Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (National) : I am pleased to stand and take a brief call on the preamble to the Mauao Historic Reserve Vesting Bill, which provides for the transfer of the fee simple estate of Mauao historic reserve, better known as Mount Maunganui, from the Crown to Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, and Ngāti Pūkenga, representing the Tauranga Moana iwi. The fee simple estate is to be held on trust by the trustees of the Mauao Trust on behalf of those iwi. The bill gives effect to an agreement to introduce vesting legislation in relation to Mauao signed by the Crown and iwi in August 2007. The bill is reasonably straightforward, as would be expected.

Mount Maunganui, or Mauao, is of significant cultural, traditional, historical, and spiritual importance to Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, and Ngāti Pūkenga. As I say, that is not surprising. The maunga is right there, placed in the middle of their tribal territory—their rohe—and clearly all of their historical and spiritual associations are tied up with that maunga, as no doubt Mita Ririnui would be able to confirm for us if he were to take a call.

I want to comment on just a couple of matters. It is very clear in the preamble that the bill does not form part of any Treaty settlement, and that is interesting in itself. I have seen a note, I think from the Minister’s briefing notes, stating that Mauao was acquired by the Crown in the 1880s and has been administered as a historic reserve since 1981. Of course, we have not been taken into the usual historical elements associated with a Treaty claim, and the information relating to the Crown acquiring Mauao in the 1880s has not been a part of the scrutiny of this bill. But I had a sense from some of the submitters when we were in Tauranga to hear submissions that that particular element, that this maunga had not been made part of their Treaty claims, was the cause of some slight concern—or maybe it was not slight, even. So obviously there is a story behind the acquisition of this maunga back in the 1880s, but that does not form part of the narrative of this bill because there has been an agreement that it is not to form any part of a Treaty settlement. As I say, I think that is a matter of some interest. It may be that when the Tauranga Moana iwi come to finally settle their Treaty claims, we will hear more of the details of the way in which the Crown came into possession of this reserve.

Instead, implicit in the preamble is the notion that the transfer is to enable the building of healthy relationships between the Tauranga Moana iwi and the Crown. That is an interesting concept, as well. We would hope that there is already a relationship between the iwi of that area and the Crown. As all iwi are, these iwi are important in their rohe. One would have hoped there was already a strong enough relationship with the Crown, but this vesting obviously has as its root the notion that the Crown wants to build healthy relationships with the iwi. That is a very fine notion—absolutely—and I hope that it will also be the basis for more energetic activity around the settlement of the iwi’s Treaty claims. To date, even with all the activity that Dr Cullen seems to be energised with, there does not seem to be much progress yet on the Tauranga Moana iwi’s Treaty claim.

Hon MITA RIRINUI (Minister of State) : I thank the Hon Georgina te Heuheu for a very positive contribution to the Committee stage debate on the Mauao Historic Reserve Vesting Bill. I think the point that she made is one that needs to be acknowledged much more strongly throughout this entire legislative process, and that is that the Crown set out to establish positive relationships with the iwi of Tauranga. Although the relationship at the time could be considered to have been reasonably positive, this initiative builds on a lot of the initiatives undertaken by the Crown in decades gone by.

As the member said, Mauao te maunga has a very, very strong history in terms of its association with the iwi of Tauranga Moana, they being Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, and Ngāti Pūkenga. There also is the historic relationship, which is acknowledged in this legislation, with Waitaha, who are of Te Arawa descent. It is also important for this Parliament to know that Mauao te maunga, or Mauao the mountain, has seen many, many iwi from all of the tribal confederations land on his shores, including Tākitimu, Tainui, Te Arawa, and many others who passed through the region at the time of the great migration.

Pita Paraone: What about Ngāpuhi?

Hon MITA RIRINUI: Mātaatua is, of course, one of those peoples. For the satisfaction of the member who wants Ngāpuhi to be mentioned, I can say that Ngāpuhi did visit Tauranga but not for very long. They were moved on and they headed north. They came from Whakatāne. The first recorded hijacking in the history of Aotearoa was when they hijacked the Mātaatua canoe and took it up to the Hokianga. They did not know how to sail into the harbour, and the canoe sunk. It has been there ever since. One member in this Chamber can confirm that that waka is there, and that member is sitting behind me. The Hon Dover Samuels went down and had a look, and it certainly is there.

So I say that there is a connection between all these tribes and this maunga called Mauao, which has this great history. At one time it sat at the back of the Taumata hills, which is a place where a lot of great mountains stand today. There is a history around that, but I will get on to it tomorrow at the third reading. It is actually quite a good story and it is a positive story.

It is important to acknowledge the significance of this legislation and the relationship of the Tauranga Moana iwi to this icon on the landscape of the Tauranga Harbour. After a very long journey and many attempts by the iwi to have the maunga reinstated with them, it finally looks like that will happen—unless someone in this House has the courage to try to stop it, and I would advise against that.

I also acknowledge the contribution made by the local authorities. They are concerned about the ongoing maintenance of the Mauao reserve, and they have very strong management plans in place, in collaboration with local iwi, through the advisory committees, to ensure that the work on Mauao is ongoing, and that whatever cost implications come to hand are dealt with through the council’s annual appropriations. I understand that those figures are quite high. They are beyond the means of the local iwi, but that is something that the iwi and the Tauranga local authorities have come to a decision on.

As I say, the history is very well documented and very strong. It is interesting that annually, on Waitangi Day, 6 February, Tauranga people—not just iwi—climb to the top of this mountain at dawn to celebrate Waitangi Day. In the last 2 years I have seen Bob Clarkson there. I have to give him lessons on how to make an appropriate speech on Waitangi Day, because twice he has got it wrong. Never mind, I am told that he is leaving Parliament—but I do not think it is because of that. However, like everybody else who comes up the maunga, of whatever ethnicity, we are always glad to see him, always glad to have him there. Next time he should come and have breakfast with us, and we will rejoice in the founding of our country. Thank you.

• Preamble agreed to.

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : I want to focus on clause 7, which has been taken out of the bill by the Māori Affairs Committee, and also on substituted clause 8(3). Clause 7, as it was when the bill was introduced, caused quite a deal of excitement in the committee, mainly because the language was inappropriate and badly written. Clause 7 provided that the general law was to continue to apply as if the reserve itself continued to be vested in the Crown. That really was inappropriate, and I considered it almost insulting to the tangata whenua of the district. I am very pleased that clause 8(3) represents a substantial improvement, and I thank my colleagues on the committee for the work they did, because the end product is much better.

Clause 8(3) simply provides that until the reservation of the reserve is revoked—I think under the Reserves Act 1977—the Crown continues to have certain rights and obligations, and that those rights and obligations are akin to those of the holder of a fee simple estate. The very reason why the clause is expressed in that way is that the Crown continues to have obligations in relation to occupational health and safety, building, and rating liability legislation. So the select committee has done an admirable job in focusing on the words and expressing them in a more felicitous manner. As a result, the legislation is much improved.

That kind of diligence and effort, undertaken by the Māori Affairs Committee, can, of course, be contrasted with what happens with regard to much of the other legislation that goes through the system in this place—for example, the Electoral Finance Bill. That bill went through the Justice and Electoral Committee, and the Labour members paid absolutely no attention to the words. As one can see, the net result is legislation where the Labour Party has shot itself in the foot with a howitzer, and that will become very apparent over the next few weeks. It is a recipe for litigation. That is what Labour wanted, and that is what it has got. [Interruption] I hear my friend Mr Woolerton from New Zealand First. Well, he is no babe in the woods, no innocent, either. He is one of the guilty people, because he could have focused on the words, as his friend on the Māori Affairs Committee did. Those members may look, from this angle, to be like peas in a pod, but I can tell the committee they are not. Mr Paraone is a very diligent and hard-working person, who focuses on the words. Although I like Mr Woolerton immensely and think he is a fine chap and a good bloke, the reality of the matter is that last year he did not focus on the words in the Electoral Finance Bill, and he is going to pay the penalty for that.

The only other thing I want to say is that clause 13, “Rule against perpetuities does not apply”, is one that members will be very interested in. The rule against perpetuities often appears in legislation. I had a brief discussion with my friend Mrs te Heuheu, and I think we both agreed that the relevant provision is section 6 of the Perpetuities Act 1964. As I understand it, if a disposition is made, the perpetuity period applicable to the disposition under the rule against perpetuities is to be a period not exceeding 80 years. Of course, what we want here is a disposition that is not affected by the rule against perpetuities, and we therefore have a particular provision that the rule against perpetuities will not apply. That is very interesting, and I am sure Mr Chauvel could lecture the Committee for hours on that particular provision. It is necessary just to tidy up one minor matter.

The rest of Part 2 is consequential on the vesting of the reserve. Some provisions deal with what is to happen if reserve status is revoked, and another provision states that the vesting itself is to have no effect on certain pre-existing rights. Other than that, it is all pretty standard stuff.

I am pleased the select committee did what the Justice and Electoral Committee failed to do with regard to the Electoral Finance Bill—that is, to focus on the words in the bill and tidy them up.

Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (National) : I too will take just a brief call on Part 2, and absolutely support everything that my colleague Chris Finlayson has talked about. He is right in saying the main discussions in the Māori Affairs Committee focused on clause 7, which, in the original bill, was the source of great pain to the Tauranga Moana iwi. It is amazing how what appears to be a very simple provision, just a few words, can cause great angst and pain. When the select committee went to Tauranga to hear submissions from the Tauranga Moana iwi that fact was very, very obvious to us. I repeat the words in clause 7, which my colleague stated, and which were taken out of the bill: “For the purposes of any enactment … Mauao historic reserve must be treated as if the fee simple estate in the reserve were still vested in the Crown.” Although clause 5 had stated, quite clearly, that the estate was to be vested in the Mauao Trust, the iwi took great umbrage at this vesting and called it a Clayton’s vesting, because on the one hand the bill stated that the reserve was being vested in the trust, but, on the other hand, it had this phrase—“as if … the reserve were still vested in the Crown.” My colleague Chris Finlayson made reference to the fact that the Māori Affairs Committee worked very diligently to find a set of words that took that pain away. I suppose that in Parliament now and again, fortunately, we get legislation to work on for which politics really do not apply. This bill is an example of such legislation.

Over 30 years of Treaty history and Treaty settlements in this country, a sea change has occurred in the understanding of many New Zealanders about the association of iwi to their maunga, or mountain; their awa, or river; and their sea or lake. Clearly the maunga, in respect of Mount Maunganui and Tauranga Moana, has huge meaning. I am grateful to the member on the other side of the Chamber Mita Ririnui for giving us some of the historical association, which I certainly was not aware of but which I had alluded to in my speech on the preamble. This bill was one of those occasions where all of the members of the select committee, both Government and Opposition, could see that it was possible to have some different wording, while still making sure that the reserve is vested in the iwi but that the obligations that should remain with the Crown and with the Tauranga District Council would be accommodated. So, hopefully, the work that has been done by the committee has resulted in something that those iwi can now accept. Hopefully, they will be present here as the week goes on, when we do the third reading, to support the work that has been done.

As I say, politics in this place are sometimes completely out of place, and to play politics in relation to this bill would have been totally out of place. The members on the Māori Affairs Committee sometimes come to that conclusion a lot faster than those on other select committees. I am very pleased that we were able to make some accommodation to better—[Interruption] Of course, our own member Bob Clarkson was on the committee, and so was Chris Finlayson. As I say, there is a tendency, when it matters—and it matters for Tauranga Moana iwi—that there is a clear responsibility to keep the politics out of the situation. At times like this it is a great pleasure to be on a committee that works in that way.

I just make reference to one of the other things that I think made it sensible to make the changes. When we look at what happened with Bastion Point and Ōkahu Bay for Ngāti Whātua, we see that a form of words and a vesting was found back in the 1990s, whereby the reserve was vested in Ngāti Whātua, and all other things were taken care of in much the same way.

Hon MITA RIRINUI (Associate Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations) : Once again I find myself standing after that member has said everything I wanted to say about the positive aspects of this bill. That is very good, and the unsuccessful interjection by the member for Te Tai Tokerau does not perturb me at all over what I have to say about Part 2 of the bill. But the Hon Georgina te Heuheu did make one very strong and salient point, which was that this transfer of the Mauao historic reserve had been described at one point as a Clayton’s return because of the manner in which the bill was worded at that time.

Of course, we can pin labels on just about everything, but what is important in this case is that Tauranga iwi in 2001 approached the Crown through the Attorney-General, who was then the Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, and the local list MP, the Hon Margaret Wilson—now the Speaker—requested a serious hearing for the return of the estate to the iwi of Tauranga Moana. Their request did not fall on deaf ears; in fact the Minister at that time summoned officials and instructed them to make this return of the estate happen.

A lot of events followed that instruction until we got to the stage where we were looking at the deed of transfer, and the wording at that time, as described by the previous speaker, offended some of the representatives of Tauranga Moana, and was given the label “Clayton’s return”. We can call it anything we like: we can call it a “Mita Ririnui return”, a “Georgina te Heuheu return”, or a “Bob Clarkson return”. The fact is that the key word is “return”—and that is what the people wanted. But words are important; as Barack Obama would say, words do matter. So there was debate around whether the words were offensive, and by and large a number of people thought they were.

But the changes in the wording basically say the same things as the words that were considered to be offensive were attempting to say. They were attempting to protect the trustees of the Mauao Trust to whom the estate would be invested, and that is important. Maybe some people overlooked that very important fact but it is important to protect trustees, and the Crown was prepared to do that and recommended specific wording to ensure that it was clear that the Crown at the end of the day had the obligation and responsibility as if it were the owner—it did not say it was, it said “as if” it were. So the protections, as far as we were concerned, initially did extend to the point where the Mauao Trust was protected on those particular matters.

But I have to say that to some degree, the select committee in Tauranga was misled. There were statements made that the Crown refused to listen to the concerns and was not prepared to make changes. Crown Law came back with a recommended change, which was put before the iwi in Tauranga and—I need to say this—was unanimously rejected by those who wanted the words changed. The funny thing is that the changes that have now been accepted are not dissimilar to those that were recommended by Crown Law. But that is by the by; that is unimportant. The important thing is that people now feel quite comfortable with the changes and are prepared to support the Mauao Historic Reserve Vesting Bill wholeheartedly.

I want to move on to the next point around the acknowledgment of the ancestral associations of Waitaha. From the outset it was assumed—in fact, it was believed—that Waitaha would be included in the certificate of title for Mauao. But considerable debate and considerable resistance developed as a result of that, and Waitaha, being the people they are, looked at the big picture and said it was not about them, it was about the estate, it was about everybody reconnecting with this historical icon, and that the management of the estate going forward was given high priority. So they were prepared to step back from that acknowledgment in terms of being recognised on the certificate of title, as long as their historical association with the estate was acknowledged in the bill—and that has been done.

I am sure that when Waitaha are sitting at the table with the Crown to negotiate the settlement of the historic claims, this particular matter will come up, as it will with all other iwi of Tauranga, because, as the Hon Georgina te Heuheu pointed out earlier on, this is not a Treaty settlement, nor has it an any time been considered to be a Treaty settlement. As she described, this is the Crown building positive relationships with the iwi of Tauranga and transferring the estate back to their ownership in fee simple title, acknowledging that at some time in the future when Tauranga Moana iwi are sufficiently prepared, they will actually deal with the matters around their historical claim, and so will Waitaha. Kia ora.

BOB CLARKSON (National—Tauranga) : When this Mauao Historic Reserve Vesting Bill concerning the Mount came up for debate I took a lot of interest in it. I joined the select committee that was dealing with the issue and I took an active interest in making sure we had a lasting agreement. It concerned me—and I spoke out about it—that the original layout of the bill was a bit of a Clayton’s deal. I was most concerned that this bill would be signed into law and then the debate about ownership would start all over again—we discussed that at the select committee—and go on for the next 20 years. I say that if we are going to do these settlements, let us do them in such a way that they last in perpetuity—that is a big word for me. I believe that with small alterations such as the ones the select committee has recommended, we will have a great end result. As I have said, I am happy to have been a part of the select committee and part of getting a good result whereby both the Māori groups and the Government are happy.

This bill protects people’s rights to use the walkways, etc. without cost. I believe I have been part of building a healthy relationship between the Crown, Māori groups, and the public in sorting out this bill. If this was a deal in the public sector I would say we had a willing seller and a willing buyer. Everybody walks away happy. I congratulate the people involved on the select committee, from both sides of the Chamber, and all outside parties. Thank you.

PITA PARAONE (NZ First) : Tēnā koe, Mr Chairman, tēnā tātou. Āe, engari he hōnore nui tēnei ki te aru i a “Bob the Builder”!

[Greetings, Mr Chairman, and greetings to us all. Yes, it is a great honour indeed to follow “Bob the Builder”!]

I am just acknowledging the privilege I have of following the previous speaker. Given his notice to the general public that he will be turning his back on this place, I want it to be recorded that during his 3 years as the member for Tauranga we can honestly say that he has done something for the people of Tauranga by giving his support to this Mauao Historic Reserve Vesting Bill. I do not want to hear anyone deride the honourable member from Tauranga as not having done anything during his time here. I acknowledge the support that he gave to this bill.

In terms of the previous speaker’s allusion to the omission of clause 7, quite clearly when this matter came to the Māori Affairs Committee the parties involved—particularly the Māori parties—were concerned about the interest that the Crown would still maintain in this reserve should the original wording remain. To the credit of all the members of the Māori Affairs Committee, they heard the submissions made by the submitters and took on board the concerns they had.

