Imprest Supply Debate

I move, That the Appropriation (2002/03 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2003/04) Bill be now read a second time. It is with pleasure that I rise to speak on these two bills. I noticed that while the Imprest Supply Bill was tabled not a single Opposition member went to pick it up to read what it says. That gives an indication of how informed they intend to be for the remainder of this debate. Opposition members will have had their speech notes written out long in advance, without any reference to what is actually said in the Imprest Supply Bill. That is the nature of the modern Opposition.

The supplementary estimates provide for new spending of some $312 million over and above that voted in the 2002-03 main votes. The majority of it, $194 million, goes to education, in three main areas, one of which is purely technical—depreciation of $83 million because of higher asset valuations requiring, therefore, higher depreciation provision. The other areas are the teachers’ pay settlement, which cost $45 million in this year—somewhat less than the National Party thought we should have settled for—and the tertiary subsidy of $58 million, which is a result of growth in the tertiary education system being higher than that forecast. Most of the rest consists of a series of technical adjustments, rather than representing major new spending initiatives.

The Imprest Supply Bill provides for supply for 2 months—in other words, through to the end of August, because the main bill has to be passed by 23 August. So funding will be sufficient for that 2-month period, which is the norm—differentiated last year because of the Air New Zealand situation requiring rather more. Also, the oncoming election required the Government to carry through to later in the year, because the bill would not have been passed in time.

It is worth repeating many features of the Government’s accounts and the economy, and, indeed, the fiscal position that New Zealand faces at the present time. Over the last year or two—indeed, the last 3 years—New Zealand has experienced strong economic growth. In the year ended March we had almost certainly one of the highest levels in the OECD, and we are expecting continued growth above the OECD average over the coming 2 years, despite the expected slow-down. It is the relative rate of growth that counts, not the absolute rate of growth, in terms of our relative standard of living. We have seen low unemployment, dropping down to 5 percent, which is the lowest for 15 years. It is not expected to rise significantly above that level over the forecast horizon. We have seen modest inflation of around 2.5 percent or so, and we are expecting to see that figure fall back significantly as a result of the falling United States dollar impacting, therefore, on a strengthening New Zealand dollar.

We are expecting, as every forecaster is, a slow-down during this year. Indeed, it is clear that that slow-down is already occurring at the present time. It is not impossible that one of the quarters in the middle of this year will produce a negative figure. The second quarter in particular could produce that, given the impact of reduced hydroelectricity generation, and the impact that that has on the calculation of gross domestic product as a value-added measure, compared with thermal generation of electricity. It is a technical effect rather than a real economy effect. We are expecting those figures to pick up again later in the year, but there is great uncertainty still around the international outlook. We still have the follow-on impacts of the sudden acute respiratory syndrome epidemic (Sars); there is still considerable uncertainty in the Middle East; the European economy is clearly showing considerable inability to grow; and the Japanese economy is not moving outside the frame that it has been in for a good decade or more.

But, against that, a number of things can be said. The United States economy's numbers are all starting now to move in the same direction; up until the last 3 or 4 weeks one could have said the numbers were looking pretty conflicting, but those coming in now pretty much look towards a US recovery in the latter part of this year. The Sars epidemic seems to be getting under control, and that, I think, will have an impact upon the regrowth of tourism in New Zealand later this year. As I said, the slow-down is beginning to show up in some of the data—in retail sales figures, in ANZ Job Ads indices, and so on—but they are pretty much in line with the forecast within the Budget of a slow-down to growth of 2 percent or so over the coming year, picking up thereafter, but with a small increase in unemployment, then falling back again subsequently.

What that does say is, both with the slow-down and with the uncertainty surrounding the outlook for the coming year, and with, indeed, some somewhat contradictory taxation numbers starting to come through in the figures—which will be released before too long—the Government’s indication of fiscal caution is the wise one. This is not the time for Governments to be engaged in massive new structural spending, or massive changes on the revenue side, given the uncertainty of that outlook. [Interruption] Of course, Muriel Newman would give a structural adjustment. The ACT party has said that the figure for the operating balance excluding revaluations and accounting changes—$4 billion—should all be spent. It would actually spend the entire difference between cash movement in and out.

I think the member should correct herself. She should read the pamphlet she has been having put out to every household, which rashly is promising a tax cut that requires us to spend the entire $4 billion surplus. Of course, the final operating balance is $1.4 billion. But, more than that—as Dr Brash will realise, not being silly enough to have made those kinds of remarks following the Budget—if we did that, we would be rapidly moving back into substantial borrowing on the Government’s accounts, because that $4 billion surplus does not include a large amount of capital spending, which, of course, is not counted against the operating surplus under accruals accounting. We would very rapidly start moving back to rising debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratios, with all the implications that would have for future Government financing.

This Government has no intention of taking New Zealand back down that path, and we are supported by 70 percent of New Zealanders in that respect; 70 percent of New Zealanders said, in a poll, that the Government was right to take a cautious approach and to keep its fiscal surplus. Those who argue otherwise are in the 30 percent minority, and we are quite happy for all the other minor parties opposite to fight amongst themselves for that 30 percent of the vote, if the parties on this side of the House can maintain the support of something like 70 percent of New Zealanders. There was a time in our history, I have to say, when the leaders of a Labour Government thought that getting more than 30 percent support for any measure meant it must be wrong, and proved that the Government was being insufficiently courageous. This Government tends to take the rather different view that in fact it is desirable to work in harmony with the people, rather than be in continuous warfare with them—not least because we all come up for a 3-yearly performance review carried out by the public at large, and they tend to make their decisions in a fairly brutal fashion if a Government has got offside with them.

The key budgetary features were funding for the growth and innovation framework, in terms of support for research and development, support for business incubators, support for a whole range of initiatives in the business development area, and looking forward to some significant tax changes, particularly in the small to medium-sized business area. What we have had from the Opposition ever since then is simply a continuation of its history of sort of scab-scratching incompetence, which is all it seems able to manage as a party. Mr English has fled to friendlier pastures in Washington DC. The latest polls show, and we will see some more tonight on TV3, that the National Party is continuing to muck around in the doldrums, while the Government is maintaining support at well over 50 percent within the opinion polls, even the one the National Party relies on—the Colmar Brunton.

On every key issue, National members have decided to oppose what New Zealanders want. When we said we wanted more electricity, they said that it should be free, that there should be no cost attached to increasing the electricity supply within New Zealand. A brilliant piece of economics!

On rail, they have said we should flog it off again, 100 percent, to the Australians. That was actively supported by Mr Key in the House today, despite the fact that on Monday night it became clear that Mr Little does not even know there is no subsidy of Tranz Rail at the moment—he thinks there is a $20 million a year subsidy of Tranz Rail now that the Government offered—despite the fact that Toll Holdings does not know about the safety problems on Tranz Rail, which are public knowledge and in the public arena; and despite the fact that it seems to think it can have carry-forward of tax losses when it takes over Tranz Rail. It has not read our tax laws in that particular respect. The Toll Holdings business is a kind of “toll of doom” in terms of its approach to Tranz Rail. Meanwhile, National Party members run around like a flock of sodden sheep in the rain, hoping that Mary Poppins is coming down with an umbrella to try to turn them dry again at some time in the future.

The ACT party has got itself into the funny position of being the biggest suckers on the public teat that there is, keeping Mrs Awatere Huata’s $110,000 while denying her a vote. Then we have the fraud over the operation of its electorate offices, which all suddenly happen to be in Wellington. Then we have Ms Coddington going off, at the Government’s expense, for 4 months at Cambridge University, while being paid a full parliamentary salary. And Mr Hide comes down to the House and talks about Māori broadcasters! That is from a party—

💬 Mr SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member, but his time has expired.

It will not surprise the House to know that I am not proposing to vote in favour of the Minister’s resolution. Indeed, I will oppose the Minister’s resolution. Let me say that I agree with one or two of the things he said. For example, he does say that the New Zealand economy has grown well in the last few years. He does not, however, acknowledge why it has grown well in the last few years. The New Zealand economy has grown well because of the successful policies of the past—because, in the last few years, we have had the lowest exchange rate in New Zealand’s history; because, with security concerns overseas, we have had a strong net inflow of people over the last little while; and because in 2001 monetary policy was eased rather aggressively. Those reasons for our success have nothing whatsoever to do with this Government’s policies.

But now, as the Minister also acknowledged, the chickens are coming home to roost. He said that in the year to March 2003, New Zealand would have one of the strongest growth rates in the OECD. What he did not say was that the first quarter of this year—the last quarter of that 12 months to March 2003—would have a growth rate of about 0.5 percent, according to most estimates, or an annualised rate of 2 percent; and that the second quarter of this year looks like seeing a contraction of the economy. Both Treasury and the Reserve Bank estimate that over the 12 months, roughly starting now, the New Zealand economy will grow at just over 2 percent. The building industry is slowing down, job advertisements are down quite sharply, and business confidence is at one of the lowest levels in New Zealand’s history. Although the Minister says the economy will bounce back to about 3 percent growth in the next financial year, there are many respectable observers—such as the Institute of Economic Research—who suggest that even in the year to March 2005, the New Zealand economy will grow at only about 2 percent.

The real problem is not this cyclical slow-down, but rather the fact that the trend in the rate of growth of the New Zealand economy will be between 2 and 3 percent over the next decade. Over the last 10 years, the New Zealand economy, measured by gross domestic product (GDP), has grown at an average rate of 3.5 percent. Over the next 10 years, as revealed in the Minister’s own Budget, the estimate is an average growth rate of 2.5 percent. Growth in per capita GDP over the last 10 years—the 10 years to 2002—averaged 2.25 percent. Treasury estimates that in the next 10 years per capita GDP will grow at only 1.8 percent—significantly slower than over the last decade.

Yes, as the Minister is fond of pointing out, this is a projection not a forecast, but it reflects the best judgment of the Government’s official advisers on labour productivity trends. The Government’s official advisers are projecting that labour productivity will grow at only 1.5 percent per annum over the next decade. That is lower than the growth rate of 1.75 percent projected by the Australian Treasury for Australia. That means, of course, that the gap between our living standards and those in Australia will continue to widen. It means also that our Prime Minister was simply acknowledging the fact that there is not a dog’s chance of New Zealand recovering to the top half of the OECD within a decade. Indeed, at the present rate of progress, we might not make it in two decades, or three decades.

The Government is doing nothing of substance to change that situation. At almost every turn, the Government erects barriers to growth. There is a failure to fix the problems in the Resource Management Act, the Local Government Act, the Health and Safety in Employment Act, the Land Transport Management Bill, and on and on. All those things make business more dangerous, more risky, more difficult, and they will slow New Zealand’s growth rate.

Since we are talking about the Imprest Supply Bill, the Budget, and similar matters, I want to talk about one particular area of failure. In 1999 the Labour Party campaigned on the fact that it was proposing to increase the top rate of tax from 33c to 39c, and it said that would affect only the top 5 percent of taxpayers. What do we have now? Ten percent of all taxpayers are now into the top 39 percent tax bracket, and almost 20 percent—one in five—of taxpayers in full-time employment are now into that 39 percent tax rate. If we want to restrict the increase in the tax rate to the top 5 percent of taxpayers, the threshold will have to go from $60,000 a year to $80,000 a year. Some of the people, indeed all of the people, who are earning more than $60,000 a year face paying almost half their income above $60,000 in tax—39 percent in income tax, and about another 6 or 7 percent in GST. Some 60 percent of full-time employees—taxpayers—are now in a 33 percent tax bracket and paying over 40 percent of the income they earn above $38,000 in income tax and GST. In addition, the Government has increased taxes on cigarettes very sharply—the excise tax went up by 23 percent back in 2001. The Government has recently increased the tax on some kinds of alcohol, petrol taxes have gone up, and now the Government proposes a tax on electricity. In addition, fiscal drag—the impact of inflation on people’s incomes—has pushed more and more people into higher and higher tax brackets.

How can we expect to have a growing economy when we punish the most successful people in our society so aggressively? We take it for granted that if we want to discourage the consumption of cigarettes, alcohol, and certain behaviours, we increase the tax on them. That is taken for granted by most members of this House. Surely the same effect exactly applies to income tax. If we increase the tax on higher levels of income, we discourage people from earning income, we discourage investment, we discourage work, and we discourage business risk. That cannot be good for New Zealand’s growth rate.

It is sometimes contended that to be fair we need to have a very high rate of tax on the people who earn higher levels of income. What we sometimes overlook is that the levels of income tax paid by people earning a little above the average are already substantial. For example, someone earning $100,000 a year, with a non-earning spouse, and two children under 13, is paying approximately 1,000 times more in income tax per year than someone who earns $25,000 with the same family circumstances. If we want growth in this country, we cannot afford the luxury of a tax system that penalises the people who work and take business risk. I am strongly opposed to this bill.

Well, that was an academic’s view of the economy. I want to be a little more hands-on. If we want to develop this country, we have to develop some of our infrastructure, particularly roading. The roads in this country have not kept pace with traffic volumes or vehicle type. That is putting it simply but bluntly. Roads in many areas of this country are a disgrace, and it is an absolute disgrace for us to say that the roads in Auckland are inadequate. It is costing the country $1 billion a year, but we will sit around the table and talk about it and procrastinate for ever. We should be addressing the roading problem of this country with some urgency.

I am encouraged that the Minister, Dr Cullen, has now got a small group of Ministers to recognise that there is at least a problem in Auckland. But he has done nothing, announced nothing, and is simply saying that it will be a talkfest. When one moves a little further away from Auckland down to Tauranga, where I come from, the biggest export port in the country—

💬 Mita Ririnui: It is a lovely place.

It is a lovely place, but it is being besieged with trucks and the trucking industry, and the roading issue in Tauranga has to be addressed with some urgency. Urgent attention needs to be applied to roading in Auckland, Tauranga, and other places in this country. The Government got into cahoots with the Greens, went around talking wacky baccy or something, and the Greens came out with a road traffic reduction bill, which the Government appears to think is the best thing since sliced bread. I tell those Government members over there that roading in this country is in dire straits in many areas, and it should have urgent consideration. I believe that the only solution is to borrow, and I say that with some reluctance. I notice from the Government’s own Budget figures that to borrow $1 billion will cost this country $57 million a year.

