Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

I move, That this House has no confidence in the Government led by Helen Clark who, given the opportunity to outline her vision for New Zealand, has failed to even identify the big challenges which lie ahead for our nation, whose Government has confiscated from hard-working New Zealanders the fruits of the best international economic conditions we have enjoyed for many decades, and who sees our future as the creation of an all-powerful, all-knowing Government, rather than the result of the Kiwi spirit of enterprise, skill, innovation, and hard work which resides with individual New Zealanders. It seems that Helen Clark’s idea of a vision speech amounts to no more than outlining what the Government will do with taxpayers’ money. I would like to thank the Prime Minister for clarifying that the Labour Party believes that the Government is the solution to everything, and that individual responsibility and enterprise have no role in modern New Zealand. She is a Prime Minister who continually confuses the efforts of New Zealand workers with the muddling efforts of a handful of Ministers. She claims that the Government has carefully built a surplus, but it was taxpayers who built that surplus. That is why families are struggling financially, why average real disposable incomes have not lifted at all under this Government, and why the income gap between New Zealand and Australia continues to widen.

Economic growth has been strong, yes, as it was through the 1990s. But that has had nothing to do with this Government. The unemployment rate has come down because of that growth, as it did in the 1990s, but the number on the sickness benefit and the invalids benefit has gone up by almost 40 percent since this Government came into office. Spending on health is up hugely, but to what effect? We have seen a massive growth in bureaucracy, little impact on waiting lists, and an actual decline in the number of operations performed. The overall crime rate is down somewhat—it has been falling since the early 1990s—but violent crime remains at close to record high levels. The biggest risk a violent criminal faces is getting a speeding ticket as he leaves the scene of the crime. What Labour does not understand is that confiscating taxpayers’ money and advertising a spending increase is simply not good enough. It has to get value for the taxpayers’ money that is used.

The so-called vision speech was nothing more than election year puffery—a collection of rambling, incoherent, meaningless feel-good phrases. It was a vision of big Government but small people; a vision of well-funded bureaucracies but struggling families. It is Labour’s vision of an ownership society: people earn it, but the Government will own most of it. The reality is that this is a Government that will drag people, via high taxes, five steps back down the ladder of success, then use their money to lift them three steps back up while kicking away the two rungs above them, and then expect their thanks. This Government thinks it has money to spend, rather than understanding that every dollar it spends has come from some hard-working taxpayer. It is hard to know whether Helen Clark is really aware of what she is doing to working people in this country. She seems so enamoured of spending their money, and then offering some of it back to them in subsidies, grants, and incentives, that she has lost sight of the fundamental unfairness of the transaction she is promoting.

Equally disturbing is that Helen Clark is starting to sound like Steve Maharey—spouting an incoherent mess of bureaucratic weasel words. She talks of the ownership society. But what most prevents many New Zealanders from owning their own homes and other assets is the overtaxation of hard-working New Zealanders, which is the hallmark of this Government. The National Party and I strongly support the concept of home ownership, but Labour’s tinkering will not offset the impact of overtaxation.

What Helen Clark will not do is to state clearly where she stands on the major issues of the day. How can she outline a vision for New Zealand if she not only fails to address the major challenges that will determine this country’s future but also does not even identify them? I have identified quite clearly what I see as the pressing issues for New Zealand. And, unlike Labour, I am making it plain to the electorate just where the National Party and I stand on those issues. Just over a year ago, at Ōrewa, I outlined the National Party position on treaty issues. With a will, and with the right Government in place, all the objectives I outlined at that time can be achieved, with treaty settlements completed by 2010. National is committed to that goal. But the Labour Party has paid lip service to those treaty issues. Under Labour there will be no end to the treaty grievance industry, no end to the special treatment of Māori in the Resource Management Act and the Local Government Act, no abolition of separate Māori electorates, and no end to political correctness in the education system, which sees our children brainwashed with a revisionist version of New Zealand history—or should that be “herstory”? I made it clear that the next National Government would change all that.

Six months ago I addressed the issue of law and order. I made it clear that we would abolish parole for all violent and repeat offenders, so that rapists and murderers, among others, are kept behind bars for their full, court-imposed sentence. I made it clear that we would increase police numbers, that we would require DNA testing of all those people convicted of a crime, and that we would amend the Proceeds of Crime Act in order to target organised crime more effectively. I have also made it clear that we would block Labour’s plans to pay compensation to some of our most vicious criminals for their hurt feelings. Labour has made some polite noises about dealing firmly with criminals, but the reality is a joke. Just last Sunday, the media reported the case of the leader of a Middle Eastern gang in Auckland who was convicted of 22 offences of theft and burglary—offences to which he pleaded guilty—being sentenced to 200 hours of community service. That is Labour’s idea of getting tough on crime.

During this past year I have also outlined National Party policy that is designed to solve the transport gridlock in our major cities. I have spoken on energy supply issues, on the environment, and on biosecurity. I have attacked the culture of big government that this Government is fostering—a culture that is evident in the bureaucratic nightmare strangling our health and education sectors in red tape. Together with my caucus colleagues, I have exposed the diversion of a stupendous amount of taxpayers’ money into programmes that have had no oversight by anyone with an ounce of common sense, and in which there has been absolutely no accountability for the disastrous results. If he had any sense of decency, Steve Maharey—the Minister who was in charge of the numerous rorts in the tertiary education sector and in social welfare—would have long since resigned, and if Helen Clark had any sense of decency, she would have sacked him.

Just over a month ago I outlined the National Party stance on taxation issues. My speech focused on incentives. We need to have a taxation system that rewards enterprise, skill, and hard work. Yet today we have a taxation system that punishes all those things. Our taxation rates are too high at all levels. Our taxation of families is punitive. Our tax and benefits systems are destroying the incentives to work and penalising those who work hard. They punish those who save, and block their ability to build an ownership stake in society. Because of that, our taxation system is fundamentally unfair. We want the initiative, energy, ideas, and drive that Kiwis have to be expressed and developed in this country—not exported across the Tasman.

Just last week I addressed the issue of entrenched welfare dependency. Around 15 percent of the workforce is on a benefit. If we add in the children of those working-age adults, we have more than the equivalent population of Christchurch and Dunedin combined. Our forbears would be aghast if they could see what has happened to the attitudes of personal responsibility, self-reliance, and independence that have been the essence of the Kiwi character. As a result of the change in attitudes, a solo mother interviewed by an Auckland suburban newspaper saw nothing ironic in saying that, although the father of her daughter provided her with some financial support, “some solo mothers want independence and should not have to rely on fathers for financial support”. Independence? What nonsense! Why should fathers escape their financial obligations—as they have increasingly been able to do under Helen Clark’s Government—and oblige taxpayers to carry the burden?

And what about those who, while already on the domestic purposes benefit, have several additional children? Nobody pretends that it is easy to deal with that situation. But there is surely something fundamentally wrong with a system that allows, and perhaps even encourages, women to have more and more children while on the domestic purposes benefit. At the last count there were more than 6,000 women on the domestic purposes benefit who have had two or more children while on the benefit, and more than 1,700 women who have had three or more children while on the benefit. Helen Clark seems content to tolerate that situation; National is not.