I want to signal to any claimant group or any Māori group negotiating with the Crown that if it does not agree with what is being proposed, then I suggest that it does not sign anything until it does agree. In this case the agreement had been signed up to. However, in spite of that, the parties came to the select committee and expressed their disquiet about the agreement. Fortunately, as a result of the collegiality amongst the members of the Māori Affairs Committee, we were able to revisit the very concerns the parties had, and the bill we are discussing at this moment is the result of that agreement.

I also make reference to clause 14, which gives due recognition to Waitaha. We heard during the hearing of submissions a very impassioned plea from representatives of the Waitaha iwi group. In spite of their being the only people in the room who would have liked to see Waitaha get a bigger representation in this bill than they have now, I think it is to their credit that they stood their ground and that they did so without any malice. At the end of the day history will show their descendants that they represented their iwi very well and that they did so without any malice. However, we have to take on board the history of that relationship. We have to take on board the standing of Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, and Ngāti Pūkenga in relation to this very sacred reserve. As a consequence of that we have clause 14, which gives due recognition to Waitaha.

I think that this bill is an example of how the members of a select committee, although belonging to different political parties and bringing together different political views, can actually work together and produce a bill that has the support of all of our different political philosophies. I commend my fellow members of the Māori Affairs Committee who did so. Kia ora.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA (Minister of Māori Affairs) : Tēnā koe. The Mauao Historic Reserve Vesting Bill is significant legislation that transfers ownership of Mauao to Tauranga Moana iwi, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, and Ngāti Pūkenga. It also recognises the historical connections and ancestral associations of Waitaha. The bill recognises the enormous significance of Mauao to the tangata whenua. It recognises the mana of Mauao, and it raises the profile of Tauranga Moana Māori.

This bill will vest the fee simple estate of the Mauao historic reserve in the trustees of the Mauao Trust to hold on behalf of Tauranga Moana iwi. The trustees will be the registered proprietors of Mauao, and the Tauranga City Council will continue to administer and manage the Mauao historic reserve in consultation with the iwi, who are represented on its Mauao steering group. The trustees will own Mauao, but the Crown will continue to bear the burden of any legal or financial responsibility. This is currently divulged to the Tauranga City Council under the Reserves Act. Tauranga Moana iwi and Waitaha are represented on the Tauranga City Council’s steering group. Together these measures will ensure that Mauao is returned to the tangata whenua. Mauao will continue to be accessible to all New Zealanders, and it will be protected from commercialisation or alienation.

I commend the members of the Māori Affairs Committee, especially the chairman, Dave Hereora, in relation to the consistency and the dedication that they have shown in bringing cognisance and true recognition to nationhood. At times platitudes were thrown around, but the practices were forthright. The thought that Bob Clarkson will roam up at every Treaty day is certainly something, and it will be a sight to watch alongside Mita Ririnui. The fact that Ngāpuhi came down and went back with the waka is an issue. It is a beacon of history, and it is certainly a point of contact for our people as a nation. I again commend the select committee, the submitters, and all those people who have been involved, especially the iwi. Kia ora tātou.

• Part 2 agreed to.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN (Minister for Transport Safety) on behalf of the Minister of Labour: I move, That the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. It is a pleasure to speak on behalf of the Hon Trevor Mallard, the Minister of Labour. I intend to move that the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and that the committee report finally to the House on or before 22 July 2008 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting except during oral questions, and during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 192 and 195(1)(b) and (c).

This bill amends the Holidays Act 2003 in relation to the transfer of public holidays for employees whose work shift crosses midnight. It will ensure that when a shift spans 2 days, at least one of which is a public holiday, an agreement can be reached by an employer and an employee so that the public holiday can be recognised on one whole shift.

This legislation is needed following a recent Supreme Court decision that found that an employer and employee cannot agree to transfer a public holiday from a day listed in the Holidays Act to another day. The Holidays Act was intended to give employers and employees the flexibility to agree to transfer a public holiday from a day listed in the Holidays Act. This could be for reasons of cultural or personal significance or for reasons of convenience.

The current situation of not being able to transfer public holidays is having a particularly disruptive effect on shift-based operations. In these businesses, many employees whose work shift crosses midnight are not able to enjoy a full shift as a public holiday. Many shift-based operations are experiencing increased production and payroll costs; for example, business compliance costs are increased where employees’ wages have to be calculated at differing rates for an entire shift when the shift crosses into a public holiday.

Currently, where a business chooses to close down on the public holiday, employees may be required to work up to midnight when the public holiday starts and to complete their shift from midnight at the end of the public holiday. Such arrangements are not reflective of the overall intent of the Holidays Act to promote balance between work and other aspects of employees’ lives.

This bill responds to the needs of businesses that operate over 24-hour periods, and to the needs of their employees, to ensure that employers will have the flexibility to transfer a public holiday in line with their business needs and that employees working shifts that span 2 days are able to enjoy the application of a public holiday to one whole shift. The bill provides that where an employee’s shift spans 2 calendar days and one of those days is a public holiday, an employer and employee can enter into a genuine agreement to transfer the public holiday to a 24-hour period that begins or ends on the public holiday if the employee is due to work a shift in that 24-hour period.

The bill also provides for situations where an employee’s shift spans 2 public holidays; for example, an employee who starts work on Christmas Day and finishes on Boxing Day. In this situation an employer and employee can agree that two separate periods of 24 hours are to be treated as public holidays if each period starts or finishes during those public holidays. These provisions reflect the intent behind allowing transfer while also maintaining a connection to the actual public holidays.

The bill requires that agreements concerning the transfer of public holidays be in writing. This will ensure that employers and employees are clear about their public holiday arrangements. The bill also clarifies that the period agreed to be treated as a public holiday will be a public holiday whether or not the employee actually works during that period. The provisions of the Holidays Act that apply to public holidays will apply to that period. Employees who do not work in the period that has been agreed as the public holiday are able to enjoy a full shift off as a paid public holiday. Employees who work in the period will receive time and a half for the entire shift and an alternative holiday. This ensures that agreements to transfer public holidays do not lead to a reduction in the number of paid public holidays that would otherwise be available to the employee.

The bill makes consequential amendments to the Holidays Act in respect of the definition of a public holiday and the provisions that were intended to allow for transfer of public holidays. The bill amends the definition of a public holiday in the Holidays Act, to clarify that a public holiday is a day listed in the Holidays Act and that if there is a transfer agreement, a public holiday will include the period agreed to be treated as a public holiday. As this bill applies only to employees whose work period crosses midnight, the bill clarifies that a transfer of public holidays can occur only in these limited circumstances.

This bill responds to the needs of employers and employees. For this reason it has the support of both Business New Zealand and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. It reflects the Labour-led Government’s policy to provide holiday and leave entitlements that are appropriate to accommodate increased diversity in working patterns. It also responds to the diverse work-life circumstances that are common in New Zealand, while balancing the needs of employers and employees. I commend this bill to the House.

KATE WILKINSON (National) : I rise to support the first reading of the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill. This amendment to the Holidays Act 2003 is required following a recent Supreme Court decision that found that an employer and an employee could not agree to transfer a public holiday from a day listed in the Act to another day.

This is a very narrow bill; the issue is limited. It is not a wide-ranging bill by any means. As the Minister has stated, it amends the definition of public holiday to include, by agreement, a period of 24 hours agreed to be treated as a public holiday but to exclude part of a day agreed to be treated as not being part of a public holiday. Then it gives the example of an employee who is to work from 10 p.m. on 24 April to 6 a.m. on Anzac Day, and from 10 p.m. on Anzac Day to 6 a.m. on 26 April. The employee and the employer can agree to treat the time from 10 p.m. to midnight on Anzac Day as not being part of a public holiday in exchange for treating a period of 24 hours that finishes on Anzac Day as a public holiday. So the bill allows parties to treat one entire shift that is split over 2 days, where one day is not a public holiday, as if that shift were entirely worked on a public holiday. Under this amendment the employee and the employer can sit down and reach an agreement, and we trust them to do that.

Just by way of background, I tell members that the regulatory impact and compliance costs statement to the original Holidays Bill, before it was dramatically altered at the select committee, stated in 2003: “The Holidays Act 1981 does not reflect current working patterns or social and economic developments since its enactment. The Act has attracted criticism from the public, and employer and employee groups over recent years for being complicated and difficult to understand and apply.” It stated further: “During the year to 30 September 2002, 59,393 (26%) enquiries to the Employment Relations Service infoline related to holidays.” That was 5 years ago. In fact, the select committee report stated: “By majority we recommend substantial redrafting of the bill to make it explicit in what circumstances the public holiday entitlements would arise, and to clarify the intent of the bill.”

The general policy statement overview at that time explicitly stated: “The Holidays Bill implements Government policy by providing entitlements that are easy to understand and easy to apply.” Well, that did not work, because it is back here again for more clarifying amendments. In fact, at the time of the 2003 bill the Minister actually admitted “the current Holidays Act is an extremely difficult piece of legislation to apply and to interpret. Areas previously left to the courts to interpret and develop have been dealt with in the bill. That will mean that users will not have to refer to the numerous judicial decisions that supplement the current legislation.”

The Minister back then heralded the original legislation as providing “certainty, clarity, and consistency”. All I can say to that is “Yeah, right!”, because here we are again, a few years later, back before Parliament with amendments to improve that very same legislation in order to provide certainty, clarity, and consistency. Let us hope that it works this time—third time lucky.

A few years back Minister Cosgrove himself vowed solemnly in this House that the bill provided clarity, but here we are again years later, after a Supreme Court decision saying that there is no clarity, and the legislation is trying to fix it. I have to say that I prefer the judgment and the wisdom of the three Supreme Court judges.

With a background like that, one would reasonably expect a better, less complicated bill, and one that is easier to understand. But, no, what we got was arguably much worse. We got a bill that had to go to the highest court in our land, the Supreme Court, which made statements such as “Parliament can hardly have intended to create this potential for confusion and disputes.”, but it did. This Parliament, under this Labour-led Government, has created such confusing, difficult, complex legislation that no one seems to be able to understand it, and now it is introducing a bill to fix one part of that original complex, difficult legislation.

As Business New Zealand stated, clearly the Holidays Act is not up to the job. This case has now been through multiple courts. With two split decisions and another court ruling to come, and with the latest ruling by the Supreme Court, at 49 pages long, it shows how defective the Holidays Act is. “Employers want the flexibility to meet business needs and employees want to be compensated for their part in achieving that. Employees also want the flexibility to choose the holiday arrangements they want. The Holidays Act should make it straightforward and simple for them to come to agreements that suit them both.”

But this is not the first time that this holidays legislation has had to be amended because of unintended consequences. The Holidays Act originally came into force on 1 April 2004. Less than 6 months later—that very same year—there was an amendment, the 2004 amendment, to correct some unintended consequences. I have to ask whatever happened to “do it once, do it right”. If we read the debate back in 2004, we see that even New Zealand First agreed, and stated: “We went through this in 2003 and got it wrong by quite some. It was far worse than we in New Zealand First estimated, and I think it was far worse than many of the submitters who were concerned by the 2003 legislation thought. Now, this 2004 bill has tidied up two fairly minor parts of the legislation, but we should be dealing with the whole thing. Let us do it once and do it right.” That was what New Zealand First members stated. They also stated: “The holidays legislation in this country is in a mess. It is absolutely in a mess. Employers do not understand it, employees do not understand it.” I would have to say that they were right, and that after all this time—4 to 5 years later—nothing seems to have changed.

In that debate it was said that the Holidays Act that had been passed by the Labour Government in that last year was such a shambles that in the following week it was before the Employment Court to try to get a ruling on how to deal with the Act, and we are here again. It is not before just the Employment Court. This case had gone right up to the Supreme Court before this Labour Government realised that it was just plain wrong. It got the bill wrong, it had the chance to fix it once, it did not, and now it is trying yet another piecemeal fix to one part of the Act, because of unintended consequences due to sloppy drafting and because of one case.

But this is not the only problem caused by the complexity of the holidays legislation. Why does the Government not fix the rest of it? As one employment specialist stated in May last year: “Rather than simplify the law relating to holidays, the Holidays Act has resulted in an increase in litigation as employers, employees and unions all endeavour to come to terms with interpretation of differing sections of the Act.” Nothing seems to have changed. Will this bill actually make much difference? Hopefully, it will fix one of the problems, as highlighted in the Supreme Court case, but there are other problems that it does not even mention. We are back in Parliament again, 4 or 5 years later, trying to fix something that has gone wrong, when we should be debating other legislation in this House. We are trying to right yet another unintended consequence that has been foisted upon us by this Labour-led Government.

National will be supporting this bill going to a select committee for scrutiny. We hope that it will get proper scrutiny. We hope even that there may be some opportunity for change—some opportunity to further clarify what is most complex and confusing legislation. Employers and employees alike need and deserve legislation that has certainty. They need to know what the legislation says. They should not have to resort to legal processes all the way up to the Supreme Court for an interpretation of what the legislation says and means. Labour has got it wrong. Is it able to get it right, third time lucky? Let us hope so. National will be supporting this bill at its first reading.

Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) : I listened to the previous speech with amazement, really, because this is pretty simple legislation. We have the two major organisations in New Zealand that represent employees and employers, Business New Zealand and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, both saying that they support this bill. We have National members saying that they will vote for it, but the member Kate Wilkinson then proceeded to spend the next 9½ minutes saying how terrible the Holidays Act really was, what a mess it was, and that nobody could understand it. But there was not a single word about what is wrong with giving people 4 weeks’ annual leave, or with giving them public holidays with some payment, which they have to be paid if they work on a public holiday. This simple bill, the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill, deals with a situation that has been around for as long as I can remember, since the days when we had awards and we had the Holidays Act—way back in the 1980s, when I started out as a practitioner in industrial relations.

There has always been a little bit of confusion around shift work, what it means, and what the entitlements were, but in the good old days, when we had awards and national agreements, that confusion just was not there. It has come about as a result of the fragmentation of the labour market. A number of people in New Zealand do not have any confusion, because they work under collective agreements and it is spelt out there pretty clearly. What becomes difficult is when we have about 80 percent of people working on individual agreements. There is no guidance for those people, so all sorts of arguments can occur. The National Party is saying that we should have even more confusion and more flexibility for people to sell off their holidays for dollars and cents. That is the National Party’s policy. Why did that member not state it? Are those members ashamed of it? But that is what they are on the record as saying.

I think that Dr Wayne Mapp was sitting on the select committee when this legislation was put through, so he will be able to elaborate in his speech about all the suggestions he made in this particular area to have it changed. He will be able to elaborate on the National Party’s minority report from that legislation when it came out of the select committee. Was there one? I doubt it. I doubt whether anybody on the select committee at that stage from either of the two main parties or from any other party would have thought that this would have caused any sort of confusion. But sometimes we have lawyers, companies, and people out there that want to take it to court, and that is what happens. Then we have the Supreme Court come up with a decision that says: “Sorry, you need to clarify the law.” We are doing that. It is simple, and it will be done in the select committee in a simple and straightforward manner. We have had employers and employees agree that this is the way to fix it, so I do not think that there should be any fuss whatsoever on that select committee in resolving this matter.

I am keen to hear, and I am sure that many workers are also keen to hear it, what the National Party actually means when it says that the Holidays Act is a mess, that it is confusing, and that it is difficult to understand. What will National members do in terms of their policy to supposedly fix it? I am looking forward to hearing about that, as I am sure many other people are, because we know what they actually mean. They want to be able to have employers and employees negotiating all sorts of weird and wonderful arrangements that, in the end, are about selling holidays for cash. Selling holidays for cash would mean that people would have to work even longer and harder in New Zealand, but they would get only a few dollars. That is the National Party’s policy on holidays. Let us hear it up front and in a speech in the House from National, instead of the waffle we just heard from its so-called spokesperson who just sat down.

PAULA BENNETT (National) : Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill 2008. As has been stated previously, this bill is needed to try to amend the Act, because the Act has been unclear for the courts once it was taken there by Air New Zealand in relation to how the company could transfer the Act’s provisions. As my colleague Kate Wilkinson clearly stated, we are supporting that because it is simply just an anomaly that needs to be fixed and needs to be clearer.

But I find it incredibly ironic that we are passing a bill to allow employees and employers to speak to each other. We are passing an amendment to the Act that will allow them to speak to each other. The Act that was passed in 2003 meant that employees and employers could not sit down to have a conversation and sort this out themselves. That is the fact. That is what the courts have declared; they have said that employees and employers cannot sit down together. By all means, if it makes it simpler for members on the other side, I can quote from the Bills Digest. It states quite clearly in the background to this bill that under its provisions employees and employers can sit down and discuss what will work best for them, and make a decision that works for both employees and employers as far as transferring hours over and within a 24-hour period.

Because the Government got it wrong in 2003, this House has to go through this rigmarole now. In the last 5 years there have been nine amendments to the Employment Relations Act and to the Holidays Act. On nine occasions we have tried to fix this legislation, and on nine occasions this House has had to go through changes to try to fix mistakes that were made originally. We have sat in this House on nine occasions and gone through this process—and we will not even go into the costs incurred and the time taken in this House—so I ask why we do not fix it, once and for all. Why do we not actually do something that will fix this legislation, once and for all? We are constantly hearing about the problems that we have with relevant daily pay. How senseless it is that we now have to pass legislation that will go some way towards solving some of the mess that was put through in 2003, but that will not solve it altogether. This bill is simply about the fact that we need to look at relevant daily pay and what that means for employers and employees.

