Q+A: Labour’s stance on water: “It effectively belongs to everybody.”
 
New Zealand national interests and Maori rights can be accommodated, but with asset sales “being rammed through”, “that process of negotiation cannot happen.”
 
Shearer says national standards “inferior” and no good for children, but Labour won’t abolish them and “turn the whole applecart upside down”.
 
Focus in schools should be on the under-achieving tail: “National standards is somewhat of a side issue.”
 
On Kawerau mill closure, Shearer says if he was PM, “I would not rule out becoming involved.”
 
Labour wants to look at volatility of NZ exchange rate
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Foreshore and Seabed: “In retrospect,… we would have done it differently.”
 
Q+A, 9-10am Sundays on TV ONE and one hour later on TV ONE plus 1.
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Q+A
 
SHANE TAURIMA INTERVIEWS DAVID SHEARER
 
 
SHANE TAURIMA
                        Mr Shearer, thank you. Good morning. Welcome to the programme.
 
DAVID SHEARER - Labour Leader
                        Morning, Shane. Thanks.
 
SHANE           Let’s start on water, because John Key says the Maori King’s got it wrong, that nobody owns it. What do you say?
 
DAVID            Well, under our law, under common law, it’s nobody’s resource. It effectively belongs to everybody, if you want to take it that way. So that’s the position where we stand. But we have to point out that this would never have come about if we weren’t about to sell off rights in water to a rather exclusive club that can afford to buy those shares in Mighty River Power.
 
SHANE           Going back to my first question, Eddie Durie says Maori law is different, and actually Maori can own water.
 
DAVID            Well, we’ve had these sorts of situations before, and actually this week we had the Tuhoe settlement realised.
 
SHANE           Water, Mr Shearer. Let’s talk about what Eddie Durie has said.
 
DAVID            I know, but-
 
SHANE           He says that Maori law says that Maori can own water.
 
DAVID            What I’m saying is that while we have different views of looking at water, over the last 20 years or more, we’ve been able to work out a regime where both Maori rights and Maori concepts of water and the New Zealand interests have been able to be accommodated together very well. And I give you the example of Tuhoe, who have been owning Lake Waikaremoana, for example. That is for their benefit. It ensures their mana, but it also doesn’t impact in any way on New Zealand and New Zealanders as a whole. I can still walk and use that lake as much as I like. So there are ways of getting through this. The problem that we have is with state asset sales being rammed through as they are, if you ram them through, that process of negotiation cannot happen, and that’s what we have at the moment where people are being pushed into corners.
 
SHANE           And I will cut you off with state asset sales, because you’ve made the point. But let me ask you would you do anything different to what the government’s doing currently?
 
DAVID            We wouldn’t be selling state-owned assets, and I know you’re going to cut me off-
 
SHANE           I am, because I think you’ve made that point clear.
 
DAVID            We wouldn’t be in this situation right now if the government did not decide that it wanted to sell off assets.
 
SHANE           But we are in this situation, Mr Shearer. And how would you do things differently?
 
DAVID            Well, first of all I would say we are not going to be selling Mighty River Power, so therefore we in fact diffuse the entire issue. And then we go back to the way we’ve always done this, which is we actually sit down and negotiate and we’re able to work through this together and get to a common resolution. And that has been the way that we’ve done it in New Zealand, and it’s worked.
 
SHANE           Well, it’s not the way Labour did it with the seabed and foreshore.
 
DAVID            I know. I completely agree, and I think in retrospect when we look back on that, we would have done it differently. Absolutely. But what I’m saying now is we look forward. If the government continues along the way that it is, there’s going to be a court case. But, most importantly, the asset sales will be derailed. They will have so much risk associated with them that the price that government wants to get for those asset sales will be low, and New Zealand taxpayers, New Zealand people, will be the losers.
 
SHANE           You mentioned the court case. Let me just ask you very briefly then we’ll go and move on to your speech. Do you think the government could win?
 
DAVID            I don’t know, but what I do know is that this will be long and drawn out. It won’t simply stop there. And the big issue is the risk around the investment that will be associated with Mighty River Power, not to mention the other SOEs that are being sold as well, which will lower the price and mean that we, as New Zealand, won’t get anything like the value for our resources.
 
SHANE           So, a big speech this week on education. Let’s jump into it. Why are you keeping National Standards?
 