We need to remind ourselves that welfare benefits are funded from the taxes levied on those who go out to work each day, including the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who work overtime or take second jobs, who are on very modest incomes, and who find themselves little or no better off than their beneficiary neighbour or relative as a consequence. They are New Zealanders who try to do the right thing by themselves, by their families, and by other taxpayers. For them, this transfer of income in order to fund welfare—an average of $50 per week for every worker—takes place at a huge cost to their ability to save, to educate their children, and to buy their own home. Those are the New Zealanders whom Helen Clark has forgotten. Those are the New Zealanders whose attitudes of self-reliance and personal responsibility will be massively undermined by the Working for Families package, because that package will mean that the self-reliant will end up in much the same financial position as those who do not make the effort, who do not take on responsibility, who do not do overtime or take on an extra job, and who do not invest in building marketable skills.

The Labour vision has pulled the plug on aspiration and drained away the confidence that people have in building a future in this country. As a result, we are bleeding talent overseas. The massive inflow of new immigrants required to replace those losses threatens to change the nature of our society more abruptly than is healthy, and more decisively than most of us want. That is no way to build a nation with a common set of values and sense of purpose.

From talking to New Zealanders, it is clear to me that there are many aspects of the way New Zealand is developing that concern them. Part of the problem is economic—we do not seem to be able to generate jobs that pay enough, and we grossly overtax hard-working people. Part of it reflects inadequacies in our social policies. Our health system seems always to be lurching from crisis to crisis. Our education system is failing about a quarter of our children, and is achieving mediocre results for many of the rest. Part of the problem reflects the fact that our communities, especially the poorer ones, are becoming fractured. We have gone soft on crime, and are reaping the consequences. Our families are struggling to cope, while this Government overtaxes them and wastes much of their money. Part of the problem is also cultural and attitudinal—our policies punish enterprise and achievement, encourage acceptance of mediocrity, and thus undercut aspiration. Part of it is that we have allowed the goodwill symbolised by the treaty settlement process to be swamped in a riot of race-based political correctness.

It is that interrelated set of concerns—partly economic, partly about social policy, and partly cultural and attitudinal—that lies behind the departure of so many New Zealanders from this country. Turning that round will be the priority for the next National Government. Those are issues that the Labour Party is woefully ill-equipped to deal with, because its policies foster most of those problems rather than solving them. In many cases Labour does not even recognise them as being problems.

As we have just heard, the Labour vision has immense faith in a centralised bureaucracy, with all the social engineering that goes with it, but little faith in the common sense of ordinary people who would rather make their own decisions with their own resources. The Labour vision has no role for competition to encourage innovation and service quality, but instead actively encourages State monopoly. Labour policies are sending a terrible signal to the next generation of New Zealanders about how to get ahead in life. There is a dismal lack of imagination from this Labour Government, an unwillingness to debate issues, a fear of new ideas, and a fundamental gutlessness in standing up to the challenges we face. Helen Clark leads a Government enamoured of ideas that are 30 years out of date. Labour is a classic tax-and-spend Government. And it has become apparent that Labour’s core values are wildly out of line with those of ordinary New Zealanders. This Government has even stopped standing up for principles that it was proud to proclaim just a year or two ago. Rather than nailing its flag to the mast, so unprincipled has this Government become that Labour will go down with no flags flying.

What New Zealanders will be deciding at the next election is much more fundamental: what is fair and unfair; what is right and what is wrong. It is right that we have one law for all; it is wrong that different races are treated differently. It is right that violent and recidivist criminals should serve the sentence given them; it is wrong that they should be free after serving only one-third of their sentence. It is right that enterprise, initiative, and sheer hard work should be rewarded with lower taxes; it is wrong that punitive taxation should stop people from getting ahead in life. It is right that the unemployed should be given financial support conditional on contributing to the community; it is wrong that we should pay them to be idle indefinitely. I do not believe in a culture of envy; I believe in a culture of aspiration and achievement. And a culture like that, when harnessed to shared values of compassion for those in need and a determination to take care of the weak, the ill, and those who have simply stumbled upon bad luck, will produce a society that we can all be proud of. This is the sort of New Zealand that the National Party represents and will be fighting for at the next election.

Like last year, we were saved by a gracious providence—the bell went. We just saw an example of starting the year with a hiss and a snore. What was remarkable about that speech was that a number of members of his own side and around this House, including the ACT party, had a look of disturbance, disillusionment, dismay, and disbelief. Any moment now I expect Don Brash to make a speech on immigration. Any moment now I expect him to go out there and say that he, by some road to Damascus experience, believes what New Zealand First believes on immigration—that is what the past two Ōrewa speeches were about, and that is precisely what the law and order speech was about. Who campaigned on those three issues in 2002? We did! We spoke of three things that, in 3 years, we would fix up, and the great thing is now we have three-quarters of Parliament agreeing with us—just like that.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: You don’t need us!

Excuse me! Anybody who even dreams of a National Party Government in the future should wake up and apologise. He should just get real. I am hearing Don Brash articulate polices that remind me of Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell in Canada. They, in one election, went from 169 seats, out of 295-seat Parliament, down to just two seats. They used to be able to fill an airline, and after that they had to come on a tandem bike to Parliament. That is the kind of turgid nonsense that I am hearing—failed policies.

This country needs solutions, not failed right-wing policies that have been tried in the past. Did members hear the Ōrewa speech about the domestic purposes benefit? Now, I cannot disagree with that speech in the case of a number of domestic purpose beneficiaries, but we have to ask ourselves this one question: if it is right to condemn that sort of thing in society, where was the man who headed the Reserve Bank, who had prudential supervision of the BNZ when it ripped off the taxpayer to the tune of $2 billion? Where was the man who had prudential supervision then? When did he raise one finger? We did not hear a mutter, a murmur, or a syllable. [Interruption] Is it not amazing? When he had the job, the Labour Party appointed him.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: But you supported him.

“Young Nick” does not learn. He never learns, even though he has been here for a long time. I campaigned for him in 1990. He was very young. I thought he would have actually learnt something in the intervening 16 years, but he has not.

We have here a most amazing circumstance. Don Brash seems to want to destroy his party with the same policies that the Canadian Progressive Conservatives tried and which destroyed them.

💬 Stephen Franks: You just said they were yours.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Order!

No, I do not want to be heard in silence. I am happy to debate with these people. It is like taking candy from a baby.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: That is right, and the member advised me of that beforehand. The only reason I am interrupting is that the member is interjecting in the second person. That is his final warning.

I was taking about failed fiscal policies and failed right-wing policies of the type that his party introduced under his leader, Mr Roger Douglas. Is he still a member of the ACT party? I do not think so.

💬 Hon Member: No.

I am advised that he is not. Let me ask the House, my colleagues, the last few remnants of the ACT party over there, and Don Brash this one question. How come Australia has grown by 35 percent more in real terms since 1984 than New Zealand?

💬 Hon Ken Shirley: They haven’t had a Labour Government.

Yes, it has. For most of that time Australia had a Labor Government. Again, the member has his history wrong. Has he never heard of Bob Hawke or Keating?

The sad thing about right-wing members today, of course, is that they are shadows of their former selves. They are not in great shape. Apparently, the new dictum in the National Party is that if women members disagree with their leader, they are gone by lunchtime. That is what happened to Georgina te Heuheu. Lynda Scott disagreed, and she was gone. Now poor Katherine Rich is gone. All she did was say: “No, Don, you’ve misinterpreted the research.” But, then again, I know—because my information sources are pretty good—that National is a deeply divided party. It has three factions, and I can tell members who they are. Would faction 1 please put their hands up now, please? I have no difficulty working that out. How do I know? Because, I say to “Young Nick”, I keep my ears open. That is what politics is about.