Why do we not fix this Holidays Act properly and do something? We could start naming the organisations that have been talking about that. We can look at the increase in sickness and in the sick leave that people have had to take. There is absolutely no question that in many cases, particularly for those businesses that work 24/7 or that do not work between the hours of nine and five, it is often better for an employee to be off sick on a particular day than to be at work. Because of relevant daily pay, there is a good chance they will get more money. The meat industry has certainly mentioned it, and the Hospitality Association, the Motor Trade Association, and the health sector have been struggling under these provisions, as have manufacturing plants and meat-processing industries. It really is something that needs to be sorted out. This House could have taken the opportunity to do that, but the legislation has been completely ignored—much to its detriment.

Let us talk about including incentive-based payments that are a regular part of an employee’s pay. Why not include those incentive-based payments? They should be included. Those incentive-based payments, which are a regular part of an employee’s pay, should absolutely be included in that relevant daily pay. But those payments that are not regular—that are sporadic—should not be included. We are hearing from people that it is too complex and too difficult to work out what an actual relevant daily pay is, and there is a simple reason for that. Why do we not exclude payments for overtime that are not a regular part of the employee’s pay, and exclude any one-off payments that are exceptional? If we did that, we might see a simple calculation so that everyone would know exactly where they stood and what they were able to do. The key to why relevant daily pay is not working is that it differs substantially from day to day, in many circumstances. The relevant daily pay is not consistent and it differs substantially. That is an important point for us to get across, and certainly one that employers and employees are struggling with—what it means for a certain day when they may get incentive payments or they may not. I think it is quite simple and this House could have sorted it out as far as this amendment is concerned. But, again, we are not taking the opportunity to do it right. This is the ninth time the Act has been amended, and I suppose we will be back again to try to sort out this mess.

Under this mess costs have gone up considerably, with no corresponding productivity lift. I think that is what is of most concern to our economy at the moment and in the questions we need to be asking. So far, it has been all talk by this Government. Certainly, employers are reporting an increase in absenteeism, and some employers are reducing incentive payments. I think it is an absolute crime that those employees who are perhaps in most need are seeing a reduction in incentive payments and bonuses because of a relevant daily pay component. We are also hearing from some employers that employees are not getting the same opportunities for overtime, because the provisions are confusing and add complexity to that relevant daily payment. So let us be clear: the Act leaves employees with an incentive to take a sickie on the day that they would earn the most money—the day on which the relevant daily pay would be the most.

That is of some concern when we talk about the economy and what this country needs in order to turn around. We can see the hope that we can raise our productivity and get ourselves to a situation where 79,000 people a year are not leaving New Zealand and moving to Australia for better conditions. We are constantly asked—certainly on this side of the House—why they get paid more there, and we have to sit down and explain productivity and what that means to people. In my opinion, here we have a classic example that is certainly not helping and that is certainly not working towards productivity in this country; it is actually working against it. There is an opportunity right now for this House to fix it. This is an opportunity for the Government to listen, and maybe we can discuss it in the select committee because it is something that is vitally important to this country at the moment, particularly when we are talking about that sort of level of productivity and what that means.

This amendment has been supported across sectors. It is not just one or two rowdy people who are saying “Oh, a few of my employees are taking sickies.” This is occurring across industries, across sectors, and across the country. It is affecting plants down at the bottom of the South Island, and it is going right past Auckland and up into Northland as well. The health sector has been quite detrimentally affected by this. Who knows—we might have been able to pay our junior doctors more if we had seen not quite such a mess with this sort of legislation, which is confused and complex, and which has made everything else complex.

The Act’s requirement to pay bonuses earned, had employees not been sick—and this includes a productivity bonus that can amount to an extra $10 an hour in some plants—has been a reality for some people. Do we support the bill to give that sort of example? Certainly there is the example in the bill, for anyone who may be having to listen to this—perhaps it is some form of punishment to have to listen to the House tonight but they may be interested in the sorts of examples used—of employees working from 10 p.m. on 24 April to 6 a.m. on Anzac Day, and from 10 p.m. on Anzac Day. So it refers to those who are doing shift work, obviously. It means that the employer and the employee can sit down and agree that they will make the public holiday that 24-hour period from, say, 10 p.m. the night before the public holiday through until 10 p.m. the following night. The shift workers get their 8 hours, or their 8 hours plus overtime, if it comes to it. They agree on that day being it, and that saves having to cut pays in half for those who do perhaps only 6 hours on the actual day. So it is a little bit complex.

It is not that sexy, quite frankly, but it is something that we need to fix up, because it was not done in 2003. We have already wasted the courts’ time on it. We have seen the courts having to go through it. We have seen the major shareholder for Air New Zealand having to put money into it, and to get lawyers so that it can go through it, and now of course the House has to go through it. We have to go through it in the select committee. It is a bit of a waste of time. It is absolutely ridiculous. I do not think we will be back here doing another amendment to this Act, because I do not think we will have to worry about that. Labour will not be there to do yet another one of its things. No, there will not be any abolishing and there will not be any of the scary talk and everything, such as “You can throw around vulnerable workers all you like.” It will not be true. So we will not get into the debate on how utterly ridiculous some of the comments have been from the other side; we will just settle with that. It is a shame that we are not fixing everything, it is a shame that we are back here for the ninth time, having to look at the Employment Relations Act and the Holidays Act, but let us hope that with National’s support we do get it right.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) : I listened to that speech with some degree of interest, but I cannot work out what the hell the member, Paula Bennett, was on about. Maybe I am a bit slow today, but she was going on about relevant daily pay—clearly she wants to cut it back; clearly she wants to reduce it. Then she asks why people go to Australia. The answer is because they get paid more.

I listened to the National Party at the time of the Holidays Act 2003. The Act incorporated 4 weeks of holiday pay. At the time National members told this House and the select committee that if the legislation were passed, the world would end. They said that if New Zealanders were given 4 weeks’ annual holiday, the world would end. Australians have had this law for umpteen years, I think. How many years?

Hon Mark Gosche: Probably about 30 years.

PETER BROWN: The member tells me now that they get 5 weeks there. I say to the National member who has just resumed her seat that I know people who have emigrated to Australia, and I asked them specifically why they went over there. Does the member know the answer? She might be interested in this and she might be surprised. First of all, it is because of the weather.

Shane Ardern: What?

PETER BROWN: The weather. Second, it is because of the wages. Third, they contend that Australians look after their children better than we do here. Fourth and finally, Australians are more patriotic. They take pride in their nation. Here we sell ourselves very short. I just thought the member might be interested in why people go to Australia.

It is true that relevant daily pay was a concern to New Zealand First at the time of the passing of the Holidays Act in 2003, but we have grown to live with it, and so have most employers. It saddens me that the member who has just resumed her seat wants to cut it back. Employers who speak to me tell me that their biggest concern is recruiting people. Unemployment has gone down so low in recent times that they cannot get staff. They are prepared to pay a bit more and they are considering wages and conditions much more thoroughly, but they cannot recruit people because unemployment has gone down so dramatically.

This is a very simple bill. I will just read a little bit from the explanatory note: “The Bill amends the Holidays Act 2003 to allow for a public holiday to be transferred where certain circumstances are met. The proposed amendment will ensure that where an employee’s shift spans 2 calendar days, and 1 of those days is a public holiday, an employer and employee can enter into a genuine agreement to transfer the public holiday to a 24-hour period that begins or ends on the public holiday. Such a transfer cannot reduce an employee’s statutory right to public holidays.” What could be more straightforward than that? It is very simple and it is easily understood.

It might well come as a surprise to the National members who have been so critical of the bill that both Business New Zealand and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions want this legislation to be passed immediately. The explanatory note states: “The alternative options identified above”—I will not go into that—“have been discussed with Business NZ and the NZCTU who support the amendment and consider that the costs of time delay and uncertainty need to be addressed immediately.” It is straightforward.

Kate Wilkinson: That’s what we’re saying.

PETER BROWN: We do not need all this whingeing from Kate—whatever her name is; I have forgotten her surname, I do apologise.

Hon Member: Wilkinson.

PETER BROWN: Kate Wilkinson—I do apologise; I forgot the name. I cannot remember everything. This bill should go without delay to the select committee. It is a very straightforward bill. I doubt there will be many objections—perhaps only National members will object to the bill at the select committee in their submissions. I cannot find any flaws in this bill whatsoever. It identifies an issue that needs to be addressed. New Zealand First will support the bill going to a select committee, and in all probability right the way through the House.

SUE BRADFORD (Green) : The Green Party will be supporting this bill right through the process, despite its being yet more piecemeal employment relations reform from the Government. Although there is no doubt that the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill will be a worthy and welcome change for a number of workers, we in the Greens think it is high time that the Government worked on a full review of the Employment Relations Act and the Holidays Act, which could encompass all these small amendments as well as bringing in some much needed major changes.

Most workers would agree that the recent New Zealand Air Line Pilots’ Association Union of Workers Inc. v Air New Zealand Ltd Supreme Court decision, which found that an employer and an employee cannot agree to transfer a public holiday from a day listed in the Holidays Act to another day, was not a good outcome for workers. The bill before us this afternoon will resolve the very specific problem that employees whose shifts span 2 days where one of those days is a public holiday cannot currently transfer the public holiday to a 24-hour period that begins or ends on the public holiday.

However, the bill before us this afternoon will not, of course, resolve some larger public holiday issues that many workers face in New Zealand. It will not, for example, deal with the fact that New Zealand’s total of 11 public holidays is a whole week less than Italy’s 16. Germany and Spain have 3 more days than us to spend with their friends, families, and communities. Those extra days no doubt help them through the equivalent of that long, and for some people depressing, stretch that we have in this country between Queen’s Birthday weekend and Labour Day, when for months we enter a public holiday drought. I note with interest that among Japan’s grand total of 18 public holidays are Coming of Age Day, Greenery Day, Children’s Day, and Respect for the Aged Day, the latter of which fulfils a traditional veneration for the elderly that we once possessed but have mostly lost.

Nor will this bill do anything for the many workers who do not have a shift that spans across 2 calendar days, but whose shift is not the traditional Monday to Friday. These workers lose many public holidays that the rest of us take for granted and include, for example, the many back-office processing workers in banks who work Tuesday to Saturday, and therefore miss out on holidays that fall on Mondays. In 2006 seven of our 11 public holidays fell on Mondays. This year those workers like the ones I just mentioned are relatively lucky—only four public holidays fall on Monday, so they lose only a third of their holidays rather than the two-thirds lost in 2006.

No, the bill will not fix any of these problems, but it was never meant to do so, of course. Like so much of the Government’s industrial relations legislation at present, the bill aims to deal with only one small problem at a time. Nor will this bill sort some other issues that hundreds of workers and union members around the country tell me are major difficulties they face at present.

For example, there is no clear vision that I know of in the Government’s agenda about how to deal effectively with the problem of freeloading, where employers play off union members and non-union members against each other, easily nurturing a culture in which staff feel just fine about bludging off the union fees paid by some for the ultimate benefit of many. This bill will not resolve the real struggle many employees are having as they attempt to bargain standard industry-wide conditions of employment or create industry multi-employer collective agreements. The bill will not help us to sign up to the core International Labour Organization conventions—convention 87 on freedom of association and protection of the right to organise, or convention 130, on the minimum working age, which outline basic internationally agreed minimum working rights for all workers. The bill will not do any of these things, because, as happens all too often, the Government at times does not seem to know who it wants its friends to be—working people and their families or large multinationals that threaten to flee every time something is proposed that they do not like.

The Green Party supports the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill that is before us today, as we will support all the other bits and pieces that the Government puts forward that we see as being in the interests of ordinary workers and their families. But we also think it is time that the Government put a holistic approach to industrial relations on the agenda—a plan that addresses the long and often uncertain hours Kiwis work, the struggles they have in bargaining with employers that are increasingly adept at using foreign human resource strategies of splitting and dividing their partially unionised work forces, and a plan that supports the efforts many workers are making to reintroduce into our national consciousness the concept of a basic set of pay and conditions that allows all workers to bring up a family and participate in their community. We think it is time the Government put aside its concerns about scaring the horses and put on the table a full agenda for working people, rather than these small, piecemeal, band-aid solutions to isolated problems.

In commenting on this particular band-aid, though, I think it is important to note that an overriding principle needs to be an assurance that any transfers of public holidays that occur should take place only when it is genuinely in the best interests of the employees to move their public holiday from the day that everyone has off. It is not in their interests to have it moved as a right that they have bargained away due to a disparity of bargaining power between themselves and the employer. In most cases it is undoubtedly in the interests of both workers and employers that someone whose shift spans 2 days should not have to down tools halfway through their shift on the stroke of midnight and then return to complete their shift when midnight rolls around a second time, just to take a public holiday. They should be able to agree to transfer it.

However, there is an important principle as to why we all share public holidays on the same day, rather than employers being able to dictate when workers can take their holidays. Public holidays are more than just a day off. They are a shared time and an opportunity for families to come together. They are a time for festivals, for sporting and cultural events to take place, and for us to join in many different ways to spend time together as well as having that important time to rest. The purpose and value of public holidays is undermined if everyone has a different day off. We need to work consistently as politicians to protect the right of ordinary working people to spend a legal public holiday with their children, their families, their friends, and their communities. Leaving an issue like the one in front of us today to be resolved on its own is not enough given the natural tendency for some of those who hold a disparity of bargaining power to offer only “take it or leave it”, failing to lift their eyes above the balance sheet.

I look forward to voting for this bill, because although it is piecemeal and small it is also a tiny but critical component of the Green Party’s much bigger vision of a better life for working New Zealanders and their families.

JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) : I want to take a very brief call in this first reading debate in support of the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill. As has been mentioned by previous speakers, the bill is narrowly focused. It is an attempt to tidy up an approach to ensure that those who work on irregular days or who work irregular hours are able to negotiate successfully with their employers some way of retaining their public holidays by way transferring them to a more suitable opportunity. I think it is a little disingenuous of the National Party to criticise the need for an amendment bill. One would think that there is no public record of Acts put in place by a National Government that did not need further adjustment.

One thing I do agree with a National speaker on is that one of the ongoing challenges facing us is the issue of improving productivity within New Zealand. United Future believes that if we are serious about improving productivity rates, we need to address that in a working environment where conditions are fair and employment relations are constructive. We do, thankfully, live in a time when unions and employers are enjoying a more collaborative approach to industrial relations, and it seems to United Future that this is an ideal time to look creatively at ways in which we can improve productivity in a way that is fair to everybody involved.

We do have fewer public holidays now than we had historically. I agree with the Green member who talked about the fact that we need to be careful that we do not move into a situation where we have a number of days listed as public holidays but really have very little that is “public” about them. People are working such disjointed hours that people are allocated days off in a way that does not reflect the intention of a public holiday, which is that families can get together and people can spend quality time with each other. I think we should make sure, as we aim towards improved productivity, that the exceptions this bill seeks to address remain just that—exceptions—and that we still enjoy public holidays that retain the meaning they always historically had.

United Future is happy to support the first reading of this bill, and we look forward to hearing back from the select committee.

Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) : National, as has been stated previously, supports the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill. Of course, it is obviously sensible to fix up technical errors, but we cannot help but reflect on the fact that there are much deeper problems with the Holidays Act than the Government is willing to admit. Government members will say that the National Party is against 4 weeks’ holiday. That is not true. We support 4 weeks’ holiday, and I want to put that specifically and directly on the record. Indeed, we have done so for quite a number of years, going back to 2004-05.

Hon Mark Gosche: You voted against it.

Dr WAYNE MAPP: So by 2005, I say for the benefit of the member, we had concluded that we would be supporting 4 weeks’ holiday. The reason I make this point very clear is that I want to assure New Zealand workers and businesses that National believes in fairness. We understand the need for that provision; we understand that people will expect internationally competitive conditions like 4 weeks’ holiday. As has been noted by others, that is the norm in Australia.

The truth is that what we have here is the problem of a complex bill that needs constant and consistent amendment. So even faced with straightforward situations, as indeed the airline pilots in Air New Zealand were faced with, the legislation was so complicated that the court could not do what in fact the parties thought they wanted to achieve, which was the ability to transfer holidays when people were working on a public holiday. The court said that was not possible because the wording of the legislation was so complex and so related to individual agreements and collective agreements that there had to be very clear words. That has actually been the constant and consistent complaint about this legislation. It is simply too complex, and it has always been too complex, and that is why we have had to have numerous amendments.

This amendment bill is not the first. My colleague Paula Bennett referred to nine amendments—to the Holidays Act and the Employment Relations Act. In 2004 I was on the select committee that dealt with the Holidays Amendment Bill, where another whole series of technical problems was being fixed up. In fact, five problems were pointed out to the Government by the various submitters, and do members know what? The Government ignored then, and is ignoring today, the major problem with the legislation, which is that of relevant daily pay.

To put it simply for members, including those from the New Zealand First Party, the problem with the current definition is that it can pay to be sick and that those people who are working to cover for a sick worker actually get less money than the person who is sick. Why on earth would Labour members want to defend that practice? Why on earth would they want to defend a practice that encourages people to get sick? That is what they are doing. I give a simple example. A lot of manufacturing businesses work on a production cycle. Teams of people have to work together to achieve a certain production target, and some of their pay is related to that productivity. If some people are sick, that productivity target is not achieved. The people who are sick get paid as if the target was achieved, but the people at work do not get paid at that level.

Why on earth would Labour members want to defend that absurd situation? That is what they did in 2004, and that is what they are doing today by refusing to deal with that issue in this bill. The Government had the consistent opportunity to fix this problem. Business New Zealand knows that. Government members would, I think, recognise that Business New Zealand is a moderate voice for business. It takes a fair and reasonable approach to issues. It works cooperatively with the Government on certain issues. It also knows that that issue of relevant daily pay is the single issue—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member, but the time has come for me to leave the Chair.