💬 David Benson-Pope: Where will we borrow from—foreign banks?

The Accident Compensation Corporation has about $2.5 billion, maybe $3 billion, that it invests in all sorts of areas. The corporation apparently invests in breweries, and it could be encouraged to invest in roading. But the area I think we should be borrowing from is the Superannuation Fund, which is sitting there doing nothing.

💬 Ron Mark: It’s losing money.

Is that right? Well, it is going backwards because inflation is sucking it away. We should be investing that money in our roading infrastructure. When it gets loaned out overseas—as I am sure it will be under Dr Cullen’s instructions—it will end up being invested in the infrastructure of some other country. I want to make it quite clear now that New Zealand First believes that our roading infrastructure should be developed, and we should be using Superannuation Fund money to develop it. Frankly, to do nothing is not an acceptable solution. It is a problem that will not go away.

I want to touch a little bit on shipping. When Labour came to power, the shipping industry put great store on that party, in particular, to address its concerns. It is a shrinking industry, and it is on the verge of almost totally disappearing. New Zealand is an island nation tucked right down at the bottom of the South Pacific, where 99 percent of our external trade—that is our exports and imports—comes and goes by ship. Yet we have a policy that is to the detriment of New Zealand shipowners and seafarers.

In its first term, the Government came out with A Future for New Zealand Shipping, which was a report from the Shipping Industry Review. That was completed in December 2000, and we have yet to hear the Government’s response. Its silence on this issue is deafening. Meanwhile, we are losing more and more ships on the New Zealand coast. We have lost all our international ships—they have all disappeared and been replaced by foreign ships with foreign crews. Many of the people who bring trade to this country seek the assistance of New Zealanders to help them do their jobs—not all of them, but many of them do. I urge this Government to get on with it and announce what it will do for the shipping industry in this country.

The Government has basically two choices. Firstly, it can instigate a favourable tax regime that will encourage the development of shipping services and employment. We dearly need the skills of competent seafarers in this country. We have 13 ports, and all of them require maritime expertise coming on stream in the future.

The other alternative is cabotage. I have some reservations about cabotage, but speaking personally, I would prefer it to doing nothing and letting the industry just slip away. I say to those Government members over there that they should take on board the fact that our shipping industry is still in existence, but only just, and it needs urgent help.

When Harry Duynhoven was the Opposition spokesperson for transport, he was very strong on this issue. He went around the country attending meeting after meeting and promised that Labour would do something to address the ills and concerns of the shipping industry. Thus far, nothing has been done, except for Labour commissioning a Shipping Industry Review that came out in December 2000. I do not know what will happen, but I am waiting with bated breath.

The third area of concern we have is in relation to the Government’s bid to buy the rail track back from Tranz Rail. I applaud the Government for that, but we are concerned that the Government has given monopoly rights to Tranz Rail to run trains on that track. That is wrong, and it will backfire on the Government in the longer term. The railway service in this country needs a competitive environment, and will be all the better for it. We do not believe—as United Future alluded to the other day—that all the trains will run on the same track at the same time. That is ridiculous. It can be carved up in a proper and rational manner. But we applaud the Government for buying back the rail track, and we hope it goes through. I see the member shaking his head.

💬 David Benson-Pope: I’m nodding.

I am glad that the member agrees with New Zealand First. If the member studied our transport policy, he would see that it is a very enlightened policy, and in the longer term would aid the development of this country.

I urge Government members to look at what they are proposing in terms of the buy-back of Tranz Rail, and remove the monopoly they have given it to run on the tracks for 67 years —

💬 David Benson-Pope: We didn’t do that!

Yes, Tranz Rail came cap-in-hand to the Government, and it gave Tranz Rail that monopoly. Although the Government had all the strength on its side, Tranz Rail wanted help from the Government. The Government could have said: “We’ll buy the tracks back; we’ll allow you to run on them, but we’re going to set up a competitive regime.” I urge Government members to look more closely at that issue, so that we can achieve that. Transport infrastructure in this country is very, very important to our long-term growth.

I rise for the ACT party to say that we, too, will not vote for this motion. The amounts that the Government has been claiming and obtaining from New Zealanders, to spend with or without approval, have been excessive. In particular, I want to focus on one small area of spending where it appears that the spending is planned without any knowing or conscious parliamentary approval.

In the New Zealand Police Statement of Intent 2003/2004, distributed with the Budget package, there is an item called output class 2. In that output class there is an item 2.4, “Firearms Licensing”. When we look at the description of the performance measures that are expected by the Government for firearms licensing, we see it looks very similar to that for the current year. The police expected to receive 20,000 to 25,000 licence applications in 2002-03, the period we have almost completed, and they expect to receive the same number in the next year to June 2004. The police also expect to inspect 100 percent of pistol clubs and their members, to inspect 100 percent of arms dealers and to check them for security and legislation compliance, and to contact 80 percent of the holders of expiring firearms licences. In other words, it is exactly the same plan as now. The police expect 100 percent of licences to be processed within 30 working-days of the completion of inquiries, and they expect the cost per licence to stay the same as it is now, at $110.

Why have I raised the issue of firearms licensing in the context of expenditure that has not been properly explained or flagged? There are two differences between the current year and what the police expect for the next year. First, they expect to spend nearly $1 million more on the process. There is an arithmetic problem there. The police expect to spend $1 million more, yet they state that the cost per licence issued will stay the same, and the number of licences issued will stay the same. It may be that the police are stating that the charge per licence issued will stay the same—the charge to the licensee—but that the actual cost is something quite different from what is stated, and will actually be $916,000 more in the next period than the police anticipate spending on firearms licensing in the current year.

The other little change is that there is a line that previously stated: “Number of firearms licences revoked” with no entry for the estimated output or performance measure this year. The police expect to revoke at least 100 firearms licences in the next year. There is a little footnote that states: “New measure introduced 2003/2004.” So we have a signal, however oblique or covert, forced out of the Government by the financial reporting and forecasting process that confirms the rumours we have been hearing—and, indeed, they are more than rumours; they are the simple statements of honest and concerned police staff—that the police will be expected in the next year to start another assault on their relationship with firearms users in this country.

In the next year the police will be required to start a gun registration process, despite the evidence that this House received in the report from the Law and Order Committee, which considered the firearms amendment bill. The Labour members who went on to that committee were determined that they would not listen to the “Rambos in camo gear”, as one of them described the gun lobby at the beginning of the process. The Minister and the police had said initially—the police, of course, with their arms up their back—that this country needed a firearms registration system such as that recommended by Sir Thomas Thorp. Despite all that preparation, that committee came to the conclusion after hearing the evidence not only that was there no justification for proceeding but that firearms users were right in saying that there were no problems with lawful firearms owners—or no problems that would be solved by putting a complete new set of laws and requirements on them—that all the problems were with illegal firearms, and that the illegal firearms problem was highly unlikely to be cured in any way by putting new burdens on lawful firearms owners.

We have prospective expenditure here. I have no doubt that some of this imprest amount that the Government wants us presently to vote for, without any detailed description, may end up being spent as part of the anticipated cost of this new scheme. We have the expected waste of at least $1 million in new police money. We can assume that the cost is probably an awful lot more than $1 million, if we look at the experience of one country that our left-wing socialist Government likes to compare itself with, Canada. That country expected to spend $85 million on a firearms registration system that would mark it out from its southern neighbour, the United States. The cost for each firearm was to be around $5 to $10 at most, and the benefit in political gain was widely expected by the Canadian Government to be a no-brainer advantage with urban women, in particular, who were concerned about firearms offences.

But what does Canada have, 7 years later? The cost is just under a billion dollars, now, for Canada’s firearms registration scheme. It was $500 million by the end of the year 2000, and at least 30 percent of owners have still not registered. There has just been a revolt by the provincial governments, which have decided they will not prosecute the owners of unregistered firearms. Registration has had no discernible effect on firearms offences, and Canada has a registry that is almost completely unusable by the police because, until it is complete, it is completely useless. The police cannot rely on the firearms register for one of the purposes that was cited so often—that they need to know whether they can safely approach a house, by knowing whether they risk a firearms offence being committed. The Canadian police cannot rely on any such register until they know that they have every firearm registered. The situation is that the Canadian Government itself has now admitted that the cost per firearm is somewhat over Can$100, and that it is no further ahead.

Let us look a little closer, in terms of our history, at the United Kingdom. It banned handgun ownership after the Dunblane massacre. The United Kingdom had, 2 years ago, a 40 percent increase in handgun homicides. This year it looks as though the rate of armed robbery with handguns will be nearly double the rate that it was when the Government first started talking about that ban. There are no-go areas in the United Kingdom where the police simply will not police that kind of offence.

The real tragedy about the spending that this Government is planning in this area is, in fact, that the problem of policing, as it is with so many of the things that trouble New Zealanders—it is the same with dogs, and with boy racers—is that the registration system, or non-compliance by ordinary citizens, is not the issue. Rather, the problem is that the police have lost the confidence, the equipment, the resources, and the ability to take the risk of going after the criminals. The fact is that the real dog problem—as with firearms; it is the same with dogs—is with people who do not register their dogs at all. The problem with firearms in this country is the same as it is in Australia and in the United Kingdom. It is the people who do not comply with the law that the police should worry about.

What do we have, instead? This Government sends the police out to chase generally law-abiding people—people who do register their cars and do comply with law—with instant fines and traffic tickets. The kind of resource that it will take from this Government, that extra million dollars, will be the mere tip of the iceberg. We know that when this Government comes out in the next week or so with a firearms registration proposal, it will be wasted money and a political bribe.

I rise to the challenge of saying something interesting about the supplementary estimates. For those who are listening, I point out that we are debating the small adjustments that the Government wants to make to its 2002 Budget appropriation in order to reflect changing priorities and needs during the last year. However, part-way through this financial year the Government did announce an important new policy, which we would expect to see reflected in the supplementary estimates. As part of its Sustainable Development Programme of Action announced in January, the Minister said that sustainable development must now be at the core of all policy-making. So I looked carefully to see whether that new emphasis was reflected in the supplementary estimates.

Sustainable development is about integrating policy across economic, social, and environmental aims, so that they are mutually reinforcing rather than in conflict. It is a very worthy objective, it is long overdue, and the Greens are hugely supportive of that approach. The Government has announced four areas of particular focus in its work on sustainable development: energy, fresh water, cities, and young people. Those are well-chosen issues. Energy is at the heart of our economy—if energy is not sustainable, nothing can be. Water is the most essential requisite for life. If we do not have an adequate quantity and quality of water, then our well-being is seriously affected. Cities are an issue because that is where most of us live, and young people are mentioned because they are the future. So it was to those areas that I turned first in the Supplementary Estimates, hoping to find some evidence of that new shift.

Vote Energy shows a number of changes that underline pointedly the growing unsustainability of our energy system and the damage that that unsustainability is doing to our economy. If ever there was proof that environmental sustainability has economic impacts, it is in the energy sector right now. The first thing one notices when one looks at Vote Energy in the Supplementary Estimates is the loss of $6.5 million of revenue. That revenue was expected at the beginning of the year, but it will not be realised because it is the energy resources levy on Maui gas, and that gas is no longer there to levy. It is interesting, is it not, how little the Government knew for so long? There was a 30-year depletion profile for the Maui gasfield. The Government had the right to seek information at any time about how it was going. It did not really do so for most of those 30 years, and then suddenly about last November we learnt that the gas will run out a bit early. Not only will it run out a bit early but it has seriously started to do so now, and the amount that we have in the current year is very significantly less—impossible, I must say, to find out at the moment how much less—than we expected.

As a result of that, of course, we are running the Huntly station on coal, so we have an increase to the Government revenue of $400,000 from energy resources levies, and of $300,000 from royalties to the Crown from the extra coal burnt at Huntly. That does not really compare with the $6.5 million previously expected from Maui Gas , but it is a little bit more revenue. Of course, if this had happened 5 years from now, when the Kyoto Protocol will be in effect, we would have had to make budgetary provision for the extra carbon credits we would have to buy on the international market in order to cover the extra coal that we are using as a result of not managing our gas well over the last 30 years.

Sticking with Vote Energy, I say to members that we all know that there has been a huge amount of churning in the Minister’s office, and a huge amount of frantic activity across the Government, to figure out what to do about the dry winter and the lack of energy from our hydro resources. That is reflected, sure enough, in the supplementary estimates, with more than another half-million dollars for policy advice on gas and electricity markets. That reflects the legal action that is going on over access to the remaining Maui Gas—as to who should get how much of it if there is less than we thought—and the setting up of the Electricity Commission to do the job that industry self-regulation failed so miserably to do.

Now that we have such overwhelming evidence that our energy patterns are not sustainable—we have virtually run out of gas, we frequently run out of water, our oil supplies will start to taper off from about 2010 to 2015, and we cannot turn to coal without frying the planet—I looked in the Supplementary Estimates for new initiatives to encourage renewable energy sources to take the place of those energy sources—and saw there was nothing. Perhaps that is because the Government did all that in the 2003 Budget and there is not really time to implement more spending on renewables before the end of this financial year. So I looked in the 2003 Budget again just to check that, and, well, no—I saw there was $200,000 to assist the implementation of 400 solar water heaters on houses. That was the sum total of assistance to renewable energy in Budget 2003.

But much worse than that, just after Budget 2003 we had an announcement that next year’s supplementary estimates—the adjustments to the Budget for the 2003-04 year—will make provision for $21 million for exploration in search of new oil and gas finds. So not only are we spending next to nothing on developing the renewable energy that will get us through into the future and put our economy on a sustainable basis, but we are spending $21 million on trying to prop up out-of-date technologies and fuels. That is not a path to sustainable development. This is supposed to be a sustainable development programme of action?

