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Metiria Turei is a co-leader of the Green Party, and focuses on the social policy side of Green politics. She also doubles as a candidate for Dunedin North, meaning she spends much of her campaign time frolicking between Auckland, Wellington, and her modest “castle” out in the wops.

Yesterday, you announced your workers plan, and part of that was to raise the minimum wage to $18 p/h by 2017. The argument on the right is always that this will increase unemployment and a whole host of changes that will be bad for the economy. How would you respond to that?
Well, they’re wrong and all the evidence shows that you do not lose jobs as a result of increasing the minimum wage; but the theory that National proposes is that there is significant job loss because businesses are paying more. The evidence, if you look at a recent July 2014 report published in the US, is that in the 13 states where they had an increase in minimum wage, they found economic development improved. They had better local economies, businesses had reduced cost because there was reduced turnover, higher productivity; so actually the evidence says it is better for the economy to have improved wages. The theory, the neoliberal theory, is that it’s bad. But I would take the evidence over the theory any day.

What about the argument that companies will hire less people because they’re paying more?
The evidence that we do have in New Zealand on youth rates, for example, when youth rates were abolished, was that fewer 16 and 17 year olds were employed, but they replaced them with 18 to 19 year olds. There was no job loss overall in the economy, it’s just that there was a shift in the choices that employers were making, because younger people weren’t cheaper. What you then have to do is make sure you’ve got good policy for young people employed or in training. But that doesn’t prove that jobs are lost, in the economy overall, it’s just not true.

What about the bits within your package that ensure workers’ rights essentially?
Not only would we increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by Christmas, and then $1 an hour per year increases until it’s $18 an hour in 2017, we would have a minimum of four weeks redundancy in the law, and encourage employees and employers to negotiate for better than that in their employment agreements. But the minimum four weeks is critical for families who are at the worst time in their lives. […]

We’ll also make sure there’s union representation, workers representation on WorkSafe, which is the health and safety organisation, and it’s critical at the moment. […] And then the other part of it is providing access to workplace for unions making sure there’s stronger bargaining opportunities and regulations in the law, and making sure that there’s an obligation still to complete collective bargaining when it happens.

So would you say that now the Greens are the “unions party?”
I think we’ve got great support from the unions, and at yesterday’s launch we had Helen Kelly from the NZCTU, Service and Food Workers Union, NZEI, PBTA. Our policy, I think, is better than Labour’s in that we provide more certainty. So Labour gets minimum wage to $16.25 an hour, but then they don’t provide any further certainty beyond that. And I think the Greens are really clear: workers do best when they have strong unions; the economy does best when workers are doing better, so we need to make sure that workers have what they need to be the best possible employees, businesses have got certainty about their costs and they can project them out to the future.

Another recent policy package is regarding housing and the Warrant of Fitness. A lot of students are exploited by landlords down here because it’s almost a mark of pride to have a really shit flat; it’s kind of like a rite of passage living in the Dunedin student ghetto. What are the plans you have to help renters increase their security with landlords?
We’re the only party that has put out a renter’s package. Everybody is concerned, rightly, about home ownership, but there are a million people living in rental accommodation; there are 400,000 children living in rental accommodation, and it is becoming the new norm. We will improve renter’s security by requiring a Warrant of Fitness for all rental properties that will become mandatory in 2017, and it’s not just insulation; it’s hot and cold running water, it’s a working toilet, a stove. These are things that are not actually required in the law at the moment. There’s better regulation on the quality of the toaster than there is on the quality of your home. That’s just not okay. But we also want to give tenants the first right of refusal; so if they’re on a fixed-term lease they’ll be the ones who choose whether or not they’ll stay. And restrict rent increases to only once every 12 months, and to have, in law, the calculation by which rents can be increased. So they’ll both be in the law – we’ll work with the industry on what that looks like – but in each of the tenancy agreements so that tenants can be assured of what increases they can expect over time, and landlords aren’t able to engage in price gauging, which is what we’ve seen in both Auckland and Christchurch.

Yeah, I mean in Dunedin you see the same flats be exactly the same and $5 more expensive (per person) every year and nothing has changed.
That’s right, that’s right, and there needs to be a justification for those rent increases, not just demand, because as long as demand is driving up rent increases, you’re going to have people paying more and more of their income in rent. When you’re paying over 30 per cent of your income in rent, then housing is technically unaffordable, and we need to improve that; it doesn’t have to be that way.

The DCC has just proposed a whole host of changes, including a 3am bar close, a 1am start to the one-way door policy, a prohibition on shot sales after midnight, and the clearance of outdoor seating as early as 11pm. Do you think this is a step forwards or a step backwards?
I think restricting access to alcohol is probably a good thing. Our view around alcohol is that there has been too much focus on the purchase and not enough on restricting the industry itself. And that includes not just the alcohol industry, but also bars and clubs and pubs as well. […] I don’t know that it has to only be in Dunedin, we would have to take a look at if it’s going to happen here or look at how to extend [restrictions] to other areas, so yeah, I think it’s good for the council to be thinking about how to control public access to alcohol where it can. But at the same time, the council also needs to be restricting where it allows its outlets to set up. We still have council giving approval to new alcohol outlets and so they need to be consistent in their policy.

An argument is that restricting bar access will a) push up alcohol prices in bars because they don’t sell as much and b) it’ll push drinking into flats where it can be more excessive.
It’s also arguably safer for some to be drinking at home or in other people’s homes. I mean, it is not an easy calculation to make. Any set of regulations you put around managing alcohol access is going to have flow-on effects. Until you do it you won’t necessarily know what they all are, so you’ve got to be reasonably nimble around what policy is working to make sure you achieve your goals; and if it’s not, then change it when it’s necessary. I’m not concerned about the pricing; there’s a proliferation of alcohol outlets, it is already extremely cheap. […] The cost of it doesn’t worry me, it’s just making sure that any regulatory changes do work to achieve an identifiable outcome and if they don’t, being honest about that and shifting to some other process.

What ministerial positions do the Greens want?
We will be negotiating a comprehensive coalition agreement with Labour, and it will include a number of ministerial posts, we expect, as well as associate minister posts. We don’t know what they will be yet, and we won’t know until we’re in the negotiations. We’ve said our priorities are economy, water, beaches, and child poverty alleviation. There’s a range of ministerial posts across each of those three priorities that we could have. We want to see progress on the whole of the election package, and we need to assess when we’re sitting with Labour about what options are on the table and how they best progress our priorities. It’s impossible to say at this stage exactly what that will look like.

What is the one policy you won’t let Labour have that you’ve seen from their policy package?
One of the ones that we have a completely different view on is deep sea oil drilling. We’ve said that we will simply prohibit deep sea oil drilling, there is none currently occurring in New Zealand waters, so let’s stop it now while we can. They have said that they are open to deep sea oil drilling; that’s a clear area of difference. But we have lots of areas of common concern as well, so we will have to work those through. We won’t know until we’re sitting at the table with them how the negotiations will go, and the only way we can be assured of getting the best possible outcome for the Greens, and our policy, is to make sure we’re the strongest possible. Which is why we’re campaigning for a strong party vote. So we are as big a part of a new government as possible.