in the construction sector, including a peak of apprentices in 2022. It was downhill from there, and this Government is taking responsibility for fixing the basics of what we were left behind and literally building the future. Arena Williams: Why would a second-year building apprentice stay in New Zealand when five-year completion rates have collapsed from 58 percent to 43 percent, drop-out rates have risen every year under his Government, but Queensland is hiring? Hon JAMES MEAGER: Because New Zealand is a great place to make a future for yourself and your family, and, under this Government, we are introducing a range of reforms to strengthen and boost the construction sector, including, in Budget 2026, doubling the number of places in trades academies and increasing the number of Youth Guarantee spots by 1,000, not to mention rescuing the Apprenticeship Boost, which was left unfunded and on a fiscal cliff by the previous administration. Arena Williams: Will he concede that his Government is tinkering around the edges—as Minister Chris Bishop has said—while presiding over the deepest construction downturn on record? Hon JAMES MEAGER: No—and, in fact, this Government is undertaking a range of fundamental reforms to the building and construction sector, and I welcome the bipartisan approach of the member across the House who, at the BuildNZ conference this year—this week in fact—said that we need to take a much more forward-looking bipartisan approach to reforms in the building and construction sector so that we can support all of our young apprentices, current builders, and those who might be entering into the pipeline in the future.

Small Business and Manufacturing Question No. 11 DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote) (14:53) to the Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing: What recent reports has he seen about growth in the manufacturing sector? Hon CAMERON BREWER (Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing) (14:53): Our manufacturing sector is having its strongest run in years. The latest BNZ - BusinessNZ Performance of Manufacturing Index (PMI) jumped to 59.7 in June, the strongest result in nearly five years. BNZ said it was “staggered” by the result. Orders, production, and employment all moved firmly into growth territory. This is further evidence that confidence is improving, manufacturers are investing, and New Zealand’s economy is growing—and, as we say, as we fix the basics and build a future. Dan Bidois: How does New Zealand’s manufacturing performance compare internationally? Hon CAMERON BREWER: Our manufacturers aren’t just growing, they’re outgrowing the rest of the world. New Zealand’s PMI of 59.7 is well above the J.P. Morgan Global Manufacturing PMI of 52.2. That puts our manufacturers ahead of Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China. Kiwi firms are proving they can beat the very best when they’ve got a Government that backs them. Dan Bidois: How did manufacturing contribute to New Zealand’s most recent economic growth figures? Hon CAMERON BREWER: There is more evidence—yet there is more!—that this Government’s economic plan is working. Statistics New Zealand’s figures show that manufacturing was the single biggest contributor to growth in the March quarter, growing at 1.9 percent in that quarter, and helping drive overall GDP growth of 0.8 percent. When manufacturing grows like this, the whole economy feels it in higher productivity, in stronger exports, and in businesses with the confidence to take their next step. Dan Bidois: How is this Government supporting the manufacturing sector to grow? Hon CAMERON BREWER: This Government is backing our manufacturers to invest and grow. That’s why we introduced Investment Boost, letting a firm deduct a big chunk of new machinery and equipment up front so they can gear up to keep pace with demand, and we’re backing them right across the board, cutting the red tape and the costs that get in the way, so they can get on with what they do best. That’s what happens when you fix the basics and build the future. Dan Rosewarne: Does he consider more than 2,100 company liquidations in the past 12 months, the highest in 10 years, to be a sign of growth? Hon CAMERON BREWER: What I can confirm are the numbers that I have just spoken about, and that is the wider trend is clear—the wider trend is clear: manufacturing has shown strong GDP growth in the first quarter of this year, and the latest PMI also shows confidence and activity continue to improve. That side might want to talk down the manufacturing sector, but this side backs it.

Energy Question No. 12 SCOTT WILLIS (Green) (14:57) to the Minister for Energy: Has an assessment of safety risks to local residents been undertaken as part of the liquefied natural gas terminal procurement process; and if so, what potential safety risks have been identified? Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister for Energy) (14:57): I’m advised that an initial safety evaluation’s been undertaken as part of the two proponents’ feasibility work. Detailed health and safety assessments will be carried out through the safety case that any operator is legally required to prepare under regulations made under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and the operator must not commence operations unless and until that safety case has been accepted by WorkSafe. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is safely imported, stored, and handled in many countries around the world. This Government will not compromise on the safety of Taranaki communities. I was recently in Taranaki, where I met residents and some stakeholders and welcomed the opportunity to hear their views directly. I reiterated to them that their safety is, and will remain, a bottom line for the Government on any proposed facility. Scott Willis: Will the risk assessments undertaken during procurement be released to the Taranaki community and other port users, given the proposed terminal’s proximity to homes, schools, and businesses? Hon SIMEON BROWN: There is a procurement process under way. No doubt, as part of that, once a preferred provider has been selected, there will be an opportunity for them to engage directly with the local community. Scott Willis: Will WorkSafe’s assessment of a full safety case be completed before the Government signs a contract, or could a contract be signed while the assessment is still ongoing? Hon SIMEON BROWN: Well, as I said in the primary answer, a safety case must be accepted by WorkSafe prior to it being able to be operational. The detailed health and safety assessments will be carried out through the safety case that any operator is legally required to prepare under regulations made under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015. Scott Willis: Will local emergency services, including Fire and Emergency New Zealand, be consulted on their capacity to respond to incidents and safety requirements for the proposed terminal, during procurement? Hon SIMEON BROWN: As I said, the safety case has to be approved, has to go through the process, and I expect those parties will be part of responding to that. Scott Willis: Will local communities in Taranaki have any formal opportunity to engage with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and have their concerns heard beyond the legislative process for the enabling legislation; and if not, why not? Hon SIMEON BROWN: Well, as I said, safety is a bottom line, and no facility will operate until WorkSafe has accepted its safety case. We’re going through a procurement process at this stage. Once a preferred candidate has been selected, I expect that they will be engaging directly with the community. I think it’s also important to acknowledge the bigger picture, which is that we have declining gas and a dry-year risk, which means that we have power bills going up and jobs being put at risk. LNG is a backup which can ensure we have affordable supply of energy in this country to keep the lights on and ensure affordable power for households and businesses, and that’s why we’re getting on and getting this done. David MacLeod: Is the Minister aware of other countries within the OECD that have safe access to imported gas, including liquefied natural gas? Hon SIMEON BROWN: Yes, LNG import facilities are regulated for safety in every country that operates them. In fact, I have a list of OECD countries that have access to imported gas, including LNG, which includes Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States. SPEAKER: It might have been interesting to hear that to music. Oral questions are now concluded. We’ll take a short break for those members who need to go other business to leave the House quietly without any conversation on the way. Debates

General Debate Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister responsible for RMA Reform) (15:03): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. Well, today—or on Monday as we discovered in question time—the Parliament has had the report back of the Natural Environment Bill and the Planning Bill. It marks an important moment for the country as we move towards a more enabling and liberal planning system that prioritises private property, growth, and development. If you just reflect back on the last 30 years of the RMA, it has been the driver of New Zealand’s housing crisis, our infrastructure deficit, and the inability of a country that has been remarkably blessed by abundant natural resources to take advantage of those resources. How can it be that we live in a country where it takes six years to consent a wind farm; eight years to reconsider an existing geothermal power station; a country blessed with oodles and oodles of land up and down the country, with only 5 million people, that has managed to design a planning system so labyrinthine and Byzantine that we have a housing crisis and housing that is more expensive than it otherwise should be; an infrastructure system where we spend $1.3 billion per year on consenting costs alone for infrastructure—that’s Transmission Gully. Transmission Gully is what cost about $1.3 billion. That’s what we spend each and every year. That’s the opportunity cost of our planning system. So, yes, we should protect the environment and, yes, we should make sure that people have a say in how they plan their cities, but the RMA has been a millstone around the economy for way too long. Yep, there’s been tinkering around the edges, and, yes, people have made changes over the years, including National Governments in the past and past Labour Governments. But what we are moving towards is a completely new system, and I for one can’t wait until that is put into law: clear goals, abundant development opportunities, clear limits for the environment, and a much more streamlined system that removes some of the chokepoints and the red tape in the system. It’s a better day for the country, and I think it will be, hopefully, one of this Government’s more sustained legacies, alongside the fast-track regime—which I am very proud to have developed alongside the Hon Shane Jones—which is really making a difference. We’ve had the draft approval for the Hananui Aquaculture Project, and isn’t it extraordinary: in 2004, Parliament set aside settlement areas for iwi around the country as part of a big settlement for commercial aquaculture claims by Māori, but 22 years later, not a single aquaculture area has been consented and the Waitangi Tribunal is currently conducting inquiries into almost every aspect of New Zealand. I would put it to the House that the inability for mana whenua to develop their own aquaculture areas that Parliament and the Government have granted is a contemporary breach of the Treaty. The Hananui Aquaculture Project—which, I should note, has not yet received final approval, but has draft approval through the fast-track panel—was declined under the RMA in 2023, and my great hope is that it receives final approval. While we’re getting on with the job of fixing the basics and building the future, sorting out the mess left behind, and actually dealing with the fundamental, systemic issues affecting the economy, the other side of the House is in complete and utter disarray—complete and utter disarray. We are yet to hear from the Labour Party how they will cope with the $18 billion bill in their Budget numbers that they have to front up and explain. The Labour Party has spent three years making spending commitment after spending commitment—wind back pay equity, more money for this, reverse the Public Service cuts, more money for this, more money for that—and what those members are about to discover in the next few weeks is that their numbers don’t add up and the public is going to expect the Labour Party to actually explain how they will fund all of their extraordinary spending promises. This election is going to be fought on, number one, who has got the best plan for New Zealand’s future—and actually having policies is a good start, so I reckon we’ve started up on the right foot there—and the second thing it’s going to be fought on is whose books add up. I know which side of the House I’d rather be on because of that. Hon SHANE JONES (Deputy Leader—NZ First) (15:08): The figure of $1 billion rhymes, after Jacinda Ardern and Megan Woods destroyed the oil and gas industry with a captain’s call—juvenile, shallow thinking—that, somehow, our economy could be sustained in the absence of fossil fuels. It shows how low, how cheap, and how inadequate the analysis is from the other side of the House. That’s why our leader has identified that in the future, we will be exhaustive, we will be thorough, we will be professional, and we will uncover every bit of information that we have. Lying around the coastline of New Zealand is the wealth at the bed of the sea. There is the Canterbury Basin, there is the Great South Basin, there is the deep Taranaki Basin, and there is the Tairāwhiti Basin. In fact, I have to tell the Māori Party that in 1937, it was Sir Apirana Ngata who wrote a very memorable article called “Petroleum and the Treaty of Waitangi”, because riddled up the Tairāwhiti are seepages of gas and petroleum. That stands to reason because it lies just off the coast, but if we could only get away from these fern and root - eating hobbits, who don’t want development on the Tairāwhiti, but want to sit around singing “Kumbaya” and stoking bits of tōtara wood. No, we’re not going to tolerate that. The final great potential site of the oil and gas industry is called Pegasus. Now, of course, Pegasus is a reference to the mythological creature, a magnificent winged horse, a symbol of creative imagination. That’s what lies behind New Zealand First’s contribution to fuel resilience, to our natural resource security. We will be using this opportunity in the near future after an event called the election. Please don’t listen to the other side of the House. That is where the caretaker sits, waiting for the undertaker. We all know that. They are not going to cower. They are not going to cancel any narrative that is driven to ensure that our energy resilience, our economic robustness, is not undermined by climate alarmism, people worshipping at the feet of false climate idols. No, we don’t tolerate that in New Zealand First. We’re not going to be scared into these beliefs that kill every cow, destroy manufacturing, eradicate industry. That’s why, as evidence of how important it is to get our energy mix right, we’ve had to step forward and ensure that Whangārei employer Portland cement is able to continue operating. We’ll be doing three things at least. There’ll be massive scanning, electromagnetic surveying, and, where necessary, sampling actual cores. We have the vessel to do it—Tangaroa. Why is that vessel under-utilised, chasing fanciful ideas about climate alarmism? That vessel can be deployed ASAP to continue the work that was started by an earlier Government. In fact, it’s a sad day that we actually gave up and ruined the traction and the momentum. New Zealand First will ensure we have a world-class reservoir of geological quantitative data outlining the potential. In some cases, I’m quite sure it’s up to 90 percent. When one considers the massive number of locations across our economic zone where we can emulate the success of other small countries—including Namibia, including Guyana—we will have the opportunity to open up new vistas through high-quality information developed through rational scientific processes, protected from political ideology, not ruined by shrill hyperbolic voices driven to confuse people rather than educate people. That’s why the $1 billion allocation for natural gas and oil, also to assist in the storage of natural gas and, just to show that we are even-handed on these matters, explore how geothermal energy can also contribute to a more robust future so that industry, households, communities, investors can lie in bed awake at night, confident that the $1 billion will boost the oil and gas sector in New Zealand. Hon TODD McCLAY (Minister of Agriculture) (15:13): Can I thank Shane Jones for the sermon he has just given us with great belief and conviction and, of course, a lot of common sense. Hon Members: Ha, ha! Hon TODD McCLAY: The reason Willie Jackson laughs when I mention common sense—it is very, very easy to laugh at something you’ve never seen before, not on your side of the House, and have no responsibility for, Willie. I want to start by thanking every farmer and grower and forester in New Zealand for their significant contribution not only to our economy, to the 360,000 people employed in the sector—those jobs—but actually to the fabric of New Zealand. The reason I do that is the primary sector will export $62 billion around the world this year of the highest-quality food and fibre you will find anywhere. They will set a record. Next year, they forecast another record: $64 billion. All around the world, men and women in countries diversely in every part of the world are enjoying the high-quality food that is safe, that we send them, and they are wearing the fibre on their back and, of course, living in houses made often from wood grown in the forests of New Zealand. That’s forecast to hit $70 billion by 2030, and that’s the hard work of our farmers, who have innovated. They care about the land, they care about their animals, and they care deeply about the environment. After all, why would you ruin something you get your livelihood from? But they have been held back, as has almost every single New Zealander I’ve spoken to, by a resource management system, a planning system, that is built more on what officials in Wellington or in the buildings of our councils around the country think, as opposed to what needs to be done to achieve it. Over the six years of the Labour Government, when they put in place as many as 20 rules and laws and regulations on our farmers, in not a single area of the country was water quality to improve as a result of those rules. Indeed, actually, everywhere they were putting those rules in, cost was going up for farmers, they were producing less, and the outcome for the environment was worse. If the resource management legislation passed by the last Labour Government—that planning Act—was to make it harder to produce, put the cost up, and ruin the environment, it was a success. We said we would replace it; we’re now doing it in our first term, and we’re backing farmers and growers to do what they need to, to produce more, and to do what is right. Fewer unnecessary rules: the new system will remove the rules that just aren’t needed. If a rule isn’t needed, why should it be there? That becomes bureaucracy. Actually, farmers around the country are already fencing off waterways and keeping stock out of rivers and planting riparian strips. They’re doing it themselves. We should have rules that support that and encourage that, not just make it a cost. Do you know, when we came to Government, under Labour farmers were spending 20 to 30 percent of their time in the back office filling out forms, not producing the food that the world needs us to produce to feed them. Less red tape, less restriction, and lower risk for farmers. I want to focus, finally, on freshwater farm plans, because this is a very important part of achieving positive outcomes for the environment and allowing farmers to make better decisions for themselves. A freshwater farm plan will mean that we need fewer consents. There will be many things, actually, under this new Resource Management Act that will mean consents aren’t needed, because the risk is so low that it doesn’t deserve the attention that the previous rules would give it. A freshwater farm plan will allow a farmer to go through and, based upon risk, make decisions as to how the farm is managed and then actually implement the changes to manage the environment as they see fit. It won’t reduce production; it won’t mean that there are just forms to fill out for the sake of it. What it will mean is that farmers can take responsibility and can find the most cost-effective, efficient way to achieve what they need to whilst producing the food that creates the jobs and that we sell to the rest of the world. The farming sector raised a number of issues with the previous law—significantly. They came forward with suggestions for how to improve the outcomes of the new bills that we now have before us, and I want to thank them wholeheartedly for doing that. We are an export nation. Our reputation to sell food around the world is highly dependent upon the way that we produce it. The farmers know that, the exporters know that, this Government knows that, and we are backing them to meet their environmental obligations, to help us clean up water, and to produce more, not merely taxing them and saying that they should be put out of business. Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Labour) (15:18): In the middle of a cost of living crisis, what have we got from this rotten, useless Government? Absolutely nothing—absolutely nothing. SPEAKER: Sorry—just keep things a little bit civil. Hon WILLIE JACKSON: OK. SPEAKER: No, no, I haven’t finished with you yet. You know that those sorts of descriptors are not at all parliamentary, and I’d encourage the member to avoid them, even though he might have been provoked to do so by other comments that have been made this afternoon. Hon WILLIE JACKSON: OK, Mr Speaker—this “useless” Government, then. Where is the plan for our communities? They’re at an all-time low. Food is at its highest. We’ve got petrol costs. We’ve got communities under attack. Our people are asking, “Where is the plan?” We have a cost of living crisis, so where’s the plan? Well, we heard the plan yesterday, and it came from the Prime Minister. The plan was about attacking New Zealand First. I don’t blame him; they’re taking all the National party votes. So we understand that when the Prime Minister talks about a populous movement, when he talks about vulgar and some of the worst aspects of society coming out, we support the Prime Minister in what he said about New Zealand First yesterday. He was on top it—he was on top of it. And what did we get from the New Zealand First conference? You heard it today: in the middle of a cost of living crisis, $1 billion for their rich mates in the oil and gas industry. That is a disgrace. Hon Kieran McAnulty: Don’t forget the showgirls! Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Don’t forget the showgirls—no, well, we don’t want to talk about showgirls. But, hey, let’s not forget about the candidates. Oh, they rolled out their brilliant candidates. And guess what! Stuart Nash thought—he woke up the other day, and he thought he was Jim Anderton. He said, “Labour walked away from me; I didn’t walk away from them.” No, Stu, we kicked you out. We kicked you out because you leaked Cabinet information. We kicked you out, Stu! Please, someone put that on the TVNZ news: “The star candidate was kicked out for leaking Cabinet Papers.” So, no, you’re not Jim Anderton, Stu. Then their next star: Michael Laws. The Speaker knows why Michael Laws got kicked out of Parliament. He got kicked out—and I’m just quoting here, don’t sit me down—I go through artificial intelligence, and it said, “dishonesty and deceit”. Now, that’s a that’s a terrible thing to say about “Lawsy” because I don’t mind “Lawsy”. I did a bit of radio with him—good bugger, you know. But dishonest and deceitful—he’s the other star candidate. Jonesey’s in trouble, because, with respect, these Pākehā boys are coming for the Māoris in New Zealand First—I can see it now. So Jonesy has got to be as offensive as possible, and, as we know, he loves butter chicken, but he doesn’t like Indians. He’s into, Māori—he’s booting every Māori going around because he’s the Matua and we all respect him, and he knows everything about Māori language. So the Jonesy style is to offend everyone, insulting everyone, absolutely condemn everyone, because we all know he wants to be the leader when Winston resigns at age 99. And then, Jonesy will gravitate to the leadership position, if Stuart Nash and Michael Laws haven’t got it by then. That’s the key. But he needs some support there, so he brought in a Māori boy in to help him—his name’s Taine Randell. Taine’s pretty good. He’s pretty good—apart from losing a World Cup and not taking my offer to join Labour. But hey, it’s OK. We don’t mind Taine Randell joining. It’s typical, he said he wasn’t interested in politics, but I have a note from the chairman of Ngāti Kahungunu, and they’ve officially abandoned Taine Randell, and that’s on record. Bayden Barber has said, it’s disappointing you walk away from Ngāti Kahungunu and you join those mongrels in New Zealand First, but kei te pai. But all we’ll say to Shane Jones is: don’t worry here. We know “Nashy” and we know Laws are biting at your heels. There’s help on the way soon. SPEAKER: I’ve just got to stop the member— Hon WILLIE JACKSON: There’s help on the way and it’s from the National Party and the person’s name is—Yes, what have we done now? SPEAKER: You might want to withdraw a descriptor that you just gave of other members in this House, which is also unacceptable. Hon WILLIE JACKSON: OK. I withdraw that—whoever that member was. Thank you very much. But I just wanted to say, with Jonesy, help is on the way, and it’s from a National Party person. Hon Kieran McAnulty: Oh, who’s that? Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Yes, and she knows everything about National and this Government. She’s the Māori queen—she was the Māori queen of National: Harete Hipango’s going to save Shane Jones’ leadership bid. The bottom line is we’re waiting for that New Zealand First. They are a bloody disgrace, just like this Government. We can’t wait for the list. Jenny Marcroft: Sit down, Willie. Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Go and jump in the lake, Jenny Marcroft, and go and jump in the lake, Shane Jones. Kia ora tatou. HŪHANA LYNDON (Green) (15:24): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s been bloody disgusting listening to the Minister Chris Bishop crow about how he’s a hero to us, in saving us, as te iwi Māori, through the Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms. I absolutely stand in solidarity with the chair of Northland Regional Council, Pita Tipene, who called out this Government and said that the changes to the RMA are cowardly and despicable, because as te iwi Māori, we have worked in RMA for some 35 years—35 years. The system was not perfect; hell no. Iwi Māori, hapū, marae, kaitiaki, even go to the Environment Court to stand up for te taiao, because, you see, Aotearoa cannot thrive if we do not honour our fundamental agreement, which is Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Don’t turn your back on te iwi Māori. Don’t marginalise our voice. That’s the issue here, is that the reforms are bringing through legislation that is scrapping Mana Whakahono ā Rohe as a pathway to working at the tēpu, rangatira ki te rangatira over successive years. I want to pay tribute to Ngāti Tūrangitukua, one of our first iwi groupings who went for the Mana Whakahono ā Rohe and paved the way for the rest of us. Yeah, only a few of us have entered the door for Mana Whakahono ā Rohe because it was yet to be proven and it ain’t no silver bullet either. But my iwi, Te Parawhau, Patuharakeke, Ngāti Rēhia, Ngāti Hine, and Ngāpuhi have all entered into Mana Whakahono ā Rohe and never had a chance to see it fully executed. Don’t act like somehow that the Government was helping Mana Whakahono ā Rohe to thrive and be all that it could be, because as iwi Māori, we only did it through the sweat of our brow. It was through us and our volunteer hours. There’s no resource for iwi Māori, Mana Whakahono ā Rohe, so don’t even think that it’s actually like the solution. Yep, we lined up. We absolutely lined up as iwi Māori because we could see the chopping block coming and it was an avenue to lock in the statutory relationship of iwi Māori and councils working together. The blind side that this Government gave to iwi Māori and councils who have operated in Mana Whakahono ā Rohe was cowardly and despicable, and I stand alongside Tina Porou who called it out as being racist and not based on evidence. We worked hard alongside the Labour-led Government in the reforms previously—5-6 years, mahi tahi. I sat in the meetings with Crown officials; we were there doing the mahi. We were honourable and worked in good faith again and again. Māori are always crossing the table; we’re always sitting there saying “Haere mai. Noho tahi ki te Māori.”, and yet, what happens? Iwi Māori has to compromise again. At what point is the Government, any Government, going to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi? Why is it that somehow iwi Māori wanting to be at a tēpu, mana ki te mana, making decisions on economic development, on resource consents, on planning; we’re now marginalised to this new iwi agreement pathway. What is that? All you’re doing is creating more bureaucracy and forcing Māori back into another round of consultation and relitigating our agreements, which already existed through Mana Whakahono ā Rohe. Just carry them through. What a rip off. What an absolute rip off and waste of time over many, many years of work. That’s the thing: the Government’s saying that they are working on efficiencies and trying to bring through progress and development that is unimpeded by us as Māori. We’re not the problem—we are not the problem. The polluters are the problem—the polluters are the problem. Aotearoa cannot thrive without te iwi Māori at the table. [Authorised reo Māori text to be inserted by the Hansard Office.] [Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.] mate, not at all. On the new resource management reforms, if you ain’t settled, if you ain’t got those Marine and Coastal Area (MACA) (Takutai Moana) rights—oh, yeah, like the rest of us in hapū, marae, kaitiaki who have been doing the mahi for years—you ain’t got a bloody shitshow of any chance to be— SPEAKER: Oh, calm the language down. HŪHANA LYNDON: —represented in the new legislation. SPEAKER: Dear Lord. HŪHANA LYNDON: Come on, come on, Mr Speaker. What is happening is abhorrent to te iwi Māori. Let’s get real about what’s happening here. It’s good luck to any of us as hapū, iwi, kaitiaki, MACA claimants who don’t have any recognised customary rights because the MACA thresholds have been put so high up that we can’t even achieve our rights as kaitiaki. Hon Ginny Andersen: Mr Speaker! SPEAKER: Ah, OK. Mindblock. Hon Members: Ginny Andersen. SPEAKER: The Hon Ginny Andersen, sorry. Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) (15:29): Thank you, Mr Speaker. SPEAKER: My sincere apologies for that—sorry. Hon GINNY ANDERSEN: That’s all good. It’s a race to the bottom right now, when we look at those parties opposite. It’s a showdown to the bottom. The bar just keeps on dropping even lower. As we watch the candidates line up, particularly in New Zealand First, I’m reminded fondly of that Michael Jackson video “Thriller”, as one more zombie crawls out from the grave and resurrects themselves and does that zombie shuffle. I can just picture now Winston and Shane leading that zombie move down the street to lead the next generation of resurrected, failed MPs to lead the next generation of what will happen. And these are the guys that are beating National right now. That’s how sad it is right now in New Zealand, that we have a rendition of Thriller beating National for resurrected, failed MPs. That is the standard of the Government’s politics right now going into the election. There is no wonder that New Zealanders are switching off. There is no wonder that Kiwis are turning off their radios and their TVs and not bothering to keep up, because the standard of policies that have been given by this Government are absolutely not hitting the mark—absolutely not addressing the cost of living crisis that most families are going through right now. In fact, we have a Prime Minister this week alone who can’t even understand what he’s promised in the past. Because what the Prime Minister said this week was something quite extraordinary. He said that the Government can’t be expected to reduce the cost of living. Apparently, this is because expecting to lower household costs would be “economic illiteracy”. This is after—can I remind people at home who might be listening or watching—Christopher Luxon has said, “The first thing we are going to do is reduce the cost of living—we’re going to reduce the cost of living.” Then he says, “I mean so. The first thing we’ve got to do is we’ve got to reduce the cost of living.” Again, he says, “[We’re] starting our 100-plan with a laser focus on bringing down the cost of living”. But wait, what happened? This week he said that it’s not going to do it. What happened there? But Nicola Willis has chimed in. Nicola Willis said back in 2023: “National will take action to get food prices under control once more.” I think they’ve given up on that one. Here’s another one from Nicola Willis: “National is committed to unshackling the rural economy by scrapping … broken regulations, which will reduce cost on farmers, ensuring agriculture can grow and Kiwis pay less for home-grown food at the checkout.” Was that before or after Wattie’s and McCain’s shut down and moved away because there was no help for those food production companies in the Hawke’s Bay? Also, she said, that we’re going to “help bring down food prices”—that was in July of 2023. “National is committed to unshackling the rural economy and making sure that Kiwis are going well.” She’s also said, “We also have to ensure that across the board we are providing families with lower cost of living.” Well, how have they done on that one? I say that’s an utter fail on all of those. Because what Kiwis are looking for is something as promising as $20 a week to catch public transport. Wouldn’t that be a great idea? Imagine that: $20 a week to get on a bus, to get on a train, to get to work, to get home again. That’s a real difference and that’s a Labour Party policy that people can put in their back pocket and make sure that they’re doing better. Solar policy: actual ways of getting people to have cheaper power in their homes and making sure that those savings are counting every single week from the savings you’re getting off your power bill. Making it available for renters, making it available for community batteries—that’s a real plan. Alongside of that, there are some jobs from installing all of those solar units we’re going to see across New Zealand—more jobs for Kiwis. That’s why we’re also putting back the Apprenticeship Boost that was cut by National. Even though they try and claim that it was Labour, Labour has backed apprentices from day one, now expanding it to five more trades and giving $1,000 for your tool kit to get started. So that’s a real thing that Kiwis can show that they’ve got a future here in New Zealand that we are backing them for. The next one I’d like to put on the table is the fact that prescriptions—taken away by National; put back by Labour. You can go and get your prescription to make sure that costs don’t prohibit people getting the healthcare they need. We will be a Government that puts people first, that puts the cost of living at the front of our agenda, and doesn’t do U-turns and fake promises like those people opposite. Hon CAMERON BREWER (Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing) (15:34): If the Opposition want to talk about zombies, can I remind the New Zealand public of the zombie economy we inherited in 2023. Can I remind the New Zealand public of the zombie policy programme we are now seeing from the Labour Party. Our plan of fixing the basics and building the future is working. Even in these difficult economic times internationally, we are seeing the numbers that are showing very encouraging signs that our plan is working, and the empirical data is now starting to reflect it. Let me just go back to budget day 28 May, when the Minister of Finance delivered the BEFU—Budget Economic and Fiscal Update—and some really encouraging numbers there. Over 220,000 more jobs in the forecast period over the next four years. New Zealand returning to surplus a year earlier than forecast. The country’s debt that they tripled arcing down over the rest of this decade. Inflation and interest rates stabilising, and growth averaging nearly 3 percent over the next few years. So the numbers are pointing in the right direction. Then we look at Statistics New Zealand yesterday, and yes there was a predictable spike in inflation—everyone was expecting that, given the fuel crisis. But when you strip out petrol and diesel, inflation was running at 2.9 percent. Food inflation fell to 2.8 percent. A long way away from 12.5 percent under Labour—that’s food inflation. Rents: rents increased—get this—on an annual basis just 0.5 percent; half a percent. That is the lowest increase in nearly 25 years. What did they increase under Labour? They increased $170 a week. So the numbers are starting to speak for themselves. Let’s talk about manufacturing, employing nearly quarter of a million Kiwis, making up 8 percent of GDP and 60 percent of our exports. It’s a loud and proud sector. Manufacturing had the best June—the best month, in fact—in nearly five years, hitting a Performance of Manufacturing Index of 59.7: world-leading. Of course, in the first quarter—when we looked at those GDP numbers in the first quarter of this year when things were looking so good before that international conflict—the first quarter showed manufacturing increasing at 1.9 percent; leading the economy. So the numbers, again, are showing we are certainly heading in the right direction once we see through this Iranian crisis. Two things this Government has done that have made a real difference—this is what people on the shop floor and on the factory-floor are telling me. Investment Boost: an