Secondly, I looked for evidence of greater activity on water quality and allocation, which is the second matter that the Government said it was specialising in. Where would I find that? I looked in the environment estimates. I thought maybe there would be funding for more policy work on fresh water, because we do need some of that. I saw there was nothing on water in the environment estimates. However, the public has got involved. We have had the formation of the Water Rights Trust in the South Island, and it has said we simply cannot allocate any more water from South Island rivers until we have done a proper assessment as to whether there is anything more to allocate. That shows how concerned the public are, and hundreds of people turned up to the trust’s first meeting, concerned about water allocation, water quantity, and water quality. There is huge concern in the South Island that by the time the Government gets around to having a sustainable development programme of action on water, the Waitaki River may not be our largest braided river any longer, because more than 70 percent of its water may have been taken completely out of the river channel for Project Aqua.

I did find in the environment estimates evidence of further delay on contaminated sites. I mention Mapua, the worst contaminated site in New Zealand. The Local Government and Environment Committee has been chasing the Ministry for the Environment for 5 years now to my knowledge, asking when it will get on with cleaning up the Mapua site. Funding was allocated years ago, and every year it is rolled over to the next year. Would members believe that the $3 million allocated for Mapua has been rolled over again to the 2003-04 year, because the ministry is still not ready to start the clean-up?. That is hugely disappointing.

We looked to see whether something was to be found in the estimates for research, science, and technology, because a lot of that work needs research funds. We found that the Government could not spend all the money allocated for environmental research grants. Instead, it gave the balance of it to Crown research institutes focused on commercialising science for industry, to spend as they would.

I looked at the third issue of children and young people, to see whether provision for them has changed this year. I found nothing that will help the 29 percent of children euphemistically described as “suffering restrictions on their standard of living”. That means poverty. It is the most serious issue facing children at the moment, and nothing has been done for those children in the supplementary estimates.

There are many fine words, but when one looks at how a Government spends its money, one finds out what it really means. The Sustainable Development Programme of Action is a programme of words, and we have yet to see any deeds. Yesterday we expressed our huge disappointment that even the grants that the Government is giving to business are not subject to any sustainability criteria, at all. There are no criteria for energy efficiency, nor even requirements to be a good employer, for waste minimisation, or for sustainability reporting.

One aspect of the supplementary estimates for the year ending 30 June 2003 swamps all else. I refer to the overall increase of $1.5 billion in the tax collected over and above the forecast included in the original estimates at the time of the 2002 Budget. The main components of that increase comprise GST of $282 million, company tax of $358 million, income tax from self-employed people of $118 million, income tax from salary earners and wage earners of around $441 million, and withholding tax increases—a category that includes companies, wage earners and salary earners, and self-employed people in relation to things like interest earnings on bank deposits and the like—of $146 million. Treasury, which prepares the forecast, tells us that the major contributor to that spectacular windfall of tax riches to the Crown bank account is the strong growth of the New Zealand economy during the 12 months ended 30 April 2003—a growth, I might add, that has now slackened considerably, to the point where we may find that growth in gross domestic product (GDP) is in minus territory for the quarter to 30 June 2003.

I, of course, rejoice that our economy grew so quickly from late 2001 through until just a couple of months ago. A number of favourable factors came together for us during that period. But if I want to single out the most important factor, it would have to be the strong net migration that we experienced, both from Kiwis coming home after 11 September 2001 and the economic slow-down in Europe and the USA, and from people from a wide variety of other nations choosing New Zealand as their preferred long-term place of residence for work, family, and retirement reasons. I note, in passing, that United Future appears to be the only party in this Parliament that has formally adopted a policy of ongoing population growth by an increase in the fertility rate, by creating conditions to limit the continued loss of our best and brightest people to greener pasture overseas, and by net inward migration from the rest of the world.

We need more people in New Zealand, not fewer. I find sometimes that that policy is questioned by people in the older age group—and I can include myself in that group, since I am approaching 60—who have such fond memories of the prosperous, crime-free, and egalitarian society that existed in New Zealand during the 1950s, 1960s, and the first couple of years in the 1970s. What is overlooked, however, is that our national demographics are now remarkably different from those we had then. In those days it was the post - World War II economic expansion, the Korean War, and the baby boom that provided the fundamental underpinning for a fast-growing economy. Whole suburbs throughout New Zealand were created as people rushed to capitalise on the family benefit, pick up their 30-year fixed 3 percent State Advances Corporation loan, construct their three-bedroom, one-bathroom home on their quarter acre plot of land, and get on with raising the kids. Indeed, it was a kind of half-gallon, quarter acre paradise—the very stuff of nostalgia.

Today’s New Zealand is very different. Our population growth has slowed significantly, and the baby boomers are now in the eventide of their working life, with their eyes fixed towards retirement. Those realities raise the all-important question of who will pay the pensions to support them. The New Zealand Superannuation Fund, established by Michael Cullen, is part of the answer, provided it is not used by the National Party for roading. However, the rest necessitates strong, ongoing population growth.

That brings me back to the supplementary estimates for Vote Immigration, where a further $23 million has been appropriated to cover costs associated with services provided to increase the capacity of New Zealand through immigration. United Future fully accepts that we must select potential immigrants to New Zealand with care. Ideally, if we are to address our demographic problem of an ageing population, immigrants need to be young. They also need to be English-speaking. I note, in passing, that I find, for example, immigrants from both the Philippines and India are able to assimilate themselves relatively quickly into New Zealand culture, precisely because they have learnt English at school and have been speaking it as a second language for many years.

But I believe that we need to do a better job in terms of the assimilation of immigrants into mainstream New Zealand culture. I believe that all immigrants should be required to attend, say, during the first couple of months that they are in New Zealand—and presuming that they have good English skills—classes in the basics of New Zealand’s culture, manners, and way of life. Likewise, we should require all our secondary schools and tertiary institutions to run a class of that kind for international students. The courses could cover some fairly basic things that all of us take for granted. For example, in this country we walk on the left-hand side of the footpath, but that is not the custom in many countries overseas. The courses could cover our habits of not pushing people—in some countries overseas, the custom is that one pushes people out of the road—of holding doors open for other people, and of not shouting at one another in supermarkets. Driving habits are frequently a bone of contention, so that area would also need to be addressed.

Then there are such important matters as the bilingual but multicultural aspect of our society—the special place of Māori in New Zealand—freedom of religion, including, very importantly, freedom to change one’s religion or to have no religion, and dating and marriage customs, and the like. In all those areas the experience of many of us is that we are sometimes involved in great cultural misunderstanding that leads to tension and puts pressures on families, whether those are immigrant families or families that have lived in New Zealand for some time. I believe that courses of that kind could go a long way towards smoothing those people’s integration into mainstream New Zealand society, and we should always stress that our goal is to make immigrants feel at home and to become fully active citizens of the nation they have chosen. I think we could see a lot of niggles dissipate in that way, to the benefit of all New Zealanders.

Let me return briefly to the huge, above-forecast tax gain included in the supplementary estimates. As I mentioned, for companies it was at least $358 million—probably more. By my calculations, that would be enough to fund a 2 percent reduction in the tax rate for companies. The Minister of Revenue would, no doubt, counter immediately that that would be imprudent, given the halving of the GDP growth forecast for the next year. That may be fair enough, but what about a 1 percent reduction? I think that would meet the test of prudence, but at the same time clearly signal how valuable companies are to New Zealand society. We need to do a lot more to support companies and small businesses in this country—particularly start-up companies.

I make a similar comment in relation to taxes for individuals. I accept that the Labour - Progressive Coalition Government has a strong preference for a progressive tax system, but why do we not at least adjust the bands every year for inflation? It is fair to do that, and therefore it is unfair not to do so. In real terms we are increasing the tax on all New Zealand workers, be they low, middle, or high-income earners, and I think that that saps incentive and innovation, gives the wrong signal, and—at least at the margin—means that a few more of our best and brightest people will decide to pack their bags and leave for greener pastures overseas. Being prudent is one thing; being unduly tight is another. Given our current weak economic outlook, a little fiscal stimulus—prudently using, say, $500 million of that $1.5 billion tax windfall—in the current financial year would, in my view, have been good for New Zealand, its people, its families, and its economy. I think that alongside monetary policy there is a place for counter-cyclical fiscal expansion or contraction, and that the Minister of Finance may rue not moving now if, as the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research forecasts, our economy contracts not just in 2003-04 but also in 2004-05.

I conclude by saying that United Future very much welcomes the commitment of the Government to review family support tax credits in next year’s Budget.

Last night in the debate on the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise Bill, the National Party slated Industry New Zealand, its operations, its quality of service, and, particularly, me as the Minister in charge of it. Evidently I was described as some kind of joke around the regions. Well, in my reading late last night I came across a full-page advertisement in the Wellington Dominion Post—which is not exactly a Progressive party newsletter, I would hasten to say—and in it I saw an advertisement for a company called Fraser Engineering Group. Industry New Zealand was charged last night with accusations that no one has ever benefited from it. Even the subject of Sovereign Yachts was raised, for about the 976½-time, even though there are 40 or 50 more jobs there than when the firm started—because there were not any then.

However, Fraser Engineering Group, named in the Dominion Post on Wednesday, 14 May, is located at 18 Peterkin Street, Wingate, Lower Hutt. So it is a local company headed by a good young couple, Martin and Raewyn Simpson, and with John Fraser as a partner.

The company has been going for 50 years, and this young couple took over the company a few years back. I can assure members that they are certainly not paid-up supporters of any party I have ever belonged to. They have developed their business and now have premises at Wakefield St in Alicetown, Petone. They are specialists in the manufacture of waterway and firefighting equipment. I have been to their factory and had a look, because they did not think that Governments ever did anything for anybody, and thought that we were all useless. That is what they said at a public meeting I spoke at. I said: “Well, look, we’ll show you something and see whether we can prove that’s wrong.”

When asked what was its biggest business triumph last year, Fraser Engineering said that it was purchasing and moving four companies on to a custom-designed site, and winning contracts worth over $30 million for fire appliances for New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. That is not the only thing it does, but $30 million of firefighting equipment and appliances is not too bad for a little company in Lower Hutt. The company became an accredited supplier to General Motors internationally, and that is not a bad effort, either. So there is a company that has been doing well.

Here is an interesting thing. The next question was: “How can the Government”—this is the Labour-Progressive coalition Government—“specifically assist your industry?”. Last night, members would have heard from National and ACT that “there’s no way they should be doing this; they should be keeping out of it.”, and “They’re useless anyway, even if they do get into it.” What is the answer? What would members pay for the following kind of comment from one of our high-growth, intellectually proficient and progressive high-tech companies? The answer in the Dominion Post from Fraser Engineering was: “Continue to fund Industry New Zealand so they can continue to provide advice and assistance, which we have found to be invaluable.” Did I actually put that advertisement in the newspaper? No, I did not. I could not have convinced the Dominion Post to write that if I had paid it $100 million. But here it is, in the advertisement for Fraser Engineering. The next thing the company said, when describing what the Government could do specifically to assist its industry, was, “Keep the Hon Jim Anderton as Minister for Economic Development.”

Last night I was a joke over there on the Opposition benches, but one of our most high-growth, high-tech companies took out an advertisement in the paper and said, “Please keep Industry New Zealand.” ACT members are in the House today. That party thinks Industry New Zealand is a load of rubbish and should not be in existence. Last night I was slated and rubbished by the National Party, yet here is one of our young, high-tech engineering companies saying, “For goodness’ sake, keep Industry New Zealand because it is doing a great job, and keep Jim Anderton because he is doing a great job as Minister for Economic Development.”

The point about all that is to ask members when they last saw an advertisement in the paper that said: “Please put Richard Prebble in as Minister of Rail.” I have looked, but I have not seen one. I can imagine a whole lot of New Zealanders saying: “For goodness’ sake, don’t get Richard Prebble back as Minister of Rail.” What do members think about John Carter as Minister of Agriculture? He had a lot to say last night about how terrible the north is, when that region actually has one of the highest growth rates in New Zealand right now, as I speak.

When I came into office with the Labour-led Government in 1999, the Northland region was one of the basket-case territories of New Zealand. John Carter was there when it was a basket case, and he is there now when it is really going well. What is the difference between the time when he was there when the Northland region was a basket case, and now? The difference is that now there is a Labour-Progressive Government, and when he was there when it was a basket case there was a National Government. What is there about that that we do not understand? Have those members of that Government learnt anything? No, they have not. When did I see an advertisement that said: “Please keep Gerry Brownlee as Minister of Education. We need him as Minister of Education. What more could you do for us than put Gerry in as Minister of Education?”. I have not seen an advertisement from the health sector that said: “Could we have Roger Sowry as Minister of Health?”. I have never seen an advertisement like that. I have never seen an advertisement that said: “Please, please, please, can we have Mr Don Brash as our Minister of Finance?”. As for having Bill English as Prime Minister—no, I do not think so.

So when we think about the debates going on in the House about what this Government is or is not doing, I say that I cannot honestly remember when I have seen private sector organisations putting in advertisements like that, without any solicitation from the Government. And if members want any evidence—and I know there are questions about the Progressive party, a new party, but we will see at the next election—this Government is a totality of every component of it, and if the Government is successful, it is successful because everyone in it is working towards that success. That is the reality of it, and the Progressive party plays its role.

The challenge for everyone in Parliament, and for the political parties that are represented here, is to get good things done for people. Have we helped to get good things done for Fraser Engineering? The answer is yes. Does that mean we have done good things for the people who work at Fraser Engineering? The answer is yes. How many staff did it have when it started? It had about 30. I know that, because that is what it had when I first went to see it. How many does it have now? It has about 75. If every company in New Zealand was doubling or tripling its staff in a 3 to 4-year period, how about that for some growth? This is in a high-tech engineering area, where we have taken contracts off the best engineering companies in the world, making fire engines for Australia and the South Pacific, and defence equipment for the American company General Motors Defence International. This is what this Government has been about—doing things for people.