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

Dr WAYNE MAPP: The most significant aspect of this bill is actually what it does not do. I indicated to the House earlier this evening that there are many, many problems with the Holidays Act. That has, in fact, led to a case going to the Supreme Court, which was symptomatic of the complexity of the legislation. The Government was warned of that right from the get-go—right from when the legislation was first established back in 2003. The issue was raised then, and has been consistently raised by business and others, that the legislation needed to be fairer so we did not get the absurdity of people being paid more when on sick leave than when working.

The Labour members might like to defend that situation, but I ask them to think about this particular issue. New Zealand is in a recession at the moment. There is no question about that. There is no quibble about it: we are in a recession. Our economy is declining. How do we know that? Unemployment went up to 3.6 percent and, more particularly, in just the last 3 months 29,000 jobs were lost.

Darien Fenton: What?

Dr WAYNE MAPP: For the benefit of Darien Fenton, 29,000 jobs were lost. Do members know how many that is? It is actually 1.7 percent of all full-time employees in the country. It is a 1.7 percent decline in the economy in terms of jobs. That is the worst record for 19 years. It is all very well for Labour to go on about the wonderful times over the last 9 years. Things have changed—fundamentally changed—and this Government thinks it is business as usual and that it can just fiddle around the edges and hope it will all go away. Well, it will not. We only have to look at global oil prices, which are already at $120—many people are projecting that they will go to $200; eminent and respectable people are saying that—and the impact that will have on the New Zealand economy.

I say to the Government that when it is in year 8½, when it is coming up to a third-term election, the public actually expect a good deal better from it than producing a three-page bill called the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill to deal with a technical issue. Yes, it has to be dealt with; that is certainly true. But more imagination is required. So this Government will spend time in the House and time in the select committees dealing with this one technical issue, as if this were the most important thing in employment law—as if this were the most important thing in the holidays legislation.

When the nation is dealing with an economic crisis—a recession—we expect the Government to lift its sights and deal with the real issues, which are how to boost employment, how to produce real fairness in the workplace, how to boost productivity, how to ensure that we do not lose 80,000 people to Australia, and how to boost skills. Those are the things this Government ought to be paying attention to, but it is not. All it can do is to come up with—let us be honest—a non-controversial three-page bill that it knows everyone in the House will vote for as if that was the most important thing.

I have news for the Government: the New Zealand public are tired of the Government’s failure. They are tired of its failure to get to grips with the serious issues facing this nation. We expect in this House that when we are presented with legislation, when we are presented with a policy, it will actually grasp the core issues facing this country and not be essentially some kind of avoidance behaviour—some sort of “let’s pretend nothing’s happening in the outside world; let’s pretend it’s all business as usual and we can forget there are difficult problems facing families out there”. In 6 months’ time this nation will decide who will be the Government of New Zealand. I suggest that when this sort of thing is put up to the people of New Zealand and they are asked whether they know what this Government has spent its last few months doing and is told that it has been worrying about some technical amendment instead of fixing the serious problems, they are likely to say that it is time for a change.

• Bill read a first time.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Minister of Tourism) on behalf of the Minister of Labour: I move, That the Holidays (Transfer of Public Holidays) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and that the committee report finally to the House on or before 22 July 2008 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, and during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 192 and 195(1)(b) and (c).

• Motion agreed to.

DARIEN FENTON (Labour) : It is a great pleasure to speak in the third reading debate on the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill. This has been a most interesting debate, despite the weak defence put up by the National Party and its mad decision not to support this very straightforward, simple, but very important bill.

We have learnt a lot about the importance of names, naming, and pronunciation. We have all been reminded that Māori is an official language of New Zealand and that we all must make more effort. We have considered many examples of geographic features and the reasons for the names, and we have talked about the importance of showing respect to each other in the House by endeavouring to call people by their correct names. [Interruption] We have been reminded, for the benefit of Sandra Goudie, that this bill is important as it updates a 60-year-old law—and what is wrong with that?

The bill contains some important provisions that were not in the original Act. One of those provisions is the extension of the jurisdiction rights of the board over the continental shelf. The continental shelf has Ruapehu-size volcanoes, ravines up to 1 kilometre deep, and sedimentary drift deposits up to 1 kilometre thick. The continental shelf is very important to New Zealand. It is over six times the area of the land mass of mainland New Zealand, and it includes approximately 1.7 million square kilometres of continental shelf outside our exclusive economic zone. Right now it is the subject of increasing research and activity. So extending the board’s role, as this bill does, to naming features of the continental shelf will play a part in New Zealand’s effective management of the undersea resources in our area.

I would have thought that the National members would see that as a priority. But, no, they have chosen to ridicule this bill and the board, to focus on phantoms and imaginary problems, and to take up hours and hours of select committee time for what should have been the straightforward modernisation of legislation that did need updating.

The bill also recognises the Crown’s responsibility in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi in the context of the collection and use of original Māori names and geographic features on official maps and charts. As we have noted, the Geographic Board already plays an important part in providing advice in proposed cultural redress for Treaty claim settlements where place names are involved—for example, in the official name of Aoraki - Mount Cook.

During the select committee process the Government Administration Committee received a small number of submissions, all of which were positive about the bill—and the chairperson, the esteemed Shane Ardern, agrees with me. Two submitters said the bill did not go far enough in regard to Māori names and wanted to see a role for the board to restore Māori place names for all localities in Aotearoa. Another submitter said he believed that the board had not been strong enough in its policing of correct names for natural features, such as original names assigned by Māori. The same person wanted the board to consider renaming New Zealand. Indeed, some people might argue that “New Zealand” is actually a misspelt Dutch name and, as such, is no longer appropriate for our country, but clause 8(2) states: “the Board does not have jurisdiction to assign a name to, or alter the name of, New Zealand.”

It is also important to remember that this bill came about after a comprehensive review and public consultation process involving the public—

Sandra Goudie: Oh, get off the grass!

DARIEN FENTON: Does the member disagree with that? She might like to take a call and say exactly how the consultation process was deficient; otherwise she should just bear with me.

The consultation process involved the public, iwi, central and local government, and sector groups, and it should have proceeded with little fuss. So it has been perplexing, to say the least, to try to unravel National’s objections to the bill. Some National members have said that the bill should not be in the House at all because it was not important enough. I do not think we can say that 1.7 million square kilometres of continental shelf is not important. The changes that the Labour Government has proposed are sensible and reasonable, but the objections the National Party is raising are not.

National claims that clause 24 gives a new discretion on whether to consult the public before a place name is changed, and National states in its minority report that it believes it is a fundamental right for all New Zealanders to be involved in this decision-making process. Well, that is news. Although the bill does not hamper public consultation, National members complained about added bureaucracy. Then they came into the Chamber for the second reading and the Committee stage and complained about there not being enough. I ask you! In any case, clause 24, which National has objected to, applies only to recorded names and discontinued official geographic names, and not to new name proposals or alterations of a name.

National members claimed that clause 23 would mean enormous costs to businesses because only official names had to be in official documents, such as those defined in clause 4. As the Minister pointed out during the Committee stage, this is a provision in section 18 of the existing Act of 1946, though that section is worded a bit differently and it may be just too hard for the National members to get their heads around it. Let me read section 18, “Names in maps, scientific manuscripts, or tourist publications”. It states: “(1) No person shall publish or cause to be published in any geographic or scientific manuscript or publication, or in any guide book, handbook, pamphlet, road map, or other publication intended for the use of travellers or tourists generally, or on any map in any such manuscript or publication as aforesaid, any name purporting to be the name of any place, locality, or natural feature in New Zealand to which any provision of this Act applies, unless the name appears on a map previously published by or under the direction or control of the Surveyor-General, or is a name assigned to or approved for that place, locality, or natural feature pursuant to this Act:”.

When I talked about phantoms and problems that do not exist, that was what I was referring to. We are dealing with a bill that rewrites an old Act and puts it into modern language, and maybe that is just too difficult for some National members to get their heads around. This has been a very interesting bill to deal with, despite National’s position. I have been offended to hear some National members branding this bill as tinkering. On the one hand the bill is just tinkering but, on the other hand, National members oppose it.

We should not underestimate the importance of the role of the Geographic Board. Our boundaries, and our land features, and the names of the places we know and identify with, such as mountains and rivers, as well as settlements and localities, reflect in a very real way our culture and shared heritage as New Zealanders. Members on this side of the House and other parties such as the Greens, the Māori Party, New Zealand First, and United Future all know that the official naming of geographic features is important to communities and needs to be dealt with seriously.

I take another opportunity to thank the officials for their patient advice, and to thank the patient members of the select committee for the interesting background information and, indeed, for the debate we have had on this bill, which has been very educational. I am pleased to support the third reading of this bill.

SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) : It is with some concern tonight that I rise in opposition to the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill, and I ask Mr Flavell to talk to me later about whether I got the pronunciation right. Some concern has been expressed as to why we oppose this bill, but let me tell members, as a member of the Queen’s honourable Opposition, that one of the hallmarks of this Government is overwhelmingly to provide the Opposition with something to oppose, and it has done so in this bill. I hasten to add that it is difficult to find the real mischievous socialist undoing in this bill, but it has provided us with ample reason to oppose the bill.

I want to share with the House the minority report of National members of the Government Administration Committee. “National members recognise the role of the New Zealand Geographic Board under the existing legislation. There appears to be nothing wrong with the way the current legislation is operating and accordingly National members see no need for change.” That is clear. There is no ambiguity about that statement.

The bill we are currently debating no doubt came about as a result of a range of various submissions to the Minister that there needed to be some modernisation of the 1946 Act. But during the submission process at the select committee, and from the advice of the officials, the select committee members could find nothing in what they put forward that would require this legislative change. We then looked deeper to find out what the bill does. We found a bit of positive stuff, so it is not all negative.

The bill provides for a number of new functions to be carried out by the board, including new administrative functions in relation to the official naming of geographical features not only within the territorial limits of New Zealand but also on the continental shelf and in the Ross Dependency. So we asked the officials what happens now and why there was suddenly a need for legislation to make this a process that is easy to carry out. The officials came back to us and said that what happens now is no different from what will happen in the future.

There is an international discussion, as one would expect there would have to be when we are talking about areas that are outside our economic zone or outside our jurisdiction. I will not use the term “united nations” because it is not under the United Nations, but there is a South Pacific forum, I guess one could describe it as, that meets and discusses these issues—although the United States obviously has an interest in that from time to time, as well—and it comes to a binding agreement amongst the nations. Hence, National members asked why there was a need to change the current Act, and we could not find one. So at the end of the day we were unable to uncover the reasons why this bill is before the House today and why we have gone through this process.

An additional concern raised by National members was the impact of clauses 32 and 33 on private entities that are affected by the definition of “official document” and the requirements for the use of official names for geographic features. The reasons for the concerns are simple. A lot of people have a strong affinity with various areas. There are cultural reasons for various names being used in different ways.

Business operators and tourism activities also use those names in their promotional material and in literature they provide not only to their customers but also to the Inland Revenue Department and various other Government agencies to explain what they are involved in. Potentially the introduction of this new proposal, this clause relating to an official name, could impose a layer of compliance requirements on these operators that is completely unnecessary, and no evidence was brought to the select committee to show why this change was necessary in the first place. The National members of the committee opposed the provision on that basis.

The commercial impact on tourism, as I have just said, could be very significant if, for example, a board took a business operator to the High Court for failing to comply with clause 32. Many tourist attractions hold their appeal because of their colloquial names, popular names, or the names they use in the promotion of their activity. All sorts of different activities around New Zealand spring up as a result of an attachment to an identity.

The final argument put to the select committee and debated was the sensitivity and consultation that takes place around the process of changing names. I give the example of Taranaki and its mountain, which has always been known by local iwi as Mount Taranaki, and that is where the province got its name from. But, of course, Captain Cook sailed past, and he looked at the mountain and said it looked like Mount Egmont, so he called it Mount Egmont. That is what it was commonly known as by most Europeans until about 10 years ago, when local iwi said that it was wrong, that it was Taranaki, and that they wanted the name changed back to Mount Taranaki. It did not matter which name one preferred to believe or which name one accepted, it was changed back to Taranaki. Most maps show it as Mount Taranaki, and people who travel through Taranaki know it as either Taranaki or Egmont, depending on their preference. The New Zealand Geographic Board was able to accommodate that change.

The other argument put forward was that a lot of the European names that had been adopted were not the original names and that that was wrong. I used the example in previous speeches that when one drives around the coast of Taranaki, one starts in South Taranaki, where there is Manaia, Ōeo, Pīhama, Ōpunake, Ōaonui, Rāhotu, Wārea—

Hone Harawira: That’s enough, Shane.

SHANE ARDERN: How far does one need to go to realise that not all of Taranaki was named by Captain Cook when he sailed past? The reality is that those names have both cultural and iwi significance. They also have a great colloquial meaning, and people accept that that is what they are. Even though the Act was introduced in 1946, there is absolutely no need for Parliament to be addressing this issue tonight.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Kia ora tātou e hoa mā i tēnei pō. Nau mai, hoki mai ki te Whare ki te taupatupatu i ngā take o te wā.

[Greetings to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and to us, fellow members of Parliament tonight. Welcome back to the House to debate current business.]

The importance of correct pronunciation and respect for a region or territory is centuries old. My colleague Mr Hone Harawira referred me to the Bible, to Judges 12:6. We all know that Hone Harawira is a fine, upstanding citizen of St Stephen’s School. I listened to him and I took down this quote. [Interruption] I ask members to listen to this, because it is very important.

“Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passes of Jordan”.

How awesome that quote is! They slew him at the passes of Jordan. In the days of the Old Testament, mispronunciation bore a price, obviously.

This bill, the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill, made me return to the wisdom of times gone by, and wonder whether the lazy or downright careless mispronunciation of geographic names should also carry a price. Death? Maybe not. Flogging? No, that is a little bit tough. Sitting next to Hone Harawira? Now that could be good.

We in the Māori Party, can I say, have been appreciative of the way in which this particular legislation has stimulated such a wide-ranging and thought-provoking debate about the importance of nomenclature—the selection of names. During the course of this bill we were duly advised by Darien Fenton, Sandra Goudie, Tau Henare, and others of the correct pronunciation of their names—and the House should be suitably equipped now to pronounce the names of Tariana Turia, Te Ururoa Flavell, Pita Sharples, and Hone Harawira with due respect and regard to the tūpuna names that we carry. I am also impressed by the way in which my offer of help was taken up by some members of the House, and it has been very pleasing throughout the debate to observe the efforts that some members have made to take care with the pronunciation of the geographic place names under consideration.

There is just one more development that is needed, and that is the correct pronunciation of Māori names outside of the discussion on this bill—even the word “Māori”, and probably “Taranaki”, I would suspect. I have a quick pronunciation sheet available here for all members of the House. I have prepared it as a follow-up so that in the future members can get it right.

The debate has also provoked a lot of interest in the outside world. I have received emails informing me of the meaning of the names of such places as Te Urewera, Panekaka, and Kaikiore; advising me that Pūtauaki is not Mount Edgecumbe and never will be; and reminding me that Rānana is not London and that it is best that we all learn to tell the difference between those names. Naming rights are the way in which we demonstrate our respect for the origins and heritage of the place belonging to the name, or, more particularly, for the name that belongs to the place. The bill will establish the development of rules, protocols, and guidelines to enable a systematic and standardised approach to the official naming of geographic features. We would hope that this systematic and standardised approach will benefit from the pearls of wisdom shared in the debating chamber over these last couple of weeks.

Last year, as part of the Speaker’s delegation to Europe, I was made aware of the protocols that have been adopted in Sweden, which require that all new names must have a linguistic form that is compatible with the Swedish language. The Swedish Names Act recommends that any names whose composition, pronunciation, or spelling are such that their linguistic form is not appropriate as surnames in Sweden will not be accepted by the Swedish Patent and Registration Office. As we debated in this House the standing of the two official languages of Aotearoa—te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language—and the de facto language of common use, English, I have wondered, indeed, about which language would inform the naming of geographic features and of the Crown protected areas. Would te reo Māori, for example, be the standard against which all geographic names would be approved? Which histories are honoured; whose ancestors are recognised?

In her 2001 doctorate thesis Tihei Mauri Ora: Honouring our Voices Dr Leonie Pīhama describes the possibility of renaming of the places around her home town, Waitara, because those streets commemorate, for example, the chief Crown purchasing agent, a guy called Donald MacLean; the Governor Gore Browne, the Hon Alfred Domett, Colonial Secretary at the outbreak of the Māori war; Robert Parris, the civil commissioner of Taranaki who was intimately connected to the conflict at Waitara; Lieutenant Blake of HMS Niger; Governor Sir George Grey; and so on. We can imagine how the iwi of Te Ātiawa feel, every day, travelling down MacLean, Browne, Domett, Parris, Blake, and Grey Streets, and recognising the history that comes with those names. We can imagine also, how they would feel travelling down streets that recognise the special histories and people of Ngāti Rāhiri, Ōtaraua, Pukerangiora, Puketapu, Ngāti Tawhirikura, Manukōrihi, Ngāti Tūparikino, Ngāti Te Whiti, and Hāmua.

I would suggest that we need a new approach. Can I say that the open-minded approach of most members of this House in considering the significance of geographical names is the type of approach that we would seek at both the national and territorial level regarding naming decisions. I say that because we noted that there was a clear consensus throughout the submissions on whether the board naming decisions should be made binding or advisory only. There was some support for retaining the status quo: what could be considered to be a mix of both binding and advisory powers. Currently most board decisions are final and binding, but the board is also able to act in an advisory capacity when it receives objections to a name proposal. In those circumstances a board recommendation is sent to the Minister for a final decision.