I have listened to members of both Labour and National in the past weeks. They appear to have decided that the institution of motherhood is some sort of evil. On the one hand, Labour members say that we should solve our labour shortage by sending mothers back to work, while National members have proposed punitive measures to ensure that women are not lying around slacking in the home. That is how old and tired those members are in their thinking. New Zealand First says that of all groups in our society it is mothers who make the most valuable contribution to New Zealand. We stand firmly on the side of mothers.

💬 Hon Member: And grandmothers.

And grandmothers. We think they deserve more than being just a cheap source of labour for big business or being whipping persons for failed politicians of the 1980s.

But I come back to my point. When the prudential supervision requirements were there in 1990, what did the man do? He was in charge of the Reserve Bank. When will some journalist do his or her job and ask him? Surely, they could write that—[Interruption] Oh, he is happy to answer. Why did he not answer? It is OK, though, to attack domestic purposes beneficiaries. If exploitation is going on and if people are cheating, then we in New Zealand First agree—but we saw real cheats. [Interruption] We saw people who cheated billions from the economy, and unlike that party we sought to do something about it. [Interruption] The National Party policy was to give him a knighthood, unlike the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition—

💬 Gerry Brownlee: Take 2!

Gerry Brownlee is the man whom faction 2 says should be the leader; the man whom National members say has got the X factor—the ability to confer, to communicate, and to somehow empathise with people.

💬 Hon Jim Anderton: How many in that faction?

There are three in that faction, but with Gerry there it looks like five.

We know that bringing up children is a valuable, time-consuming, and often thankless task. Although it may not receive monetary rewards, it is hugely valuable to our society. Mothers make up a huge proportion of the voluntary workforce in our society. They support their children’s education, sport, and cultural activities, and a myriad of other endeavours. They fill the role of nurse, taxi-driver—

💬 Stephen Franks: Especially the ones at the TAB.

Here comes the ACT party’s true side. He thinks that all the mothers are at the TAB.

💬 Hon Member: His mother might be!

Yes, his mother might be. What a sour, acerbic look at society that is! I hope the ACT party never gets into power. But there is no chance of that—it will be gone by election time.

Neither this Government nor the National Party truly values these people. We in New Zealand First say that if mothers want to work, then that is fair enough, but there should always be a choice and never an obligation. It is not the role of mothers to fill a labour shortage, and it is a desperate Government that knows nothing about families that promotes such thinking. Thank God there is one party in this Parliament that cares about mothers and values what they do in our society! New Zealand First is that party.

What we heard today from Helen Clark was a facade that was constructed around the Government’s so-called economic management. May I ask just one question of all New Zealanders? When is an economic boom not really an economic boom? I will tell members. It is when nobody but a select few get to benefit from it. That is the boom we are living through at the moment. The only thing is that most New Zealanders cannot feel, taste, or even hear it. Most of them are going backwards, and we know that is a fact. How have real wages moved in the last 5 years? Well, they have not moved at all. Some people have made a fortune in the last 5 years, but for the ordinary New Zealander—the blue collar worker, the hard-working person who makes up the biggest proportion of our society—there has been nothing whatsoever in the main. The Prime Minister was talking about all the indicators and about how good things are. Do members know that we have a balance of payments crisis of $7.4 billion coming by June of this year?

💬 Hon Brian Donnelly: How much?

It is a $7.4 billion balance of payments crisis—the worst we have ever had—and she is talking about these profound indicators. The fact is that we are now 37th in the world in per capita incomes. This is from a party that came to power saying that within 10 years it would restore New Zealand to the top 10. Top 10 of what—because it ain’t the First World and it ain’t the OECD. She has given up any hope of that. Then, most profoundly, today she said that we have a marvellous savings record. She cannot be talking about New Zealand. We do not have a marvellous savings record. This, of course, is the same person who, along with her colleagues, went out in 1997 and campaigned for all she was worth to stop a compulsory savings regime being brought to this country—something that would have helped women workers in particular. Today Labour members say: “Oh, we’ve racked our brains and we are struggling to find new ways of encouraging people to save.”

💬 Stephen Franks: We supported it.

Well, thank God that member made some sense that time.

The main point is this. Since the Labour disaster of 1984, of which Helen Clark was a member, and so was Mr Cullen, Australia has performed over 35 percent better than New Zealand in real terms, and even Australia says it can do better. What fascinates me about Dr Brash, of course, is that he is starting to use these Australian figures, but he never tells anybody that he agreed with Mr Douglas. He said in 1987, when Bruce Townshend died: “No, I can’t possibly stand in that by-election if there is one. I would feel like a hypocrite. I agree with Roger Douglas.” That is what he said. Now he is trying to tell us to look at Australia because it is a good benchmark and we should follow its policies. Well, none of Australia’s policies are in any way remotely like Dr Brash’s policies—none of them. When did he campaign for compulsory savings? Australia has that. Australia has, just by way of example, 75 different mechanisms to help exporters. What have we got here? Not one. That is why we are doing so badly. That is why we have people leaving in their droves to go to Australia. In Australia people get paid First World wages, and here in New Zealand we replace them with people from the Third World—as if we need more taxi drivers lining up around our airports!

People also know that, despite the so-called economic boom, many people on hospital waiting lists are dying. Here is an example of the most cynical Government that the Labour Party has ever produced in this country, and I will tell members why. In 2002 more than 1,000 people on hospital waiting lists died. By August last year 1,200 people on hospital waiting lists had died, yet the Prime Minister boasted today of a 40 percent increase in expenditure since Labour came to power. The only problem is, of course, that the waiting lists are longer than they have ever been despite being rejigged and reconfigured.

The second thing is that fewer operations are being performed now than before they spent that money. Do members know why? Because they decided to spend the money on the bureaucrats and a whole lot of district health boards—21 of them—all running around doing the same thing, in a country the size of New Zealand. Now the Treasury papers reveal that waiting lists are longer. I ask this of Dr Cullen and Helen Clark. If the Government has that sort of surplus and thousands of people are dying unnecessarily, how does that make them feel? How do those members feel when they know full well that those people could be alive today? Thousands of people are dying unnecessarily because the Government wants to have a huge war chest for the 2005 election. How cynical is that! I hope some of those Labour Party people out there who do hold constituency clinics have a chance to meet some of their constituents who are on hospital waiting lists. They number in the thousands.

💬 Government Member: No.

Yes, they do, especially in Rotorua. Do members know how many people on waiting lists in Tauranga died last year? Sixty-three people on hospital waiting lists died.

💬 Heather Roy: How do you know that?

I asked the hospital board. How does that member find out? What a curious question! Is it a fact or not? Sixty-three people on waiting lists in Tauranga alone died last year.