When I made a decision in 1998 to join as a potential coalition partner for the Labour Party, the reason I did it was that the people we represented needed people in Government to do things. I look at the ACT party. I had a thought the other day. ACT has been in Parliament since 1996—I think that is when it first came in—and by the time of the next election it will have been a decade in Opposition. ACT had a chance of going into Government when the collapse of the National - New Zealand First Government took place, but it chose not to. It chose to stay outside the Government and fire potshots—wet bus tickets of press releases—at the Government, while staying in the safety of Opposition. ACT did not come over into the Government, try to make some of the hard decisions, and try to do something to lift the country. No, it chose the safety of Opposition. The people of New Zealand have a sense of that. That is why the ACT party is where it is and why it will stay there.

I say to the Greens that they have had choices to come into Government, influence Government policy, and do something about it, but no, they have chosen to stay over there. They have all sorts of reasons every time. But it is much easier to be in Opposition firing press releases. It is much easier being in Opposition and being holier-than-thou on every single thing that happens. Over here we make things happen. This is where the action is, and I am proud to be part of this coalition.

That was a “Helen, please pick up the phone, I am still here.” speech from Jim Anderton. How many times has any Minister had to come into the House and put his curriculum vitae before the House, hoping the Prime Minister would hear it and decide to keep him inside Cabinet? Jim Anderton is the leader of the Progressive party, the party in Parliament known as the “Progressive duet” that is propping up the Labour Government. We had no idea on this side of the House that things were in such turmoil, and that Mr Anderton’s security in Cabinet was so thin.

Quite clearly, the National Opposition has been very, very effective in sending a message to Helen Clark that poor old Jim Anderton, after 4 years of running around the countryside handing out $2,000 cheques and getting photographs in all the local papers, has to come into the House and present one example of a company that says he is doing a good job. He then went on to tell us that it is doing so well it has tripled and quadrupled its growth in the last 4 or 5 years. The question must arise that if the company is so busy running the business, would it not just have decided, when one of Mr Anderton’s minions came toddling into its office with a big cheque it did not need and said: “Look, can you thank us?’’, to say: “All right, we’ll put a bit of an ad in the paper for Mr Anderton.”? That is not a real endorsement of the policy. It is just a simple recognition that it wants the environment for growth in the economy of this country to be as it is and better. And it will be better when this country gets a National Government.

I want to tell the House that although everybody out there might think the energy crisis has passed, this country is in the grip of a very, very deep energy crisis indeed. It is not one that is about saving a few kilowatts in our homes every winter, but one that will seriously impede the ability of New Zealand businesses to expand in the years to come. When I look at the estimates I do not see the issues that are facing New Zealand being addressed at all.

The other day, the Minister of Energy was questioned about his estimates at a select committee. He was asked whether we were potentially likely to see the 2003 electricity shortage, which was due to lack of water, repeated in 2004 because of a lack of gas, coal, and oil supplies. The Minister said he thought the answer was yes. Then he went off, as he often does, on a series of ponderous statements about whether the Rimu field was going to produce very much, how long Kapuni would run, and the uncertainties existing over the current Pohokura field. Then he said again that when we consider all those uncertainties, the answer is yes. New Zealand in 2004 could be facing the same sort of electricity shortage, according to the Minister, not because of a lack of water this time, but simply because of a lack of the fossil fuels necessary to fire up those big North Island plants.

What is the Government’s answer to the problem? Because it is a big problem. By the Minister’s own admission, some 1,250 megawatts of new generation were commissioned in this country between 1996 and 1999, and since he has been the Minister 166 megawatts have been commissioned, 105 of which were started and substantially completed under the previous National Government. We have not seen investment in generation in this country for some time. The Minister’s answer is that it is not an issue of generation; it is an issue of fuel supply. But I do not see anything in the select committee report that deals with fuel supply. It does not deal with the shortage of gas, or whether enough coal to fire up Huntly is being taken out of various deposits around the country. It says we are going to create an Electricity Commission.

💬 Lindsay Tisch: Another committee.

Another committee that will supposedly fix the problem! It states that in particular the Electricity Commission “will contract with generators to provide a dry year reserve generation capacity and fuel. It will withhold these reserves from the market until dry year conditions look likely, at which point they will be released into the market at a higher price.”

The question I have is: where is that reserve capacity now? It does not exist. If the intention, when that capacity may be on stream, is to hold the spot price down, why is the Government going to do that by putting the price of reserve generation up above where the spot price is likely to go? That is the real question that has to be answered.

How does anybody who has responsibility in this area hold down the price of electricity to reasonable levels, if the Government has come along and said it will purchase a reserve capacity at a much higher price, and release it into the market only if it is needed? Then the question is: who will pay for that reserve capacity that may never be used? It is the poor old electricity consumer. The Minister says it should not cost any more than half a cent a unit. Half a cent a unit is about $200 million a year, and this is from the Government that said, “no new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes”. Tell that to the pensioners around the countryside who are frightened to turn on the heater—not because they think there may not be any electricity there to supply them, but simply because they cannot afford to run their heaters.

It is an utter nonsense for anyone to suggest that by setting up a committee, which is what this group is, a whole lot more capacity will suddenly be created for the generation of electricity, and that it can be held back in dry years. It just will not work. The Minister himself acknowledged that in a speech the other day, where he said the distinction between new generation needed to meet national demand growth, which is about 150 kilowatts a year, and reserve generation needed for dry years is an important one. So he understands the problem, but he is caught up in the Government spin machine that says: “We’ve got trouble here, and we need to convince people that we’ve got an answer.” So the Government has gone out with the very silly idea of setting up this big committee. Incidentally, I am told that the committee will initially operate using the rules for governance of the industry that have just been rejected by the industry, by the consumer group outside the industry, and by Grey Power, a most conservative organisation that is not known for favouring a market solution but which totally rejects the proposal the Minister currently has on the table.

As I said at the outset, we have a very deep energy crisis in this country. It is not one that will see the lights go out immediately, but it is most definitely one that will see New Zealand business unable to expand at the rates that it would like to. New Zealand entrepreneurs who want to start new businesses are unable to do so because there is not good supply. I ask some of the clever members on the other side whether they have looked at how many businesses have withdrawn proposals, particularly for timber processing in this country, because they cannot get adequate electricity fuel supply. There are a number of such businesses, and for Mr Anderton to come in here today and beg the Prime Minister—who is clearly considering giving him the chop—to keep his job, on the basis that one firm in the Hutt has said, “Please keep him.”, really shows how much this Government has its head in the sand, and how convoluted its policy is for business development and for fostering growth in this country. It is right out of control.

Furthermore, the contribution this afternoon from the Green Party on the issue of energy should alarm anybody who is concerned about living a good and decent lifestyle in this country. None of us are rabid polluters. None of us are out there, attempting to destroy the environment in a free and cavalier way. To suggest that we should not have big generation projects happening in this country, and that we should somehow be reliant on wind and biomass, is utter nonsense but it does fit very well with the convoluted policy being offered to this country by Helen Clark and her Ministers.

It is always a pleasure to speak after the National front-bench heavyweight has spoken, because if one speaks after him, anything one says has to sound reasonably good. I want to commend the Appropriation (2002/03 Supplementary Estimates) Bill to the House, and I will shape my speech particularly around pages 25 and 26 of schedule 1, which are about Parliamentary Service’s budget, and what the taxpayer might spend for value in that regard. I want to look at a couple of cases to explore that. There was once a person called Donna Awatere Huata, who had great credentials before she came to this House. Her biggest problem in coming to this House was that she got involved with the ACT party. She would not have understood and would not have been able to keep together the Pipi Trust unless she had seen the way secret trusts, secret commissions, and a range of other secretive deals might well have been engineered and geared. So the difficulty Donna Awatere Huata has is the company she keeps. If one wants to know how to rort something, if one wants to see a scam—whether it is in Fiji or anywhere else—one has to go to the ACT party, because ACT is a specialist in those sorts of things. [Interruption] Yes, it could run tutorials.

Let us work a bit further on that. Rodney Hide, the perk-buster extraordinaire, went on a 3-week, taxpayer-funded holiday. He was missing in action. Where did he go? Well, he travelled. Did he travel economy class? No, he travelled business class, and he went to New York, London, and on to Geneva. Who lives there? The underwriters of the ACT party, the people who pull the strings—that is who lives there. That is where he goes to get instructions, but not on behalf of the Kiwi taxpayer. Rodney Hide can travel business class, but Hemana Waaka, like Rosa Parks, has to sit in the back of the plane. Hemana Waaka, a Māori boy, is no good up the front. That is disgraceful. Māori people are told: “Get down the back of the plane!” That is the type of treatment we get served up, and that is the amount of money Kiwi taxpayers pay. Is it any wonder that the ACT party is just about on the margin for error in the polls? We will see how it goes in today’s TV3 poll.

It worries me desperately when people come into this House and are actually on the take outside it. I am not saying that the ACT party, particularly Rodney Hide, gets cash for questions—I am not saying that. I would never say that; I would never even try to allege it. But I would say that we have to be very careful about people’s motivations and intent, and that we must look behind those things. That is what worries me with the “rort party”, the ACT party. Time and again in this House, its members get up and do nothing on the policy front-foot. They are not here on the policy front-foot; they are here to hunt down a few heads. I think the “rort party” is disgraceful, whether it is the Pipitea office that is not an office, or, you name it, whether it is the pyramid scheme operating out of Owen’s office or wherever else. It is disgraceful. So I am pleased we are starting to put more money into the Parliamentary Service so that Rodney can go on more 3-week holidays.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): The member may not refer to someone by his or her first name. He must refer to members by their title or their full name.

Yes, Rodney Philip Hide. Not only does Rodney Philip Hide go on a 3-week junket, flying business class, to take his instructions from New York, London, and Geneva—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): No. The member cannot imply that the member is taking instructions from somewhere else.

Advice—he took great advice. That was part of the trip. He picked up advice—and it was not from the stewardess, or from someone in the urinal; it was actually from somebody who is a bit closer than that to Rodney Philip Hide. We all know who the underwriters of the ACT party are. They all live over there in New York, London, and Geneva, and they keep trying to pull the strings over here. It is disgraceful.

The other juxtaposition is that Hemana Waaka was paid, by way of a contract, to do a job. He was paid by a purchasing agency, and he did the job. Whether he wanted to travel business class is his business—he had the profit to do it. Oh, but Māori are not allowed to travel business class! What a joke! It is absolutely disgraceful, discriminatory, and prejudicial. What an ugly, evil man Rodney Philip Hide is—and I do not say that in terms of his external presence, which is bad enough, but internally.

The next dollar value that one has to ask oneself about relates to the pinstriped one from Tauranga. He is well past his use-by date—we all know that—but apart from that, he is the champion of honesty, integrity, and credibility; that beacon of justice from Tauranga! Here is the truth of it. He has misled this House and the Kiwi voter more times than Richard Prebble. How bad is that? It is absolutely disgraceful. But it gets worse. When one actually starts to crawl through the times that he has been misleading, one starts to understand that it gets worse—and it does so for this reason. There is a chap called Michael John Laws—his confidante and closest lieutenant.

He deposes in an affidavit that the wonderful one, the one with integrity, credibility, and honesty rorted the Electoral Act; committed a fraud—discriminatory—

💬 Peter Brown: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It is totally out of order where he is going, and I seek your advice to give him some advice.

What do you expect from a £10 pom?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I caution the member that the path that he is going down may well lead to gross disorder in the House. I ask him to come back to the point.

💬 Peter Brown: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. For the member’s enlightenment, I am not a £10 pom; I came here for nothing.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): That is not a point of order.

Is that not a wonderful confession! A stowaway! The immigration-busting party has a stowaway as a member of Parliament! That is absolutely disgraceful. I will tell Winston that tomorrow. “Peter Brown Wong”—that is what we will call him. Anyway, I will continue on the topic of that wonderful affidavit, signed out by Michael John Laws. It is quite clear that the honourable one from Tauranga is not as squeaky clean as he would have us believe, in the House or out on the street. It is quite clear in the same affidavit that Doug Woolerton knows all about it, because he is named in the same affidavit. One does not waltz into the House and make all sorts of serious allegations, and believe that one is squeaky clean. That particular member from Tauranga has never made it in the legal profession and has never made it out in the street in terms of business. He would not know how to run a chequebook but, more important, he knows how to rort the Electoral Act. That is a fact. That is what was deposed in that particular affidavit.

💬 Peter Brown: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Rt Hon Winston Peters has never been convicted of, or even charged with, anything.

Not yet.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Points of order will be heard in silence. There are a number of yellow cards coming.

💬 Peter Brown: For that member to make an allegation such as that is an absolute disgrace. He is not entitled to besmirch a person’s reputation, and that is what he is doing. I repeat that the Rt Hon Winston Peters has never been charged with or convicted of anything, unlike that member, who has a track record of being charged and convicted of quite a lot.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I thank the member for drawing that to my attention, and I refer the member to Standing Order 117, about personal reflections. Let us leave it at that. I know it is an open and robust debate—

💬 Peter Brown: With due respect, Mr Assistant Speaker, I believe it has gone a little bit further than that. This is the second time I have taken a point of order, and I believe that the member should be asked to withdraw and apologise.

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: We have witnessed Mr Peters raising a large number of inflammatory allegations against Mr Tamihere in the House. They were heard. Secondly, Mr Assistant Speaker, I point out to you that Mr Brown has, three times, raised points of order that are not points of order—and I think you have ruled so on two occasions—in order to break up the member’s speech. I would ask you to ask him to pull his head in.

💬 Ron Mark: That member is quite incorrect. It is quite in order and within Standing Orders to demand that members who are besmirching an MP’s reputation be pulled into line, and that they be asked to withdraw and apologise if offence is taken. Offence has been taken. The bottom line is this: if a member of Parliament comes to the House, as I have, with criminal convictions, then people, quite rightly, can say that I, Ron Mark, have a criminal conviction. There is not a lot I can say about that, because it is a fact. When a member stands up and says that I, Ron Mark, have defrauded the electoral system or have defrauded a bank, and there is no proof, no charges, and no evidence of such a thing, then that member has just crossed the line, and all the honourable Peter Brown is asking you to do is to bring members back within Standing Orders, and, as offence has been taken, to ask for a withdrawal and an apology.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I refer the member to Speaker’s ruling 33/3, which states: “Words or phrases used robustly in debate but which do not impugn the honour of a member will not be ruled out of order.” It is up to the member him or herself to take exception.