This latter example was the situation that confronted the Minister in March 2005, when the Geographic Board sought to correct the spelling of Mount Parahaki in Whangarei to Mount Parihaka. Mount Parihaka, for those who are not aware, was the site of a very substantial pā in pre-European times and comes under the care of the Te Parawhau hapū as tangata whenua in the Whangarei region. Now the Minister was required to make a decision under section 13 of the Act on whether to confirm, modify, or reverse the board’s recommendation. One matter that was indeed of crucial importance to both the board and the Minister was whether an original Māori place name existed. In coming to the point of decision making, there was unanimous agreement between the various Māori groups represented at the meeting on 14 June 2005 that Parihaka was the name that had always been used in their oratory on marae. As the case developed it became apparent that although the Native Land Court had sometimes got Māori names wrong, the oral record by chant and repetition keeps the correct pronunciation coming through in its original form. The board was assured that Parihaka was the name that Māori were using in the 19th century and earlier. Accordingly the Minister confirmed the correction of the name back to Parihaka.

I wanted to share that case study in some depth as it represents to me an excellent and robust process. It is important that we remember there are processes that work, that there are people who believe in consultation, and that there are local government authorities that do respect mana whenua. Sometimes when some of our more media-hungry mayors hit the airwaves yet again with their pet hate, we can overlook the positives that do happen.

I was thinking about that yesterday when Wanganui mayor Michael Laws instructed residents that any move to add an “h” to the name of Wanganui “will be fiercely resisted”. Yes, here he is—“Mr Mōhio”; “Mr Knowledgable” of Māori names, pronunciation, history, and culture. You see, Te Rūnanga o Tūpoho, a local iwi committee, has petitioned the New Zealand Geographic Board to put the “h” in Wanganui so as to spell the city “Whanganui”. The Māori Party says it is a fundamental human right to ensure that the integrity of local language is upheld. Whanganui was the name given to the area by an ancestor over 600 years ago. It acknowledges the existence, identity, and status of tangata whenua. It was tangata whenua who originally named the geographic features of the district, and retaining their tribal spelling is all about respecting that special relationship. Yet the local authority, the Wanganui District Council, slaps them in the face by describing their decision to retain the traditional spelling of the name “Whanganui” as a “needlessly provocative gesture”. Well, give me a break!

In closing, I say that in that issue there could not be a more dramatic departure from the precedent established by the people of Whangarei. We will support this bill in the optimistic hope that the legislation we are debating today will enable a benchmark for best practice to assist wayward councils back into processes that serve not to undermine and belittle but to honour and respect the relationship they have with tangata whenua.

SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) : I am very pleased to be able to rise to speak against the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill—and I do not mind in the least if members pronounce my name wrong. This bill from the outset lacked good problem definition. That is actually a hallmark of this current Government. Whenever it is putting legislation through the House, it lacks good problem definition, so what we get is usually legislation that is less than robust and full of difficulty and conflict. This bill will be another one of these bills. There would be only a few dozen people who are aware of the bill’s existence. Largely, the New Zealand population is unaware of this bill, unaware of the provisions of the bill, and unaware of what the potential outcomes of this bill will be. We heard about those potential outcomes from the previous speaker. We heard a reference to the renaming of names in the Waikato, so we could see a plethora of Māori names being promoted for use in the Waikato.

One of the key concerns around the bill is the fact that there are some new provisions outside what is currently in legislation. The provisions include board places for two additional Māori or iwi representatives, and there is now discretion on the part of the board as to whether it is going to consult. That is a serious issue. There were only about 17 submissions to the discussion document and there were only about 5 submissions to the actual bill, which I consider hugely disappointing. But the majority of submissions to the discussion document supported the requirement to consult the public. I think that is absolutely imperative, because place names are important to people. My learned colleague was also talking about the cost in regard to place names, and I will cover that a little bit later.

The purposes of the bill are outlined at the beginning of it. They are about widening the powers of the board, and the bill certainly does that. The board can now collect Māori place names, and the Māori place names and any other name that has been collected to date may be validated without further referral to the public, then becoming official place names. The effect of an official place name is this. Let us take the example of Wanganui and the adding of just an “h” to its name. If public bodies, and any brochures or documentation used by tourists or for travel, or whatever, have to change the name that they currently have from Wanganui to Whanganui—I am not sure how we pronounce it—by adding an “h”, there is a cost to that. If they have to completely change a name, there is a huge cost to that. That has a much greater burden of cost on local authorities and commercial enterprises that use geographic place names as part of their tourist promotion.

If the official geographic place name is not used, some words have to be added. For example, if we take people for a walk down to Sarah’s Gully and it is instead called Onewhero but we want to keep the name Sarah’s Gully, we have the name Sarah’s Gully on a sign but underneath that name there has to be put the words “not the official name”. That is only if the official name is not used; if the official name is used, of course that does not have to be done. But if the official name is not used there has to be put underneath the name Sarah’s Gully the words “This is not the official name.” I have not heard of anything more impractical or more dumb in my entire life. Well actually I have, because quite a lot of that sort of thing goes on in the legislation of the current Government.

These are just some of the things members will find in this bill—this innocuous little bill that everybody thinks is fine and is going to be OK. But I tell members we will see continuations of bun fights up and down the country. We have them already on occasion. Simpsons Beach at Whitianga now has the place name Wharekaho. That is put in big letters, and underneath in smaller letters in brackets is Simpsons Beach. So what are we going to see?

Some of the other functions of the board—as set out in clause 11—are to collect original Māori names for recording on official charts and official maps. What will that mean if the board has a function to collect original Māori place names throughout the country? What will that mean in terms of how official names will be required to be used over and above the other names that are already there? This is not readily apparent. If these names are validated without going out to public consultation, how are communities going to react to no longer being able to use their local colloquial names? Will we see a plethora of dual names throughout the country, and will people want to see that? People go crazy enough about seeing so many billboards, sandwich boards, etc., now.

The new discretionary powers of the board that allow it to not have to give public notice and, consequently, not publicly consult, apply to a range of areas. They apply to the alteration of a name of a district or region, geographic features outside territorial limits, the adoption of existing names for undersea features, the process for review, and the validation of certain names. If an official geographic name exists—and bear in mind that it is the function of the Geographic Board to collect those names—then it has to be used. If it is not used, then one has to put in a little statement that “this is not an official geographic name.” The organisations that have to do that are all public authorities, anybody producing brochures for travel, or tourist operators that use place names. Let us just think about that. Here is another cost on local authorities, another burden on ratepayers that they do not want. No organisation will provide the funding assistance necessary if it has to start changing a plethora of place names. That is certainly a possible consequence resulting from the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill. Do the public know that? No, they have not got a clue. The problem definition certainly was not done.

There has not been a problem with the current legislation. Why change it? One of the new areas in the bill is clause 6, “Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi)”. It refers to those sections that come under some of the other functions of the bill, which is about collecting those official geographic names.

As my learned colleague Shane Ardern pointed out, there is potential added cost if public bodies or commercial entities do not use the official geographic name and do not enter the statement that it is not an official geographic name. An injunction may be granted by the court to the Geographic Board in regard to the use of a name, but the board will actually be exempt from any damages. It might be able to bring a claim against a local authority or a commercial entity about the fact that it is not using an official geographic name, and it will be exempt from damages while a tourist venture could be crippled as a result of any action taken.

The Human Rights Commission has stated: “Schedule 1 could be seen as giving rise to indirect discrimination on the basis of race or ethnic origins because Māori are more likely than non-Māori to have knowledge of tikanga Māori. Non-Māori could therefore be disadvantaged in appointments to the Board. It could also be argued that clause 11(1) appears to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnic origin because it gives the Board a specific direction to collect and encourage the use of Māori placenames. There is no such direction in respect of non-Māori place names which could be of equal importance to these groups. Whether this would result in disadvantage to Māori is not clear, however, we have considered clause 11(1) further on the basis that it could be prima facie inconsistent with section 19(1) of the Bill of Rights Act.”

I am very proud to stand here and oppose this bill on behalf of National.

Hon TAU HENARE (National) : Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. I see that the Māori Party has castigated some of the members of the House for the mispronunciation of “Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa”. I want to congratulate those people who consider the pronunciation of one of the official languages of New Zealand. We are in a time when we should not be lazy about the pronunciation of New Zealand’s mother tongue, whether it be English or Māori.

Sandra Goudie: There is no need to get precious about it.

Hon TAU HENARE: Well, it is not about being precious. It is about loving one’s nation. It is actually about nationalism.

The reason I say that is that during the adjournment I happened to walk past a second-hand book store, and for five bucks I purchased I, George Nepia. I have just finished reading I, George Nepia, which tells the story of one of this country’s icons. The thing that I got from reading about that man was his nationalism, his love for his country—not Māori, not Pākehā, not English, not Māori but his country—and everything that went with it; his rugby, the way he did things, and the way he saw the world. All it came down to, I believe—and I could be wrong; I have been wrong before—is that he had respect for his nation. He loved his nation, and he had respect for his nation—for the hills, the valleys, and the rivers—and he enjoyed everything in his nation to the utmost.

So as I talk about the pronunciation of one of the mother tongues of this nation, I say that I believe that English is one of the mother tongues as well, and that it too should be enshrined somewhere in our legislation alongside Māori—which it is not, actually, at the moment. So we need to do something about that in the future.

Anyway, I go back to what we are talking about, which is the New Zealand Geographic Board. If one is going to move that Māori language be incorporated in the name of this bill, then one should actually try one’s hardest to pronounce it correctly. Some people do, some people do not. I think it is intergenerational laziness—

Hone Harawira: That’s a big word.

Hon TAU HENARE: What—laziness? It is for the member from Te Tai Tokerau! The member from Te Tai Tokerau would know a big word like “laziness”, but I will leave it there.

I want to wade into the debate about Wanganui and Whanganui, and the use of the letter “h” by Mr Laws up in that lovely place, Wanganui. I think we should leave it up to the people up there to decide. Leave it up to the people—

Te Ururoa Flavell: The Māori people.

Hon TAU HENARE: No. You see, this is the problem we get into if it is left to only one sector of society to have a say. Why does not everybody have a say about it, put it all into the pot, and let the elected officials go about their business? The Māori Party says no to letting the elected officials go about their business, and I suppose that is their democratic right, but it is also the democratic right of the council up in Wanganui to decide on whether to have the “h” inserted. Is it a big issue? I do not think it is, and do members know why? Well, let us say that tomorrow we get a rush of blood to the head and we insert the “h”. What would that do for the nation of Aotearoa or New Zealand? Well, it would not sort out the educational strife that our people are in. It certainly would not stop the dairies in Moerewa selling stuff to our young people. It certainly would not stop the P epidemic that is flourishing in our neighbourhoods. Look, I say we should leave it to the locals. Here is a funny story. Well, I think it is funny. Just outside of Whangarei, north of Whangarei by, maybe, 29 minutes as the crow flies, there is a place called Towai. There is a little pub on the left-hand side.

John Carter: What is it called?

Hon TAU HENARE: It is called Towai—T-o-w-a-i.

John Carter: “Toe-why”.

Hon TAU HENARE: That is absolutely correct. You know, John Carter has said the correct pronunciation of what everybody else in the nation thinks is “Tor-wai”. It is not “Tor-wai”. Some bright spark forgot to put in the “u”, and its correct pronunciation is “Toe-why”. So I congratulate Mr Carter on his correct pronunciation of that name.

In Whangarei itself we have had the battle over what name we should give Parihaka, one of the maunga, one of the mountains, in the area. I think that whether it is “Para-haki” or “Parry-haka” is a moot point. It is not “Parry-haka” as far as I am concerned. I have never known it to be “Parry-haka”. I had never ever heard it called “Parry-haka” by any of the kaumātua in the mid-north until someone had a bright spark and said it was called “Parry-haka”. Well, it is not, and that is the problem with these boards.

This legislation is a complete waste of the House’s time—a complete waste. It shows a Government that does not have much to do, apart from buying a few train sets. There is nothing in this bill that is new or that enhances the Geographic Board’s work. The bill fiddles around with the edges, and I take the point made by the speaker just before me, Sandra “Goo-dee”—

Hone Harawira: “Gow-dee”.

Hon TAU HENARE: Oh, sorry. I apologise for my mispronunciation. That was, as in the words of the great poet from Tai Tokerau, “lazy”.

I will talk about the Treaty of Waitangi. How this bill has anything to do with the Treaty of Waitangi is completely beyond me. Clause 6, “Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi)”, has three paragraphs. Paragraph (a) states: “section 11(1)(d) confers on the Board the function of collecting original Māori names of geographic features for recording on official charts and official maps;”. Paragraph (b) states: “section 11(1)(e) confers on the Board the function of encouraging the use of original Māori names of geographic features on official charts and official maps;”. Again, what that has to do with the Treaty of Waitangi is beyond me. Maybe someone from the Māori Party can get up and elucidate on how that has anything to do with the Treaty of Waitangi. Further, clause 6(c) states: “clause 1(2)(a) of Schedule 1 requires 2 persons to be appointed to the Board, on the recommendation of the Minister of Māori Affairs.”

Goodness gracious me! Is that what we have come to? After 169-odd years of being a nation, the Minister of Māori Affairs is now doing a wonderful job by recommending two people to sit on that board. Why do we not just appoint two people who are good for the job? Let us get Cabinet, the Government, to do that. It is a radical suggestion, but let us appoint people because they can do the job. That would be really, really great. Let us have faith that Governments can appoint people not because they are Māori but because they can do the job that is expected of them.

ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) : I confess to the House that I had not even looked at this bill before tonight, but I have listened with a great deal of interest to this debate, and I am happy to support my colleagues in the National Party and to say that I too do not believe that we should support this bill. I can find no justification for it. There is an old adage that says “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It has not been clearly laid out for me what is broken—what actually needs to be fixed. We in the National Party have looked at a number of layers of things that this Government has done across a whole range of areas, and we see that they have all ended up with one result: more bureaucracy, more office space in Wellington, and more central control.

I am going to talk a little bit later about nomenclature, about a place name that is important to me and why, and about why I think this bill will not help the cause. I am already involved in a process of determining the appropriate, correct geographical name of a significant part of New Zealand.

But, first, in looking at this bill I am quite intrigued by a lot of it. As I said, it establishes a bureaucracy. It continues the Geographic Board, which is to determine appropriate names. We have heard quite a bit in this debate tonight about the appropriateness, adequacy, or correctness of pronunciation. That is an entirely different issue. It is about education. It is about a desire to actually get it right, and we should all want to get it right. It is a separate issue, and creating a board in Wellington will not change the attitude of the nation in terms of their desire to give the correct pronunciation. That is the first point I would make.

When I look at what the functions of the board are, I see that under clause 10 one function is to “assign an official geographic name”. So the official geographic names we have got are wrong? Well, in some cases they are. Then the question is how the board would know what the correct name was. When we look at the board’s other functions, which are detailed in clause 11, we see that it has been given incredible powers. Under clause 11(1)(a) it may “adopt policies, rules, standards, protocols, guidelines, or similar instruments for carrying out its own functions,”. Well, what a huge responsibility that is.

But supposing that at the end of the day the board actually does not get it right; what is the critique process, or the review process? What happens if the Geographic Board goes bad? What would we do then? Well, hello! We are not told. What if it cannot actually work out what a name should be, after going through the whole process prescribed in this bill, and using all its powers? Well, members should have a look at clause 20; that should make them feel better! If the board cannot determine what a name should be, this is what happens: “(1) If the Board does not make a determination under section 19(1), it must report in writing to the Minister,”, and “(2) The Minister, after making any inquiry he or she thinks fit, may determine the proposal …”. So we set up a board, but, at the end of the day, if it cannot get it right, the Minister makes a determination, and there is no other review process. I think that is not the right way to determine something as important as a geographic name.

Let me explain my interest in this. I live in a small rural district in the lee of the Hokonuis. It has different names depending on which map one looks at. On most road maps of New Zealand—on those in which it appears, because it is quite a small district—it is Te Tipua.

Hon Tau Henare: What is it?

ERIC ROY: Te Tipua. But the locals across most of Southland call it “Titty-poo”.

Sandra Goudie: What is that—call it what?

ERIC ROY: “Titty-poo”. That is what it is known as. That is, clearly, the incorrect pronunciation—or is it?

Sandra Goudie: No—

ERIC ROY: Just hold on; I will explain. The interesting thing is that a nephew said to me one day: “Uncle Eric, it must be really bad living in a place whose name has two swear words in it.” Just by chance—

Hon Member: Which one’s the swear word?

ERIC ROY: —the middle one—this year is the sesquicentennial of this august district. In the course of the celebrations of the centenary of the school and the sesquicentennial of the district, I have been trying to determine the original name. All the original maps have it as “Titipua”—one word. But, interestingly, when the education board got involved in 1907—it created a school—it decided, without consulting anybody, that the correct spelling was ”Te Tipua”.

Some of my colleagues may wish to correct my interpretation of te reo, but “te tipua” means the devil, the goblin, the ogre, or the spirit. That is my understanding. Maybe the board named it after the schoolteacher—I do not know. Also, the river has not changed its name; it is still Titipua, but the district is called Te Tipua, which the locals pronounce “Titty-poo”. As part of the sesquicentennial celebrations, I determined that we would sort out all this stuff and find the correct name. There is only one place, after all.