Before I close this speech I want to say that, really, the 2005 election campaign is under way now. I hope this campaign is met with fair reportage from a certain section of society called the media. The media should expunge from its mind now any idea that this election will be a two-horse race. That would be a gross misrepresentation of how the election will pan out. I make no bones about it. We believe that New Zealand First will perform in 2005 like no other party would ever believe we could perform. Our now thirteen MPs will become legion after the next election, and I want the media to get their people to give us a fair go. I heard Morning Report this morning, for example, going on about Helen Clark’s speech. So was the New Zealand Herald yesterday. Did members hear about a universal allowance in that speech? No. But apparently the New Zealand Herald gave it the front page yesterday—and it was not there. Today on Morning Report, minute after minute and hour after hour was devoted to that speech. Where was the vision? Where is the comparative future that our young people might have, as against Australians, Europeans, or America, or, for that matter, Singapore or Taiwan? It does not exist.

Every time I come back from Australia I wonder what is going on with New Zealand. We are not doing anything like we used to. We are not building anything. We have a huge war chest of money saved by the Minister of Finance, yet from Ōrewa yesterday I was travelling at 5 kilometres an hour most of the time. That happens every day now. There has been no investment, no roading, no infrastructure, and not one new business of any size at all since 1984. Labour members sit smugly and think they will win the 2005 election. Like hell they will! But then again, they have some good news—nor have they over there. In 2005, the deciding factor will be New Zealand First. I seek leave to table my amendment to the amendment.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Leave is sought to move the amendment. Is there any objection? There is not.

I move, That the amendment be amended so that—[Interruption] No, you did not.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: I did not hear anybody object.

We cannot have a leaderless rabble like that. They have to be faster than that.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Brownlee, can I just clarify this. You said you objected before Mr Peters moved his amendment. Is that correct?

💬 Gerry Brownlee: That is right. I understand that Mr Peters sought to table his amendment. I cannot see what the point of that is, because we are obviously not going to vote on it.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Brownlee has indicated that he raised an objection before the member asked. I accept his word on that. I did not hear it for the—

I sought leave to table this amendment. I was asked by the National Party to read it, I thought, so I started reading. [Interruption] Someone asked me what it was about so I said I would read it.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes, that is true.

I seek leave now.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member is seeking leave to table his amendment. Is there any objection? There is.

Members should remember Winston Peters’ big guffaw when someone from the National Party forgot to move his or her motion. We have just seen the same thing from Winston Peters today. He forgot to move his motion as part of his speech. We have had 20 minutes of speech from Winston Peters and we had one policy. Yes, Bob the builder has discovered mum. New Zealand First will be campaigning on motherhood at the start of the election year, and as we close into the election, it will add in some apple pie. That is the motherhood and apple-pie party of New Zealand politics.

The ACT party rises to support the motion put by Don Brash. We have no confidence in this Government and neither do New Zealanders. They are sick of Helen Clark and her nanny State approach to New Zealand.

Let us just deal with some of the things that Helen Clark forgot to mention in her speech. She mentioned the tsunami and the huge efforts of New Zealanders, but Prime Minister Helen Clark is so anti-American that she could not, even through clenched teeth, acknowledge the huge relief contribution made by the Americans in Indonesia and the other Asian countries. It is all very well for Helen Clark to say: “We stand ready to enter into negotiations with the United States.” Helen Clark will be standing ready until hell freezes over to enter into negotiations with the United States. Why? Because she does not like the Americans. Any leader worth his or her salt would acknowledge the huge contribution of the United States—and, indeed, the Australian forces—in relief efforts.

Members should think of this. A nuclear-propelled aircraft carrier is a handy thing to have on stand-by when there is a disaster like the one we saw on Boxing Day. The USS Abraham Lincoln moved 3 miles offshore and was able to ferry in 20,000 gallons of fresh water, medical supplies, food, and help. No other nation on earth could have done that. What was Helen Clark’s response if—God forbid—we have a disaster here?

💬 Hon Ken Shirley: The ship would be banned.

Helen Clark said that our nuclear ship policy was to ban nuclear-powered ships and that it would not be gone by lunchtime. However, I guarantee that if the New Zealand people needed a nuclear-powered ship, she would change the policy. Well, what sort of friendship is that? We will be with the Americans if we need them, but we will be agin them if we do not.

Here is something else that Helen Clark neglected to mention. I do not think that she picked it up. There were elections in Iraq last weekend Iraqi time. But in her speech there was not one mention of the brave Iraqi people—8 million of them—voting for the first time in my lifetime, who were under the threat of having their heads cut off by suicide bombers and terrorists who would stop at nothing to prevent the Iraqi people being free and democratic. The voters were putting blue paint on their fingers and marking themselves out for death. Eight million voted. They defied the terrorists and those who would destroy, and they voted in the first free elections in Iraq in 50 years. Helen Clark did not mention that, because she would have had to acknowledge the huge achievement of the coalition forces. Yes, there is a long way to go, but what a start. Why can Helen Clark not be big enough to acknowledge what happened in Iraq on the weekend?

Then we return to New Zealand and realise that this Helen Clark Government is all about spin, but no facts. We heard in Helen Clark’s speech that crime was down. Try telling that to New Zealanders. Reported burglaries are down, but we know why. Why would any New Zealander report a burglary to the New Zealand Police? What would happen? Violent crime is up over the last 5 years. It is hard to believe, but in New Zealand during the 1950s a murder would be front-page news for days. The number of murders in a year was in single figures. In the year that I was born there were nine murders. It is 1 February and there have already been nine murders this year, including the murder of an 83-year-old woman—a grandmother and great-grandmother—in a little town in New Zealand. She was brutally assaulted, tortured, and murdered. Where did Helen Clark deal with that in her speech? Every grandmother in the country is scared while at home. There is nowhere safe. Every son, daughter, granddaughter, and grandson is scared.

The No. 1 duty of any Government is to keep us safe in our homes, on the streets, and in our places of work so that our nanas and mothers can be safe. What has been Helen Clark’s response? If she was serious about crime she would not have George Hawkins as the Minister of Police. Any MP—even those in the useless rabble of the Labour Party—would make a better deal of it than George Hawkins. Under George Hawkins as Minister of Police, one in five police officers are traffic cops. George Hawkins responded to a constituent who wrote to him to say: “I’m worried about crime.” by saying that the constituent should not be worried, because quite often criminals were bad drivers and would be picked up. That is what George Hawkins said. [Interruption] As Don Brash says, we will catch them as they speed away from the place of burglary. Helen Clark had the temerity to say that the Government is getting tough on crime. My God!

There was the case of Daniel Hedgri, a 19-year-old Middle Eastern immigrant to New Zealand with previous form. The police, through hours and hours and hours of work, nailed that criminal. He had no option but to plead guilty to 12 counts of burglary, each of which was for over $5,000 worth of goods. Imagine the police work that went into that! And what did he get? He was sentenced to 200 hours of community service. Crime pays in New Zealand. Do any members believe that he committed only 12 crimes? Of course not! He has committed hundreds of crimes and has tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of dollars, but when he was caught, he was ordered to pay it back by doing 200 hours of community service. The message is loud and clear—crime pays in New Zealand. Those are the policies of Helen Clark.

Why, in her statement today, did Helen Clark not say that we will keep our nanas safe at home? Why did she not say that we will send a message to the young people of New Zealand that if they commit a crime, they will be caught, and when they are caught they will pay the price proportionate to the crime? We used to be one of the safest countries in the world. We were proud of that, and we can be again. We could be the safest place in the world. We are a peace-loving people who are a long way away from the world’s trouble spots. But we require a Government that does its job and realises what its job is.