💬 Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I have already ruled.

💬 Ron Mark: I am asking for your guidance on this because this goes from the sublime to the somewhat ridiculous. How can members who might not be able to be here to stand and take a point of order be defended? We are caught in a bit of a catch-22. [Interruption] I am on my feet. Given that one cannot refer to members who may or may not be present in the House, as per the Standing Orders, who, then, can object? If the Prime Minister is away on official business and I stand up and besmirch her reputation, it is perfectly in order for the Deputy Prime Minister, the Government whip, or anyone else to demand a withdrawal and an apology. I think that we are getting ourselves a bit crossed here, and that last ruling creates some difficulty.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I take the opportunity to caution the member as to the manner in which he is addressing the House.

They do not like it. They can dish it up but they do not like it. The honourable pinstriped one from Tauranga, who is well past his use-by date, can waltz in here, ambush anybody when that person is not in the House, and run all over him or her. His team over there chortles. They are getting very excited—they are “over-Viagra’ised”—but I tell them that this is Parliament. One cannot zip the lips of the highest court in the land. That is what it is for. It is for identifying people who live double lives in that regard. All my stuff is out of the closet. Mr Peters’ is not; not by a long measure. So the reality is that I am allowed to waltz down here in this debate and actually put some evidence on the Table—they will allow me to table it. There will be no problems over there, and away we will go. For the edification of the New Zealand First members over there—none of whom we know, apart from Winston Peters—I just want to say: “Have a great time!” I will leave that issue, because I have been cautioned by the Assistant Speaker.

I conclude by saying that it is really wonderful to be on this side of the House in such a great Government, which is going great guns in terms of every measure, from the gross domestic product measures all the way up to all the others. I say to the Rt Hon Winston Peters that when I go home, up to Auckland, the people in Waiparera are proud to be Waiparera people. The people in Waitakere City, who are part of us, are proud of us. We are into nationhood-building. We on this side of the House are solution drivers. So when that member climbs and slithers and slides outside the sewers and the gutters, or wherever they come out from in that caucus, the reality is that we over here are going great guns. We have all the solutions, and those members have all the problems. They are welcome to keep them.

I rise again to signal that New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill. There are no surprises there. I just wish—and so do a lot of people I know—that our colleagues in the United Future party would not support such legislation and would not fund this Government’s rather obscure programmes.

I want to speak to one issue in the Supplementary Estimates of Appropriations. Let us look at the D1 appropriations for Vote Police, Vote Courts, and Vote Corrections. The D1 appropriation for Vote Corrections takes a broader interpretation. It is not just about advice but about information services. Is that not typical? We have come to expect a lot from the Department of Corrections, and the one thing it is very, very good at is spin doctoring. Its information services are booked out at about $26 million. All I have to say to the Government and everybody who is listening is that that money does not need to be spent on policy advice for this Government, because, one, it does not listen to good advice, and, two, on the track record thus far—

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

I was drawing members’ attention to the D1 appropriations in Vote Police, Vote Courts, and Vote Corrections, which deal with advice. But before I go further in dealing with advice, I want to reflect on the speech made by the Hon John Tamihere, the aspirant to the Māori affairs portfolio—which I do not think will happen now. I have some advice for Mr Tamihere, and it comes directly from the leader of New Zealand First, the Rt Hon Winston Peters. In response to that speech this evening, he said that Mr Tamihere’s allegations of electoral fraud against New Zealand First were the ravings of a bum lawyer practising without a certificate. He said that the facts are that in 1996 a complaint was made by two disgruntled New Zealand First candidates. New Zealand First vigorously defended the charges, and the District Court in Wellington struck the complaint out on the basis that there was not a shred of evidence to back it up. He said that Mr Tamihere was floundering around, desperate to defend himself, but that, as Al Jolson once said: “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”. That is direct advice from the Rt Hon Winston Peters.

The bloke-to-bloke advice I would give to John Tamihere is that he should not come into the House making allegations of corruption and fraud if he does not have the evidence to back them up. That case, brought by two disgruntled people, was totally thrown out of court. It was not backed up. There is an old saying that the member needs to know: “If you’re going to take on Winston Peters, you need to know who you’re picking on, mate!”. I leave the member with that bit of advice.

The issue I want to talk about now is the advice to the Government. I have a piece of advice to give the Government—[Interruption] One gets tired of hearing that from that guy over there. What is his name? Al Bundy? I cannot for the life of me think of his name.

💬 Peter Brown: Alf Garnett.

I did not realise Alf Garnett had been elected to the Parliament of New Zealand, but I get tired of hearing interjections from him.

The advice I have for the Government is that it should stop wasting all its money on advice that it ignores. It should come straight to me or to New Zealand First if it wants advice on Vote Police, Vote Courts, and Vote Corrections. If members are wondering why I am saying that, I simply draw their attention to what has been going on in the last few months. In the last few months I have raised a number of issues, one of which has been home detention. The hapless Rick Barker over there was overseeing the Department of Corrections, and when he was asked about violent offenders being on home detention, he said that violent offenders were not on home detention. He said that in this House. What did we find out within about 3 minutes after he had sat down? We found out that people who had raped, who had assaulted children with firearms, who had threatened to kill, and who had committed grievous bodily harm were on home detention. It took only about a week or so for the Minister of Corrections, Paul Swain, to come out and say there are problems with home detention and some of the recording data, and the Government was reviewing the situation.

I raised a stack of issues on home detention. All those issues, I have to say, had been flagged to the Government previously by other people—people like Joe Public, who had pointed out that home detention was being abused; people like Glen Goodman, who had worked for the probation service for 16 years, and said that the home detention system was being abused. Did the Government listen? No. Has it finally admitted it was wrong? Yes. Is it moving to tidy up the situation? Yes. So I tell the Government to stop wasting all its money on bringing in all this advice; it should just come and talk to me. I am only too pleased to help.

Where else have we been able to help? Let us talk about deferred sentences. When I first raised the issue of deferred sentences, it was about a woman who had embezzled money from her employer. She was convicted in the court, was given a jail sentence of 2 years, then was allowed to go home. Where was she found? She was found back on the pokies, gambling again. What did people say? They said it was not an issue. What did Mr Phil Goff eventually say? He said: “Well, there is an issue, and we want to bring a Statutes Amendment Bill to the House to amend the law.” We said: “Actually, let’s do it the right way, put it through for public submissions, and tidy up a few other problems.” But it is good to know that, finally, the Government knows it has got it wrong. In relation to justice issues, Government members should not just sit there pretending they know it all. They should come and talk to me. They should stop wasting Government money on all this advice that, quite frankly, does not seem to be doing any good.

Another issue to look at is quota ticketing and unpaid fines. Here we have a Government that has clocked up, according to the Supplementary Estimates of Appropriations, $90 million worth of traffic infringement notices. That was for this year just gone by. It is in the Supplementary Estimates. The figure has been downsized a wee bit, actually. Not as much was picked up as was hoped. I think the shortfall is a few hundred thousand dollars. How sad! The projected figure was $94.5 million, and it finally ticked off at $90 million.

But here is the real kick: the Government is aiming to increase that amount by 30 percent. That is in the latest Budget. It wants to up those figures by 30 percent. Why is it doing it? It is to improve road safety. Well, there are a whole heap of problems about handing out, carte blanche, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of fines. One is that the fines have to be able to be collected. The Government says it does it because it makes our roads safer; that people who get a ticket say they will not speed again. But that is not the truth. We now know, from what I have brought before this Government, that people are not paying their fines. That is why this Government has $488 million in outstanding fines. What has the Government said about that? It has finally conceded that there is a problem. So now what is it doing? It has a bill coming to the House that will help deal with the fines collection problem. The sum of $315 million is outstanding in traffic fines; $488 million is outstanding in fines across the board. It is nice to know that, finally, the Government has said that, yes, there is a problem. It is nice to know that the Government has said it will do something about it. That is three strikes. I would say: “Three strikes, and you’re out.”

The point is we are spending a fortune under these appropriations on ministerial advice from all these various departments, and, quite clearly, either the advice is wrong or the Minister does not want to accept it.

From where else have we got advice? We had advice recently that the police wanted 169 extra police. What did they get? They got 55 extra police. What is the result? The result is that someone like Mr Scotty Watson, a Ready to Retail coordinator in Rotorua, is saying: “We need police on the beat again. In 17 months I have never”—underlined—“seen police on the streets, and on two occasions I have called police. They never have anyone to send. It is going to get to the stage where we will take the law into our own hands.” It is good advice to put more cops on the beat. It is good advice from the commissioner—“Give us 169 extra police.” What is the Government’s response? Its response is to provide 55 extra police over 4 years.

The bottom line message is that this Government is paying an absolute fortune to get advice. Its Ministers receive advice—we have watched Parekura Horomia and what has happened with some of the advice he has been given—but consistently they have denied the accusations and the issues we have raised, only to find themselves falling flat on their faces, having to defer to New Zealand First, and saying: “Ron Mark, you and New Zealand First were right all along.”

I can do no better than to start by looking at tonight’s poll figures.

💬 Government Member: What are they?

They make very interesting reading: Labour 52, National 24, New Zealand First 8, and nobody else made the margin to get in. I say to United Future not to worry, because I think it will be judged better in time. But to ACT I say: “You’ve gone!” I ask Gerry Eckhoff, who is sitting over on the ACT benches now, to answer a question—and he can do so by way of interjection if he likes. As Donna Awatere Huata is one of ACT’s members of Parliament, New Zealand would be very interested to know who is paying for her husband and daughter to be with her in Australia on the select committee trip she is on right now. Can the member tell us who is paying for that?

💬 Gerrard Eckhoff: That member is suspended from our caucus.

He says that is why she is suspended. Maybe he could also tell us why his party is continuing to pocket her $111,000 of electoral funding. Furthermore, maybe he can tell us why Deborah Coddington is spending 4 months in Britain, at the taxpayers’ expense, beefing up her qualifications. That is the party that goes on about integrity. Let me say there is a word for that sort of action, but we cannot use it in this Parliament. I ask the next ACT speaker—

💬 Darren Hughes: What is it?

I cannot use that word and I am not going to. I ask the next ACT speaker to stand up and put a few things on the record, because we could say it smells. We were talking about hippopotamuses before; well, the hippopotamus that is that party rolls in the mud. I am surprised at the way in which its members behave, because it is supposed to be a liberal party. What do they do? They roll in the mud. I say to them: “Grow up!” It is about time they listened to someone in their party like Stephen Franks. I do not like his policies much, but at least he is policy driven, not muckracking driven, like the rest of that party. It is time they grew up.

I must say I feel really quite sorry for John Carter—

💬 Gerrard Eckhoff: Who creates the muck?

Who is that little man chortling over there? I feel quite sorry for him in the position he is in. He needs to pick up the phone and ring the Leader of the Opposition. He needs to tell him he has to come back here, because somebody, finally, has to give Bill English the message that he is not going to make it. The cruellest thing that the National Party can do now is to retain him in the leadership.

Bill English is my next-door neighbour in electoral terms, and I despair to see the position he is in. He probably is a decent man. I heard a magnificent speech from Kim Beazley one time, after a Government Minister had decided to retire. He said: “Well, now that he’s going, we can praise him.” Now that Bill English is going, I can praise him. I say to John Carter that it is his job as chief whip to be straight with his leader, and to tell him he is not going to make it. The figures tonight that show that Bill English and Don Brash together do not get anywhere near a quarter of the support that Helen Clark enjoys are quite revealing. The National Party used to be the party that got elected to government more often than most, and now it has been reduced to a minor player in political circles. The good news for John Carter is that National will go up from 27 to 31, based on tonight’s poll, but there—

💬 Darren Hughes: That’s seats.

—that is seats—but there is one thing he needs to understand about that figure. It is the traditional mid-term return of votes to the two major parties. Unfortunately, the National Party can no longer be called a major party, in this situation. It is a serious matter for National. I tell those members that they should get out of their unmarked cabs, and travel in ordinary cabs, like ordinary members of Parliament. They should start to understand they have been voted into Opposition, start to understand that the National Party is no longer the Government, and get rid of the trappings of privilege. It is an interesting thing that the three people in the National Party who look to be going anywhere have very interesting names: Power, Rich, and Worth. It is the rich, the powerful, and the worthy, as they see it. I say to them that they have very unfortunate names for politics.

This Government has been an extremely good Government. My electorate has done enormously well in this period of time, and not only with growth in the economy; we are starting to attack some of the infrastructure matters that need to be dealt with. I am looking forward also to seeing some work done as far as Stewart Island’s infrastructure is concerned, and I am sure that once the final report on that is done—

💬 David Benson-Pope: Eric Roy never did it.

No, Eric Roy talked about it a lot but never did a thing. I tell the National Party that I actually have its economic policy.

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: A blank piece of paper?

No. I say to the member that is a silly interjection on this occasion, because it is a very well-detailed policy, and it was given to the knowledge wave conference by Don Brash. If the National Party has not voted for it yet, it will not be long before it does. I will tell members what it is. Actually, I quoted Don Brash’s speech in my economics essay as one of the possible approaches New Zealand could have taken to the unemployment of the 1990s. We had to talk of two competing areas, and I thought Don Brash’s comments did set out a competing area.

But here is what he would do. He would remove all remaining tariffs—not review them but remove them. His attitude is let us not learn the lesson from the 1980s that if one takes away all protections, one should not be surprised if there is a crash, which is what happened. Not only did the stock market crash, but once we had removed industry protections we actually had an enormous crash of people hitting the scrap heap. He says let us not worry about that.

He would introduce a capital gains tax. While he was the Governor of the Reserve Bank he was on record as saying at the Finance and Expenditure Committee that he supported a capital gains tax, and he has not recanted from it. It is still in his policy, as outlined to the knowledge wave conference.