initiative out of Budget 2025; 20 percent off taxable income when businesses invest in their assets, in plants, and machinery. A great policy, lifting investment, and lifting productivity. Another thing that they tell me they’re very pleased with is vocational training—this Government’s commitment to it in 2026. We saw the numbers of places doubling in our trades academies from 10,000 to 20,000 in the next four years. We will see schools leading the charge when it comes to trades academies, building and construction, automotive, hospitality and tourism. Getting our kids work-ready—that’s what the sector wants. Getting our kids work-ready, getting our kids into trades and manufacturing, and we are meeting the market. Earn as You Learn is another programme that’s having huge success in the Waikato, and that is one that we are taking a lead on as a Government. This country is a country of small businesses. National is the party of small business. In fact, when you look at our caucus, we’re all out of business, we’re all out of private practice, or we’re all off the farm. We are there to represent the working New Zealander. Small businesses are the backbone of this country and National backs them. We back manufacturers, despite all the challenges economically that have been thrown to us this year. New Zealand is ready to launch, and they have a Government that backs them. We are all about building the future and fixing the basics. RAWIRI WAITITI (Co-Leader—Te Pāti Māori) (15:39): To Māori roll or not to Māori roll—that is the question. The Māori roll strengthens Māori influence; the general roll weakens it. I want to talk specifically and directly to our people: our people need to promote our own roll instead of leaving it up to the Government to pay people to be neutral. This is not a time to be apolitical; this is a time to be a Māori. Māori on the Māori roll now outpopulate Māori on the general roll—that is a fact. What we have are politicians in this House misleading—misinformation—and the leader of the New Zealand First party does this quite often because he’s said it for the last 50 years, but he hasn’t said anything new. What is new is that he constantly says there’s no need for the Māori roll, because Māori on the general roll outpopulate Māori on the Māori roll. Now Māori outpopulate Māori on the general roll, he’s saying there’s no need for the Māori seats. There’s absolutely a need for the Māori seats, and Shane Jones said it so well a few years ago: “Māori will determine when the Māori seats are up.” Our people out there, we have an election coming up, and we have a roll closure coming up in 6 August. This is our time to make sure that our voices are heard loud and clear. For the very first time in 172 years, it will be the Māori seats determining who the next Prime Minister is, out of those numbers. I don’t give two hoots about your polls. The seven Māori seats will be the game changer. Now, how many parties in this House can, hand on heart, say that they have contributed to the growth of the Māori roll? Nobody! Nobody. No other party has contributed to the growth of the Māori roll. It has been Te Pāti Māori. Now, the maturity of te iwi Māori in this country’s democracy has happened in the last three years. There are 50,000 more Māori on the Māori roll now. There is a hell of a lot more migrating, and there are more new voters coming on to the Māori roll. I can tell you what: that is the big threat to the current Government and their parties. Why? They will no longer have the power to be choosy. No longer will te iwi Māori be somebody else’s choice. We will be doing the choosing. That prospect scares the current Government and its coalition partners—absolutely scares them. I can tell you what: come 7 November, when Te Pāti Māori delivers their part of the rourou, and that’s what kotahitanga is—kotahitanga doesn’t mean the same. It means [Authorised reo Māori text to be inserted by the Hansard Office.] [Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.] So the change of Government will come from that party giving their rourou, another party giving their rourou, and Te Pāti Māori bringing their rourou. [Authorised reo Māori text to be inserted by the Hansard Office.] [Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.] The Māori roll strengthens Māori political influence, and my kōrero directly to those Māori organisations that have received funding to go through and say to people to decide which roll they’re on is: this is not a time to be apolitical; this is a time to give the power of the Māori seats where they should be. The Māori seat population outpopulates the majority of the votes that New Zealand First got—and ACT. This is the power, e hika mā, if you want to change the legislation that is harming our people at this particular time, since this Government took office—who have had the most dangerous, have had the most despicable, record in regards to Māori relations—and the legislations that kill Te Tiriti o Waitangi, that kill our workers, that kill our women, that kill those who are in poverty, and that kill the homeless and criminalise homelessness. There is only one way to change that, and that is at the ballot box. Te Pāti Māori will ensure that we will work hard to make sure that this is a one-term Government. Nobody else will ensure that there is an overhang; only Te Pāti Māori created that overhang in this term and we’ll create it in the next one. This is what scares that side of the House, and I can tell you what: for the very first time in 172 years, Te Pāti Māori will be choosing who the next Government is. The Māori roll is not simply a list of names—it is whakapapa of resistance. Those who choose to be on the Māori roll sit alongside the generations who refused to let our political voice be erased. CAMERON LUXTON (ACT) (15:44): This country has not appeared by accident. It was scratched out of a primordial land. For millions of years, these islands existed without a single primate lighting a fire, digging a drain, or arguing with a council consent officer. Then people arrived. We cleared tracks, cultivated land, built settlements, and connected isolated communities with roads, railways, electricity, and communications. We turned this beautiful wilderness into the best place on earth for human beings to live. Kiwis don’t generally choose to commute via dirt tracks and live in cold, draughty huts—as idyllic as that might sound to some during a parliamentary debate. We want warm affordable homes and communities where people trust their neighbours. We want roads and networks that connect us to workplaces that are productive and enriching and—if we can possibly help it—be somewhere that’s inspiring too. We want a natural environment that we’re connected to and proud of. Everything around us that makes modern life possible was imagined, financed, and built or manufactured by somebody. People who came before us built this country, which we should be thankful for. But our responsibility is not simply to preserve what was left to us—we, everybody in New Zealand, are stewards of New Zealand for the decades that we are here. This country has far more to offer to the world and to the people who call themselves New Zealanders. Nobody embodies that potential more than our makers—our builders, tradies, and engineers. Like thousands before me, I was privileged to serve a building apprenticeship. I worked on sites where progress isn’t measured by the production of another report; it’s measured by whether you stand the frames and get the roof on before the rain starts coming in. Makers have a simple outlook: if there’s a job to be done, let’s get on and do it. Unfortunately, Government has often not had the same approach; it has treated people who build as a risk to be controlled rather than capable professionals to be trusted. It has made building products expensive, consenting slow, and investment vulnerable to political whim, and that is why ACT entered Government, determined to unlock the potential of people who make things, of the people who provide for us. The coalition agreement committed the Government to exploring pathways to allow builders to opt out of traditional council consenting, where they can provide long-term guaranteed insurance for their work. Instead of assuming that a council inspector is the only measure of quality guarantee, we think you can say a stable insurance company and an accountable professional should be trusted to do their jobs. Government has already made it possible to build small standalone dwellings without a building consent. That means more people who are aged, more families, and more Kiwis who want to make better use of their land can do so. We have opened up New Zealand to high-quality overseas building products and standards. For too long, good products have been used overseas but kept away from plumbers and builders in this fine country. We want New Zealand to be able to get access to windows, taps, and wallboards. The Government has increased the use of remote inspections, published council performance data, and dramatically reduced waiting times for building determinations—a whole lot of other stuff to make building more sensible. The goalposts have been changed too much. H1 is a prime example of that, and this Government is also making changes so that H1 makes at least some sense to us. That is what we’ve also done with regional deals—setting up a long-term partnership between councils and Government, making sure that it lasts beyond the whim of political cycles. We’re backing that principle with a new $400 million Incentives for Growth Fund, where councils who consent more homes will receive more funding. Instead of treating a new house as another cost for existing ratepayers, councils will finally participate in the upside of growth—an idea ACT have given life. We’re replacing the crappy old Resource Management Act system with a system to recognise property rights, provide clearer rules, and make it easier to build and unlock the productive enterprises New Zealand needs. These reforms matter because delay is not free. Every year waited is another cost. Uncertain pipelines cause businesses to hold back from hiring apprentices, building machinery, and expanding their operations. That cost eventually falls on a Kiwi’s bill. This Government has made real progress, but there is more to do. We need a culture in Government that understands a simple truth: a country cannot regulate its way to abundance; somebody must grow it, somebody must manufacture it, somebody must transport it, and somebody must build it. That is how New Zealand was made, and that is how we’ll unlock its potential. KATIE NIMON (National—Napier) (15:49): Mr Speaker, I do love a general debate speech. Actually, today, what a great time it is to have a general debate speech and just talk about how actions speak louder than words. In fact, I will briefly touch on something that is going on around the world today which is mums—working mums—and I actually just acknowledge there was a mum up in the gallery this afternoon. You can be a mum, have a baby, and work, and actually achieve great things. I like to say that in three years, as a member of Parliament for Napier for National, we have achieved more in three years than my predecessor did in nine, and I’m really proud of that, so I’m going to share some of those things. I think it is really important to share that, in that three years, we have the four-lane expressway under way, progressing ahead of schedule and ahead of budget or under budget. The Waikare Gorge realignment: early involvement tender is back to local ownership, and, of course, they are rebuilding after the cyclone. We have invested well over $100 million in our regional hospital, and more than that in healthcare services. We have built more classrooms, in fact I was at the opening of two beautiful new classrooms for Fairhaven special school at Onekawa School, for 12 new students with disabilities who now have a school to call home. We are building more classrooms because, in fact, we’ve halved the price of building a classroom; now, we can build twice as much. In fact, the Resource Management Act reform, which we are all talking about at the moment, equals growth. Houses are being built, and across the spectrum, not just houses in the hills that will be lovely for some families but also houses that are affordable, and the Government doesn’t need to build all of them; they need to enable them. We are all about an enabling environment and that is what is important: houses being built, jobs created. Over the next four years, 220,000 jobs proposed, based on the work programme that we have set out ahead of us. That is important to remember because the actions that we show speak way louder than any word that is said that might counter what you’re actually seeing out there in front of you. In fact, I’m very, very pleased with all the amazing work that’s going in the Napier electorate and the wider Hawke’s Bay region, as well. We’ve got new energy, we have got wind farms, we have got a solar farm happening on just the other side of the electorate, over in the Taupō Rangitaiki Plains. We have new housing developments across the motu; we have bridges, we have stopbanks. We have a stopbank, I might just share, that without my intervention was going to have a gaping hole in the middle of it where the road goes because we were unable to get funding to get the road to be raised to the height of the stopbank. Now, that is what advocacy of a local MP achieves—they listen to the community, they listen to industry, they listen to residents, they talk to Government agencies, they talk to Ministers, and they make stuff happen. Representing people is the best part of the job: turning up at the crack of dawn to bless new houses; cutting the ribbon on bridges that the community has helped build; partnership; listening to your community and being there when it matters. I’m very proud, and I will acknowledge it, that after 10 weeks off work because of course MPs, as most people might not realise, don’t get maternity leave but kindly granted parliamentary leave so we don’t have to travel backwards and forwards to Wellington, I was able to take my son with me to some of these incredibly historic occasions. Turning the sod on the four-lane expressway; turning the sod on the new commercial vehicle safety centre in Napier; announcements from various Ministers that we’ve been a part of and advocated for; the announcement for the Waikare Gorge realignment; some of these things that I will remember forever and I got to have my son be a part of it. He’s now 14 months old; a real treasure. Yeah, and you know what? He’s being raised by a village, and I feel very proud that I get to show other young mums that you can do it. Can I just say I have got so much respect for any parent that has more than one child and does it because, my goodness, it is hard but we work 24/7. I think it a representative with a bit of empathy and a bit of love in their life can do a pretty good job. I just want to thank members from all across the House for their support today. I really do appreciate it, and I will just leave people with the view that actions speak louder than words, and when you hear unkind words said by people, question them, have a look— Grant McCallum: Call them out. Katie Nimon: —see what’s real, see what’s true, and actually, yeah, call it out. Thanks. SHANAN HALBERT (Labour) (15:55): Thank you, Mr Speaker, and can I tautoko the previous speaker and give a shout-out to all of our working mums out across Aotearoa New Zealand. Yesterday, the Prime Minister made an extraordinary admission. Christopher Luxon told this House that expecting his Government to reduce the cost of living was economic illiteracy. That says everything that New Zealanders need to know at this particular point. This is a Government that promised to fix the economy. Instead, they have made it absolutely worse. Inflation has climbed to 4.1 percent. It’s the highest it has been on their watch in the past two years. Kiwis don’t need an economics lecture. They know exactly what is happening every time they set foot into their local supermarket. I ask everyone in this House just to think for a moment about a good, wholesome dish that is lasagna, but the thing is, when you go to the supermarket now, the mince costs 28 percent more than it did only three years ago; the cheese costs 30 percent more; the milk for the cheese sauce—and, of course, the milk and cheese make the best part of the lasagna—26 percent more. If you want a bit of bread or doughboys on the side, 68 percent more. These aren’t luxuries, of course; they are everyday essentials for families. Yet this Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, says lowering the cost of living isn’t the Government’s job. Lasagna, of course, is a staple diet for students in student flats as well, and they are feeling the pressure more than most. Of course, studying should be a pathway to opportunity; it should be affordable, not a pathway into further debt, but under the National Government that’s exactly what it has become for students. This year they allowed another 6 percent increase to tuition fees, taking the cost to more than 19 percent higher than when they took office. Students are paying more for education, more for rent, more for power, more for transport, more for food, while part-time jobs are harder to find. Where is the support? The evidence is clear: there isn’t any. When the National Government launched the tertiary education strategy, Penny Simmonds said education is essential to prosperity. She says we cannot afford to leave young people behind—we cannot afford to leave young people behind—but her actions tell a very different story, because, today, there are almost 100,000 young people not engaged in education, employment, or training across the country. There’s 17,000 fewer apprentices than when that lot took office; that is appalling. Regional training opportunities have been cut and our polytechs are worse off. There is not a pathway for them to sustainability without cuts, without job cuts— Grant McCallum: Investing $40 million in Northland. SHANAN HALBERT: —and without less opportunities out in the regions, just like Northland. Universities are being asked to do more with less, while students are being asked to pay more. If making education more expensive, cutting apprenticeships, and reducing opportunities isn’t leaving young people behind, then what is, because too many young New Zealanders now believe that their future lies somewhere else, in places like Australia. That is a direct failure of this National Government, of Christopher Luxon, not a lack of ambition from young people and what they want to achieve. Under Labour, we have a different plan; we have an approach that actually invests in young people. I take a recent policy like expanding our Apprenticeship Boost into more industries, to support more women into trades, to ensure that young people have the pastoral care and wraparound support that they need to complete their qualifications, that they have the tools and resources to support them in their work from day one. That’s where it makes a difference, and under Labour, we’ll ensure that we will continue to be focused on your job, your health, and making sure that your home is affordable, and we’re taking real action on the cost of living. SUZE REDMAYNE (National—Rangitīkei) (16:00): Thank you, Mr Speaker. You may have noticed already that National is