People pay their taxes so that there are police to keep them safe, a justice system to dispense justice, and a prison system to punish. Helen Clark says she cannot afford tax cuts. There is a $6 billion surplus, but she cannot afford tax cuts. I have a message for Helen Clark: working New Zealanders cannot afford to pay the tax. That is the truth of it. It is all very well for Helen Clark to say that New Zealanders are incompetent at saving and need help to save. No, they do not. They need the money to save, and whose money is it?

💬 Katherine Rich: Theirs!

That is whose money it is. They do not need help. They just need to keep what they earn.

Helen Clark says our economy is not going very well, so we need to get more mothers into the workforce. Well, mothers have to work because of high taxes. A lot of mothers now in the workplace would like to be home with their kids, but that choice is denied them. Why? Because of our “pernacious” tax system they are working simply to pay taxes to Helen Clark so that she can have her great surplus and crow about it.

💬 Hon Jim Anderton: “Pernicious”, not “pernacious”.

It is pernicious, as Jim Anderton just piped up. He knows where the taxes go—$183,000 to Hubbard Foods. That is why New Zealanders are paying so much tax. A total of $300,000 went to the cronies of the Labour Party. That is what happens in New Zealand now. Hubbard Foods said that it did not need the money, that it could have done its project anyway, but the Government was shovelling the money towards it, so it took the money. And so New Zealanders struggle.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: Who got the photo?

That is when Jim Anderton turns up, but he is not so good at turning up when the trouble hits the fan. He disappears then.

What has happened in New Zealand? The average New Zealand household is $8,000 gross better off than it was 5 years ago. If we take away taxes and allow for inflation—and these are Michael Cullen’s numbers—that household is no better off. In 5 years of Labour, which have been 5 years of the best economic conditions in my lifetime, the average household is no better off. Helen Clark had the temerity to stand in the House today and crow about the fact that she has $6 billion—“Look how good I am!”. That is a disgrace, and it is obscene. Labour is just looking after its mates.

Helen Clark has totally abandoned working New Zealanders. It is not the workers that Jim Anderton is sitting there smirking about, because the workers in New Zealand are the business owners of this country. They are the small-business people, who work longer hours for lower pay than any other New Zealanders and who carry all the risk. They are the professional people, whom Helen Clark declares to be rich. They are the truck drivers, electricians, and plumbers of New Zealand, who get up and do a day’s work, and they produce. What has this Government done for them? It has done nothing—just more taxes. Those people want the Government off their backs and out of their pockets. They do not need Helen Clark lecturing them about how to save, run their businesses, or run their lives. They need the Government off their backs. They need the Government out of their pockets—and then they will succeed.

Helen Clark brags about the Working for Families package. Where is the “working” in that? Where is the “family” in that? It has nothing to do with families or with working. Someone with a couple of kids who goes from $35,000 a year to $55,000—maybe, as Helen Clark says, the mother goes out to work to earn the extra $20,000—is $2,500 better off. People earn an extra $20,000 to be $2,500 better off. The effective tax rate is 90 percent. Likewise, someone who goes from $55,000 down to $35,000 is only $2,500 worse off. Where is the incentive to work, invest, and be entrepreneurial? Is this not a perfect socialist heaven for Helen Clark? If people are stuck at a certain income level, they cannot work and get ahead. They are stuck at that income level and are dependent on the Government for some of their money back. They cannot get ahead or go down. They are static.

Do people know that some 240,000 families, of the 525,000 families that have children, will face effective tax rates of 60 percent or more under the Working for Families package? Helen Clark stood up and said that she will promote prosperity and enterprise. Do people remember 1999? Helen Clark said that all those earning over $60,000 were rich and needed to be taxed hard, because “we” needed the money—“we” being the Labour Party.

💬 Opposition Member: Not the Government.

Not the Government; the Labour Party. Now, if a person is on $70,000 and has children, he or she qualifies under the Working for Families package as needy and is able to get a handout. Those families are not needy. What they need is simply to keep more of the money they earn.

That is why we say that the $6 billion surplus should be returned to New Zealanders. We should reduce our tax rates to just two rates: 15c all the way up to $38,000, and then drop the rate to 25c above that level of income. If we did that, we would have a stronger economy, people could pay off their mortgages and own their own houses, and students could pay off their loans. If we did that, there would be an incentive to put a bit of effort in, and to save and invest. If we did that, we could have a more prosperous nation.

I will quote an exact sentence from Helen Clark—the lady who wanted to close the gaps between Māori and Pākehā. So open did she rend them that there is now a Māori Party, which will win all the Māori seats. She was going to reduce university fees, yet student debt is higher than it has ever been. Waiting lists are up, not down, despite an extra “40 percent money”. She will put us in the top half of the OECD. Here is an exact full sentence from Helen Clark’s speech today: “The future of our dreams will provide better wages and salaries.” That is what this Government is about. We heard a lot about dreams in Helen Clark’s speech, but the Prime Minister is dreaming if she thinks that the programme she has will make us a prosperous and more independent nation.

We live in a great country, but we can make it a much better place. We can let people keep more of their money so that they can be more independent, proud, and able to prosper for themselves and their country. We look across to Helen Clark and her Government and we realise this: Helen Clark is taking this Government on the completely wrong road for New Zealand. That is why ACT supports Don Brash’s motion, and why we are looking forward to this election—so that New Zealanders can make a choice about the country they want to live in.

I begin by acknowledging the support that the Government and the Prime Minister are giving the Greens in election year. Once again the Prime Minister has delivered a speech in which she talked about a sustainable future and a better quality of life without a single reference to ensuring that we protect and invest in the ecological foundations on which that quality is based. That is right: the environment did not rate a mention—not once—in the Prime Minister’s vision for the future of our country.

One would never guess that the Government’s own research company recently told us that 95 percent of our lowland rivers and streams are not fit to swim in, let alone to drink. One would never guess that 65 wild rivers are threatened with hydro development. One would not guess that our vehicles kill more people with what comes out of their exhaust pipes than by running people over. One would not guess that people are dying and seriously ill from toxic waste that was sprayed on them in Vietnam or on New Zealand farms in the era of 2,4,5-T, which was manufactured near them in New Plymouth or that permeates their land around timber treatment sites.

As people return from their summer holidays, they are talking of the changes they have seen. Favourite beaches are now built up, favourite camping grounds have been sold for private development, there have been sewage spills, and there has been a loss of the unspoiled character of the New Zealand coast. That is what people mean by quality of life—it is not just about how much money they earn. We fear that the liberalisation of foreign investment in the Overseas Investment Bill will accelerate that trend, and Rod Donald will talk more about that. Others are seeing their quality of life threatened by the prospect of power lines—much larger than anything we have seen so far in New Zealand—marching across the landscapes they love, and even over their homes and gardens. There are alternatives to those lines, but the Government is not actively pursuing them—just leaving it to the market and to a State-owned enterprise bent on empire building.

Those who focus on economics as a measure of everything simply do not understand that for many of the people affected, compensation is not the answer. Numerous surveys, both very recent and going back to the 1970s, show that a majority of Kiwis would trade some income and wealth for a better quality of life, which is defined as the social and environmental conditions they live in. That is why the country and the Labour Government need the Greens to protect our land, water, air, food, and the other creatures that we share the planet with. Labour on its own cannot be trusted to do that.