He would go to the Singapore model of welfare—no superannuation, and no support for those who are a bit down on their luck, or who are ill or injured. He would have none of that, because it is inflationary, and one cannot have inflation in the economy. He would drive it out with those measures. I say to him he should come down here and tell us what he would do then to prop up the justice system and the prison system to make sure that people who own property are protected. They would need to build fences. People who do not have anything to live on will find a way of living.

He would also reduce tax for the very wealthy. In his speech he went on asking what damage would be done if those on half a million dollars a year paid only a small proportion of their income in tax. He asked what difference it would make. It would bring people to New Zealand, as he saw it, who might be prepared to invest. That is the National Party policy.

People understand that this Government has introduced good policies, which are working. People have had enough of the right-wing experiments that were undertaken by National and ACT. People have had enough of the double standards of the ACT party, which have been exposed in the House tonight, and that is why this Government is riding so high, and that is why the National Party is in deep disarray. That is why I say to John Carter he should get on the phone, get Bill English back here, and deal with that party’s systemic problems. Lord forbid, we do not want a situation where New Zealand First ends up being the major Opposition party! At least the National Party should stand for something decent. But in the condition it is in, it has not got a prayer of even starting to form a policy, much less the next Government

Just last week, representatives of the non-governmental organisation umbrella group Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa travelled to Geneva to make a formal presentation to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. Among numerous recommendations contained in its excellent report is one relating to article 4 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which New Zealand officially ratified 10 years ago. Article 4 states that Governments must do all they can to implement the rights contained in the convention, including taking measures to fulfil the social and economic needs of children to the maximum extent possible, given their country’s resources. Picking up on this, the non-governmental organisation's report to Geneva contains two pertinent recommendations. The first states firmly that the New Zealand Government should implement a framework in its annual Budget allocations that accounts for its obligations under article 4 of the convention. The second recommends that the Government should prioritise the elimination of child poverty, and services for children and youth, in its budgetary allocations.

How well do this past year’s Budget and the supplementary estimates we are looking at tonight stack up against these recommendations? The Green Party says “not very well”, despite some of the excellent reforms that Labour has carried out over the last 3½ years. In a whole range of areas relating to the way we treat our children, and the value we place on them, we are falling far short. Many of our children and young people are badly impacted by social and economic inequity and still live in poverty—a third of them overall, according to the Ministry of Social Development’s briefing to last year’s incoming Government. Too many of our children continue to miss out on adequate access to health, education, and employment opportunities, a situation exacerbated by the housing crisis, which disproportionately affects low-income families.

Just to pick up on one very specific example, on looking at the supplementary estimates for the Ministry of Social Development I see that the provision of income support for unemployed, unsupported 16 and 17-year-olds was underspent by nearly $2 million. This comes at a time when I continue to hear cases of young women desperate to leave the life of prostitution who are still being denied access to the independent youth benefit. If people in that situation cannot access it, I seriously wonder who can, especially given this House’s avowed support for exit strategies from the sex industry, as shown in a certain other debate we are having in Parliament at the moment.

I use this example only because I believe it exemplifies an underlying attitude towards children and young people when it comes to our spending Government money on them. In the mental health area, the grossest underfunding continues to occur in the area of child and adolescent mental health. The Department of Child, Youth and Family Services still has long waiting lists and big gaps in the quality and timeliness of care and protection. Above all, child poverty remains, despite protection from poverty being a right identified specifically in articles 4, 6, 26, and 27 of the treaty. The Green Party believes, along with many groups in the community, that children should not be discriminated against because their parent or parents are unemployed. Family support and family assistance should be made equitable and increased immediately, and a universal child benefit should be introduced as a non - income tested, non-transferable payment to all primary caregivers. The thresholds on the amount that beneficiaries can earn before losing their benefit should be raised along with core benefit levels. The minimum wage should be lifted to $10 an hour immediately. More needs to be done to increase the level of social housing, and improve the access to housing finance of low to medium-income earners.

I hope that these and many other measures I do not have time to list tonight will be included in next year’s Budget. Surely a Labour Government that is running a surplus and that feels able to pour billions of dollars a year into a superannuation fund to invest on the overseas markets should be able to see its way clear by next year, at the latest, to prioritise the needs of our children, in line with our international obligations.

I rise to speak in support of the Minister’s motion. In talking in relation to the supplementary estimates, I think it is important to put the general background first. New Zealand has had one of the highest growth rates in the OECD in the last year, and one of the lower unemployment rates. The Government is running a healthy surplus, and Crown debt is at the lowest level it has been for about 30 years—and that is after the Government has been making prudent contributions to the Superannuation Fund. So one wonders whether, against that background, there would be some analysis or some attempt to find some bad news in the supplementary estimates on the part of the Opposition. Have we heard much talk about the detail of the supplementary estimates? No, we have not. One would expect an analysis of the detail, but, no, we are not getting that. What we saw today was the Rt Hon Winston Peters making a vicious attack against Mr Tamihere—the same old tired allegations that have been made over the previous 3 years. There is nothing new in them.

Most members of the public—and I am certainly of this view—know that Mr Tamihere is a man of some considerable ability. That is reflected in what he did before he got to Parliament. In his brief time on this planet, compared with some of the old dogs on the other side of the House, he has achieved far more than they will ever achieve. That was reflected in 1997 when North and South named him Man of the Year. The next year the Sunday Star-Times named him Man of the Year. Metro did something similar when it named him New Zealander of the Year in 1999. They are all high accolades. Mr Tamihere’s considerable efforts on behalf of the Waipareira Trust are a shining example of the good things that can be done for Māori on a limited budget. He is a man of some talent. It is obvious that the Rt Hon Winston Peters recognises that. He is threatened by that and is attempting to tear him down. Instead of focusing on the positive things that Mr Tamihere does, and instead of looking at the strengths of this very important part of our Labour Party, Mr Peters is spouting unjustified negative comments.

I wish now to refer to the supplementary estimates, which we are here to debate. John Tamihere is the Minister of Youth Affairs, the Minister for Land Information, the Minister of Statistics, and the Minister for Small Business. Let us have a look at the supplementary estimates to see whether the accounts are in order in Mr Tamihere’s departments—looking at the actual numbers is a rare event in this debate. If we look at the total appropriation for Vote Lands, we see that the supplementary estimates show that Land Information New Zealand is actually giving money back. Its supplementary estimate is a return of some money. If we look at the total appropriations for Statistics New Zealand—John Tamihere is the Minister of Statistics—we see that the total of appropriations for that department is $59 million. The small amount of $3 million is supplementary appropriation, all of which is described as being a change of outputs between output classes and departments. There is actually no additional Government spending.

John Tamihere is a man well in control of his ministries. If we look at the appropriations for the Ministry of Youth Affairs, we can see that his ministry is actually handing money back.

💬 Government Member: What is he doing?

He is handing money back. He is not actually getting additional money.

I would like to turn briefly to some of the outrageous comments that we heard earlier from Dr Don Brash in relation to his suggestion that we are not growing fast enough, and that the Labour Party is not to be trusted. I refer him to his comments, which were reflected in his article, around the time of the Budget, in the Dominion Post on Thursday, 15 May, when he was comparing us with Australia. He said: “There is too slow a rate to narrow the large gap in living standards between New Zealand and Australia that emerged during the 1970s and 80s.” Now that seems to be a strange comment, when one thinks about it in 2003. It is strange to see reference to the 1970s and 1980s and no reference to the 1990s. When I read that I thought I would have a look at the statistics. The OECD statistics, which compare economic wellbeing, show that in 1980 Australia was No. 10 on the list. New Zealand at that time was at No. 18. The 1980s was the decade of the Labour Party, effectively. During that decade—between 1980 and 1990—Australia went back six places on the OECD tables. New Zealand went back only one place—compared with Australia, that was a far better performance. Let us now look at the decade of the National Party—the 1990s. What would one expect to find? I thought that this deserved particular attention—it was the decade of those failed policies of the National Party, and it was omitted quite conspicuously in the comments of Dr Brash that were reported in the Dominion Post of 15 May. One sees that during that period—the 1990s—Australia started at position No. 16 in the OECD rankings. By the year 2000 it had advanced to position No. 12. It had gone up by four places. In comparison, during the 1990s—the decade of the National Party—we in New Zealand went backwards.

💬 Mark Peck: Where did we go to?

We went backwards from position No. 19 to position No. 20. This is no basis at all for the National Party to argue successfully that its policies are better. In fact, it shows the contrary. It shows that the fundamentalist policies that are backed by National and ACT—which they still cling to, which they have not moved past, and which they still believe in rigidly—are not the policies that would improve the lot of New Zealanders. We know that that would be a return to that decade, the 1990s, when New Zealand went backwards while Australia was going forwards. They cling to their old-fashioned, fundamentalist ideology. They have no faith at all in the ability of New Zealand to do better than look to its past. That past, the decade of the 1990s, makes sad reading. Lynda Scott is shaking her head, but I will show her these statistics, and she will see that they do not lie.

💬 Mark Peck: As far as Lynda Scott is concerned, National never did anything wrong.

That may be right—some people do not learn from their mistakes. In 1990 Australia’s position was No. 16, and in 2000 it had advanced to No. 12. In 1990 New Zealand’s position was No. 19. We went backwards to position No. 20.

💬 Mark Peck: Who was in power?

The National Party was in power. Who was in charge of the Reserve Bank? It was Dr Don Brash. What happened to provincial areas? They were strangled. One of the points that comes out in the supplementary estimates is that in the last year the funding from Industry New Zealand to incubators increased. Under the National Government, there were no incubators. They are associations of like-minded businesses that are given a bit of a hand up by the Government’s providing of some mentoring or its facilitating services that are not very expensive. The National Party just does not believe in that stuff, but I can tell those members that as of May 2003 there were 15 incubators in New Zealand and three emerging incubators—103 companies, in incubators, have received some Industry New Zealand funding. The incubators have received the funding, not necessarily the individual companies. The companies in those incubators have doubled their staff numbers. They are small, emerging companies. They have also raised more than $10 million in equity funding, and their turnover has increased. Those are all good statistics, and that is a small part of the reason that, in the last few years, so many new jobs have been created in New Zealand under the wise governorship of this Labour-led Government.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: As opposed to what National did in the 1990s.

Exactly—as opposed to what National did in the 1990s when it closed down all of the funding. Max Bradford did not ruin just the power industry; he dealt to Tranz Rail, as well. National also withdrew funding of the business support that was available through the then agencies. That had a negative effect, and it is one of the reasons that in that decade New Zealand went backwards from No. 19 to No. 20 while the Australians advanced from No. 16 to No. 12.

I want to talk about the decline in the public health sector. Today at the Health Committee we debated the radiation waiting times. New research has come out, and it shows, quite categorically, that if people wait more than 8 weeks for radiation therapy post-mastectomy or lumpectomy they have a far greater risk of local recurrence. A report was finished in 1999 by the oncology working party. The report is called the New Zealand Radiation Oncology Advisory Committee Report. The Minister of Health said that the reason she did not see the report for 2 years was to do with the Hon Wyatt Creech and was nothing to do with the ministry. I tell this House that Colin Feek set up that working-party, that the Ministry of Health was totally involved, and that the report went back to the Ministry of Health. The Minister of Health is continually trying to blame the National Party and is continually trying to pass the buck for what is going wrong in the health sector in this country, and that is absolutely unacceptable to us. She should front up to the issues, and, instead of passing the buck, she should tell us what she is going to do to improve things. But she does not do that.

The radiation waiting times at the moment mean that women who know the risks of local recurrence are choosing to have a mastectomy and lose a breast rather than lose a life. This situation has been going on for the last few years with nothing being done to improve it. The Minister stood up in this House and said that nobody was waiting more than 12 weeks. That is not the case, and she knows it. The individual cases that I have raised are the only way that we can get this Minister to take a look at the issue. Those people know that their lives are put at risk because of these delays. The public health system is in decline. Those women have no other choice, because there is no private provision for this. We have to send patients to Australia to use its private hospital system. The Minister said today that she does not object to public-private partnerships. So I asked her how many new public-private partnerships had been set up in the last 4 years. How many do members think?

💬 Lindsay Tisch: I’ve got no idea.

She could think of only one in the last 4 years. Before that, under National, there were public-private partnerships all over New Zealand, and they were improving health services. We had it happening in radiology and in urology, and it was happening in hospitals with private wards using spare space. Services were improving, and we were keeping our consultants in rural areas. The incomes for staff were improving, and we were not losing them overseas.

The boards’ objections now to private involvement are simply and utterly ideology. If the Minister agrees with public-private partnerships, then maybe she should not have appointed all those board chairs who do not—because they are totally ignoring her. That is absolutely why Capital Coast Health cancelled the Wakefield Hospital contract. It is why Waitemata District Health Board cancelled the birth-care contract. Contracts have been cancelled, not increased. This country needs good public and good private health-care to be able to deliver for New Zealand. We are a nation of only 4 million people. We are the size of Melbourne, yet we have 21 district health boards. The Minister trumpets the fact that this year the deficit will be only $194 million! Can members believe that? In 1999-2000, when she took over, all, bar two—they were hospital and health services then—were in the black and only two were in the red. What do we have now? Do we have any that are actually in the black? We have one breaking even—that is it.

💬 Opposition Member: Where’s that?

South Canterbury. Huge amounts of money are being spent, and that would be more acceptable if people were getting more service, but 25,000 patients have been culled off the waiting list. The Minister said that there would be no health cuts. In Canterbury alone 10,500 received a letter saying: “Goodbye, we aren’t going to treat you. There is going to be no publicly funded service for you.” One would think that the general practitioner, who knows the patient best, would actually know what is right for the patient and whether the patient had to have surgery.