relentlessly focused on fixing the basics and building the future. We are ambitious for New Zealand and all New Zealanders, and it’s making a real difference for people across the mighty Rangitīkei, and for people across New Zealand in health, education, law and order, defence, business and trade, and infrastructure. We’ve opened the Manawatū Tararua Highway and the construction of Ōtaki to north of Levin is under way. Unlike that disparate, lacklustre lot over there, all focused on borrowing and spending and taxing, over here, we are walking the talk and we are getting things done. I want to talk about a once-in-a-generation reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA). We’re replacing the cumbersome old broken beast with a new planning system that will make it easier to produce food and fibre, and build the homes, infrastructure, and renewable energy that New Zealand needs while continuing to protect the environment. It’s a big part of our plan to fix the basics and build the future. It will save time, money, and stress. I can speak on behalf of hundreds of constituents, farmers just like me, many of my colleagues—Grant McCallum—and businesses about the toll taken on the welfare and wallets of hard-working New Zealanders forced to go through the current consenting process. The fact that we as a country collectively spend $1.3 billion a year on consenting is an outrage. The economic benefits are significant. Independent analysis shows the new planning system is projected to boost GDP by up to $3.1 billion a year. A cost benefit analysis estimates $13.3 billion in savings over 30 years through reduced administrative and compliance costs. I also want to talk about trade. Trade drives jobs, growth, and prosperity. New Zealand is a trading nation. Over here, we know that we’re not going to get rich selling houses to each other. We have to trade. Trade—it’s in our DNA. In 2023, we said we’d do a trade deal with India. Chris Hipkins laughed. We got it done. National’s trade agenda has supported rapid growth and exports, which have risen from $94.4 billion to $114.1 billion. We are on track to exceed our goal of doubling the value of exports by 2034. National’s plan to secure New Zealand’s next billion customers includes prioritising new trade deals. This is all part of our plan to build New Zealand’s future, one where our exporters succeed on the world stage because we know that means more jobs, more opportunities, and higher wages for people here at home. Meanwhile, over there, all they’ve confirmed to date is resort to type. Yep, they’ve announced more than $20 billion in promises with absolutely no plan on how they’ll pay for them let alone deliver them. New Zealanders deserve to know how they’re going to make their promises add up. Why? Because they’ll have to pay the bill. There are two choices available to Labour, and both put this Government’s hard work, progress, our aspiration, and our economy at risk. They’ll either have to type taxes on Kiwi incomes, on our KiwiSaver, on our houses, on our farms, on our businesses, or they’ll have to borrow billions of dollars, pushing up inflation and interest rates, and adding thousands of dollars onto your mortgage repayments or rental costs. Chris Hipkins wants to hide the plans from you until after the election. We’re not having it. The election is only 3½ months away, and I think the choice has never been clearer: fix the basics and build the future with National or return to Labour’s happy place—low growth, low productivity, higher taxes, higher inflation, and more debt. National’s plan to fix the basics and build the future is about backing Kiwis to get ahead. It’s about growing the economy through responsible economic management, reducing wasteful spending, red tape, and lowering debt. It’s about a once-in-a-generation reform of the RMA that will unlock potential. It’s about being ambitious and aspirational for New Zealand and all New Zealanders. That’s what responsible Government looks like. I’d also like to talk about a very special event that’s happening in Fielding tomorrow. Talking about fixing the basics and building the future, we have the Rt Hon Christopher Luxon, the leader of the National Party, coming to talk about his vision for New Zealand and how he plans to fix the basics and build the future. Dan Bidois: Where is it? SUZE REDMAYNE: Midday tomorrow in Feilding. See you there. The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed. Sittings of the House

Extended Sitting Hon MATT DOOCEY (Minister for Mental Health) (16:05): I move, That the sitting of the House today be extended into tomorrow morning to consider Government orders of the day Nos 1 to 4. Motion agreed. Bills

Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill First Reading Debate resumed from 20 May. Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) (16:05): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. This bill seeks to provide closure for victims of families and incentivise homicide offenders to cooperate, and it implements a no body, no parole presumption. It does this by seeking to amend two different pieces of legislation. The first is to amend section 9 of the Sentencing Act to include the failure to disclose the location of a body as an aggravating factor that the courts must take account. Secondly, it seeks to amend section 28 of the Parole Act 2002 requiring the Parole Board to refuse parole unless the prisoner has cooperated satisfactorily to identify the victim’s location. Tom Rutherford has brought this bill to the House, and it seeks to address the additional anguish faced by families unable to recover bodies of their loved ones. Labour supports this legislation and acknowledges those families who have been directly affected by these crimes. The Michael McGrath case, the Christchurch builder whose body, sadly, was never found after the perpetrator was convicted. We know from accounts previously in this House, and also through the media, that his ex-partner described fearing for her life as no body or murder weapon was found and the perpetrator was convicted on circumstantial evidence. The other case which springs to mind is the Sara Niethe case where a mother of three was murdered and the perpetrator was convicted of manslaughter and released six years and seven months and no parole exclusion period. The victim impact statement from her son testified that the perpetrator’s failure to disclose the location of his mother’s body worsened the grief and worsened that trauma, and so we support this bill. It is important to note, I think—and I haven’t been on to hear the submissions on this—but the member in charge has highlighted that the cases I’ve just referred to deeply affect New Zealanders and deeply affect those families. Their experiences remind us that justice is not simply just about punishment, it is also about accountability, about truth, and recognising the ongoing impact on those families of those victims of crime. Labour acknowledges the argument that this bill may create a stronger incentive for offenders to cooperate with authorities and disclose information about the location of a victim’s remains. If that results in more families being able to obtain answers, and also achieving some measure of closure, that is a goal worthy of serious consideration. While we do support the bill’s intent, we also believe that there are important questions that deserve careful examination through the select committee process. It is important to note that I’ve just been reading through now, which is the section 28A report—sorry, the Attorney-General’s New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 report on the section 7 report, and in particular, the concern that has been raised as the new section 28A in the Parole Act. The concern that has been raised is that prolonging the detention on the basis of an offender’s failure to cooperate to the board’s satisfaction with the identification of the location of the victim potentially could remain a punitive measure that is at odds with the public safety emphasis of the parole regime. It says in this report that is an insufficient basis on which to justify continued detention in circumstances where there is a period of imprisonment considered by the sentencing court to be necessary to serve the purposes of that punishment, deterrence, and denunciation of the offender, as reflected in the applicable minimum period of imprisonment that has passed, and the offender is not considered to pose an ongoing risk to the community’s safety. I’m sure that that will be one of many things that there are submissions to the select committee on, in terms of understanding how we can make sure that this bill works well and is operating as effectively as possible. That is the benefit of having a good select committee process. I’m sure, like the Justice Committee often is, it will be incredibly busy hearing so many of those submissions. I think that this is one of those bills that is likely to have a wide range of people submitting their views. We would like to consider whether the provisions in this bill can be strengthened, whether they are workable in practice, and understand as to whether there are any unintended consequences that we haven’t turned our minds to at this first reading stage. In particular, I’m sure the select committee will examine the concerns raised in overseas jurisdictions about the possibility of disproportionately extended imprisonment in cases where there may be an offender who is unable or unwilling to provide that information, or, in rare circumstances, where a conviction is later found to be not found or not right. These are important questions in terms of justice in our country. They do not diminish, in any way or means, the suffering of those victims’ families, but they do require us to ensure that legislation is responsive, is fair, and is effective, and, also, is consistent with the principles of our justice system. The experience of comparable legislation in the United Kingdom and Australia will be really useful, and I’m sure that will be drawn upon when this is sent to the Justice Committee. It will be useful in informing that discussion that takes place. We should carefully assess what has worked overseas in similar jurisdictions to our own and, also, what has not worked. We want to make sure that New Zealand’s approach in this place strikes the right balance between making sure the victims and their families are well-supported and also maintaining the integrity of our justice system. I’m sure the Justice Committee will do a good job at striking that balance well. This House has a clear responsibility to listen to those families who have indeed had to live with uncertainty, because the truth has been unrightfully withheld from them. Their voices deserve to be heard, and their experiences very much deserve to be considered. It is for that reason that Labour believes that this bill warrants the full scrutiny and public submissions through that select committee process. We support the purpose of providing greater recognition of the harm caused when offenders conceal the location of a victim’s remains and, also, examining the bill’s legal and practical implications in detail. I’d like to conclude by commending the member in charge of this bill. I know that Tom Rutherford has worked on the ground and has contact with those families that have been personally affected, and I’d like to commend him on doing the job of being a good MP and bringing real-life issues that affect everyday New Zealanders and making that into a bill. That’s often one of the most rewarding parts of the job of being an MP—using New Zealand’s democracy to serve the needs of people—and this bill is a good example of that. I’d like to conclude by saying for those people, anyone who is listening, or those representative bodies with legal expertise or even experience on this, to seriously consider making your submission to the Justice Committee. We know that we strengthen bills like this one through having a good, wide range of views being submitted and taking all of those views into consideration when we look at how we can further strengthen this legislation and make it work as effectively as possible. On that note, I commend the bill to the House. SCOTT WILLIS (Green) (16:14): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Likewise, I would like to acknowledge the harm and trauma of the families and the need they have for closure, and I want to thank Tom Rutherford for bringing this bill to the House. We are very concerned, and we share the concern of Tom Rutherford, at the trauma and harm that a murder victim’s family has when the victim’s remains are still concealed. This is something that, I think, it would be very difficult for us to understand if we’re not in that situation. We’re really concerned by that. But we don’t see that this bill is really going to address the issue. As my colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan wrote to Tom Rutherford back in May this year, the Australian example is that “no body, no parole” laws have been in place in many states of Australia for around a decade, and, unfortunately, have not increased the rate of disclosure. While there’s a good motivation behind this legislation, it’s not necessarily going to achieve the stated goal. We don’t see any evidence that these reforms have achieved their aims. In fact, we’ve heard from the Attorney-General that—the quote is: “I have concluded the Bill appears to be inconsistent with the right to be free from arbitrary detention affirmed by s 22 of the Bill of Rights Act.” What we’re seeing here is that there could be harmful consequences of those wrongfully convicted. Most importantly, we can’t always tell if we’ve got things right in the courts. We’ve heard here that this is a punitive measure on parole. It’s against the purpose of the parole regime, which has resulted in the section 7 report. It says here that the “no body, no parole” law is an understandable reaction to the emotionally fraught situation, but it’s unlikely to accomplish its goal of providing closure to victims of the crime in most cases. As a review of these laws state, prolonged detention on the basis of an offender’s failure to cooperate to the board’s satisfaction with the identification of the location of the victim’s remains is a punitive measure that is at odds with the public-safety emphasis of the parole regime. We will continue to use evidence-based solutions and best practice to provide closure for families, but we are concerned that this bill, while it has a good intention, will not achieve that aim, and for that reason we are not supporting it through. However, we commend the member Tom Rutherford for bringing it to our attention. Thank you. LAURA McCLURE (ACT) (16:18): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of the Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill. Firstly, I just want to congratulate the member Tom Rutherford, who is in the House, for bringing this bill to Parliament. It’s awfully horrendous when you hear of somebody who’s lost a loved one under really extreme circumstances, the likes of murder, and then to have to be continually re-traumatised and unable to heal and move on because they don’t know where their loved one is. That is deeply, deeply hurtful, and I know that other speakers have spoken about some cases and some ones that are in Christchurch, where I’m from. It’s not just the families involved; it’s actually the whole entire community that can feel this. It definitely slows down that healing process for the family and for the community. This bill amends the Sentencing Act to make an offender’s failure or refusal to reveal or cooperate in identifying the location of a homicide victim’s body or remains an aggravating factor at sentencing that the courts must consider. It also requires the Parole Board to take into consideration, or it amends the Parole Board’s ability when it comes to looking at whether there has been a justified reason or an attempt in order to identify where the location of the remains of could be. There, obviously, could be situations where an individual may no longer exactly remember the location or they may have attempted to locate and that may not be able to be located, so I think that there are some exceptions to this. But I think that, overall, families of homicide victims who may have greater leverage to obtain information about the location of loved ones’ remains should have that ability to do so. Actually, I found it quite ironic when the previous member was speaking around evidence-based solutions in this area. Look, I think that, actually, the evidence does show that when there is some kind of incentive to get parole, for example, that that is something that I think someone would consider in revealing other details. Actually, evidence does show that that does help with this. There could be some costs associated with this, of course, because the Parole Board will need to assess offender cooperation and there might be some administrative changes with that. ACT, obviously, is going to support this bill, because we think that victims deserve a justice system that puts the interests ahead of the interests of the offender. I commend this bill to the House. Hon CASEY COSTELLO (Associate Minister of Police) (16:21): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill. I do genuinely commend the member for bringing this bill forward, not only because it is very hard to interact with victims who have suffered such a loss, but, also, he has taken that and turned it into a positive programme of work to ensure that we actually, as a country, start a very serious conversation about how we deal with these issues. The loss of a loved one through violent crime is horrific and, having been in the position of having to inform loved ones of that loss to investigate homicides and serious violent crime, it is traumatising to the extreme. But to not be able to give the family an opportunity to grieve, to put their minds at peace, and to know that their loved one is at rest is beyond horrific. I would recount that I was fortunate enough to be able to work on an investigation where a young woman was concealed after being murdered. Only after the offender who had committed the horrendous crime died were we able to recover her remains and return her to her whānau. It is an incredibly honoured position to be able to do that and put a loved one at rest, so any effort we can to ensure that there is opportunity to create some level of leverage to force those that have been responsible for these crimes to come forward and to give some alleviation to the suffering of families is really important. New Zealand First is, of course—our foundation pillar is about the protection of country and protection of our communities. We are absolutely committed to ensuring that we have the very best of law and order and reducing violent crime. I think this Government has done an exceptional job in working towards reducing violent crime. This is an area that is going to be challenging. It is a complex piece of law around how we deal with the deprivation of rights until a certain condition is met. It is going to be a complex piece of law to navigate, and I’m sure the Justice Committee will receive a number of submissions on both sides of this position as to how we make this law come into effect. It is important that we do have this conversation, however, and we do work out how we navigate this law. We