The interesting thing is that the district was originally native reed tussock country. I wonder whether the name “Titipua” comes from “titi”, the sooty shearwater—although the district is a long way from the coast. I asked my learned colleague Tau Henare about it; I have asked everybody. I do not have any confidence that the Geographic Board could determine it. I have asked every single te reo - speaking person of authority, including Tau Henare, what it means. Tau’s missus gave me—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): The member knows that he should use a member’s full name.

ERIC ROY: Tau Henare’s wife, his lady, gave me the best interpretation I have heard. Maybe she should be on the Geographic Board. She said that “pua” is the seed of reed grass. I can see that that would be a good explanation of the name of the district, given that it was reed tussock country. It is far, far better than a name meaning “the ogre”, because that could refer to me or to anybody else living there.

But my point is this. There is a whole range of names like that out there, and I do not have any confidence that the Geographic Board would come any closer to determining and sorting out what those names should be. I have spent about 10 years on this project, and I cannot find anybody in New Zealand of authority who can determine what the correct name is, so the decision will fall back to the Minister. Tau Henare made the point originally that the locals should decide and should have some say. That certainly makes a whole lot more sense to me than our creating a whole bureaucracy that may not be able to resolve the matter. Quite clearly, names capture identity. They are significant and important things. There is a great deal of feeling around them. The local ethos is captured in them.

Let me conclude by saying that this bill might be a principled bill, but it will not resolve the issue of pronunciation. I suggest that it will not resolve the complex issue of what precisely and exactly is the correct name. For that reason, National members say that it is unnecessary, that it will be ineffectual, and that it is most unlikely to add anything to the geographic distinction of any place in New Zealand.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Minister of Tourism) : Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. I have made a number of speeches in this House and I think that recently, when speaking in the first reading of this New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill, I was criticised for my pronunciation. I apologise if I cannot pronounce Māori names properly; I do my very best. One thing I do realise, in spite of my faults around pronunciation, is that New Zealanders are taking a lot more pride in te reo, in the Māori language, and in trying to pronounce place names properly. If we come from the South Island, as the previous speaker, Mr Roy, or I do, we have not had as much practise as people who come from the North Island have had, but we do try.

I think that this bill moves us down the path of recognising our nation, and its culture and heritage, in a way that makes us more proud of what and who we are. We have named many, many places across this nation on the back of our heritage from England, from Ireland, and from Europe. We have brought those names to this country and they have served us well. But looking back now we can see we are trying—as we have done for some time now—to use Māori names more appropriately where those names will mean more for local people, be they Māori, Pākehā, Pasifika, or any other cultural group in this country, because we are a multicultural nation made up of many ethnic communities. However, we are a bicultural nation by virtue of the Treaty, and Māori people were here before the others, such as my ancestors from Ireland or those people from Scotland, and I think that Māori have the right to name places, locations, and features in an important way that recognises that cultural heritage.

One example is Aoraki. It was Mount Cook for many of us for many years, but I think that it is now appropriately named Aoraki. My home river, the Buller River, is more often referred to as Kawatiri.

Shane Ardern: What about Greymouth?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: I do not know the Māori name for that. Mawhera is the local iwi group down there. I think that we on the West Coast all now refer to the Mawhera Incorporation, a commercial entity, and that the Māori iwi and hapū groups in our region are more recognised.

Sandra Goudie: I’ll bet the locals don’t use those names.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: We use their titles with more pride, unlike the member there from Coromandel, who is trying to discredit the whole process. We are moving down the path to greater self-identity, and take pride in who we are in a way that we should embrace and celebrate, unlike the National Party, which seems to be loath to make any real progress in terms of national identity.

This Government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in building our national identity through a whole lot of means—through the promotion of the country offshore, through culture, art, and heritage, and through film. We are trying to build an identity for New Zealand Aotearoa. I think that that has been an invaluable process, and one that the National Party has always failed even to recognise in terms of its value. National members do not know where they are on this bill. They do not recognise that changing and modernising a bill from 1946 is progress. It is something we should celebrate.

The bill allows us to have a better system of naming places around this country. I must refer to what is a difficult and challenging issue in my own electorate—that is, an issue in the very small and very proud community of St Arnaud by Lake Rotoiti. Those people are going through the process of deciding whether they should move forward to call their community “Rotoiti”. That is the view of a number of people. However, there is confusion—and there would be, of course—in identifying a South Island community as opposed to a North Island community where there is also a Lake Rotoiti. But the issue is that there is growing enthusiasm to use Māori names—names that identify a place as being in New Zealand and as being part of New Zealand—and that is very important.

Sandra Goudie: Now he confirms this is what’s driving it.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: I encourage that member who is now criticising the process to embrace the direction the Government wants to move us in—that is, to be a proud New Zealander, someone who is proud to determine his or her own destiny and to invest in his or her own future, which is something that the National Party seems loath to do. The National Party seems open to any sort of outside influence. In fact, as we should be reminded on a regular basis, it would have had New Zealanders in Iraq because it does not believe enough in our own identity to think that New Zealanders should make a decision for themselves. Labour, on the other hand, made a decision to stay out of Iraq because we are New Zealand Aotearoa and we make decisions for ourselves, our people, and our future. This is unlike the National Party; at that time, when Simon Power was speaking in Nick Smith’s electorate in Nelson, he said that we should be going to Iraq too. We would have been doing what our friends in the US told us to do. I am afraid that that displayed a complete lack of judgment from Simon Power, from Nick Smith who supported him, and from John Key on occasion.

Sandra Goudie: Is this the best he can do? Goodness me—spare us!

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: The member there is wondering why. It is because the lack of pride in our New Zealand identity means that the National Party does not know what it stands for, who it stands for, and when it should stand up for New Zealanders and for New Zealand. Well, we have no hesitation in this area; we believe that we must get on. We must update the 1946 legislation by way of this bill and better enable us to identify New Zealand as an independent nation using its own language, and its own terms and titles, so that we and others around the world clearly know te reo whenever possible even though many of us cannot pronounce it properly. We clearly identify with being New Zealanders.

I think this is good legislation and I cannot understand why the National Party will not celebrate its progress and passage through this House. But that is typical of National members, because they really do not know who they are, they do not know what they stand for, and they really do not know what sort of policy they should have for New Zealanders—full stop. I look forward to the day when we can debate policies, or debate anything of substance, with National members, because in fact they are not anything of substance.

CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) : I rise to take a call in the third reading of the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill. This bill has been before the House for an hour or so tonight. It is a bill that National members oppose. I want to focus initially on the reason why we oppose the bill, so that it is clear to members of the public why we are doing so. It comes out quite clearly in the minority report presented in the summary of the bill. It states: “National members recognise the role of the New Zealand Geographic Board under the existing legislation.” There is no doubt there. We recognise the opportunity to name parts of the country. We are fully behind that. However, the minority report states: “There appears nothing wrong with the way the current legislation is operating and accordingly National members see no need for change.”

Therefore, National members believe we are debating a bill that, in our opinion, is a waste of parliamentary time. We accept that there are some benefits in the new administrative functions within the bill, but essentially it is more bureaucracy. We are taking up Parliament’s time to debate this bill at a time when food prices are going through the roof, when petrol prices are going through the roof for hard-battling Kiwis out there, when mortgage rates for hard-working Kiwis have doubled over the last 4 or 5 years, and when we are seeing job losses throughout the country. I refer particularly to the loss of 500 jobs today in Ōringi in southern Hawke’s Bay.

The National Party believes that at times like this we should be debating legislation that will take this country forward. We look at this bill and we do not see it taking us forward as a nation and addressing any of those issues out there in the public domain. In fact, if we look at what is on the Order Paper, which includes this bill, we have to ask ourselves whether there is anything on it at the moment that is taking our nation forward and addressing some of those key issues we are talking about. The fact is that we are slipping behind the rest of the world.

If we want to tie this speech to geography, then we are No. 22 in the developed world for income per person, and we are falling. We cannot seriously compare our standard of living with the geography of the UK, Australia, or the United States, which are the areas of the globe that we used to compare ourselves with significantly. If we go back to 1958, when my dad first put on his boots for the All Blacks, we were No. 3 in the OECD, and we compared ourselves with nations like the UK and Australia. But now, it is not those key trading nations that we compare ourselves with geographically; it is the Czech Republic. That is not a nation we have been compared with before. We are comparing ourselves with families that are struggling in nations we have never compared ourselves with before.

Right now, as we are dealing with this bill, grocery bills are going through the roof. Families are finding it harder to save for a holiday, and it is becoming harder and harder every day to save for the mortgage. More than 78,000 New Zealanders are leaving this country every year. There are 78,000 Kiwis leaving this nation every year, and here we are, debating the New Zealand Geographic Board bill. What will this bill do to stop 78,000 Kiwis leaving this nation every year? I put it to members that it will do nothing—absolutely nothing. Here we are, in this Parliament, taking up hours and hours of this Parliament’s time to debate a bill that will do nothing for growth in this nation and will not take us forward.

Members will be aware that Michael Cullen said earlier this year that this year’s election would be about a contest of power in New Zealand. I have news for him; I have a lot of news for him. This election will be about other, far bigger issues at stake, such as grocery bills, mortgage payments, and job losses, like the 500 jobs that were lost at Ōringi today. It will be about growth and productivity—things that will take this nation forward. We should not be spending hours of this Parliament’s time debating the New Zealand Geographic Board bill.

New Zealand needs to be focusing its efforts on the things that will really make a difference in this country. Do members think this bill will do that? No, it will not. There is not a chance. Tinkering around the edges is not good enough. We have major issues in this country now. Mortgage prices are through the roof. Hard-working Kiwis are battling to keep their heads above water. Those are the issues we are facing out there.

New Zealand needs a step change geographically. National has a plan for this. We have a plan to deliver geographically around this fine nation of ours, around all the different parts of this country, from Kerikeri at the top to parts of Mr O’Connor’s electorate—to Punakaiki, to Hokitika, and even to Motueka. We have a plan that will deliver geographically for this nation. It will not achieve what this bill has set out to do, which is just more bureaucracy, more administration, and not taking a step change forward for us.

National has plans to deliver an ongoing programme of personal tax cuts. We have plans to take a disciplined approach to Government spending, so that interest rates will track down over time, not up. Over the course of this Government we have seen interest rates go through the roof.

Hon Mark Burton: What plan? Waffle, waffle, waffle.

CHRIS TREMAIN: I ask Mr Burton how the people in his electorate of Taupō are coping with the interest rates that they are currently paying. How will this bill help them to sort out their interest rates? It will do nothing. That member’s lack of activity on this issue will drive him out of his seat of Taupō very shortly.

We have other plans to deal with, geographically. The third plan is that we will stop the massive rise in head office bureaucracy that Labour has encouraged. We will deal with the compliance issues that are affecting small businesses in Taupō, in Tokoroa, and all around that member’s electorate, where people are struggling to pay the bills and the grocery prices.

Mr Burton is in this House, and we have Ministers here—Mr Carter is here, and so is Mr Barker. They are spending time on the New Zealand Geographic Board bill, when we have issues such as rising grocery prices and interest rates going through the roof. Ministers of this Government are down here debating insignificant little bills like this when we should be looking at a step change to this economy

Here is something else we will do. We will have an unwavering focus on improving education standards. These are the things that this party will do to take a step change in this country.

Geographically, we will be investing in infrastructure, because this country needs a step change in investment in infrastructure. In particular, 3 weeks ago my leader announced a huge step change in investment in infrastructure. This policy will take this country forward and will increase productivity from Kaitāia to Kerikeri, all the way down to Waihī, down to Wairoa, all the way down to Ōringi—where we lost 500 jobs today—to Paraparaumu, to Kaikōura, to Waipara, all the way down to Punakaiki, Wānaka, and right the way down to Invercargill in the south. This step change is about an investment in broadband; an investment like we have never seen before in this country. It will bring us closer to the rest of the country and to other nations. It will improve productivity and take this nation forward.

These are the things that the Labour Government should be discussing in order to take us forward, rather than the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill, which we are debating tonight. We are spending hours and hours of this country’s time on this bill while hard-working Kiwis are battling with grocery prices, battling with interest rates, and battling to keep their heads above water. This bill is a waste of time. Thank you.

SU’A WILLIAM SIO (Labour) : I rise to take a short call on this bill. The ordinary citizens of this country who are listening to this debate on the radio and the TV could probably be forgiven if they were confused by the speech made by my learned colleague Chris Tremain who spoke just before, because he spoke about everything under the sun except this bill. He criticised everything under the sun except this bill here—the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill. I just want to bring him back to the debate at hand. The first thing I say is that it is easy to criticise and very difficult to build, look forward, and capture a vision for this country. The other thing I say is that this bill here is part of Labour’s plan for the future. It will help to keep and preserve our unique national identity into the future. It is difficult to have a vision, and easy to criticise, if one does not know what a national identity is. That is what this bill is about. It is about building a strong national identity for Aotearoa New Zealand.

The bill repeals and replaces the New Zealand Geographic Board Act 1946. It modernises the official naming process of New Zealand geographic features. Places like Manukau, Ōtara, Māngere, Manurewa, and Papatoetoe all have meaning to the people who have given those names from long ago. Knowing the correct names and locations for places such as those is also important for people in all manner of everyday communications. I have heard the National Party attack the bill at the Government Administration Committee. Its members have said that the requirement for official names to be used in official documents is too burdensome for some businesses. Obviously those members have not been to Australia, where some of the names are so long that it takes a mouthful to be able to pronounce them. However, it is important for legal practice, consistency, and our national identity that official names are used in all official documents.

This bill recognises the Treaty of Waitangi responsibilities in the context of official geographic names and refines public consultation processes. People in Manukau City take Te Tiriti o Waitangi very, very seriously. They take the pronunciation of names very, very seriously. I believe that the people of Manukau listening to this debate will agree with Labour that this is an essential bill in ensuring that we move forward as a nation, that we take everybody on board, and that we begin to appreciate what makes this country very unique when one is dealing with international people. Nowhere else will one find Māori, other than in New Zealand. Nowhere else will one find Māori words, other than here in New Zealand. As I mentioned before, this bill will encourage the appreciation of names such as Manukau, Ōtara, Papatoetoe, Ōtāhuhu—

Hon Chris Carter: Māngere.

SU’A WILLIAM SIO: —and Māngere. Those are the original names given by the people of Tainui, of Ngāi Tai, and of Tāmaki-makau-rau. Those are names that we have to be comfortable in the pronunciation of.

I complete my speech by saying that Labour is happy to support the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Bill in its third reading.

JOHN CARTER (National—Northland) : If ever there was an example of our wasting taxpayers’ money, it was that contribution. I have to say that it added absolutely nothing to this debate. However, having listened to some of the other contributions, I must say that they are in about the same league, quite honestly. What is even worse is that this one will be on just about the same level—it will not add much to the debate. But, nevertheless, that is part of the problem with this Government: it is tired, it is old, and it has run out of steam. So what do we do? We spend Tuesday evening putting around—

Hon Member: Sounds like John Carter.

JOHN CARTER: It takes one to know one, does it not? Talk about old and out of pace! That member across the way cannot even get on the rugby paddock.

If ever there was a bill that showed that a Government had run out of something to do, it is this bill tonight. It is old, tired, and exhausted, and all it can do is bring up a bill that says we need a system for changing place names—a system that has worked since 1946, I think.

I have to say that in all the time I have been a member of Parliament I have not had one constituent come to the electorate office and say that there is a serious need to change this legislation. Other members may have had that happen—not that I have heard anybody mention it tonight. If any members have had a constituent come up to them and say: “Could we please change the New Zealand Geographic Board legislation?”, I would be really pleased to hear from them.

Hon Rick Barker: When was the last time the member was in his constituency?

JOHN CARTER: I hear the member Rick Barker making some suggestions about constituents. Of course, he still has to get his first constituency clinic going—and he has been in Parliament for about 10 years!

A couple of points are worth noting tonight. I listened very carefully to my colleague from the Māori Party Te Ururoa Flavell make his contribution. He is one who stands in this House and talks about pronunciation. There he was, as he was talking—

Sandra Goudie: And I gave him permission.

JOHN CARTER: Well, I just want to make the point that he was pronouncing Sandra Goudie’s name as “Gow-dee”—I think that is how he pronounced it. And Shane Ardern’s surname is actually pronounced “Ar-din”. If we are going to pronounce names incorrectly, then maybe we should call Te Ururoa Flavell “Toheroa” Flavell, or something like that.

Brian Connell: Oh!

JOHN CARTER: Well, there is nothing wrong with that. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. The fact is—

Hone Harawira: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I find no reason why the speaker should be insulting my colleague to make a point. If he wants to make a point, he should use an example that points at one of his own colleagues.

Brian Connell: I have been listening to this debate in my office, and I have to say that this is a robust Chamber and I would expect that points of debate would be allowed to flow. Mr Carter was just making some clear observations. I do not think it is necessary for the member to oppose that type of robust debate.

JOHN CARTER: I say to my friend from Te Tai Tokerau that if it is all very well for Te Ururoa Flavell to mispronounce the names of my colleagues, then he should expect to get the same response. I do not like Sandra Goudie being called by anything other than her correct name, and I do not like Shane Ardern being called by anything but his correct name. He should be called Shane “Ar-din”—that is the correct pronunciation. I respect the name “Te Ururoa Flavell”, and I do my best to pronounce it correctly. I do not want to call that member by any other name, and I say to my colleague who raised the point of order that that is why I raised the issue. If we are going to have this sort of legislation, and if we are going to stand up and say that we should use correct pronunciation, then that rule has to fit everybody. It cannot be good just for some and not for others. I think it is important that we recognise that point.