DAVID            Well, what we’re saying is that in another two years’ time, National Standards will be in our schools, and while a lot of schools believe that those National Standards are certainly inferior to what we had before and the measurement that we’ve used before, other schools have got used to it. And what we’ve said to the schools is, ‘Look, if you have a better system of being able to report to parents in clear English on the progress of their child, you go ahead.’ But we’re not going to turn the whole apple cart upside down. The big thing for us if we’ve spent four years talking about how we measure kids in the schools. In the meantime, we’ve had 80,000 kids turn up to schools not fed, hungry. We’ve got kids slipping behind, and the dropout rate at 16 is so high that we’ve got kids that are not going into work and not going on to get other skills. That’s the priority for us; not dreaming up yet another system of how to measure people.
 
SHANE           I want to hone in on your decision around National Standards, because 12 months ago Labour said it would get rid of it. Sue Moroney - let me quote: ‘It must stop.’ Phil Goff said it was a shambles. And let me quote again: ‘It doesn’t help our kids’ progress in education.’ So why the change?
 
DAVID            Well, the last quote is absolutely right. It doesn’t help our kids progress in education at all.
 
SHANE           So why aren’t you getting rid of it?
 
DAVID            Because it’s a measurement system. It actually doesn’t do anything for the kids inside the classroom. Those kids that turn up to school hungry or turn up to school behind in their reading or their maths or whatever, National Standards doesn’t help those kids.
 
SHANE           So if it doesn’t help those kids, why aren’t you getting rid of it?
 
DAVID            It’s a measurement system. It’s not a tool by which you use to bring kids up. It’s simply a measurement system, and there are lots of measurement systems, and they are actually better than National Standards. But what we’re saying is, and we were consistent about this in our last policy despite what you’ve just said, is that we said we would give schools the opportunity to go to a different system if they felt that that was superior to what National Standards could offer.
 
SHANE           Well, I suppose the point is a policy is either good or it’s not. It just sounds like you’ve said it’s not good. So therefore the question is why not get rid of it?
 
DAVID            Well, what we’ve said is that schools if they already have it, if they can prove to us there’s a better system certainly than the system they had before where they were reporting against all of the curriculum rather than National Standards, they can go ahead and use that. But the point is that what we need to be able to do in our education system- We have a great education system. It regularly rates in the top five in the world. But we have a very long tail, and what we need to do is address that tail. And if we don’t address that tail, then we’re going to have kids dropping out at age 16, going on to the dole, filling up our prisons, having health problems. Those are the issues that we want to tackle. And I think, to be honest, compared to that priority, National Standards is somewhat of a side issue.
 
SHANE           Let’s talk about another issue that I spoke with the Prime Minister about: the economy. You heard what he said, that subsidies don’t work. You heard that we can’t do much about the economy, and things aren’t looking too great. What practical alternative do you have?
 
DAVID            Well, first of all, it sounds like a lot of excuses. There’s always something that is stopping the government from actually creating growth. We have had the worst growth under this government since World War II. There hasn’t been another government - National or Labour-led - that has had worse growth than this government.
 
SHANE           So I’ve given you your free shot to the Prime Minister. Tell us your solution.
DAVID            Let’s look at the issues. At the moment, our dollar is so overvalued that it’s killing our manufacturing sector, and you look at around the country at some of those layoffs, they are all about not being able to compete. We need to look at monetary policy. We do need to look at our exchange rate, particularly the volatility of it. We need to-
 
SHANE           So what would you actually do? It’s fine to say, ‘We’ll look at it,’ but what will you actually do?
 
DAVID            Well, right now we’re working on the ways in which you can provide certainly the Reserve Bank with a broader set of criteria by which you could look at the economy. So rather than just looking at it in terms of inflation, which was put into the legislation years ago when inflation was a problem, let’s look at exchange rate. What is it doing to our exporters? Second thing, let’s look at pro-growth tax reform. Instead of encouraging our investors to put money into the Auckland property market, why can’t we encourage to put it into our business, our thriving businesses? And that means about a capital gains tax, it means giving companies research-and-development tax credits to actually be able to grow as the companies in other countries of the world that we are competing against. They have those advantages. We don’t.
 
SHANE           Can I just ask you finally, the Australian Labor Government has given a subsidy to Norske Skog to keep their paper mill open in Tasmania. Would you do the same for Kawerau if you were in government?
 
DAVID            I don’t know the details in and around Kawerau. I will not rule out becoming involved. Let me tell you one thing - last week I was down talking to the miners in Greymouth about keeping the Spring Creek mine there open, and it was pretty clear that a lot of what is looking towards closing that mine is around Solid Energy and Solid Energy wanting to make its bottom line look a whole lot better for sale. So if you can look at monetary policy, exchange rate and you can look at what we’re doing in selling assets that are not to the advantage of New Zealand, I believe we can go a long way to saving jobs and creating the sort of future that we want in New Zealand.
 
SHANE           We have to leave it there. David Shearer, thank you for joining us.
 
DAVID            Thank you, Shane.
 
ENDS

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