Today in the House I brought up the case of a patient who has a hernia and has been put on a disability pension because he cannot work. He cannot get his hernia fixed. He will never be able to afford to pay to have that hernia fixed privately. But the Waikato District Health Board, the Northland District Health Board, and the Canterbury District Health Board have all said that they will not treat people with hernias unless they strangulate, which is a life-threatening situation. I am talking about a 42-year-old man who is the father of two children. He is a solo dad, and he is working part-time. His employer has said: “I can’t employ you. You’re too unreliable. Every time you’re in pain you have to go home.” Do members know what the hospital said? It said: “Take a Panadol.” Well, people cannot do that because they cannot swallow them. Pharmac has bought such a cheap one that people cannot swallow them. They are terrible to try to take. But that is what the hospital said.

💬 Darren Hughes: Tell us your policy!

I will tell the member what our policy is. We want the general practitioner to have far more say in what—

💬 Darren Hughes: That’s not a policy.

Yes it is. The member should ask the general practitioners. They want to have more say. The general practitioner I have referred to sent the patient back to Waikato Hospital, but the hospital said, no, it was not even going to see him. Not only would it not give him surgery but it would not see him to assess him. That is unacceptable to us, it is unacceptable to general practitioners, and it is unacceptable to patients.

Then there are all the other people who are being bumped off that list. What are general practitioners supposed to do with them? They have no solutions for this situation because their patients are just being bumped off the list. Another thing we talked about today was primary health organisations. Elective services are being severely rationed around the country—with no debate. There is no core health services debate with the local communities. Those patients have not been asked. The general practitioners have not been asked. They have just been told that, no, sorry, the patient is off the list. At the same time that that is happening, public health organisations, this year alone, are having $163 million poured into them in an untargeted, unfair funding formula. The Government has changed the script for public health organisations about 16 times. Every time a new one develops, there is a new script. It has not been trialled anywhere.

I worked as a doctor in the Hokianga a few years ago. They had absolutely free health-care, yet there is no research or study to show that the outcomes were better. Yet we are pouring money, $163 million, in an untargeted fashion just to a location. Do we think, do we know, whether it is of benefit? Is there any trail of this? Do we know that there is any evidence that it is going to improve health outcomes? No.

💬 Hon Tony Ryall: It’s just ideology.

That is right. It is absolutely ideology. It is the socialisation of medicine. Medicine is being socialised in this country, and because of that there are doctors’ practices that are worthless. There are doctors who have worked hard, bought into a practice, and now found that the practice is absolutely worthless. If we take the example of the Drury practice in south Auckland, we can see the stupidity of what is happening. If those guys move their practice 2 kilometres down the road, they would be inside the boundary and they would get cheaper care for their patients. But if they stay where they are, they do not. Does that makes sense? So they either go broke or they move. It does not make sense, and they have asked the Minister of Health to visit them and try to sort the problem out. But she does not. She just passes the buck. She just says it is the district health board’s problem. She is the Minister who has said that the buck stops with her, but no, no, she just passes the buck to the district health boards every time she is asked a question. That is not right, and we will hold her to account for that.

Public health organisations have their funding untargeted. It is not based on need. A lot of it is based on the fact that an area has to have 50 percent Māori, Pacific Island, or low-decile people. The problem with that is that there are a lot of people in that area who do not have high need. So the Government is using a lot of funding to pay for those patients in places like Gisborne and south Auckland.

💬 Darren Hughes: But it’s a good start for Māori health needs, isn’t it?

No, it is not a good start. If the Government wants to put money into primary health care, it should target it to those in need. That is what it should do—target it to the individual need. Then it might get some outcomes. But the way it is happening is just pure ideology.

What a litany of whines and moans and groans from Lynda Scott—which explains why the National Party is now on 24 percent in the polls. If there is one thing we can say about Lynda Scott, it is that she actually contributes to the poor performance of the National Party. That is probably her great talent.

The public health organisations are part of a marvellous scheme for distributing funds to those who are in need. It is population-based funding, and we thank Annette King, the Minister of Health, for introducing the scheme. I remind Lynda Scott that $9.5 billion is going into the health sector. This year’s supplementary estimates show that there is an 11.3 percent increase from last year. While we are talking about the money in this year’s Budget, I remind Lynda Scott that the health sector has received the largest increase in funding—31 percent, or $443 million of new money. What is next? Education. That sector receives $437 million. That is 31 percent new spending. Growth and innovation receives 4 percent new spending. Social services, justice, and the environment are other areas with increased funding. I will go through those again. Health has had the biggest increase.

Can I say to Lynda Scott that I, as an electorate MP, can remember when the National Party was in Government. I remember that many, many people came to my office. I am talking about people who were on accident compensation and were constantly waiting for operations. I am talking about people who could not work in their usual jobs because they needed hip replacements or other operations. I have not had one of those people in my office for months and months. Lynda Scott should get real. People are getting their operations. People have rung me and said: “I waited, while that National Government was in power, for my operation. I was unable to work. I was unable to take part in my normal occupation.” That was the legacy of 9 years of National. I say to Lynda Scott that she should get off the grass, look at what is happening, and look at what her Government delivered for the 9 years it was in power. At least this Labour-Progressive Government has some new policies, some new ideas, and creative people in it. We can see from those members opposite and their rating in the polls that they are absolutely bankrupt of ideas and bankrupt of personalities. National is literally a bankrupt party.

💬 Government Member: Impotent.

“Impotent” is the word I hear from a colleague behind me. National is a totally impotent party. In this House, and even in select committees, there is actually very little contribution from the Opposition. New Zealanders are showing, through the polls, that they agree with what I have just said.

As we are talking about the supplementary estimates and the amount of money that this Government is putting into New Zealand, I want to say that the Budget is a good Labour Budget. The priorities are health, as I have just said—the biggest increase in spending is going into health—and education. There is more money, 31 percent new spending, going into education. More than 700 new teachers are being paid for. While we are talking about education, I want to congratulate a couple of schools in my electorate. Waikato Diocesan School for Girls and Hamilton Boys’ High School were today finalists and runners-up in the Goodman Fielder School of the Year award. Two schools from Hamilton were in the final: one is the secondary school, Hamilton Boys’ High School, and the other is the Waikato Diocesan School for Girls, which was a runner-up in the combined schools contest. I thank Goodman Fielder for running that contest. It is a very, very good scheme. It was very encouraging and great to see the young people here in Wellington, and I was pleased to celebrate their being in the finals. More than 90 schools entered, and two schools from the Hamilton East electorate were in the final. So I say a big “Congratulations!” to the principals, to the boards of trustees, to the teachers, and to the young people themselves on being in that award ceremony.

The education sector, as I have said, is where there is big spending. There is increasing funding in health, education, and housing. We have not said a great deal about housing. The 2003 Budget injects almost an additional $100 million over the next 4 years into the Government’s State house purchase programme. That means another 318 houses in addition to those State houses already planned. Can I say that one of the most horrendous things that the National Government did was to sell off State houses. National sold off 13,000 houses. No wonder we have waiting lists! That is the situation that National left us with. Can I also say—and I am really pleased about this—that Steve Maharey is encouraging the third sector and local government to be in partnership. Sixty-three million dollars in the Budget is to be spent encouraging greater involvement in housing by third sector groups and local government. So that is an extra amount of money that is going into partnerships with those who are involved in social housing. I commend Steve Maharey for that particular initiative. I trust that local government and those who are involved in social housing will participate to the full in that partnership. So that is the situation with health, education, and housing.

I come now to the job situation, and that is where we can see that the Labour-Progressive Government is particularly proactive. I thank Jim Anderton for the involvement in the Regional Partnerships Programme. Twenty-six regions, involving 57 local authorities, have taken part in regional partnerships, and spending has gone into that area. The Waikato Innovation Park in Hamilton, forestry training in Rotorua, food processing in Napier, and wine research in Marlborough are particular highlights of that programme. I commend those people in my electorate, and the Minister, and the trusts that have been involved in that community partnership. This Government is about partnership, not only in its rhetoric and not only in its work with local government. The Government is putting its money where its mouth is, and it is coming up with its share. It was particularly good in Hamilton to see Jim Anderton pitch in and say “Here’s my money.”, then say to the city council and the local trust “Where’s yours?”. That partnership is creating 2,500 jobs in my electorate, and I thank the Minister for Economic Development for that initiative.

There is job creation through Industry New Zealand. Steve Maharey, a proactive Minister, is putting $85 million into job training. For 10 years a National Government wound down modern apprenticeships. What did we get? We got the leaky buildings problem. That problem was not caused by George Hawkins, I can tell members that. George Chapman, a National Party stooge, was put in charge of the Building Industry Authority. That was when Mr Prendos first wrote, in 1998, to George Chapman, and said they had a problem with leaky buildings—a problem that was largely due to deregulation, a National Government that got rid of apprenticeships, and a number of other causes. I thank Lianne Dalziel, the new Minister, who is working on new legislation on building. She is doing an excellent job in bringing forward new legislation to straighten up one of the major problems that was created by the National Government. It is interesting that a Labour Government has had to clean up the messes of the incompetent National Government. What did the member call it?

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Impotent.

An impotent National Party had a great belief that it could do everything through market forces. That has been totally impossible, and we have inherited the messes. Look at what has happened to our airways and our railways. The Labour Government has had to clean up an enormous amount of mess. I reiterate once again that the emphasis in the supplementary estimates is on education, health, housing, and jobs.

I listened with some incredulity to Mr Mark Peck, that well-known cold-climate sex symbol from Invercargill, criticise a colleague of mine for accepting a scholarship to London, where she will be studying. She will be actually seeking knowledge. [Interruption] Yes, she is guilty of seeking knowledge overseas, and yes, she is guilty of having talent. That is something that Labour Party members need not concern themselves with. They need not worry about accepting a scholarship overseas or anywhere else. What a mean-spirited bunch they are to deny any person in this country the opportunity to go overseas and increase his or her knowledge base! What a pathetic speech Mark Peck delivered!

In the short time I have, I would like to talk briefly about a scoreline that this Labour Government knows nothing about. I give members the scoreline of Australia: it is 145, and New Zealand’s is 15. Does anybody in the Labour Government have any idea what I am talking about? Well, they should, because it is probably the single most important scoreline that will affect New Zealand for years and years to come. I refer to the number of trade negotiators. I think that even the Labour Government recognises the importance of trade. Australia has 145 full-time trade negotiators overseas doing the business for Australia—and what do we have? We have 15. I look at the supplementary estimates, and I see—oh, it is pathetic! Members will have to excuse my laughing. I would cry otherwise; it is so pathetic. We have a paltry $3.5 million to support the World Trade Organization negotiations. The Australians have 145 people, full-time; we have 15, and we are increasing our expenditure by $3.5 million! It is so pathetic, and it clearly shows to everybody in this country that nobody in this Labour Government understands the importance of the rural sector, the manufacturing sector, or the export sector of this country. It is just absolutely tragic.

Let me ask the House this question: how much has the Prime Minister cost us, in terms of trade, with her gaffes over the last 3 or 4 months or so? How much have her gaffes cost us? It is very, very clear that the Prime Minister’s heart is a long, long way from her lips. What the Prime Minister says about positioning New Zealand in the top half of the OECD does not really matter to her, because she knows that once she is done with the ordinary people of this country—[Interruption] Yes, she knows all about ordinary people, as somebody observed a wee while ago. The Prime Minister has studied ordinary people. She has spent some time looking at ordinary people.

One of the greatest problems this country has is the absolute refusal of this Government to understand the significance of the rural sector to this country. The Government has increased expenditure, roughly speaking, in the order of $13 million. Then it took it all back. It whacked the rural sector with an $8.5 million levy—which it said would never happen—on flatulent sheep, and so on. No other country in the Southern Hemisphere has even considered doing something as dumb as that. The Government has whacked the productive sector yet again. That seems to be the only sort of philosophy this Government has. Accident compensation levies and occupational safety and health levies are all costing this country.

As Gerard Eckhoff rose to speak, he looked like a man who had risen from a warm seat at least five or six times tonight clutching pieces of paper—especially after seeing tonight’s TV3 poll. That poll put ACT at 4.5 percent and falling, which is consistent with the Television One poll of 4 percent.

In referring to the supplementary estimates, I want to touch on a couple of things that Mr Eckhoff talked about. Mr Eckhoff—that great genius of the ACT party, the man who will tell us the secret of his, and his party’s, success—talked about the rural sector. He should read some of the statistics on economic growth. The urban sector had 3.7 percent growth this year and the rural sector 3.9 percent. That is real growth, real jobs, and real productivity. And he calls himself a farmer, now and again! He touched on that and also talked about Deborah Coddington, who has gone to seek knowledge on a scholarship to Great Britain. She has, I think, been away for a couple of months. There is nothing wrong, in my view, my party’s view, or the view of anybody in this House, with people seeking knowledge. In fact, if Rodney Hide and Richard Prebble did a bit more of it, their party might rise slightly more in the polls. But what is wrong, and what is a rort, is when someone gets a Qantas Media Awards scholarship that pays all his or her expenses and gives a few bob to have a pint down at the local pub in Oxford or Cambridge—or wherever it is that Deborah Coddington is for the next 3 months—but the taxpayer still picks up the tab for the salary. That is wrong. That is a rort, and is it any wonder that it is just one of many rorts to come out of the poor, old, 4-percent ACT party?

Then Mr Eckhoff went on to do the old “tried and true”. ACT party members really are political strategists. They have pulled every cat out of the bag that they can, and they are being advised, I am told, by some great Australian political strategist. He attacks the Prime Minister. He attacks our fantastic trade diplomats. We are small in numbers as a country. We are small in numbers in terms of our diplomats, but I would put our diplomats up against those of Australia, the United States, or the UK any day of the week when it comes to world trade. Our people, and I think even some of the National Party people, would agree that our diplomats are some of the best in the world. But Mr Eckhoff, desperate to try to find anything negative in these supplementary estimates, attacked our diplomats and our Prime Minister, yet again.

I have a message for the ACT party. That party is on 4 percent in the polls, but it keeps attacking the Prime Minister, whose measure of leadership and confidence from the people of New Zealand keeps going up. ACT members are on a loser in attacking her. They try to get the people to lose confidence in her, but it does not work. Tonight the people have spoken—they have spoken two nights in a row—and they are sick to death of Mr Eckhoff’s party and its grubby little muckraking tactics.