Māori also are not focused solely on economics. Economic development is crucial if Māori are to participate fully in the benefits of our society. But unless policy on the treaty also looks at the kind of relationship we build between Māori and Pākehā in this country, and unless it works at better dialogue, better understanding of each other, and greater tolerance, then economics alone will not do the trick.

The number of people who gathered in Rotorua this past weekend to make a stand against the field trial of genetically engineered pine and spruce trees shows that opposition to GE is still a very live issue. But it seems to have moved somewhat off the Government’s horizon. In previous speeches, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen have lauded biotechnology as the great white hope of the knowledge economy to make money for New Zealand. The failures of GE overseas seem to have moderated that stance, and today we are pleased to see there was no mention of it at all. With Monsanto shown to have bribed Government regulatory officials in Indonesia, GE companies pulling out of the European Union and Australia, massive stock market losses by GE agriculture firms, and a crisis from weeds and herbicide poisoning in Argentina, it is clear that we would have lost nothing by keeping our moratorium in place and benefiting from the international reputation that would have given us. Despite the lifting of the moratorium—against the wishes of 70 percent of New Zealanders—there have been no applications for release, but the situation demands that we be eternally vigilant.

For that reason, and to keep the Greens’ 2002 election promise to the 70 percent of people who support us on this issue, I move, That all the words after “this House has no confidence” be omitted and substituted with the following words: “in the Labour-led minority Government because, despite there being some positive elements in its programme, its decision to allow the release of genetically engineered organisms exposes our health, our environment, and our economy to significant and quite unnecessary risks”.

I look forward to the day when the Greens will no longer need to move a motion of no confidence in the Government. Labour could win our support this month by supporting Ian Ewen-Street’s member’s bill to restore the moratorium, or it could win it after the election with a post-election policy agreement for a new Government that includes progress on the GE issue.

The Prime Minister has foreshadowed some improvements in childcare, housing, workplace superannuation, and addressing the causes of crime, all of which we welcome and support, although there are, at the moment, very few specifics. But she is curiously silent about the looming threats that put at risk our economy and, therefore, our way of life. New Zealand has now had 5 years of a booming economy. We have used that boom to foster increased consumption and have done little to invest in an economy that can weather the shocks that are coming. On the one hand, too many people have not participated in the good times and poverty remains an issue, particularly for many of our children. Poor housing and poor health lead to poor education and unemployment. On the other hand, those who have benefited from more money have nevertheless borrowed even more, and the credit card economy means that many households, as well as the nation as a whole, are living beyond their means. When the economic bubble bursts, as it must at some stage, those families will be particularly hard hit.

In my state of the planet speech 2 weeks ago, I drew attention to authoritative voices warning us that we are very close to the point where world demand for oil will outstrip the capacity of the oil fields to supply. I have been pleasantly surprised at how that seems to have resonated with the public. The Greens are up significantly in both polls this week, and today we are the only third party to be above 5 percent—very comfortably, in fact. We have had many affirmations, but I will now address the few arguments that the sceptics have managed to muster.

The simplistic response is that technology will always find a way. That denies that there are any limits at all to planetary resources, and amounts to a “close your eyes and hope” attitude. More sophisticated are the arguments that rising prices will make oil exploration more worthwhile, so we will find more; that it will make the development of tar sands and oil shales economic—and those resources are large—and that it will suppress demand so that oil production can cope.

The last argument about suppressing demand just states that either we will become more energy efficient, which is exactly what the Greens are proposing we should do, or the poor will miss out as prices rise. That is not something we want to encourage in a fair and inclusive society. I would like to think that we can keep ahead of oil scarcity with energy efficiency, but the evidence is that we are not even meeting our current, very mild target with current policies. In the first year of the National Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy we managed a 2 percent improvement, but last year it was zero. We need a big policy and funding shift if we are to do better than that.

Oil exploration always drills the easiest targets first. Oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s and have dropped sharply ever since, despite continued effort. At present we are finding about one barrel for every four we are using, and no one can say the price has not been good over the last year.

Oil shale and tar sands are vast but they yield little net energy, because it takes so much energy input to exploit them. As the price of fuel rises the cost of extracting these heavy, dirty, inaccessible, and environmentally very destructive oils will rise with it. In short, if $55 a barrel was going to make oil shale economic, we would be into it now. The New Zealand Herald reported today that OPEC sees its target price of US$22 to US$28 a barrel as “unrealistic” and analysts are anticipating it will be moved to around US$40 a barrel. Today’s price of US$47.95 suggests they may have underestimated again.

Nor can we turn to coal. For one thing, turning coal into oil is an extremely dirty and dangerous process, leaving destroyed landscapes and toxic wastes. Secondly, the carbon emissions would be astronomical, at a time when all the reports coming in on climate change suggest that we have seriously underestimated this threat to our economy and our way of life. The rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice took everyone by surprise and is itself accelerating climate change because the darker colour of the exposed ocean traps more heat. Release of the methane hydrates from thawing tundra would do the same on a larger scale. Last week’s report from the UK said that if we do not turn round carbon emissions in the next decade, we will not stop runaway climate change, whatever we do after that. A doubling of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, once seen as the limit of acceptable change, now looks very dangerous. Long before we could get oil-to-coal under way, the reasons not to start will be overwhelmingly obvious to everyone—

💬 Hon Ken Shirley: That’s right.

—even the ACT party.

So what is the Government doing about this? The Prime Minister said that the Government will provide leadership in “making this country relevant to and engaged in Asia’s future” by exhibiting at the World Expo in Aichi, Japan this year. What she does not say is that the Government’s foundation partner in the New Zealand pavilion will be our coal company, Solid Energy. Is this how we want to be known in Asia—as a country that profiles itself to the international community as wanting to sell them the means to change their climate, destroy their food production, raise their sea levels, threaten their biodiversity, and cause droughts and floods?

There are several worrying proposals on the table for new coal developments, and the Government has not discouraged them. Nor has it addressed the inefficiency of our vehicle fleet, which could be twice as good with proper standards. It is still building new motorways, which will not even be paid off by the time oil prices shrink our use of cars. Unsustainable transport is a big contributor to our growing balance of payments deficit. Imports of petroleum and its products increased by 21.7 percent last year. Vehicles, parts, and accessories increased by 7.4 percent, which is the largest single category.

But this Government does understand about climate change. It has done some worthwhile things with carbon credits and new renewables. The Prime Minister said in her speech that we must ensure as much of our energy comes from renewables as possible. We want to help the Government meet that goal. What the Greens were hoping for in the Prime Minister’s speech was some recognition that there is a serious economic problem here. We hoped for an announcement of investment in reducing our dependence on oil and other fossil fuels, a commitment to help our industries adjust, and a refocus of our trade policy to make it relevant to the 21st century.

The Prime Minister says she is building a nation of fairness, opportunity, and tolerance in which every New Zealander has a stake. But too many New Zealanders are falling even further behind. As the Listener has pointed out, a survey of 25 of New Zealand’s leading companies shows that the average pay rise of their chief executive officers last year was 25 percent—in 1 year. This compares with 2.4 percent in the average ordinary-time weekly earnings in the year to September 2004, and Westpac points out that for most people that is below the inflation rate. Statistics New Zealand shows that since 2000 the split of national income has moved in favour of capital and away from workers, despite the present low unemployment rate.