I want to make two other points before I get on to the most serious point—

Te Ururoa Flavell: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I say to the member who made those claims that I appreciate the sentiment he was trying to put across, but I want to explain to him that before those statements were made I asked his colleague in the National Party about the correct pronunciation of her name, and she guided me on that. Therefore, my pronunciation, according to her, was acceptable. So I ask that Mr Carter be asked to withdraw and apologise.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, I will not do that, but I thank the member for clearing that up.

JOHN CARTER: I respect the statement the member has made. It was actually quite good because it added to the debate a little and put some flavour into it. So it was very helpful. Kia ora.

I want to make this point. Let me move on to some names and some issues that are hotly debated in Northland. There is a township that I grew up calling “Manga-why”. Now there is a debate as to whether it is pronounced “Manga-why” or “Manga-fy”. It is one of those cases where, as my colleague Tau Henare was saying earlier, it is hard to say who is right and who is wrong. It has been known as “Manga-why” since forever, and all of a sudden, now that we are politically correct, we have to start calling it “Manga-fy”. Well, as far as I am concerned it will never be “Manga-fy”; it will always be “Manga-why”. It is the same with the township spelt O-m-a-p-e-r-e and called “O-maa-pirry”; now people are saying it is “O-ma-perry”. Well, my mind boggles. It is no wonder my mum does not know where she is going these days; she does not know whether she is in “O-maa-pirry” or “O-ma-perry”. I was listening to my colleague Eric Roy. If mum had gone to that town he mentioned, she would not know whether she was in it, out of it, or coming through it, quite honestly. It has three different names. She would not have known whether to go in backwards and walk out frontwards, or what to do.

Let me come to the most serious point about this bill. The problem with this bill is that it gives a board the power to change place names. That is all very well, and we will consider and debate endlessly whether that should or should not happen. The worry I have every time a bill like this comes into the House is that, from a local government perspective, sixty-nine different pieces of legislation have been passed by this Government in the last 9 years, and those bills have imposed costs and more costs on the ratepayers of this nation to the extent that it is now estimated that the changes made by this Government—just the changes—have cost ratepayers in excess of 6 percent of the rates they now pay. That is not the cost of the Government doing anything; it is the cost of just the changes themselves. The fact is that a bill like this will heap more and more cost on to the ratepayers of this country.

Of course, when a place name is changed all the official documents have to be changed. Let us say that a local authority changes a name from “Ōtamatea” to “Ota-ma-taa-ta” for some reason. Suddenly, all the documentation, and all the leases, and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all—the history of it—has to be changed officially. What is the cost of that? It is a huge cost.

Brian Connell: Who’s paying for it?

JOHN CARTER: The ratepayers, of course, are paying for it. There is an extra cost on their rates. That is the problem with this sort of legislation. It is all very well for the Government to come along and say it would be nice to change the name of this board and to give it more power. Those members do not think of the consequences. The consequences are that the long-suffering ratepayers in this country face another cost. I tell members that we are heading into another rates revolt, and we will have to have another Shand report to try to appease the ratepayers. They will not accept rate increases this time. Here is another cost being loaded on to the ratepayers of this country. The last thing the ratepayers of this country need is more cost to bear. They have problems now with rate increases. I read an article just the other day by Mayor Michael Laws of Whanganui, or is it Wanganui—how do we pronounce that one, by the way?

Brian Connell: Wanganui.

JOHN CARTER: Wanganui, or Whanganui, or whatever it might be. Well, the fact is that Mayor Laws is saying that the cost to his ratepayers of the changes made by this Government is $4.6 million. That is in excess of 6 percent of their rates. That is nuts. We have just had changes to the building legislation. The councils now have to have buildings accredited. When the Government brought in that legislation it said it would be cost neutral—that it would not cost anything and there would be no increase in bureaucracy. Well, as a consequence of the accreditation provision, the number of inspectorial staff has gone up by 20 percent. Some city councils have increased their staff from 40 to 50, which is a 20 percent increase. The cost across the country just to implement the first stage has been in excess of $40 million.

Brian Connell: That’s the cost of the train, not the cost of running it.

JOHN CARTER: Oh, bless my soul! We will not get into trains and choo-choos, will we! The fact is that this sort of silly, nonsense legislation means more cost to the ratepayers and more cost to the taxpayers.

I conclude on this note. Can someone remind me of how much it costs to run Parliament every minute? Is it something like $1,000 a minute, or is it $10,000 a minute? I cannot remember, but it is a significant sum of money. We have spent the last 2 hours debating this legislation at great cost to the country and to the taxpayer, and I would like the Labour members to stand up and tell the taxpayer what benefit and value they will get from this bill tonight. I will tell them: zilch, none, nothing. Quite honestly, that is one of the main reasons why the National Party opposes this bill.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: When the House was last debating this bill the Hon Darren Hughes was speaking. He has 6 minutes remaining.

Sandra Goudie: Mr Deputy Speaker—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member has, according to my records, spoken on this bill once. Does the member wish to speak again?

Sandra Goudie: Yes. I seek leave to finish that part of the debate.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, you may seek leave to take another call if you wish.

Sandra Goudie: I seek leave to take another call.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Leave has been sought for that course to be followed. Is there any objection? There is. I call Brian Connell.

BRIAN CONNELL (National—Rakaia) : I rise to reinforce the fact that National strongly opposes this bill. We do so for two fundamental reasons. One of them I will canvass in some detail, and one of them I will just touch on.

The latter reason is that the argument put forward by the Minister of Internal Affairs and by the Labour Party specifically is that this bill is about identity fraud. Well, that is a smokescreen argument. A cursory glance at the statistics demonstrates to all those who are interested in consulting statistics that the number of identity fraud cases in this country has dropped off markedly. I will come back to that a little later.

The key reason we object to this bill is that it implies restrictions on access to information. The National Party put these arguments in a very coherent fashion to the members of the Government Administration Committee, and I am convinced that the Labour Party members felt that those arguments had merit. I am of the view that they went back to the Minister and presented these views to him, but the Minister, for some reason best known to him, simply would not accept those arguments. So the National members were forced—and we did it reluctantly—to put our position in the commentary on the bill.

I want to touch on that commentary, because I think that after the Minister had read it he started to think that maybe he had made a mistake, and that that led to our now having two more Supplementary Order Papers before the House. That would have been totally unnecessary had the Minister listened to our arguments, because embodied in the Supplementary Order Papers, and in one in particular, are the arguments that I want to put before the House.

The first reference I want to make, as I said, is to the National Party’s commentary. It reads, in part: “The Government failed to consult widely on the bill prior to the bill being introduced to Parliament and consequently struggled to get widespread community support.” I will demonstrate to the House through the course of this debate that that argument is meritorious.

The second thing we want to say is that a significant number of submitters raised this concern, as well. They went on to add that they felt that the key component leading them to object to this bill was the access restrictions. The National Party’s commentary goes on to say: “It is the view of National members that these restrictions will continue to hamper academic and genuine genealogical research, and other legitimate purposes needing access to births, deaths and marriage information.” The National Party members on the select committee argued that our party supported openness and transparency, that we believe that they were being denied to the public, and that our position was not being taken in isolation.

A number of academics of renown also take that view. One in particular comes to mind, and that is Professor Geoffrey Rice from Canterbury University, who heads up the history faculty there. He took the time to write a detailed submission to the select committee. I want to refer to just one paragraph of that submission, because his argument is compelling. It sums up why this bill did not get public support, why the Government, at a million miles an hour, started to back away from it, and why we have a Supplementary Order Paper before the House right now. He said, in part: “If passed, this Amendment Bill would render the writing of New Zealand’s twentieth century social history well-nigh impossible.” Which select committee members who were in their right mind could deny, when confronted with that statement from someone of such renown, that this bill was something that needed further discussion?

I then said to the members of the select committee that we should have Professor Rice, and the other academics who had taken the time to write to the select committee expressing their concerns, come in front of the select committee to put their positions, because on the one hand we were getting petitions from petitioners, and on the other hand we were getting advice from the Government members and officials that those people’s concerns were wrong. I argued that we should have those academics come in front of the select committee so that they could put their position to it. The Labour Party members backed off that proposition at a million miles an hour.

Professor Rice went on to say: “The value of such data for genealogists, family and local historians has been invaluable and their work has contributed enormously to the enrichment and understanding of New Zealand’s heritage.” He also went on to say: “The Minister of Internal Affairs, Mr Barker, referred to the prevention of ‘identity theft’ as one of the aims of the amendment, but such cases are rare in New Zealand”—which is a point I have already made—“and this legislation will not prevent them.” The most compelling sentence of his whole submission is this: “Here is an example of a bad law being proposed to remedy a very small problem.”

Again I made the offer to the members of the select committee that we have these academics come in front of the select committee so that we could understand their concerns in more detail, so that we were in control of all the facts, and so that we could put together coherent legislation. As I have already argued and articulated in the House, the Labour Party members were opposed to that proposition.

And those are not isolated examples. That socialist rag, that tabloid in Christchurch that some will know as the Christchurch Press, which will do anything to pursue a populist theme, took the time to write an editorial, and I want to quote to the House a couple of sentences from it, as well, because it sums up public opinion on this legislation. It starts by stating: “It is not often that historians and researchers get stirred up about a matter that makes it into the newspapers. But an innocuous-sounding bill quietly put before Parliament … ” has done just that. The emphasis there is on its having been quietly put before Parliament. The Minister argued earlier in the House that there had been widespread consultation on the introduction of this bill, and that is simply not the case. The Christchurch Press on this occasion got it right. It went on to say that the bill “would almost close free access to public registers that have been open to everyone since not long after colonial government was established in New Zealand.” It goes on to say: “There is no compelling need for the secrecy provisions of the bill and certainly no sign of any public call for them. … it is yet another encroachment that chips away at information that should be publicly available to all.” The last sentences are these: “These registers have been public information for centuries, long before they were kept by governments. No other free society has this kind of restriction. There is no need for it here.”

What is driving the argument on the behalf of the Government? It is a silly, misconstrued argument that people will have their privacy interfered with if other people go about their legitimate business of accessing data so that they can pursue social histories, family tree histories, genealogy, and accurate historical accounts of where New Zealand has come from. This bill will impede good scholarship, and National has to oppose it. Any person with any dignity—

Peter Brown: You’ve got it wrong.

BRIAN CONNELL: Unfortunately, Mr Brown has not been listening to the evidence that has been put before the House. The Christchurch rag got it right, Professor Rice got it right, and the 164 submitters who submitted to the select committee got it right. But Mr Brown stands up and says that we have all got it wrong.

Mr Brown will do anything to support the Government, because he knows that in a few months’ time things will get a bit—well, let me just say that he probably will be dusting off his CV, along with a few other non-Government members who continue to vote with the Government. I know that that will mean a huge loss of quality in this House, but, unfortunately, that is the way things are starting to pan out. That is the cost of their voting with the Government. The logic of what is being suggested by everyone who is opposed to this legislation is starting to catch up with some of my colleagues.

Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future) : The previous speaker, Brian Connell, referred to those who made submissions on the bill to the Government Administration Committee. I was one of those who did so, in concert with my good friend Mr Keith Locke. I think it is fair to say that we made a submission on the bill as it was introduced, and on some serious shortcomings we saw in the bill, but we now see that the amendment the Minister is proposing—the Supplementary Order Paper that will be moved at the Committee stage—substantially addresses our concerns.

The view we took was that this bill would impede those who were seeking family histories, that the limitations it contained originally were excessive, and we doubted its impact on resolving the issue of identity fraud. The Minister and the select committee have listened, and the amendments they propose will address those issues. To some extent though the whole issue is somewhat of a fiction. In the last couple of months I have taken the time to catalogue my own family’s history back through all of my own grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great, and great-great-great-grandparents for the previous five generations. I have all of their data, but none of that has been obtained by accessing official records in this country. I have gone to cemetery records, I have used overseas records, newspaper accounts, and some of the National Library’s provisions, and I have built up a pretty complete picture of my own origins. I am quite satisfied with having achieved that as a spare-time hobby. But it does raise the issue again that we were concerned about at the time we made the submission on this original bill.

The amendments being proposed remove some of the immediate problems we foresaw about access beyond certain periods. But I think it remains a fiction to suggest that even with this amended bill, which we will be supporting, the fundamental issue that was put up as the reason for it in the first place is valid. As I recall telling the select committee, and as my experience in recent months has confirmed, it is pretty easy when one sets out to trace information about families and about people if one has a few basic tools.

I will give members a “for instance”. The member who preceded me is from the Christchurch area. The Christchurch City Council has available on the Internet all of the cemetery burial records for Christchurch cemeteries. So if people know the name of an ancestor or a family member they simply type it into the search page and it will give them all of the details, date of death, description of where the person is buried, occupation, age, and last-known address. It has nothing to do with registers of births, deaths, and marriages; this is information that is held by other sources. If people are then interested enough they can go to the National Library’s Papers Past website, which has a record of previous New Zealand newspapers up until around the first years of the 20th century. One can search death accounts, obituaries, and other pieces of information there.

Genealogists and amateur historians will know this well, but the point I am making is that even with this bill, even in its most Draconian original form, and certainly with the amendments now being moved to it, it will not have any impact on people’s ability to access that degree of information. So a number of the concerns that were being raised are readily able to be addressed.

That then leaves the question of identity fraud and whether one wants to put restrictions on the period through which one can have access to records to prevent the exploitation of fraud for those purposes. It reminds me of a story attributed to the late President Johnson, who in earlier days in Texan politics was part of a group of people who used to visit gravesites at night to find the names of the dead whom they could then enrol to cast votes for them in current elections. A story was told about one evening when a group of people were going through a particular cemetery. The trick was to go back several generations so that there was no prospect of the person they were having vote ever having anyone who would turn up and say “Hang on, that’s my uncle who died a few years ago.” They were going through the cemetery and Lyndon was particularly punctilious in going to the oldest graves he could find to get the names. His contemporaries were saying to him: “Come on, Lyndon, we haven’t got time for this. Just grab these names and go.” He turned to them and said: “He’s got as much right to vote as anyone in this cemetery.”

The point I am making in relation to identity fraud is that although the bill puts some restrictions in place, if people are determined enough they can find their way around it. That may be an extreme example for a nefarious purpose, but to go back to my example of cemetery records, one can find people there. One can find out that they did not have any descendants so one would be quite safe in assuming their identity. As members will be aware, we have had many cases of people adopting multiple aliases for fraudulent purposes. It is a comparatively easy thing to do, and the restrictions in the bill will not prevent that from happening.

So why support the bill? I think we need to make an effort to offer some level of protection. I think that the amendments the bill contains—and certainly the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister has indicated he will move subsequently—are an improvement on the original. I think that is indicative of the fact that the select committee did listen to the submissions made to it. I have talked to a number of those who made submissions at the time who feel somewhat more comfortable about the bill in its likely amended form than they did in its original form. Most people acknowledge that some protections need to be put in place to prevent the rampant misuse of information that is held about people, but clearly at the same time they also acknowledge the old proverb that where there is a will there is a way.

We should not think that by passing this bill we will absolve ourselves of the difficulty of identity fraud. We should not think that we will prevent people from getting legitimate access to information because they will, and they will obtain it from all variety of sources, but we are in a position to offer some modest protection against the misuse of the official information that is currently held by the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, and civil unions are probably now added in there, as well. For those purposes we think that the bill is a reasonable step forward and we will support it, given the fact that it is a vast improvement on what was originally introduced.

NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) : I am giving this speech on behalf of Keith Locke, who is unable to participate in the debate this evening. The Greens will support the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill now that the Supplementary Order Paper has dramatically transformed it. We thank the Minister Rick Barker for recognising the role that the Greens, and in particular Keith Locke, have played in this transformation. Keith was, of course, added to the Government Administration Committee to represent the Green Party on this bill.

As has been mentioned by previous speakers, including Mr Connell just previously, the original bill met with huge opposition—in fact, from virtually every genealogist, historian, biographer, and journalist in the country—and rightly so. The original bill largely eliminated the traditional free access to births, deaths, and marriages records, or at least people would have to go through a hugely cumbersome, time-consuming, and costly process of trying to get immediate relatives to give them permission to look at records of relatives who had died less than 50 years ago, were married less than 80 years ago, or had been born less than 100 years ago. The Green Party responded to these concerns and said that we would not support the bill going any further. We linked up with United Future and, in the best MMP tradition, Peter Dunne and Mr Locke presented a joint submission to the Government Administration Committee, which was considering the bill, and Mr Dunne has referred to that.

With several MMP parties, plus National, being against the bill, the Government did not have the numbers to pass the bill in its original form. Rather than simply opposing the bill as the National Party had done, the Greens tried to look for a way through, and we think that it has been found. The key point is that we have pretty much kept open access to records. If people want it, they can get it. However, there is provision for people to close their records, but the Greens successfully pushed for this to be on prescribed grounds and for a prescribed purpose. We were given confirmation in the House by the Minister that it will not be easy to meet these prescribed grounds. He said it must be on “substantive” grounds, and the prescribed period cannot be too long either. We reiterate that position, particularly for the reference of those making the regulations and for the Regulations Review Committee.

The select committee looked at a real substantive ground that might occur infrequently. It looked at cases like a woman who had left a spouse and set up a new relationship and did not want her former partner to be able to track her down. The former partner may be able to track her new address by getting hold of a marriage or civil union certificate, finding out the new partner’s name, and then the address. So it has to be something serious to close a record. It cannot be done just on a whim and for a long period. The period would not need to be for years and years, because there is the right of renewal with the registrar.