do know of cases in New Zealand where people have been in custody for long periods of time and are later reprieved of that conviction. If we look at the case of Teina Pora in terms of his release, if it had been a circumstance where someone’s body had been concealed, how long would we detain someone who in the end was found not to be guilty of the offence for which he was detained? There are complexities in this process. It will be challenging to navigate, but that doesn’t mean we don’t look at how to tackle it. That doesn’t mean we don’t look at how we achieve an outcome that demonstrates to those that have lost loved ones through this type of serious violent crime that we as a Government, as a country, and as a Parliament are prepared to consider alternate ways of addressing the loss and alleviating the hurt and suffering. I think it is important that we navigate the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act implications, that we navigate the unlawful detention components of this to ensure that there is a way we can provide some incentive or some input to ensure that we are doing everything we can to alleviate the hurt and harm. The ability to lay your loved one at rest and particularly to know that they are at peace, the unknown factor of not knowing where someone is, how their life has ended—there are so many unanswered questions. We can stand in this House having empathy, but until you’ve walked that walk, the suffering and incredible pain that you carry just in not knowing—and quite frequently what you pursue in your own mind can be so much worse than the reality. I think it is with great honour that, on behalf of New Zealand First, I commend this bill to the House. RYAN HAMILTON (National—Hamilton East) (16:26): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s a privilege to speak on this bill, the Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill, on a members’ day. I just acknowledge the previous speaker and her words and experience that certainly ring true in this House. Every MP brings with them life experience and a skill set which we all add cumulatively to the legislation-making process. I want to make a special mention to part of the genesis of this bill. I will keep it brief. To the former member for Hamilton West, the Hon Tim Macindoe, who actually, I believe, seeded this bill or was part of the original seeding of this member’s bill many years ago—in fact, he was here 12 years in Parliament and never once was successful in pulling out a member’s bill. Yet in this House, we have some members like one to my left, who has pulled out three, I think, and Catherine Wedd— Hon Andrew Hoggard: Just two. RYAN HAMILTON: —who has pulled out three—just two—within two years. The record’s three in less than three years. It’s amazing. It’s a bit of a lottery in some respects, but all credit to you. All power to you for those members who have had that success. In this case and in this term, it was none other than Tom Rutherford, MP for Pāpāmoa—Bay of Plenty? Tauranga? Grant McCallum: Mount Maunganui. RYAN HAMILTON: Mount Maunganui. It’s a moving feast. That general direction. None the less, a great MP—a great MP. In fact, he’s the youngest of the National Party to become an MP in the last term, but don’t let his youthfulness fool you. Don’t let his good looks fool you. He’s a very intelligent, very diligent, hard-working MP and deserves the honour and the ability to take this bill forward. In fact, he has already advanced the work that the Hon Tim Macindoe did by actually aligning—and this is specifically for you, Mr Webb—some of the bill with the legislation from some other jurisdictions just to enhance the legislation and make it a bit more fit for purpose so it’s very relevant. But the special thing about this is this is justice for victims and families, because families deserve answers and closure. I can only imagine the difficulty when something horrible and traumatic like that has gone on, but then not to be able to get the closure and the proper process of a send-off, a burial, a tangi, or whatever the appropriate cultural send-off would be in those instances—so this is a very measured and thoughtful bill. It’s only a small bill and it only makes a small legislative tweak, but it is an important one because for every individual, for every family member that is affected by something like this, it’s their world. It’s their everything. It’s also important to know that parole is a privilege, not a right, and so release should depend on genuine accountability and rehabilitation. If an offender was unwilling to disclose information, it does raise legitimate questions about their remorse and their ability to genuinely provide mental, physical, emotional compensation for the damage that they’ve done. It’s also about accountability, because we know that part of justice is accountability. Whilst we can control the offender in the way of prison or sentencing and stuff, part of the process, and many times for the victims, is to hear the offender’s remorse, the offender’s guilt, and to disclose the location of the body is really an important part of that process. So, on this side of the House, we’re keen to advance this bill to select committee. We know the Justice Committee is certainly the busiest in terms of legislative process in the House—an incredible amount of legislation around justice and law and order. No doubt, they probably don’t enjoy the extra workload. I know that even this week in the House, it’s put extra pressure on their timing with rosters and double-ups and commitments. But justice delayed is justice denied, and so this is an appropriate response to deal with something that’s quite bespoke, quite nuanced, but very appropriate. This bill sends a simple message that justice is not just about punishment; it is also about truth, accountability, and giving families every possible chance to bring their loved one home. SHANAN HALBERT (Labour) (16:31:06): Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Can I just start this afternoon by acknowledging Tom Rutherford and the work that he’s done in his community, and, of course, the success of bringing a member’s bill before the House today for its first reading. I remember vividly growing up in Napier and the sad time of our community losing Teresa Cormack. Teresa was part of the Maraenui community, only a child, and went to school with many of my cousins. It impacted the whole community for many, many years, and that included their family, it included the local school, and it’s something that has sat with me since my own childhood through to today. As I look at this piece of legislation, our member’s bill this evening, I reflected back to that moment and the sadness and the impact, and the devastation that it had on so many. So, thank you, member Tom Rutherford, for following this through to bring it before the House today. This bill seeks to provide closure for victims’ families and incentivise homicide offenders to cooperate. It must be one of the most difficult things, not knowing where your loved ones are in something that is such a tragedy in the first place. I know, particularly for Māori communities, all communities across New Zealand, when somebody is murdered, somebody is taken, the grief is much deeper when they can’t put that person to rest and that includes to rest with all of their remains. This member’s bill implements a “no body, no parole” presumption and would amend two particular pieces of legislation. It amends section 9, of course, of the Sentencing Act 2002 to include the failure of disclosure of location of a body as an aggravating factor, which the court must, of course, take into account. Then the second one is that it proposes to add a new section 28A into the Parole Act 2002 requiring the Parole Board to refuse parole unless the prisoner has cooperated satisfactorily to identify the victim’s location. Part of the work that I’ve seen from the MP that puts this forward today is, of course, the acknowledgement of the Michael McGrath case, the Christchurch builder whose body was never found after the perpetrator was convicted. The ex-partner described fearing for her life as no body or murder weapon was found and the perpetrator was convicted on circumstantial evidence. This stuff continues to be traumatic for New Zealand and New Zealanders, but my heart really goes out to all of the whānau and families that are impacted by what are very sad, tragic circumstances to so many. Labour’s position today is that we will support this member’s bill to go through to the select committee, albeit quite a complex piece to work through. I acknowledge that the Justice Committee is quite hard-working and it’s not unusual for them to put in extra hours to work through the legislation that goes before them. So we will be supporting this bill through its first reading today, to go on to hear from submitters through the select committee process. Sadly, we will hear from those families too, but no doubt it will influence the decisions of our select committee and the report back to this House, and in many ways I look forward to reading that report to this House at that particular time. I commend this bill. Hon MELISSA LEE (National) (16:35): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise to support this Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill in its first reading. I’d like to acknowledge Tom Rutherford for bringing this bill to the House, and no doubt he will do an excellent job in the Justice Committee. When I first read this bill, it took me back to my early days of journalism. When I give this example, lots of people are going to think I’m really, really old, but it’s something that actually happened more than 30 years ago. As a young journalist working for a Sunday paper, I remember getting a phone call from man in prison, a tip-off that somebody was actually going to go and point to the location where his missing wife was buried. I had to think very quickly. I remember having to go and talk to my editor and basically dispatching a photographer to the location, which was in the—I’m trying to remember—Woodhill Forest out in West Auckland. What it relates to was a missing woman in 1982. It was well before I even came to New Zealand, but for a decade she was missing. But a tip-off came from a contact, someone who had actually heard the prime suspect, which was her husband saying that he had actually buried her, and so the search was on. That was the tip-off that ended up with a front-page news story, which I actually helped to write, and in 1994, the husband was convicted of murder. That came about because they managed to find the body. What had happened was that he had killed her in 1982 and reported her missing, pretending that she had left him because he wanted a divorce. That wasn’t the truth. What he had tried to do is that he buried her in a low-lying area in Woodhill Forest, but then he was worried that he was going to be discovered, so a couple of weeks later he dug deeper in the ground so nobody could find her for more than a decade. After 12 years since he actually killed his wife, he got convicted of murder. In 2004, he was paroled, but he was called back to prison in 2011. Actually, when he got convicted for murder, he got a life sentence. He was recalled to prison because the Parole Board was concerned that he was going to commit another crime, based on the report from his second wife. So this is a man who had issues with anger, who actually killed his wife, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and then he was recalled to serve his life sentence. The fact that we have a case where this man eventually ended up pointing to the location of the dead wife was actually very helpful, but there are so many other cases where they do not find the body of the deceased. I think that having that closure for the family—and as a young reporter, I remember feeling so sorry for the wife’s family, who would have been grieving for more than a decade, not knowing where their daughter was or where their sister was or where their cousin was. I think that this bill reminded me of that case and one of the stories that I remember. It’s one of those things that has stayed with me for a very long time. So, I support this bill. National has been tough on crime and we have actually reduced victimisation: 46,000 fewer victims as a result. This bill will go towards making sure that families and victims get the support that they really need, because when you have the discovery of the body, that actually means that there is closure. I know that the Justice Committee will do a grand job looking at the bill, going through the bill, and making sure that we actually work through the processes of what is right. In terms of the rights for the offender, we have to look after that as well, but, as far as I’m concerned, the rights of the victim actually trump the rights of the offender who ends up killing people. I commend the bill to the House. HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert) (16:40): Thank you for taking this call. I’ve just been away from the House because I have been listening to submissions on the move-on orders. I was asking a question, in that process, about the risk there is when we move women on who have had domestic violence and sexual violence in their lives and they’ve ended up on the street, in the light; when we move them on, we move them into the darkness, and there’s a real risk of violence and murder as a result. I think it’s very important when we look at this area that we’re super-realistic about it. I want to, first of all, say that I have thought quite a lot about the true trauma in the area of this kind of violence, because of my portfolio. I’ve had to meet with people who have lost their children as a result of, often, domestic violence. It is utterly heartbreaking and it is absolutely real that if you can’t find the person, because they have been hidden from you, that adds so much to the trauma of the family of that person. There is clearly a need for us to have closure and to be able to know, even if it’s something we terribly wish we didn’t know, that the person has been killed. I want to, first of all, say that has got to be a fundamental value in our society, that we want to make sure that people get closure, as much as possible, and so has the prevention of this kind of violence, which is why I raise the other issue that’s right before us now, because we can’t have it both ways. If we care about the prevention of violence, we must stop it before it happens, surely, rather than this after-the-event type of law. Now, that does not mean that it doesn’t have a place—and Labour is going to vote for this going to select committee—but there are tricky things about this particular law. If the person actually is innocent, they won’t know where the body is. It’s just an obvious thing we have to deal with. I worked in law for a long time. I know it’s a very flawed process. It’s one where we make judgments, we have to decide, and sometimes we get it wrong. So it is going to be an important piece of law to examine well and robustly and think preventively, but I also urge this Parliament to think very seriously about move-on orders in the same brief, because they also end up with people who are victims of violence and, even, death. Thank you. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Tom Rutherford, in reply. TOM RUTHERFORD (National—Bay of Plenty) (16:43): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I, firstly, want to acknowledge the House for the tone and the approach that has been taken to the debate on this legislation. When I first introduced the bill 2½ years ago, it was because I had met the McGrath family in Christchurch. I had met Michael’s brother, Simon, alongside Hamish Campbell, who joined me, and listened to him in his lounge, to hear the despair that he as a brother, that his mother, that his family, and friends of Michael had to experience on a day to day basis. This is a case, now, nearly 10 years ago, and that family and that friend group have still not had the opportunity to lay Michael to rest. What a shameful experience that is for them—and for us, as a country, to allow to take place in the sense that, in 17 years’ time, David Benbow, the gentleman convicted of Michael’s murder, will front to the Parole Board and, without this piece of legislation, can potentially be eligible to walk free, to be reintegrated into our society, and yet Simon’s head will hit that pillow and he’ll wonder “Where is my brother? When will I have the opportunity to lay him to rest? When will I have the opportunity to finally and properly grieve?” That’s what this bill is about. It’s not going to impact hundreds or thousands of cases, but even one case is one case too many, because that’s one family, that’s one community dealing with the day-to-day impacts of the unknown—the unknown of where their friend, their family member is. That’s what this bill will fix, because, for too long, we’ve said to those convicted murderers “You can reintegrate into society, with no obligation whatsoever to disclose what you have done with your victim’s or victims’ body.” I’m saying that we’re drawing a line in the sand. It’s not only the Michael McGrath case as an example; there’s Sarah Neith, and many others across the history of our country, where families still carry that burden today. I say thank you to this House. I say thank you to the New Zealand Labour Party, I say thank you to New Zealand First, and I say thank you to the ACT Party, for their understanding and willingness to allow this piece of legislation to go to the Justice Committee, to allow us, as members of that select committee, to hear from members of the public who will submit on this legislation. I acknowledge that there are some pitfalls and shortcomings that this bill may have, and that is entirely the right place to send the bill, to sort it out, to iron it out, to fix it, and to get it right. In the same breath, I acknowledge the section 7 report prepared by the Attorney-General. The Attorney-General said, in his own words, it was a line call. But in his own report—and if you get the opportunity, I recommend you read it—he says that there are opportunities to fix and remediate the issues that he is highlighting in his report. That is precisely what I encourage the Justice Committee to do: to take the Attorney-General’s report, listen to the submissions, and, where necessary, fix this legislation so we make it workable and practical for our communities and our country. This bill has never been about harming people who are already in prison; it’s solely about putting victims at the heart of our justice system. It’s solely about saying to them, “If you want to be released on parole, then do the right thing: share with our families, our friends, and our loved ones what you have done to your victims’ remains, so that they have the opportunity to finally lay their loved one to rest.” I say thank you to this House. Thank you for engaging in the debate and thank you for today, in my first member’s bill, supporting it so that it can go to the Justice Committee, and we can progress it into law. Thank you. Motion agreed to. Bill read a first time.

Referral to Select Committee ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The question is, That the Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill be considered by the Justice Committee. Motion agreed to. Bill referred to the Justice Committee.

Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill Second Reading Hon Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangārei) (16:49): I move, That the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill be now read a second time. This bill is looking to save an average of 10 lives per year, with a 60 percent reduction in small recreational craft drownings through wearing life jackets that are, mostly, already on board. The problem we are trying to solve is the 115 fatalities in the past decade on all recreational vessels for people who capsized or fell overboard and weren’t wearing a life jacket, and subsequently drowned. In this reading, I want to start by thanking the Transport and Infrastructure Committee for improving this bill, including by having the wisdom to take it back to the Business Committee for a scope change. Cameron Brewer brought this bill to first reading, and through the first select committee process, there were 158 unique submitters. Two-thirds of submitters requested that the scope of the bill be changed from under-15-year-olds to all ages, on the basis that the average age of death in recreational boating incidents is actually more towards the age of 50 than 15. This was evidenced in the past decade, with eight fatalities in children under 15, compared to 161 fatalities in those aged over 15. In light of this, the select committee received approval from the Business Committee to change the scope of the bill to encompass all ages and to commence a second submission process. This was where the bill was passed into my name. In the second select committee process, there were 128 unique submitters. The select committee heard that in the past decade, across all size of recreational craft, the vast majority of fatalities on recreational craft were on small vessels of less than 6 metres. The vast majority of fatalities were while the vessel was under way. The vast majority of fatalities were on recreational craft that did carry life jackets. However, despite a relatively high carriage rate for life jackets, 60 percent of fatalities were not wearing them and may have been saved if they were. In summary, officials told us that 60 percent of fatal drownings could be prevented by wearing life jackets on small recreational craft, as this bill recommends, and this would be around 10 people per year. The select committee heard that recreational craft fatalities on vessels under 6 metres without life jackets accounted for 50 percent of all drownings last year. However, I am informed that, unfortunately, this year is already tracking above that average, with seven deaths already on recreational craft of less than 6 metres where life jackets were not worn. The select committee has taken this into account with its timeliness of progress that brings us here today in order to have these benefits in place for the upcoming summer season. At an international level, our current position on life jackets is out of step with many jurisdictions, such as Australia. We heard that Tasmania introduced similar legislation 25 years ago, with an immediate 50 percent reduction in small craft fatalities in the first year. We also want that benefit. Domestically, the Waikato Regional Council introduced this policy 13 years ago, with significant, ongoing improvements in life jacket - wearing compliance and an apparent reduction in fatalities, albeit on small numbers, of nearly 50 percent from before and after. One of the important issues reported to the select committee was the range of life jacket by-laws across the country, from life jackets having to be worn or having to be worn while under way, to having a skipper’s discretion for them to be worn at all or having a discretion for life jackets depending on the region that the by-laws are encompassing. Harmonising these confusing approaches has been requested for many years and it is considered important for saving lives. This bill achieves this. The select committee considered all submissions when working its way diligently through the issues, with amendments that were then unanimously accepted as 12 recommendations. It was agreed that 6 metres was the correct vessel length, and it is a common cut-off point in maritime legislation, where commercial requirements of over 6 metres include annual surveys, and bilge pump and firefighting equipment requirements. Six metres is also consistent with many current regional by-laws in international jurisdictions. The recommendations include, as number one, that the age be amended to all ages on the basis that the vast majority—indeed, nearly all—recreational craft fatalities are over the age of 15. Recommendation two is that the title of the bill be changed to the “Maritime Transport (Lifejackets on Recreational Craft) Amendment Bill”. Recommendation three is that existing requirements for all recreational craft greater than 6 metres to carry life jackets and for people to wear them at times of heightened risk are retained. Recommendation four was to change the term “waterline length” to “length overall”, which is better understood by the public and is consistent with the existing legislation in Part 91 of the Maritime Rules. Recommendation five is to amend the wearing of life jackets “while underway”, instead of “at the time of use”. Officials advise that “underway” is more appropriate as it is already used in current by-laws and, again, in international jurisdictions. It was noted that of the 88 fatalities since 2015 where the phase of voyage was recorded, 77 of the 88 occurred while under way. Recommendation six is to take the opportunity to embed the soon-to-expire 2022 exemption for stand-up paddleboards in order to bring the exemptions all into one place. Recommendation seven is to use the term “life jacket” as being better understood by the public than the term “personal floatation device” to clarify that life jackets also include other types of buoyancy aids. Recommendation eight is to develop an infringement regime. Recommendation nine is that if an existing by-law has a different standard, then the national rule will take precedence. Recommendation 10 of 12 is to change the timing for the bill to come into force from the date of Royal assent to 28 days after Royal assent in order to allow education campaign preparations that would position the benefits to be in place for the upcoming summer season. The final two recommendations look to make implementation easier for local authorities who already have existing by-laws, and I thank the obvious local government expertise on the select committee for addressing this. Recommendation 11, then, is that local authorities review their by-laws in order to be consistent with the national rule, with a five-year transition period, and recommendation 12 is to achieve this by-law harmonisation so that local authorities need not undertake onerous public consultation to align with the national rule. The committee also explored mechanisms to bring this policy into effect in as timely a manner as possible, including through regulatory review. However, recommendations 11 and 12 subsequently involve primary legislation and not just regulations, and so the current process is the most appropriate. The select committee also considered potential unexpected consequences—for example, the transition period between being on an eligible recreational vessel under way, and jumping into water for water activities such as swimming. It was recognised by the committee that it would be impossible to legislatively cover all transition scenarios, and harbour masters and officials did not indicate that this was an issue, anyway. I spoke with the Waikato Regional Council, who have had this policy domestically for 13 years, and they have had no significant issues. I also spoke with recreational boating safety officers in Hobart, Tasmania, who have had this policy for 25 years, and they have had no significant issues. So this appears to be less of an issue than envisaged. All of this notwithstanding, the committee felt that it was important to provide clarity to monitors around these potential transition activities, and so the committee agreed to the equivalent of having a removal of doubt clause by way of example. This is recommended as new rule 91.4(1B) in clause 8(3). We also discussed life jacket types, and I was encouraged by experts, who said that this is best undertaken by education from domain specialists, such as Maritime New Zealand, Water Safety New Zealand, and others, including those in the retail and recreational craft environment. They will provide advice on the best of fit for purpose life jackets for each scenario, underpinned—importantly—by the philosophy that any life jacket is better than no life jacket. In conclusion, this coming Saturday, 25 July, is World Drowning Prevention Day, and this year New Zealand is already batting against the drowning average. Let’s do what we can today and work with Water Safety New Zealand, Maritime New Zealand, harbour masters, and recreational water sports to have this policy in place for summer 2026-27 and for the Water Safety New Zealand education campaign in late October. To that effect, I would like to again thank the committee for their timeliness and diligence in progressing this policy, which was unanimously agreed to at select committee, and we all look forward to the lives that may be saved as we look towards the upcoming summer season. Thank you. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That was a very buoyant presentation, Dr Reti. TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North) (16:57): Kia orana, Madam Speaker, and it’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of the Labour Party to support the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill. As the member responsible for this bill has indicated, if the Transport and Infrastructure Committee’s recommendations are adopted, the title will change to reflect the changes that have been suggested. Can I acknowledge the Hon Dr Shane Reti, who is the current sponsor of this bill. I also acknowledge the Hon Cameron Brewer, who initially held the bill before his accession, but I want to acknowledge Dr Reti’s constructive way in which he has engaged with committee members, including myself, to ensure that there is a clear understanding of the changes that needed to be made and the basis on which those changes have been advanced. I think that it’s important to acknowledge his cooperation in that space. As Dr Reti has indicated, the select committee had two bites at this particular bill. For round one, as we might call it, we went out, and, as a result of submissions and also the departmental advice that was received by the committee, it was very clear that children are not the main victims of drownings from sailing in small recreational craft. As a result, many submitters asked for the age band to be one of universalism in order to indicate the focus in that. The committee sought the permission of the Business Committee to expand the scope. That was granted, and so the committee went out for round two. I want to acknowledge that that is a collegial thing for a committee to do—to go back out for a full process of public consultation and to hear what the community might say on this change—and I want to acknowledge the 286 submitters who submitted through that process. The Labour Party supports the justification for this change because when we look at the stats, since 2015, there have been eight fatalities for children when it comes to recreational craft. When you look at those who are aged over 15, that number is 161. The average age of fatalities related to recreational craft is 50 years of age, and so this change that has been promoted and accepted by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee is one that, actually, will really tackle those 94 percent of craft-related drownings in 2024 for where there were no life jackets actually used. The advice that’s been received is that a significant number of that percentage would still be with us here today if they were, in fact, using a life jacket. This requires the person who’s in charge of the recreational craft of six metres or less—and I want to acknowledge the collegiality of Dr Reti, because when I showed him my little drawing of a recreational craft, he gave me some feedback on that, but we were looking at the six sort of metre and where that would fall. But the responsibility is there nonetheless so that those who are going to be on that craft whilst the craft is underway—and that is a term that is accepted and well known within marine maritime circles—they would be responsible for ensuring that all of those people, regardless of age, who are on their craft actually have a life jacket. I want to acknowledge the officials, in particular Maritime New Zealand, who came and gave a little bit of a practical exercise to the committee about the range of personal flotation devices that are actually out there and that would kind of lend its favour to a whole range of different individuals. The other sort of issue that Dr Reti has touched on is where the measurements would be taken. Would it be on the overall sort of dimension of the craft or would it be the water line? The select committee and the Labour Party agrees with this that, actually, the overall sort of dimension is far more easier to monitor, and so we support that change. This is a bill that we believe will make a huge difference. We believe that it will provide some consistency around the country as well, as regional councils at the moment set their own rules around this. In particular, where Kiwi families might be moving about the country in some or other parts and wanting to utilise recreational craft and realising that, at the moment, there are different rules for different places, this will provide some consistency. Finally, I’m delighted, as I’m sure my other colleagues on the committee are, to ensure that there has been some change in the kind of quick fashion that local councils would be able to make this change without having to go out to a full public consultation process. One of the beauties of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee is that it has a couple of former mayors and one deputy mayor on it, and so all of those members are in the House this afternoon. We were all very keen to ensure that, actually, changes like this are not held up as a result of the full sort of consultation that needs to follow in some particular areas. This is a good bill. We support it. We support the timeliness of it. It should be enacted just in time for summer. That will make a real difference and ensure that lives are saved as a result. I commend this bill to the House. CELIA WADE-BROWN (Green) (17:03): I rise on behalf of the Green Party, but also as a kayaker, to absolutely support this bill. It was a really good process, both from Mr Reti and also from Mr Brewer, who originally brought it to us. They were open to the fact that this was a member’s bill that had actually had a longer history, but that this was what they thought should come forward, but they were not dogmatic about the details. That was extremely helpful for the full select committee process to be able to be applied in the way that I understand it should be. This process would improve much other legislation, to be honest, if it was followed in the same way, if Government bills, when they were introduced, focused more on how you could solve the problem than taking the idea of the solution and never moving even six metres from the proposed solution. I think there is more to this bill and its likely agreement across the House than only the issue of life jackets on recreational vessels. We did learn a fair amount about terminology and differences between a ship, a boat, a vessel, and what we were going to call it. It was really interesting to hear from so many harbourmasters, Water Safety New Zealand, and other people. Often those submissions are pretty moving because they talked about people who had lost their lives, they talked about family members that had drowned, and often the situation was not, “Yes, they went into these raging storm of 40 knots and they couldn’t manage it.” No, they went out and the conditions changed, or there was a rogue wave, or there was a bar, or they didn’t realise how windy it could get on a lake. Those are all common situations that sometimes the most inexperienced are more likely to be caught out in those situations. As my colleagues have mentioned, we heard submissions and thought, actually, there’s some quite big changes that we want to make here. Those changes were not consulted on in the first place, and we did the correct and democratic and inclusive thing of saying, well, let’s go out and see people who are quite happy with 15 and younger—because that’s the skippering age—would they be quite happy with everything? Oh, and going to all adults as well. I’m pleased, for the safety of our 50-year-old males, that people were generally supportive of those changes and the change, obviously, to the title that will be a consequence of this. I’d like to thank the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee who helped make it a collegial process. We could drill into the issues that mattered, and probably there are some issues that we’ll get teased out about how effective our definitions of “underway” are, but I just want to be clear on this for anyone that may be listening and have some concerns about recreational boating—if you are at anchor, you don’t need a life jacket. However, if you are using one of the technological ways of anchoring without a physical anchor, that can actually be quite rough, quite exciting, and quite lively, even if you are not physically moving from the GPS spot that you are fishing at or whatever else you might. For me, it’s probably taking eye naturalist pictures of dolphins, but whatever you’re doing, sometimes when you’ve stopped, just being stopped is not that much safer. I am pleased with the definitions that have come about in that bill. Personal flotation device is something that’s a familiar term to me. It’s one of our wonderful three letter acronyms in this country—PFD—and it is a different term from life jacket, but life jacket is what people understand. So I think we moved around a word. We’re going to call it PFD. We were going to call it life jackets, and we didn’t come up, thank goodness, with the new term for it all, but we explained the inclusive nature of life jackets. I would like to also say that there are many, many times when regional differences are important, whether it’s soil types, whether it’s housing density, whether it’s ecological variation. Those are valid reasons for different regions to have different rules, to have them locally set, and so forth. Drowning is universal, so I really appreciate the way that we will have one set of rules. It wasn’t just to make it happen quicker that we decided we would be able to allow bylaws to be superseded. It was also one of those rare moments where we collectively agreed to help local government. I really support this bill. Thank you. SIMON COURT (ACT) (17:09): Madam Speaker, wonderful to see you in the Speaker’s chair again. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Wonderful to see you, too. SIMON COURT: The starting point of this bill: the evidence that we were presented with the original proposal—the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill—was insufficient to progress the bill in that form. What we learned is that it would be a very rare occasion where the provisions of the original bill were actually going to save the lives of children and young people. What became very clear from the evidence the Transport and Infrastructure Committee heard was that, in fact, it was adults, and typically men of about my age, going out on small craft with the hero cape on feeling invincible, or simply not being prepared for when the conditions changed and they needed to take action to make sure that themselves or their passengers were safe. What became very clear from the evidence the select committee heard was that, in fact, it is adults—typically men of about my age—going out in small craft with the hero cape on, feeling invincible, or simply not being prepared for when the conditions changed and they needed to take action to make sure that themselves or their passengers were safe. Now, ACT listens to evidence, so we supported the change in scope to include the wearing of life jackets for all people on vessels under 6 metres. But we also support recreational boaties to make good decisions about the safety of their vessel, to understand the conditions they’re operating in, and how their passengers need to be protected. But a lot of that comes down to personal responsibility, and it will continue to. Because despite changing a law, which is what this bill proposes, in the end, every skipper will continue to be responsible for the safety of their passengers, as they are under the law right now. They will need to make good judgment calls and make sure that their passengers wear life jackets where appropriate and where required. Now, ACT also believes that there needs to be a reasonable approach to enforcing the wearing of life jackets. We advocated very strongly for that reasonable approach to be written into law. Because if you go out on a small boat and you’re out for the day, you may or may not have a marine toilet, you may or may not be in a depth where you can safely anchor. But on a flat, calm day—say if you’re boating off the Bay of Plenty, like my good friend and colleague Cameron Luxton often does, and you want to have a swim off the boat or you want to have a bit of a play in the water, as he often does, he tells me, you’re not likely to be wearing a life jacket to get in and out of the water, so you technically comply with wearing a life jacket on the vessel at all times. So ACT advocated very strongly for a test of reasonableness so that if a harbour master or anyone else enforcing a law in the future came across a boatie and some passengers who weren’t wearing life jackets, or one of them for some reason, they could say, “Oh, actually, we understand the law provides for a reasonable reason where you might not be wearing it.” In the legislation, we managed to get some way. The legislation as returned to the House says that if you’re going for a swim, then you don’t have to wear your life jacket. Well, who knew? Because who on earth in New Zealand swims with a life jacket, apart from babies and people learning to swim? But the intention in the bill is still not conveyed in sufficient detail, and we’d like to see further improvements, and we hope the member responsible will take those. While going for a swim might make sense, actually, there are other reasons why you might not be wearing a life jacket at a certain time. You might be taking a raincoat on or off. You might be donning warmer clothing. You might be going to use the boat’s head. So, for that reason, ACT supports the bill as reported back to the House, but we’d also like to see further changes to make it very clear that there must be a reasonable level of responsibility applied to the skipper, so that they can use their judgment at times when that’s appropriate. Thank you, Madam Speaker. ANDY FOSTER (NZ First) (17:13): I’m delighted to rise on behalf of New Zealand First and also as the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which considered this—well, I’m not sure whether I call it the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill or the Maritime Transport (Lifejackets on Recreational Craft) Amendment Bill, because that’s the new name that we have suggested that it has. Look, it’s a delight to actually be able to have a 10-minute call, knowing that I’m not going to have members of my good friends over there in the National Party going to give me grief about how long I’m going to be speaking for and tell me it’s only going to stick with 10 seconds. [Interruption] See, now they’re on to it already. They cannot help themselves! When we have a message to say—we are New Zealand First, and we will have a New Zealand First message to say on any piece of legislation, and we will have to say that because that’s important that we make it our space. While the Opposition are being so supportive of those kinds of message as well, if we were going to be more efficient in this House, both sides of the House need to look at the behaviour, depending on whether it is a Government bill time, when it’s the Opposition who are filibustering, or whether it’s a member’s day, when it’s the National Party who are filibustering. Anyway, it’s a great pleasure to have a 10-minute call on this piece of legislation. I wanted to start off just by thanking the Hon Shane Reti, but also before him the Hon Cameron Brewer for the work that they have done in shepherding this bill through the process. I wanted to thank the select committee, who, as always, were really, really collegial and worked very collaboratively together through a really, really good process—so thank you very much for that. You were thoughtful, you listened well to everybody, and I think we’ve made some really good changes—well, a lot of good and substantial changes to the bill—because it’s quite a different bill to what it started out as. I also wanted to thank the advisers and the officers of Parliament who supported us. But I also wanted specifically to thank the submitters, because the submitters here were people who, in many cases, were actively involved in water safety. So whether it was the coastguards, Water Safety New Zealand, and so on, these are organisations and these are people who have dedicated a lot of their lives to saving other people’s lives on the water. They gave us a lot of really, really good advice. When we went through the process, this bill started off as being targeted at under-15s. These organisations and a lot of our submitters were very, very strong in saying, “Actually, the problem is not under-15s—that is a problem—but the main problem is actually adults.” The data there is absolutely crystal clear, as we’ve already heard. Since the beginning of 2015, eight children lost their lives as a result of drowning off recreational boating craft—eight children. That’s far too many—that’s eight too many—but 180 adults lost their lives in that same time. So it made it very, very clear that children are a problem, but the biggest problem there is actually adults. We had some really, I thought, terrible stories that we heard. You can just imagine the scarring for life which would occur here, where we had children in a boat, wearing life jackets, parents in a boat not wearing life jackets; they got into trouble and the children watched their parents drown. Can you imagine what that does to those children for the rest of their lives? That was avoidable. Those are the things that this legislation is trying to avoid. If we can save those 10 lives a year which the estimate is, that’s worth doing. Now, I kind of heard from ACT a little bit about personal responsibility there. This is a place where the Crown is stepping in to say, “Actually, we want to mandate that you do wear life jackets in these circumstances”, and I’ll come to those circumstances in a moment. But I want you to think about another area where we also mandate that you are required to wear a safety device, and we do that to save people’s lives and to stop them getting injured, and it is a safety belt. We require people to wear safety belts. We don’t say it’s up to you to make the choice; we don’t say it’s personal responsibility; it is everybody’s responsibility. In effect, the State has got that responsibility, but also the State has a huge investment in every one of us, so it’s important for the State that we want our people to survive. We want our people to be part of our community. They are no good to us dead—they are no good to us drowned. So we are taking some responsibility in that area. Anyway, we started out as an under-15s bill. We had strong, informed submissions saying that, actually, we needed to broaden the scope. Actually, we did ask the question of “Should we actually just get this through?” It’s an improvement—we’ll just get the children part of it through, and we won’t go and do the adults as well. And they said, “No. We want you to take the chance”—if you like—“go back out to consider it again, and take it to adults as well.” We took that on. We went back to the Business Committee and said, “Can we have an extension of time?” Now, we were told, line call, that we could actually have said, “Well, we’ll box on and we’ll do it anyway. We will go and expand the scope ourselves.” We felt that that would be the wrong thing to do from a democratic point of view. From a scope-of-the-bill point of view, we felt that that was the wrong thing to do because there would be potentially people who would submit against taking it to adults, who might have not submitted at all or been in favour of children being covered. So we went out again, we think that’s the right thing to do, and guess what happened is that people came back and said, “Actually, we support the change to the bill; we support it covering adults as well.” So we think we have a really, really strong mandate there and I think we gave exactly the right process. There is one other area which we did get in the second round some thought that we could also extend it, and that was the size of the vessels involved. Because we went out, we said 6 metres—we had 6 metres at the water line to start with, which people said, “What’s the water line?” If the vessel if more heavily laden or less heavily laden, that becomes a bit of a challenge. So we said, “Right, OK, well, it’s the bow to the stern.” OK, we leave out the motors and all those sorts of things and we leave out bowsprits. You can’t muck around with bowsprits and that sort of thing. So we were clear about what that is. But, first of all, there was a scope issue there. We had not consulted on that, and that would have been a really unreasonable thing to do, in my view, in terms of scope. Secondly, lower risk: the largest the vessels, the lower the risk. We certainly heard that. Thirdly, you’ve got things like sleeper boards. Well, you know, if you’re sleeping on board a vessel—the larger the vessel, the more likely you are to be sleeping on board, using a kitchen, whatever else it might be. Doing that with a life jacket probably is not a particularly practical proposition, as well. And then there’s also that issue that whatever vessel you’re on, even if you don’t have to wear the life jacket in a larger vessel, you do still at least have to carry sufficient life jackets, and if you’re in that situation where it’s a time of heightened risk—you’re crossing a bar, whatever it is, really rough conditions—then the skipper’s discretion there is to say, “Actually, I want everybody actually wearing a life jacket at the moment, whether you need to, or not.” So we felt those things were well covered. We’re recommending changing the name of the bill, as we said, because, obviously, clearly, it’s not about under-15s anymore; it’s about all ages. So we’re recommending that, as well. We spent a bit of time discussing the definition of a “life jacket”, as you already heard. “Life jacket” is now all PFDs—or personal floatation devices—rather than the other way round where personal floatation devices covered life jackets and everything else, as well. What is clearer, though, is that for each of those devices, you choose which device is most appropriate, whether you’re windsurfing, kayaking—and like Celia Wade-Brown, I’m also a kayaker; in fact, we’ve been kayaking together quite a number of occasions, including across Cook Strait, which is very, very good, but I wouldn’t dream of not wearing a life jacket when I’m kayaking. It’s an appropriate thing to do, and I wear a life jacket. But there are different floatation devices, different life jackets, and different circumstances, and people are able to choose those, but they’ve got to meet the standards that are required. We did have some discussion also about this issue of being under way, whether electronic anchors were OK, whether drifting was OK. We had some concerns from Fish & Game about that, the really slow movement issue—so I think there is an issue there that they might have concerns about. We also had issues around exemptions, which we’ve already heard a little bit about from the ACT Party. The maritime rule also already has a long list of what are pretty common-sense exemptions. I mean, surfing with a life jacket on is going to be a bit strange. We brought in, as you’ve heard, the stand-up paddle boarding in the surf situation because we had an expiring rule, and we thought, “Well, let’s bring it in, so we’re reducing the administrative burden there, in this case, for the Government.” We took on board ACT’s concerns around things like swimming off a vessel. So we said “Look, that’s practical.” We’ve also said, quite specifically, that we expect harbour masters and enforcement agencies to use common sense and discretion when they’re enforcing the by-law. Look, finally, just in terms of implementation, we did want to make sure—and we changed the implementation date to 28 days—there is time to develop a penalty regime to do the public education. A lot of our submitters were organisations who will be actively involved in that public education programme, and I thank them for that. Finally, the point that Tangi Utikere raised about amending the by-law process, it’s not often that Government actually helps local government out and makes life easier. Central government’s very good at loading costs on, and we were quite insistent and we said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” So if their by-laws are inconsistent now with the new law, then they can simply just talk to the director of maritime safety and say, “Look, we want to take those out.”, rather than having to go and consult. That just saves them a bit of money. There’s no point in going to consult on something which is, effectively, ultra vires or illegal. So thank you, everybody, for the work that’s been done. I commend this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Five minutes—Julie Anne Genter. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai) (17:24): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I have to say that I think this might be some of the absolute best work of this entire term of Government. I want to congratulate chair Andy Foster, the member who is now “Hon” Cameron Brewer, who had the bill pulled, and now the Hon Shane Reti, and all the members of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. Normally, I’m a permanent member of that committee, but I haven’t been for most of this bill, just because I’ve been overseeing the Planning Bill on the Environment Committee, but I’m soon to come back to transport—I know you all miss me! My colleague Celia Wade-Brown did excellent work looking after this bill on behalf of the Greens. I think this is such an important issue. I’m sure everyone’s talked about all of the issues, so I probably don’t need to repeat them all, but, as someone who occasionally gets lucky enough to go on a sailboat with my partner’s family who are fond of sailing and don’t own a boat but charter boats, and we take our little children on a boat, never would anyone consider being at sea without wearing a life jacket. But, of course, it just makes sense to make that the default for everyone. I think it’s fantastic that the select committee listened to the submissions, listened to the evidence, and actually has decided to nge the bill to go further, to do what people were asking it to do. This is New Zealand’s Parliament working at its absolute best to get sensible outcomes. I do think it’s been too long. We shouldn’t have had to wait for a member’s bill for this to happen; it should have been on a Government programme. But, as is often the case with these things—like marriage equality—it came from a member’s bill, and it was some of the best work this Parliament has done. So good on members’ bills, and MPs putting in really good, constructive members’ bills and having a select committee that’s actually treating the issue seriously and taking on board and pushing to actually get the changes that are needed for the bill to do the best job it can do. I really hope that we see other changes to support this implementation that means that we can actually reduce our drowning record, which is far, far too high, and it can be much lower. So I commend this bill to the House. Dr CARLOS CHEUNG (National—Mt Roskill) (17:26): I rise in strong support for the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill, which has now changed to the Life Jackets Bill in its second reading. At its heart, this is a bill about protecting lives. It is about making sure that when New Zealanders head out on to the water—whether they are fishing, boating, kayaking, paddle boarding, or simply enjoying a day with their families—that they can come home safely. This bill is about strengthening that chance through a clear, critical, and common-sense measure: the wearing of life jackets. New Zealanders have a deep connection with the water. The water is part of who we are. We are surrounded by it. We grew up around it. We enjoy it. But we also know that our water can be unforgiving. Weather can change within minutes. Calm conditions can become dangerous without warning. Even experienced boaties can find themselves in trouble. This is why this bill matters. It is a critical piece of legislation, it is evidence-based, and, most importantly, it saves lives. One of the highlights of this bill has been the select committee process. I want to acknowledge the work of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which is led by chair Andy Foster. But, above all, I want to thank every person and organisation who took time to make a submission. In this House, we often talk about public participation in the lawmaking process; this law shows exactly why that participation matters. The select committee is not simply another stage in passing legislation. It’s not about just listening to the submitters’ feedback. It’s not about just listening. It is where New Zealanders can bring their expertise, their experience, and sometimes their personal stories to Parliament. It is where legislation is tested, challenged, and ultimately improved. This is exactly what’s happened with this bill. We heard from Water Safety New Zealand, Coastguard NZ, Maritime NZ, emergency responders, boating clubs, and members of the public who care deeply about keeping people safe on the water. Many submitters made one very clear point: if the purpose of this bill is to save lives, then it should not be limited by age. The committee listened. Because of the thoughtful and constructive feedback we received, we agreed to expand the scope of the bill so that it applies to people of all ages. I think this is one of the strongest outcomes of the select committee process. It demonstrates that public submissions are not simply listened to; they genuinely shape legislation. This is democracy working exactly as it should. To everyone who made a submission, thank you. You have strengthened this bill. Your voices have made this legislation better. Because of your contribution, this bill has the potential to save even more lives. As the member for Mt Roskill, I want to speak about what this bill means to my community. I had a chance to visit the Royal New Zealand Coastguard Federation’s base in Auckland and talk about what the bill means to my community. I didn’t realise that many families from Mr Roskill actually enjoy spending time on the water—whether it is fishing, boating, or spending a weekend with families. One of the most popular destinations is Manukau Harbour. The Manukau Harbour is also one of the New Zealand’s most challenging waterways. It consistently tops Water Safety New Zealand’s list of country’s high-risk water safety blackspots. Its powerful tidal currents, shifting sandbanks, narrow channels, and rapidly changing conditions make it one of the highest-risk areas in the country. Many Aucklanders know how quickly conditions can change there. What makes the harbour especially challenging is the unique geographic position. Rescue teams require extra travel time before they are able to reach an incident. When every minute counts, those extra minutes can mean the difference between life and death. This is why wearing a life jacket is so critical. A life jacket keeps a person afloat. It helps them conserve energy. It helps keep their airways above the water. Most importantly, is significantly increases the chance that they will still be alive when the rescuers reach them. Simply put, a life jacket buys time. For those who enjoy the activities in Manukau Harbour, that extra time means everything. This bill recognises that reality. It is not about taking away people freedom to enjoy our waterways; it is about making sure they come home afterward. This legislation is about creating a stronger culture of safety. Changing behaviour does not happen overnight, but Parliament has an important role in setting expectation. We have seen this before. Seatbelts were once resisted. Motorcycle helmets were once debated. Today, those measures are accepted, because they work, and I hope that, in time, wearing a life jacket becomes just as automatic. Before someone starts the engine, before someone leaves the boat ramp, before someone heads out to fish—putting on a life jacket should become second nature, because prevention is always better than rescue. I also want to acknowledge those whose work behind the scenes has helped bring this legislation to where it is today. I want to thank Minister the Hon James Meager, the Hon Cameron Brewer, who was originally the bill carrier, and now the Hon Dr Shane Reti for their commitment and support throughout the development of this bill. Much of the work that goes into this legislation happens away from public eyes. It involves careful policy work, engagement with stakeholders, collaboration across Government, and a genuine commitment to improve outcomes for New Zealanders. I also want to acknowledge the officials: committee staff, departmental advisers, and everyone who has contributed to this legislation. Good legislation is never the work of one person. It is the result of many people working together with a common purpose. Ultimately, this bill is about something very simple. Every life lost in our waterways is one too many. Behind every statistic is a family, a parent, a child, a partner, a friend—people whose life are changed forever by a tragedy that, in many cases, should have been prevented. If wearing a life jacket can give someone a better chance of survival, if this legislation encourages more New Zealanders to wear one, if even one family is spared the heartbreak of losing a loved one, then this bill will have been worthwhile. This is why I support it. It has been strengthened by the public participation, it reflects common sense, it promotes a culture of safety, and, most importantly, it will help save lives. Before I conclude, I would like to acknowledge all the rescue personnel, all the volunteers, and all the water-safety advocates who work tirelessly to save life and keep New Zealanders safe on our waterways. Like Dr Shane Reti mentioned just now, I think this Saturday will be the World Drowning Prevention Day, and there will be multiple events happening in Auckland. I encourage people to go there to have a look, to understand more, to understand how a life jacket can save life—how you can handle when you are drowning; how can you keep calm and ensure you can preserve energy so you can earn more time for the rescuer to come to rescue you. Also, here, I would like to say that I want to thank all the volunteers, because their courage, dedication, and commitment to educate the public in responding when emergencies arise makes a huge difference. It makes the difference between life and death. This will support your effort, and I hope that it will ensure more people will come home safely. I commend this bill to the House. Debate interrupted. Points of Order