This is extraordinary for a Labour Government and it suggests that while National is driving a wedge between the working and the non-working poor, Labour is also drifting away from those most in need, who used to be its constituency. Sue Bradford will speak later this evening on some of our solutions to address this inequity, but I can illustrate them with reference to the Prime Minister's wish to increase savings and asset ownership, and to encourage people, especially women, off the benefit and into work.

If the incentives to work are not strong enough, I do not understand why the Government does not follow its own belief in the market, which says that if something is in short supply one pays more for it. We could do more to encourage people off benefits by raising the minimum wage and making it worthwhile. Less than $12 an hour is not much of an incentive to take on the extra costs of going to work, especially if one has children at home. I am not surprised there is a shortage of seasonal workers for fruit-picking and packing when I look at the wages, the living conditions in some places, and the uncertainty of whether there will be work at all. The income must be there before one can save it or invest it.

We welcome proposals to help people save—for housing and superannuation at work. But many people will never be able to save because of the millstone of student debt. The Government should address this by letting past students work it off by contributing to New Zealand society, and by having universal student allowances so that present and future students can borrow less. To help prepare for the coming crises, we need our best and brightest at home and contributing here.

The Prime Minister says we are short of workers and wants to encourage more women into the workforce. We welcome more resources for childcare, which gives women a genuine choice, but we must not pressure women to leave their kids if they want to raise them themselves. Raising children is one of the most important jobs one can do and parents must be free to choose to do it themselves if they want. There is a strong feeling that this Government does not regard raising children as “real work”, yet it wants to address the causes of crime and to ensure all children have a good education, which needs support from home. The State, in our view, should be neutral on whether parents work while their children are small or stay home and care for them, and should support them regardless of which choice they make.

Opposition parties are calling for a tax cut, and that is seen as a defining issue in politics this year. The Greens welcome a debate on tax, because we want to debate the more important issue of what should be taxed. There is no particular reason why it should be incomes, profits, or retail spending. We need to use the tax system to prepare to weather the shocks ahead, and to shift some tax off the things we want to encourage such as work, incomes, enterprise, and on to the things we want to discourage, such as scarce resources, waste, and pollution.

The Government signalled a carbon tax for 2007. It should start now. The Kyoto Protocol has been ratified. It is time we sent a clear signal that fossil fuels will be relatively more expensive in the future and that renewables and energy efficiency will prosper. There are many other resources and kinds of waste on to which we could shift some of our tax under policies of ecological tax reform.

This weekend thousands of people visited the Future Living Expo in Christchurch. Some came to my talk on peak oil and stayed to discuss our options. They were well informed. Businesses exhibited a range of contributions to a sustainable future—electric commuter scooters, clean-burning and efficient wood stoves and the fuel for them, solar water heaters of many models, water efficiency, sustainable building technologies, and wind turbines. This is what we should be showcasing to the rest of the world, rather than coal. Business—some businesses—and consumers—some consumers—are leading the way to a future that uses resources wisely. It is time for Governments to follow.

It is a sobering reminder that in the 45 short days since this House last met, around the world we have seen the turmoil of the election in the Ukraine, we have seen the horror of the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and we have seen the tumult and the drama of the first democratic election in Iraq. And we have even had one or two shakes in our own country.

I make those points to emphasise the fact that all people, wherever they are today, live in a world that is subject to more constant and dramatic change than ever before in its history, and where things like confidence and certainty and hope take on far more profound significance than has been the case in the immediate past. A lot has been said in this debate already about our emerging confidence and maturity as a nation, and about the prospects that gives us for our own future. I think there is a new sense of national confidence and identity starting to emerge in New Zealand. I think it is very fragile, but it is very important that this new spirit be encouraged and promoted. The debate about the flag is a strident reminder. It is probably a little at the periphery of the main argument, but it does draw to our attention that people have a sense of identity with their nation and how it is portrayed, and they want to be part of that.

Later this week the first meeting of the Constitutional Arrangements Committee will take place, and that is the start of a process of reviewing our constitutional arrangements and deciding the type of country we want to be as we move through the 21st century and beyond. This weekend we celebrate what passes as our national day on Waitangi Day. For many New Zealanders—sadly, too many in recent years—the turmoil and the upheaval that has been associated with that day has meant that it has become far less of a national day for most, and, unfortunately, if it is a good day weather-wise, just another day to go to the beach.

If we are to be a proud and confident nation, certain about who we are and bold in our predictions and our hopes for the future, we need to be able to celebrate the day that brings all of us together, whatever our ethnicity, our gender, our geography, our age, our income, or other differences—by virtue of the common fact that we are all New Zealanders—without it becoming a day for sullen protest, for division, for bitterness, and, increasingly, for apathy on the part of so many.

I get very saddened and angry when I hear people say: “I am not interested any more. I couldn’t care less. Scrap the whole thing.”, because that strikes at the heart and the core of our nation and what we want to be as a people. That is why I am bringing a bill to Parliament next month to rename our national day—not because a change of name in itself makes a huge difference, but because it starts to put us all on the same playing field where we all feel a common sense of ownership and purpose in what it means to be a New Zealander, of whatever disposition, today. Our hopes and our future as a country rest on our ability as a people to come together—to say that we are different strands of the same rope, but we are all New Zealanders. While we remain divided, embittered, and suspicious of one another we will lack the capacity to address any of the other major issues that confront our nation.

It is all very well in that context to hear the speeches of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and others portraying a vision for New Zealand. If this country is divided against itself it will not stand. The first component of any vision has to be a sense of national unity and national purpose. I cannot think of a better time in our recent history for us having the opportunity of addressing that. It has been noted, I think appropriately, that we are currently enjoying the most sustained period of economic prosperity in 40 years. That gives us a little bit of breathing space. It gives us some of the confidence we need to address these issues. It also provides us with a chance to look at affairs—if I can paraphrase the phrase made about Neville Chamberlain—through the right end of the telescope.

The problem we have faced in societies like ours for far too long is that we have become completely captured by outcomes. We hear them stated year in and year out as slogans: “We want to have this level of economic growth.”, “We want to bring unemployment down to this level.”, “We want to change our productivity rate so it strikes this rate.”, and so on and so forth. All of these things are important as outcomes, but fundamentally what we need to be focusing on is why, and the purpose of seeking to achieve those outcomes. United Future says unequivocally that the purpose is to ensure that New Zealand families get the benefit of favourable economic and political circumstances, whatever other beneficent things are coming along. Because when families are functioning well, our country is functioning well. Confident, bold, certain families contribute to a confident, bold, certain nation. We do not achieve that for those families by saying that unemployment is down or inflation is down. We actually have to say that a consequence of their being able to achieve their potential is that those things are achieved.

In that context I want to make a few comments about the Prime Minister’s reported comments yesterday about the entry of women into the workforce. I want to make it absolutely clear that I think that every New Zealander, whatever gender, whatever circumstance, has an equal right to participate in the workforce, and that we are not talking here about some sort of attitude that says it is not the traditional role of women to be in the workforce. But at the same time as that, we are not talking about some sort of neo-socialist environment best characterised by the belching chimneys, the overall-clad women that we saw in the Soviet factories in World War II, where driving up productivity became the overarching aim, either. We are talking about balance. Fundamentally, what we are saying and what we ought to be addressing is, why is the pressure there for this to occur? In many, many cases it is an income-adequacy argument. The pressure that many young mums feel to get back into the workforce is not because of an overarching desire to contribute to productivity as much as it is one that their household needs the income to enable them to give their children the standard of living that they aspire for them to have.