What a spectacle we have had tonight in this Parliament. Coming to the Chamber tonight, I had a revelation. I saw groups of National Party members of Parliament huddled in little teams around television sets. In the dining room there were little groups of National Party and ACT members of Parliament, ashen-faced. They know they are in deep, deep trouble. They know that the people of New Zealand, who have spoken through the polls, want more than platitudes and Lynda Scott’s fake pity and bravado; they want words matched with deeds. What grinds down the soul of every National Party member and every drongo from the ACT party is that these supplementary estimates deliver.

My colleague Dianne Yates talked about the priorities in this Budget—health, education, housing, and training. It is worth noting that this Government has delivered a $4 billion surplus, and a growth rate of 4.4 percent. That might be a hard concept for Mr Eckhoff to get his head around, but when we go to the towns and cities in this country—and I invite some of the ACT party members to do that; to come out of the flash boardrooms, to close the cocktail cabinets, and to actually go out on the street and talk to some of our Kiwis—we find that people are feeling pretty good about this country and about their own well-being. There has been growth of 4.4 percent. In my own half of the country, the South Island, there was 4.3 percent growth. In the North Island it was 3.7 percent. As I have said, in urban New Zealand there was growth of 3.7 percent, and in rural New Zealand growth was at the rate of 3.9 percent. That is real, substantial growth. That is a building block on which we can go forward as a country, and it would be nice if, just once or twice—in fact, it might earn them a brownie point or two in the polls—the Opposition , the ACT party and the National Party, said something positive about our people, about our nation, and about where we are going as a country.

Since we came into office, 120,000 new jobs have been created—real ones. Suddenly, the clatter from the Opposition benches has ceased and there is a hush of silence from those members, because they know that it is true. There is a current account balance of 4 percent of gross domestic product. Inflation is at 2.5 percent. Interest rates are some of the lowest around the world, at 5.38 percent. This Government, in these supplementary estimates, is backing our young people through the Modern Apprenticeships scheme. Every time we go around the constituencies, including mine, and we mention the word “apprenticeship” to constituents, two emotions are displayed. One response is that they ask: “Why did those fools in the previous National Government abolish apprenticeships? The second is that they acknowledge that this Government reinvented them. We have 5,100 young people on the go getting real training, and in these estimates we have committed to having 7,500 in total by 2006. That is not the sort of Don Brash philosophy of the unemployed going to the Post Office and cutting grass with scissors, or doing something inane, just so that Mr Eckhoff and his fat-cat, privileged mates can say that someone is sweating for his or her social welfare benefit. What use is that person to an employer in getting a job if he or she has not been properly trained? None!

I want to turn for a moment to Lynda Scott’s contribution.

H V Ross Robertson: If you can call it that.

My colleague says if I can call it that.

💬 Hon Damien O'Connor: Rant!

My other colleague says it is Lynda Scott’s rant. Lynda Scott, another member of the National Party, again takes any opportunity to find a negative. She does not make one move towards announcing a health policy from the National Party but rants and raves. I find it a bit distasteful. There are people on the waiting lists who are hurting, but they will get there. There are people in our society who have it a bit tough, but they will get help. But that member, Lynda Scott’s—Mr Carter laughs, and that says it all—getting up every day in this House and jumping on the back of people’s tragedy and misfortune for her own political gain, is behaviour not worthy of the so-called, once-great National Party. It is desperate. It should circle the wagons, because every tactic it tries does not work. Members can look at the polls. Even Mr Sowry was booted out for the first time in his career.

After their best week of having a go at us, the message for the National Party is that people have had a gutsful of all the peripheral rubbish that its members keep going on about. What people want is an Opposition that comes out with some policy so that they can then measure it against us, and then we could have a debate. But the problem is that we cannot have a debate if there is no policy coming out from a weak and lazy Opposition, which spends its time whingeing and whining, and lamenting the fact that it has had 9 long years—Lynda Scott should remember—to put all those great, grandiose ideas that they never announce in place. They did nothing, and now all they do is criticise us. Lynda Scott failed to mention that we are putting $9.6 billion into health this year—an increase of 31 percent. She failed to mention that, because that might be good news; that might actually be telling the truth. Then she could say what her party and her prospective Government—though National will never make it—would do.

I say to the National Party and the ACT party that they are on a loser. The people of New Zealand, for the second night in a row, have spoken. We can hear a sort of death rattle in the Opposition around this Chamber. We have the C-team with David Carter, who will be up speaking next, I am sure. We can hear the death rattle and see the body bags coming out. They are not up to it economically, they are not up to it socially, and they are not up to it politically. They ought to take note of the people and what they say.

I start by referring to a comment that that member made about the current growth rate of 3.9 percent in rural New Zealand being a building block for our economy.

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: Absolutely! That’s right.

The Labour member for Waimakariri interjects and says again that that is right, so I invite that member, who claims that all is well in the rural economy, to read—

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: And getting better.

I invite him to read the press release put out on Monday this week, 16 June, by his colleague Jim Sutton, the Minister of Agriculture. In it he said that the rural sector of New Zealand is under extreme pressure. The Minister of Agriculture has belatedly realised that the Labour Government has squandered the opportunities that were presented to it by 3 years of buoyancy in rural New Zealand, but he has not taken the opportunity to brief his junior members in caucus to say what is happening. We have just had a contribution from the member for Waimakariri, who claims that the Waimakariri electorate is a rural electorate, and who has not bothered to read the statements made by his Government’s Minister of Agriculture. I think that says it all, because the Minister of Agriculture is finally aware that all is not well in rural New Zealand. Clayton Cosgrove needs to get out of Rangiora and drive around his rural electorate, and he will find out that farmers are under pressure because commodity prices are falling.

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: Really!

Hon DAVID CARTER:The member did not know? The rural member had no idea that the dairy payout this year is less than last year? He had no idea that the price being received for lambs in Canterbury at Tuesday’s market is less than last year? Had the member for Waimakariri not realised that the dollar has continued to increase and the exchange rate is putting pressure on rural New Zealand? It appears not. A real threat that the member ought also to take some responsibility for is that trade access is now under threat because of the incompetence of the Prime Minister and the threats she made to the Americans.

I want to reiterate the points made by the ACT member Gerry Eckhoff, because today the Labour Government can “celebrate”, almost 6 months to the day, its ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Its headlong rush to ratify the protocol, against all sensible advice, is now coming home to roost. Within 6 months we have another press release from the Minister of Agriculture, Jim Sutton, which I invite the rural member for Waimakariri to read. In it he will find that the Government, by stealth, has today announced an $8.4 million tax on the farmers of New Zealand. I will say one thing: at least Clayton Cosgrove has gone white and quiet for a change, because he now realises that New Zealand has put itself in an unenviable position over the Kyoto Protocol. We are the only country in the Southern Hemisphere that has ratified the protocol and has a commitment to it. No other country in the Southern Hemisphere was as dumb as New Zealand. What makes the matter even worse for New Zealand is that this country is absolutely unique, in that 50 percent of our emissions come from animal emissions.

💬 Hon Damien O'Connor: You signed up to it.

Minister Damien O’Connor now says the National Government ratified the Kyoto Protocol. If the Minister had listened, he would have heard me say the ratification occurred 6 months ago last week, and if the Minister used his brains he would realise that he was a Minister in the Government 6 months ago, which means it was not possible for the National Government to have ratified the protocol. That Government made the decision against all advice, including the advice from the National Party, yet today we have the announcement of a discussion document. This is the sneaky way this Government does tax increases. It puts out a discussion document that says it is going to extract $8.4 million out of the livestock farmers of New Zealand, with the exception of pig and poultry farmers—and I would like an explanation of that from the next member who stands up—

💬 Darren Hughes: Did the member put in a submission on the discussion document?

Mr Hughes interrupts to ask whether I put a submission in. I say to him that the discussion document was released by his Minister of Agriculture only today, so the chances of my putting in a submission within 6 hours of its release are not so great. What a silly member. This particular tax has a lovely name. It will be called an “AER”—an animal emission research levy. I am not sure how it will be collected. The discussion document states that it may be collected via the producer boards. Well, hello, the Primary Production Committee has just reported back legislation that gets rid of one of the producer boards, but Mr Sutton, the Minister in charge, appears to have forgotten to tell Mr Hodgson, the Minister in charge of climate control, that that is happening. I say to the Government that when it gets junior members to stand up in here and say that all is well in the rural economy, it should advise them to at least manage to read the press releases put out by their own Ministers. It is not much to ask.

The other issue I want to talk about is the growth rate that Clayton Cosgrove took the opportunity of being so happy with. The growth rates will decline over the next year to half what they were the previous year. We see in the Budget an outlook for this country to grow at somewhere around 2 percent. I do acknowledge big surpluses, and that is why I was absolutely disappointed to note that the Minister of Agriculture, who is also the Minister for Biosecurity, was happy to present to the select committee recently the budget for Vote Biosecurity, which has been dramatically cut from $176 million a year to $138 million a year, yet he tried to argue that those figures were not a cut. There is money around. There is money to spend on biosecurity—the biggest single issue facing this country—but the Government is intent on investing in sharemarkets and transport infrastructure—Air New Zealand and Tranz Rail so far, and maybe Mainfreight next week; who knows?

I want to finish very briefly on the issue of trade access, because this country survives on its ability to export.

💬 Hon Jim Anderton: It’s surviving a lot better than it used to.

Jim Anderton interrupts and says it is surviving a lot better than it used to. If the Minister really seriously believes that by insulting the Americans and allowing Australia to sign a free-trade agreement, with New Zealand being left out—

💬 Hon Jim Anderton: Haven’t signed one yet.

The Minister says Australia does not have one yet, but he does not seem to realise that we have been cut out of the equation. The Minister for Economic Development has learnt only tonight that we have been cut out of free-trade discussions, and Australia is proceeding. That says a lot for the current Minister for Economic Development.

The comments of the member who has just resumed his seat are a little sad, but quite remarkable. They smack of a party in denial. This Labour-led Government is a strong, stable Government, and a responsible, cautious fiscal manager. The Opposition benches can deny it if they like, but it is true. This year’s Budget is about fiscal certainty and stability in an uncertain environment, and balanced policies. That is a new innovation for this place. Surpluses will be used to ensure long-term fiscal stability, and will not be thrown away at the first cheap sale that people think we should throw our money into. No, we are fiscally prudent, and this year’s estimates would bear that out.

We are determined to continue the task of building a shared vision and national consensus around the goal of lifting New Zealand’s economic performance and improving our social outcomes. The foundations have been laid and bedded in over the last three Budgets, and this year’s Budget is about staying on course and maintaining our strong position in times of uncertainty.

I ask members to imagine, if they will—and what a thing it would be—that National, and not Labour, had been running New Zealand’s economic policy for the last 3½ years. Let us run through a list of possibilities that might have happened if that were the scenario—though, thankfully, it is not. In welfare, National would have kept the work test for sole parents and sickness beneficiaries that was introduced in the 1990s. Had Dr Don Brash become the Minister of Finance, the unemployed would be queuing at the post offices in the mornings for their work for the dole.

Regarding superannuation, here is something that our old mothers and fathers would cringe at: if National were on the Treasury benches, New Zealand superannuation would have been cut again—yes, déjà vu, and that kind of thing—and the age of entitlement would more than likely have been raised. Not a good idea, I would have thought.

Asset sales are another topic of interest. The intention would have been to sell off the remaining family silver, including New Zealand Post, the Accident Compensation Corporation, Television New Zealand, and Radio New Zealand. This Government has taken the initiative, on behalf of New Zealanders, to claw back some of the rail that this country so badly needs for its infrastructure. That is a responsibility we are taking on to try to fulfil that aspiration for New Zealanders.

As for work life, unions would still be dwindling under National. The minimum wage had been frozen at $7 an hour for almost 3 years, and it might still have been there by the 1999 election, which would have been a worry for most working New Zealanders—the ordinary New Zealanders of this country. In economic development, research and development spending would more than likely have been slashed by National. Business incubators would have been non-existent, and the job of innovation and growth would have been left solely to the whims of the free market.

Under a Labour-led Government, we have spurned the hands-off policies of the previous 15 years, and New Zealand is benefiting. That is why the Opposition tends to find itself in denial over the good news that the estimates offer New Zealanders, particularly this year. We have developed the growth and innovation framework, with the objective of returning New Zealand’s per capita income to the top half of the OECD. Budget 2003 continues the Government’s commitment to the innovation and growth framework. Those initiatives include, for example, $140 million—excluding capital—over 4 years for research, science, and technology. That is reinvesting in New Zealanders; it is reinvesting in people we believe in. I think the Opposition would struggle to try to justify its position on those matters. There will also be $73 million over 4 years to promote overseas trade.

Where do I hear that we have let this country down? I hear it from the Opposition benches. We have not let this country down. The polls that have been talked about in the debate this evening, and in the previous evening’s debate, would bear out the fact that there has been little damage to this Government undertaking strong, stable action under the strong, stable leadership of a Prime Minister who cares, who has compassion, who is pretty smart, and who is a darned sight better than the Leader of the Opposition. He has had to escape the country at a time when I would have thought it was particularly dangerous to do that. What is he doing? Is he cosying up to “GW” in the White House over there in the United States? I do not think so. We have seen very little of what he is actually doing, and I would be worried if I were the Leader of the Opposition.

But let me come back to the point, which is the estimates for this year. We have put in $19 million for the pre-seed accelerator fund. That is for projects that have moved beyond eligibility for grant-funded research, but which are not yet at the stage where they might attract venture capital or other forms of private sector financing. I could go on on that particular tack, but I just want to finish with this: our policies are working. Our strong performance over the last 3½ years has left us in a solid position while we go into a period of uncertainty. The economy has grown 4.4 percent, and unemployment is hovering around 5 percent. With that I conclude, and thank the House for listening to this fantastic speech.