Mana | Movement of the People

 

MANA in Parliament, 31 July – 2 August

This week a number of bills went through committee stage in Parliament. In this stage, each part and clause of a bill is debated and voted on, and, once completed, bills are sent back to Parliament for a third and final reading. Up for committee stage this week was the Biosecurity Law Reform Bill whose provisions will actually weaken biosecurity protections in Aotearoa and thus have a detrimental and potentially devastating effect on many of our primary industries.

MANA opposed this bill at committee stage. MANA also opposed the Appropriation (2012/13 Estimates) Bill which is one of the bills that puts in place the government’s budget and policy priorities – such as cutting public spending across the board to continue to pay for tax cuts to the highest earners. Also up this week was the committee stage of the Sentencing (Aggravating Factors) Amendment Bill to ensure that offences against police or prison officers are taken into account in sentencing. Not only is this current practice by judges in sentencing, but offences against police officers have been going down in the last few years – making the bill a nonsense, and a waste of time and taxpayers money. MANA was the only party to oppose this bill.

See the website for MANA Vice-President, John Minto’s, release on this: “MANA says no to political window-dressing bill”. Also up this week was the second reading of the Taxation Bill which sets the income tax rates for the coming financial year. MANA opposed this too given our very different tax policy from the government’s, and instead applauded the French government’s announcement to introduce a financial transactions tax on share market trading. See the MANA website for John Minto’s release on this. MANA has a very similar policy which we call the Hone Heke tax. It would introduce a tax on all financial speculation – including share market and currency trading – and because none of these activities of the super-rich are currently taxed, it would enable us to abolish GST, lower tax rates for low income earners, and still bring in more tax income than we currently do to fund things like employment initiatives.

Over the last couple of weeks, a number of education, health and wellbeing organisations and groups have appeared before Parliament’s Māori Affairs Select Committee to speak to their submissions on the committee’s ‘Inquiry into the determinants of wellbeing for Māori children’.Hone is a member of the committee.

Importantly, many of the submitters argued that poverty is a central factor in determining child health and wellbeing, and because of that, the government needs to do more to address it including better supporting the whānau ora policy. The last of the public submissions were on Wednesday. MANA looks forward to the recommendations of the committee, despite being very disappointed that National and NZ First members voted to appoint a non-Māori advisor to the inquiry (Māori Party abstained on the vote).

In direct opposition to education groups’ submissions on the importance of quality schooling and teaching to the wellbeing of Māori children, the government announced during the week that their charter schools model will utilise unregistered teachers and that they won’t have to follow the NZ schools’ curriculum. See MANA’s release on the website: “Low Quality and Low Expectations Dominate the NZ Model of Charter Schools”. It’s a model which will allow private providers to cut costs and rack up profits at the expense of kids in low-decile communities, where charter schools are to be located – aue. The other big news of the week was the Waitangi Tribunal’s interim recommendation that the government halt its asset sales programme until after the Tribunal reports back on the Māori Council’s water claim. See the MANA website for Hone’s release expressing MANAs support of this recommendation, and also his response to the government’s request for the Tribunal to report back early – which he likened to a turkey calling for an early Christmas given the expectation that the news is going to be all bad for the government.

Finally, this week the MANA Parliament office farewelled intern Mika Bailey (nō Ngāti Tūwharetoa), politics student at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. She could have chosen any MPs office and she chose us! Ngā mihi Mika for all your mahi – we’ll miss you.