CONCEALMENT OF LOCATION OF VICTIM REMAINS BILL—Intention to Vote SCOTT WILLIS (Green) (17:36): I would like to put it on the record that the Greens intended to cast 15 votes against the Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill and Te Pāti Māori intended to cast four votes against the Concealment of Location of Victim Remains Bill. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): That will now be on the Hansard. Bills

Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill Second Reading Debate resumed. RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson) (17:36): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on what was titled the “Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill and is now being renamed the “Maritime Transport (Lifejackets on Recreational Craft) Amendment Bill. Mr Speaker, can I just quickly indulge the House on a different matter, because last week I attended a basketball game in Palmerston North between my two favourite teams, the Manawatū Jets and the Nelson Giants, and I promised my friend Mr Utikere that whoever lost the game had to congratulate the other in the House. And so, I do that tonight. Even though I grew up in Palmerston North, I still strongly support the Nelson Giants and wish them well for this Saturday. Having led the game for three of the four quarters and then going into two sets of extra time, it was a fantastic game, and I congratulate my colleague. So, there, I did it. It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill— ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): He hasn’t turned his back on you, I notice. RACHEL BOYACK: —as MP for Nelson. We, like many parts of New Zealand, are part of a country that is surrounded by water, and where many people spend time out on the water for recreation purposes and for commercial purposes. This is a very good bill, and one which I support. Can I congratulate the various members who have been in charge of the bill, the Hon Cameron Brewer and now the Hon Dr Shane Reti, and, of course, the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, because they did an excellent job, in my view, of listening to submitters. The bill originally was intended for—as it said on the tin—children and young people, but if you look at the statistics, there is very clear evidence to show that the greatest risk on our waters is adults who don’t wear life jackets. Others have mentioned the statistics—I will just briefly, to have it on the record: there have been eight recreational boating fatalities of children under 15 since 2015, compared with 161 for people over 15; and 94 percent of craft-related drowning fatalities in 2024 involved people not wearing a life jacket, and so we know that life jackets save lives. The conversations I’ve had with our local coastguard and with our local harbourmaster is that they support this bill. In Nelson and Tasman, we have two very closely located areas under the two different councils, with separate by-laws; they’re very close to each other, but not 100 percent identical to each other. That’s the case around the country. It’s been left to regional councils to make those determinations. A boatie could be going from one region to another on the same day and they’d have a change of by-law throughout that time. What the harbourmaster said to me is that what would be really helpful would be nationwide consistency. That’s actually the most useful thing to do. Alongside actually making life jackets compulsory—for adults as well as children and young people—what this bill does is it actually puts some nationwide consistency in place, which is going to be really helpful for enforcement but, also, for education purposes. I do want to congratulate those MPs on the committee and MPs across the House who then had conversations around changing the scope of the bill quite considerably for actually taking the time to listen to the feedback. I think this is a change that is probably overdue. On that note, I commend it to the House. DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote) (17:40): I appreciate the tone of this debate, because we have a debate here about a serious issue. There aren’t many bills in Parliament that you can genuinely say save lives, but this is one of them. As my friend and colleague Dr Shane Reti pointed out, we have terrible cases of drownings in New Zealand: 383 drownings since 2000, and roughly 80 percent of those drownings were found to have no lifejackets that were worn. In economics, we talk about causation, and it’s very clear the causation between wearing a lifejacket and saving a life. So this is a serious bill, and it is good to see that unanimous support has been found for this bill in Parliament. I must say, as a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, I’ve learnt a lot, actually, through the select committee process. I’ve learnt about various different definitions of lifejackets, different definitions of boat sizes, what “underway” means and what being anchored means and so forth. It has been a real privilege to understand the current piecemeal rules that we have. The former speaker Rachel Boyack actually just mentioned those. It was very regionalised—regionalised in a way where every region had their own bespoke rules. So if you were a harbourmaster going through from one region to another, oddly enough you’d actually have to, in theory, change the rules as you head from those different regions. So this is about standardisation and about saving lives. I do want to mention the members who have brought this bill to the House: so Dr Shane Reti and Cameron Brewer. But I also do want to mention Alfred Ngaro, because he was, I think, on record as perhaps the first former member to— Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Don’t mention him! DAN BIDOIS: What’s that? Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Don’t mention him! DAN BIDOIS: Oh, Alfred actually raised this as a member’s bill when he was in Opposition. If you guys can recall, he actually wore a lifejacket in the House to raise the profile of this issue. So I do want to acknowledge him, and I wish him luck in his candidacy and for his contribution to this bill. As part of the select committee process, I think Carlos actually spoke really well about how the select committee process worked. I do want to thank those that submitted initially on this bill, because what we heard very clearly is that there was a strong consensus to widen the scope of it. That is why we actually heard from submitters and then took it to the Business Committee to see if we could widen the scope. Then we put it out to more submissions and heard from the public. As a result, we came up with some pretty impressive changes from the select committee process. As has been outlined, those changes include extending the lifejacket mandate for all ages. That is in part to save more lives, because the lives lost at sea are disproportionately older adults—it’s not young children, it’s actually older adults that are disproportionately lost. And when you break it down by gender, it’s actually older men. I think it speaks to the culture of New Zealand, where it’s older men who aren’t wearing lifejackets, and therefore are putting their own lives and the lives of their families at risk. We’ve widened the scope and said that people of all ages will need to be using these lifejackets. We’re keeping the definition and we’ve expanded the definition of “underway”, which is a technical definition that most boaties understand. If you’re anchored, then you don’t need to wear a lifejacket, but if you’re not, you’re expected to be under way, you’re moving, and therefore you are expected to be wearing a lifejacket. There are technical definitions of what is a lifejacket in the bill. As we heard in select committee, there are different flotation devices. We actually had an exhibition of different lifejackets— Andy Foster: Great photos! DAN BIDOIS: Yes—and different devices, and it was really helpful. So I do want to thank Maritime New Zealand for helping to educate select committee members. They have done a really good job of helping to bring us up to speed on the technology and the current rules. As my friend and colleague Dr Carlos Cheung has mentioned, this is about culture change. It’s not just about legislation; it’s about a culture change. Really, what we want to do is use the legislation to drive culture change in this country. Much like when you get into a car—I’m a bit old-fashioned, but when I was raised in this country, it’s just what you do when you get into a car: you put your seatbelt on. What we want in this country is just common practice, when you get in a boat and you’re going out for the day—whether it’s in a lake or in the sea—you just put a lifejacket on; that’s all we want to see in this country. The legislation is there as a guide and as a stick, but as we know, there’s limited resources to police and enforce these laws. They will be enforced, but it is actually about driving a shift in culture in this country. So that is really the intent behind this is to help shift the mood and the culture of this in New Zealand. Other changes I think from select committee have been, actually, extensively explained by Shane Reti. I do just want to talk about and thank the members of the select committee for their hard work—ably led by Andy Foster. Andy’s been really engaged in this process, as I think all of us have been, but I appreciate your contribution, Andy, in pushing and guiding the select committee to the changes that we’ve got here today. I want to thank the submitters, because we had people who submitted on the first round and then had to resubmit, and that’s not easy to get people to do. They’re busy leading busy lives. I want to thank the members of the public who submitted on both occasions as part of that process. As Carlos Cheung mentioned, this is a case of democracy in action. We listened to submitters. People in the public that think that select committees— Celia Wade-Brown: Try it—see how good it is! DAN BIDOIS: How good select committees can be. I think there was a lot of cross-bipartisan work together on this right across Parliament. So I really appreciate members of the public for getting behind and becoming part of this process, because there were a lot of submissions. In the first round of submissions, there were 158 submitters, and then the second round was 128. We did hear submissions on both. We’ve come out of that process with some changes around definitions. We’ve changed the title of the bill. So we don’t have to have a lengthy debate about title and commencement, hopefully. It’s now simply called the “lifejacket bill”. We’ve changed that from the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill. So hopefully that’s clear for the public to understand. Look, there is a desire to get this in place for this summer, so that Kiwis up and down the country, when they’re celebrating the return of the National-led coalition Government, they can actually go about their lives and start enacting this. But this also gives an opportunity for regulators—the likes of Maritime New Zealand—to really start to ramp up the education campaign, because there will be a desire and a need for education and awareness of the new rules. This really literally is a case of fixing the basics and building the future. I know it’s a member’s bill, but it is all part of our Government’s plan to fix the basics and build the future. So it is my pleasure, on behalf of this side of the House, to be commending this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Just before I call the next speaker, Mr Bidois, I didn’t want to interrupt you—quite a liberal use of first names. Just maintain the dignity of the House by using full names, not making it sound like a public bar on a Saturday night. HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert) (17:50): Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to congratulate all those involved in bringing this bill to the House. I dipped into the select committee process, probably to sub in for someone, and this bill was actually being discussed in its early stages, so it’s great to see it here. I wanted to start with a personal experience. When I was about six, my mother got a phone call from a friend, and she worked with a beautiful woman called Alice McGlashan, and her son Sandy had gone missing. He drowned; he and his two friends drowned. It was a terrible learning experience of how that impacts on an entire family. It was just such an incredibly terrible event in what was a very beautiful and strong family, and it caused so much harm. That was, really, a really formative experience for me, because, I think, I was about six, and I just don’t think you really understand at that age what the ramifications are of things like that. But I come from a family that are kind of gung-ho. They’re those kinds of men—particularly in my family—who take risks. In fact, one of my uncles died on top of a roof while trying to fix his electricity during a storm. That wasn’t an uncommon thing in New Zealand culture. They were from a farming background, and you got up and you fixed your electricity, despite the fact that that was completely insane. I think that is true, often, around the culture of boating, as well. People have been brought up in this country to take unnecessary risks, and the consequences can be absolutely devastating. So I was really pleased to see this bill come forward and to grow into something that wasn’t just about children; it was about grown adults, because I think that that’s probably the part of the culture which has just been a little bit out of kilter with reality, and it’s really necessary sometimes to nudge people. And we did that with some other law here. Like, one of the ones that I remember most profoundly was the smoke-free law. We changed the culture in New Zealand by changing the law and making it inappropriate to smoke in a public place, and we probably saved a lot of people’s lives and a lot of tragedy as a result. This is another example of that. I thank the Parliament for doing this. It’s obviously something we don’t do every day. We have to be careful when we’re making rules for people, but this is a good one. Thank you very much. SAM UFFINDELL (National—Tauranga) (17:53): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s good to hear the speeches from members around the House, in support of this bill, and in support of a bill that is going to make lives more safe for people on our water. We are an island nation. A lot of people in New Zealand spend a lot of time in our local lakes, rivers, harbours, out there in the ocean, whether they be swimming, fishing, pleasure boating, and, as some of my colleagues have mentioned—I think Dr Cheung did it very well when talking about Manukau Harbour, how dangerous that can be. I represent Tauranga, which is, as you well know, an area surrounded by water—Tauranga meaning “safe anchorage”—and there are a significant number of pleasure boaters and recreational fishers who are out there on a regular basis. This bill will deliver a significant change and make things quite clear that if you are below 15 years of age, you must wear a life jacket. For someone with young children, I am always very clear that whenever we are out on the water, children are in life jackets—as should every parent and person in charge of a vessel or out there on the water, be making sure that young ones are protected. Now, assuming this bill proceeds all the way through, that will become a legislative requirement for all New Zealanders. You do see a lot of unnecessary deaths in New Zealand—young people in New Zealand, I think it’s the third-highest cause of accidental death, is drowning. Suze Redmayne: We’re a nation surrounded by water. SAM UFFINDELL: We are a nation surrounded by water, that is right. Even in the Rangitīkei, there is water—probably one of our more mountainous electorates— Suze Redmayne: We’ve got the sea. SAM UFFINDELL: But you do have the sea, and I know that you do live on the cliffs. All jokes aside, it is a very serious matter and it is a bill that we are in favour of. I want to congratulate the member in charge, the Hon Shane Reti; also give mention to the Hon Cameron Brewer, who initially placed this bill into the biscuit tin. I also make mention of Andy Foster, who has helped shepherd this through the select committee process. It’s quite clear from the speeches given so far that the select committee process was a thorough one, that the committee did its job very well and have brought back a strong bill to the House for further consideration. I think, as another speaker said, it is quite rare that you do get everyone in the House coming together on stuff. It’s great that we are able to put safety first, instead of politics, and say “Look, this is a sensible thing for New Zealanders. If you are a young person in motion on the water, on a vessel, on a small vessel, under 6 metres, you must wear a life jacket.” That should have been common sense and common place beforehand; now it will be a requirement. Time will tell, as we look at the drowning statistics of New Zealand. But there will be accidents out there. There will be things that happen that are beyond skippers’ control, or weather conditions come up. In time, this legislation will save young people’s lives, and it will, hopefully, also encourage adults on vessels to consider whether they should be wearing a life jacket as well. Dan Bidois: It applies to adults. SAM UFFINDELL: It applies to adults, as well. Suze Redmayne: Life jackets have got a lot less bulky than they used to be. SAM UFFINDELL: Thanks for the conversation! It will save lives—it will clearly save lives. It will also save many families significant anguish. No one wants to lose a loved one, no one wants to lose a loved one through an accident, and no one wants to lose a loved one in an accident where death was avoidable if only some simple safety precautions had been taken. This is what this bill does. Dr Carlos Cheung: Fixing the basics. SAM UFFINDELL: National is fixing the basics and building the future. I commend this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the meal break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m. Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. This early draft is automatically published - it is not yet complete and reviewed.