After the big changes made to the original bill, New Zealand remains like Britain and parts of the United States, in that it is holding the line for open access to records. We do not need to exaggerate security concerns, because Government officials could not identify many people who were stealing other people’s identities by using the births, deaths, and marriages records. In fact, it is much harder to steal a person’s identity now, due to computerisation and checks in the records of the Department of Internal Affairs. It is much, much harder to steal the identity of a dead person—

Sandra Goudie: There never was any correlation between access and fraud.

NANDOR TANCZOS: All I can hear is yak-yak-yak. It is much harder to steal the identity of a dead person because a death is now registered in the computer records, in the same file as the person’s birth, marriage, or civil union details. If someone goes to the Department of Internal Affairs for a passport, plenty of questions can be asked of a fraudster to check them out. Some defenders of the bill in its original form said that might be true, but what about the private firms, banks, and various agencies that might be deceived about someone’s identity if information on births, deaths, and marriages is too readily available? Well, if they do not do the proper checking, it is their lookout. We do not need to close off the records because of their incompetence.

There are a couple of new checks and balances in the revised bill that are not too onerous and will give people some protection against fraud. First, people accessing information have to provide some identification and their access to a particular subject’s files will be recorded on that subject’s access register. Secondly, if people have some worries that a particular person might be trying to get at their details with ill intent, they can check their access register regarding their own birth, marriage, or civil union details. The death details are outside this process, for obvious reasons—it is a bit difficult for a deceased person to fill out the relevant forms. Thirdly, the identification criteria for the person accessing records will presumably not be too onerous. The requirement is for any means of identification that are reasonably necessary. It will not be watertight identification but it will make it easier to track down harassers and fraudsters.

Presumably, it will not be necessary for bulk users, like genealogists, to go through a lot of hassles and repeatedly lodge ID. They might be identified by a particular email address for repeated searches. Cost and ease of access is rightly important for many genealogists. They are often retired people, without much income, who often have to go up many paths to track down forebears. The computerisation of records should make it easier for them to get printouts, and hopefully will be cheaper for the recipient, in that there is a much lower administrative burden on the Department of Internal Affairs with computerised records compared with paper records. What are known as historical records will be readily available—that is, where the person was born 100 years ago, and the like.

There is a provision in the bill for the Department of Internal Affairs to provide information on whole categories of people, in an easy form. This could be very important for some historical research. For example, one researcher did a project on what types of people were most affected by the 1918 flu epidemic in New Zealand, and where they lived. A comprehensive look at the death records during the several months of the flu epidemic was obviously required. The downside for researchers is that the Government will not now be providing sets of hundreds of people’s records, or summaries, often called indexes, in the same way it did previously. People will not be allowed to put whole sets of records on the Internet. How this will work in practice is anyone’s guess, because the long arm of the New Zealand law does not necessarily get to Internet jurisdictions on the other side of the world, where foreign websites may host the mass genealogical records of New Zealanders, which currently exist. This question of whether a mass of records, or summaries of them, should be available on the Internet, and the practicalities of preventing it, is one we will have to work through over the 5-year test period of the legislation.

In finishing, the Green Party thanks the dozens of submitters to the bill who were instrumental in paving the way for this bill to be changed to allow open access of records. Mr Locke says it was also nice to see the two Tims—the two previously faceless editors of the New Zealand Herald and the Dominion Post—Tim Murphy and Tim Pankhurst, pop their heads above the parapet and jointly make the case to the select committee for freedom of information. The original bill was very unpopular. As the Green MPs talked about it around the community we discovered that almost every second person appears to be a genealogist, which is great not only for family histories but also for the refining of our nation’s history. We praise these genealogists, just as we praise the historians and biographers who will gain greatly from the changes in this bill. In the main, genealogists, historians, and biographers work long hours, month after month, year after year, generally unpaid—in fact, spending money out of their own pockets quite often—just to bring some enlightenment to their families and their nation.

HONE HARAWIRA (Māori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) : Kia ora tātou katoa e te Whare. This Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill is important to a lot of people for many reasons, but it is very important to Māori because it deals with information that is an essential element of whakapapa, and whakapapa is a very, very special part of being Māori.

Whakapapa is not something introduced through 21st century computer-based family tree programmes or family history websites. Indeed, whakapapa is not even just about genealogy; whakapapa is far, far deeper than that.

Nearly 80 years ago Sir Apirana Ngata presented a paper to the Wellington branch of the Historical Association in which he challenged the prevailing practice of depicting genealogy and history as having started in this country only with the arrival of the European settlers. Ngata referred the historians to the minute books of the Native Land Court, describing them as containing “the most diversified use of the genealogical method, as illustrating the Māori customs relating not only to land tenure but also to birth, marriage, death, war, peace-making, conquest, gifts, mana, chieftainship … and other aspects of pre-pakeha life of the Maori people.” Whakapapa is the basis of our history, the basis of kinship underpinning the whole concept of whānau, hapū, and iwi, and an essential element in how Māori see ourselves as tangata whenua here in Aotearoa.

I recall just last year a good mate of mine by the name of Joe Te Rito gave another perspective on the complexity of whakapapa research. He talked about how he was trying to trace his whakapapa all the way back to Papatūānuku, with particular interest in the 16 generations from Rongomaiwahine, high chieftainess of Te Māhia, down to himself. Joe drew on Ngata’s legacy to explain the concept of whakapapa as a genealogical story told layer upon layer, ancestor upon ancestor.

He also talked about the many different ways Māori had to describe the detail and the history of births, deaths, marriages, and relationships, such as the notion of whakamoe, or intermarriages within a person’s lines of descent; the concept of taotahi, or listing ancestors’ names without including those of wives or husbands; tararere, or tracing a single line of descent without showing intermarriages or other kinship relationships; and the notion of tāhū, or setting out the main lines from the progenitors of a tribe—ancestors, for example, like Ikanui and Wheeru for Te Aupōuri, Tūwhakatere for Ngāi Takoto, Rāhiri for Ngāpuhi, etc. So members can see how identity and having access to the records of that identity are crucial in enabling people to better understand their history, their place in today’s world, and their potential for the future.

I recall, for example, when I first came to Parliament I was asked what name I would like to have on my door. So, naturally, I told them that my name was Hone Pani Tamati Waka Nene Harawira. Just as naturally, Parliamentary Service told me that it could not do it, that I could not have my name on my door, that it was too long. Did I have a shorter version? Would I mind if one of my names was dropped? But the reality is that my name defines me through mana tupuna and mana whenua as well. Indeed, with a name like Tamati Waka Nene it would not be possible for me to be anything but a member of Parliament for the mighty Tai Tokerau. I carry my name with pride in my ancestry and pride in the relationships I have through my tūpuna to a goodly number of other MPs in this House, including MPs from Labour, National, New Zealand First, and the Māori Party.

Peter Brown: Are we on that computer?

HONE HARAWIRA: I say to Peter Brown that he is not, but members of his party are.

Far be it from me to risk causing offence by chopping off one of my names, because through my whakapapa I am also the living image of those who have gone before us. So rather than agreeing to chop one of my names off, I simply asked that Parliamentary Service work it out, and, lo and behold, it came to pass.

Whakapapa can be complex, it can be frightening, it is always keenly watched by observers, and it is a mark of maturity in those who are able to capture its essence, albeit at wildly different levels. The recalling in proper order of whakapapa is one of the greatest skills of our most treasured orators—our kaumātua—and, increasingly, the young sharp minds of our rangatahi.

There is nothing like listening to a master in the art of whakapapa, and I have been privileged in my time to hear some of the truly great orators of the north, including the Rev. Māori Marsden and Sir James Hēnare himself, who used whakapapa to build connections between people who had no idea of their relationship to others in the same house, who used whakapapa to define the value of historical links between hapū and iwi who might have been at loggerheads with one another, and in a truly masterly display Sir James Hēnare used whakapapa to completely destroy the arbitrary boundaries laid down for Ngāpuhi, by highlighting the deep whakapapa connections between hapū inside and outside of that arbitrary boundary line.

I was speaking to Angeline Greensill, the Māori Party candidate for Hauraki-Waikato, about this very bill just last week, and she said that it was really, really important that the Māori Party supported the right of tangata whenua to be able to access information about births, deaths, marriages, and relationships, as it is one of those essential aspects of our whānau, hapū, and iwi that must be preserved. I followed up that discussion by making a call to Monty Ōhia, the Māori Party candidate for Te Tai Tonga, to see what his thoughts were, and I was not surprised at all to learn that he was of the very same mind. Indeed, he said that the Māori Party should also support the right of all other New Zealanders to have access to that information for the same reasons, because he believed that genealogy helped people to build awareness of themselves and their relationships with others, through knowledge of their own ancestry.

And Derek Fox, the Māori Party candidate for Ikaroa-Rawhiti, added that the concept of mana tupuna was equally important in helping Māori to define our status as tangata whenua and as a distinct people. He said that mana tupuna was the bridge that linked us to our ancestors, that defined our heritage, and that gave us the stories that defined our place in the world.

And although we accept the importance of security measures to protect personal details from abuse, it is because of the critical importance of whakapapa to Māori and the safeguarding of the art of whakapapa as a key asset in the survival and renaissance of Māori as tangata whenua that the Māori Party will be supporting the right of whānau to continue to have access to registered information on births, deaths, marriages, and relationships, for the legitimate purpose of discovering more about one’s whakapapa and all the relationships that flow from that knowledge and those connections. Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Kia ora tātou katoa.

RUSSELL FAIRBROTHER (Labour) : I want to take a short call on this matter to highlight the inconsistency of the National Party’s opposition to this bill. This bill, of course, is aimed at moving births, deaths, and marriages registration into the 21st century, and the hallmark of the turn of the century has been the increase in the information age and the accessibility in electronic form of much data. The price of that, of course, has been a greater vigilance of privacy, and one cannot have the ease of access through information technology without revising the barriers in order to protect privacy. So this bill seeks to achieve a greater degree of accuracy by facilitating the interdepartmental swapping of defined information so that the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages has an accurate register.

At the heart of this bill is the search for accuracy. Of course, that makes ironic the comment by the National Party members, if one listened to them this evening—and as far as I can tell, this seems to be summed up in the National Party’s view in the Government Administration Committee report, when it could not agree on any changes to the bill—that the restrictions proposed in the bill will hamper academic and genuine genealogical research and other legitimate purposes for which access is needed to information on births, deaths, and marriages. Well, let us just look at that. If the National members want to have an Act that continues to rely upon inaccurate information, then the whole pyramid of academic research and genuine genealogical information is a house that is built on sand. It is a pyramid of no substance. What better basis could there be for academic research and genealogical analysis than accurate records?

This bill simply moves the Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Act into the 21st century, even though Sandra Goudie is still walking on the streets of the 18th century. This bill seeks to impose high levels of accuracy on the registrar-general, and it recognises the effect of our information technology on the recording and exchanging of that information between the various Government agencies and individuals who possess it. The bill enables individuals to accurately describe aspects of their identity. It enables some individuals in sensitive occupations to suppress their details, and it restricts the unlimited access of those with prurient interests. But the bill also opens up the right for individuals to give consent to further research, and after 100 years, of course, it opens up the books entirely for proper research.

So at the heart of this bill is a search for accuracy, and that search for accuracy, of course, puts a lie to the National Party’s opposition when it wants to retain outdated and inaccurate records, using the claim of academic freedom.

COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) : It is good to get an opportunity to speak to this bill, the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill. Just following what the last speaker said, I think probably the point that needs to be made and restated is that there has been a lack of consultation within the process of developing this legislation, and that displays a level of arrogance that is borne out in most of the legislation that comes forward from this Government. We have only to think about legislation such as the Electoral Finance Act, which has been put there for a purpose but was not consulted widely enough on and will not survive. Really, when we look at the process of democracy inside this country we see we are starting to understand just how thin a veneer of democracy we have left under this Labour Government.

That was also borne out by this Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill when the original version of the bill that came before the House was poorly conceived. That certainly did raise the hackles and ire of the genealogists, and the process of hearing submissions by the Government Administration Committee certainly raised that issue. The point I make is made again in an editorial in the Christchurch Press that said: “The idea appears to have been one cooked up by bureaucrats in a closed circle in which they consulted only other bureaucrats. It came about after a policy review, but although 15 government departments were able to have their say on it, no outside opinions seem to have been solicited. The bill will go to a select committee,” but, as it says there, the opportunity to make submissions will be quite limited.

When we look at the size and substance of the Supplementary Order Papers, it is quite easy for us to say yes, we have got it sorted. But I do not think we have. I mean, once something has been made crooked, it is very hard to make it straight. I have absolutely no confidence that the Labour Government has been able to get this matter sorted. The information that is quite relevant is that 68,000 corrections have been made by the public to the information on births, deaths, and marriages. The Department of Internal Affairs would not have the capability even to be able to access and source that information and to keep it correct.

When we look at this bill we have here before the House, with its associated Supplementary Order Papers, we can see that it is in the johnny-come-lately style we have become very used to from this Labour Government. It is certainly not what the National Party would call creditable Government. On that basis, it is still very appropriate that the National members are opposing this bill, because once something has been made crooked, it is pretty difficult to argue that it can be made straight purely by putting in a couple of Supplementary Order Papers. Restricting the public’s opportunity to see the full substance of the bill originally was a denial of people’s democratic rights, and democracy is something we must value at all costs.

The thoughts about identity fraud are a typical example—a very lightweight excuse, sort of thought up on the fly to justify this bill. When we look at the access restriction, we see is a very serious matter. We had the member from United Future before talking about how he was able to build up a pretty complete picture without going anywhere near the registers of births, deaths, and marriages, but that is not necessarily always the case.

The arguments that have been put forward by the National Party are very relevant. The Government has failed to consult. That is a pretty serious indictment, when we consider that the public have every right to be able to submit on something. The ability to put forward Supplementary Order Papers—this has become the custom of this Government—at the very last hour denies the public their right to be able to articulate their views, and to ensure that our lawmaking in this House is well considered and that the public are well and truly engaged. The fact that the majority of submitters opposed the structure of the original bill was bad enough in itself. It is important to recognise that in relation to the history of this country, as has been related in this House, it is important that we are able to carry out accurate research with regard to our genealogies. That is something we all take very, very seriously.

So the National Party, I believe, is certainly in the right space on this bill. Openness and transparency were denied to the public. The Government’s continuing custodial role is therefore brought into question. It is quite clear that the Minister of Internal Affairs referred to the prevention of identity theft as one of the aims of the bill, but such cases were considered to be very rare, according to the submission that was put to the select committee. So let us not forget the experiences that we are having from this Government, as it works its way through a very lightweight Order Paper. We have to realise that democracy in this country is being challenged by virtue of the fact that we are constantly seeing the public kept out of the discussions around how this country is run. This bill, on that basis, should not progress, and the National Party is quite rightfully in the position of objecting to it. Thank you.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) : Unfortunately, I missed my turn for my call, so I am taking a tail-end Charlie. I have to say that the contribution of the member who has just resumed his seat, Colin King, was quite disappointing. I usually listen to him with some interest because he usually talks common sense, but here he was talking gobbledegook—absolute gobbledegook. When this legislation was first introduced by the Government it all seemed very, very straightforward, and New Zealand First supported it going to the Government Administration Committee. But shortly thereafter we found a number of flaws were identified by the genealogists, the historians, and the people who represented adopted people. They all registered huge concerns. A number of submissions outlined the details of those concerns, none more so than that of the Hon Peter Dunne and Keith Locke, where they combined together and outlined their concerns.

In order to ensure that the select committee took on board the submitters’ concerns, Sandra Goudie—and the member can tell me whether I am correct—got somebody to extract the records of, I think, her own family, without anybody whatsoever challenging it. She came back to the select committee and told us how loose the system was.

Sandra Goudie: I don’t have a problem with that part.

PETER BROWN: The member does not have a problem with that part, but she will vote against the bill. She will vote against it. She identified quite clearly that there was a problem in the current law, and the National members will vote against the bill.

But I say “fair go” to the Minister, because he took on board all the concerns and realised that the legislation was not doing the job that he thought it would do. It needed amendment, and he has produced a Supplementary Order Paper to address all the concerns. The Minister needs to be complimented on that. He wrote to the select committee addressing all the concerns, and I have a copy of his letter here. [Interruption] One of the concerns—and it is the concern of the member opposite, who is going into hysterics as I speak—was that if Joe Blow goes along and asks about the background on, the criteria on, or the information about a certain person, then Joe Blow is captured on an access register. Under the legislation as it was originally written, there was nothing, and that is considered to be a solution.

Sandra Goudie: That wasn’t a concern.

PETER BROWN: Oh, the member is agreeing with it.

Sandra Goudie: No, I said that wasn’t a concern. I don’t mind people having access to the information, but the member actually doesn’t understand the issue—nor did the Minister.

PETER BROWN: The member is quite confused. She is opposing this bill, and she knows that the current law is inadequate. The member knows that the current law is inadequate. She was a member of the select committee—a rather vocal member of the select committee—and she is advocating that the National Party does nothing. She knows that there is a problem, and she wants nothing to be done.

New Zealand First thinks that the Minister has taken all the concerns on board. He has produced a Supplementary Order Paper to address the concerns that the public raised before the select committee, and New Zealand First will be supporting it.

I am conscious that I am running out of time, but I just want to talk a little about another concern of New Zealand First. When one goes for a death certificate when a person has died, it states whether that person is buried or cremated, but if one goes for a computer printout, it does not state whether the person is buried or cremated. It does not use those terms at all; it states where the body was disposed of. Many people, many New Zealanders, find that to be insulting. They find that to be insensitive. We made representations to the Minister and to the select committee, and that wording will be changed in this legislation. That is a significant improvement, and I compliment the Minister on listening to that concern and taking it on board. Thank you very much.