What we say is that the focus therefore ought to be primarily on looking at the conditions that will boost household and family income. I readily concede that it will not be the answer in every case, but it is a part of the start. That is why this party promotes income-splitting for tax purposes, enabling the two parents in a household where there are two parents to contribute equally in a financial sense and to benefit equally from their participation in the running of that household. Under the policy that we propose that would see the average household in New Zealand about $190 a fortnight better off, and that is a significant factor in many accounts.

I am not against children having access to childcare, far from it. I want to ensure that children have access to quality childcare. But I also want to ensure that parents do not feel estranged, by economic circumstance, from their role to be parents in this society. So many parents today worry about whether they are doing it right, whether they are caring as they ought to for their kids. There are no supports there for them. We simply assume that this is an inherited behaviour animalistically that can be automatically translated to work effectively in every family situation, when clearly it cannot be. So we do need to bring that focus back to the household.

I am reminded, as I say that, of the words uttered in this House about 30 years ago by Norman Kirk. He said that the principal function of a Government must be to ensure social and economic justice for all families, to protect their physical security and well-being in such a way as to assist parents to achieve an independent, secure, and happy life. All social reforms, he said, must be judged by the standard of whether they assist the family. If they assist the family, they are good; if they handicap the family, they are bad. I agree 100 percent with that sentiment. That is the emphasis we bring to the debate this year and beyond.

But it extends well beyond the immediate scope of parents. Many of them worry about the opportunities for their young children as they grow up and encounter the tertiary education system. It is clear that the area of student support—the mounting student debt crisis and the way we fund tertiary education—has to be at the forefront of action for the future. We will be making proposals this year regarding working off time after graduation and reducing the principal of the loan in proportion to the time worked in New Zealand. We will be proposing voluntary savings schemes for parents who want to contribute to tertiary education. We will also be looking at ways in which the means-test arrangement can be progressively lifted back so that we get universal student allowances from the age of 20, because fundamentally this party believes that the role of our tertiary education sector and the role of our graduates is to contribute to the future of New Zealand—that they are not some giant export-producing factory, as they seem to be at present.

We also believe that families prosper best in good and vibrant communities. A couple of important elements of communities are to do with recreation. We have a strong association with those who enjoy good outdoor recreation activities and the ability to access our traditional heritage and our birthright as New Zealanders without undue encumbrance. But at the same time we also say that in the world today the future of many people is based on their contribution to high-performance sport. Just as we see tourism and the new service industries as an investment, so too should we see high-performance sport as a major investment. Instead of bemoaning the fact that we keep losing to the Australians, it may be time we set up something akin to the Australian Institute of Sport—which was established in Canberra after the disastrous Olympic campaign of 1984—to give succour and support to sportspeople and to sports organisations that are, yes, doing good things for individuals but are increasingly major export earners for this country as well.

Any community that is confident is one that is safe and secure. That security emerges from confidence in the legal system and in law and order—in the fact that the police are there to protect people from the worst offenders in society and that those offenders, when they are caught, will face the full sanction of the law. We need to become much more focused on making our community safe in that way, rather than seeing policing drawn aside as it has been in recent years to focus on speed cameras and all sorts of other issues and leaving our communities less safe than they were in the past.

It is time we stopped pussyfooting around when it comes to those who prosper from the misery of others. The drug fiends, the drug barons, and the gangs that promote them deserve to have the full force of the law directed against them. Only last weekend, for example, a police aircraft was shot down, apparently, for getting too near a drug plantation in the lower South Island. That is criminal behaviour, it is utterly unacceptable, it is banditry of the worst sort, and we as a community ought to be placing a priority on getting rid of those who promote that sort of behaviour.

Security goes to another aspect as well. Many New Zealanders—an increasing number, according to the statistics—will say: “These things are all very well. They were the issues of my youth, but I am now in my declining years, and I am looking forward to security in my retirement.” While the pre-funding of superannuation is a positive move that we have been very happy to support, and while I believe that more certainty needs to be introduced into the national superannuation arrangements, we need to revisit the formula as it applies today, because the way it works is effectively dispossessing today’s superannuitants of around $10 per week in income. They get it back when the rate is struck in April, they then fall behind for the next 12 months, and they never get ahead. So we need to start right there.

I want to conclude with a couple of big issues for the future that I do not think we have got our collective head around. The Prime Minister made reference in her speech to a 40 percent increase in health expenditure. I assume that is via the Government’s contribution since it came to office. I have seen a graph used by the Minister of Finance that is essentially a vertical upright in health-spending expectations. The reality is that we will not be able to meet that demand in the future, given our current health needs, our current population, and current costs. The debate we need to be having is not about whether it is 40 percent or 50 percent or something else, but about how we can effectively provide health services to the widest range of New Zealanders in the future, using the widest range of services available across the spectrum, because we cannot afford to carry on as we are.

In that context, I saw in the Prime Minister’s statement a reference to pharmaceutical policy. I raised with the Government some time ago a “thinkpiece”, really, about what we are doing in terms of a pharmaceutical strategy for the future. I was not playing politics. I was not even asking about Pharmac or current funding arrangements; I was simply asking whether anyone was thinking—given technological advancements, the cost of pharmaceuticals, and the increasing access of New Zealanders to information—about how to develop a pharmaceutical strategy for the future. My letter was referred to the Ministry of Health for a draft reply. It has now been sent to Pharmac, which seems to think that by raising the issue I am launching an attack on it, and we are no further ahead. My point is none of those things; it is simply that this issue will affect all New Zealanders, whatever our age or circumstance, in the future. It is that the demand from people as they become aware of medicines that are available elsewhere but not available here will increase, and we need to ask what we are doing about it. If we are a caring society that genuinely worries about the needs and aspirations of its people for the future, we will be thinking about those things as much as we do about the things we are thinking about today.

As this House embarks upon an election year, I express the earnest hope that, as well as the usual election year jollity, all parties focus on the issues that count and seek to give answers to New Zealanders about those matters now and in the future, because ultimately that is where this country’s future intentions lie.

Since 1999, the progressive Labour-led coalition Government has overseen a transformation of the New Zealand economy. Anyone who does not acknowledge that either has no idea of the facts or just wants to make cheap political capital. The Progressives are also working inside the Government—and have been doing so in all those years—for a transformation of our communities, not only in terms of economic development in the regions of the country and in terms of industry development but also in the social and environmental areas. Our objectives, put simply, are universal public education from pre-school to tertiary level, universal access to quality public health care, and the opportunity for every New Zealand family to have a home of their own. That, in our view, is social justice.

The work we have done on the economy, which has been spectacular and will continue, is a means to achieving higher levels of social equity. Programmes to promote industry and regional development, along with increased investment in research and development, have helped to upgrade the quality and the quantity of our industrial development base as well as, of course, our exports into global markets. New Zealand is now less vulnerable to things outside our control—like wild swings in global foreign exchange markets, or even the weather—than it has ever been in my lifetime. In simple terms that means New Zealand is making significant strides towards having a more productive, independent, high-skill and high-value economy. That is why the Reserve Bank recently upgraded its assessment of our potential sustainable growth rate from 2.5 percent in 1999 to around 3.7 percent per annum. That is also why we have started to climb up the OECD economic ladder rather than fall down it, which was the propensity over the 30 years up until 1999. Winston Peters was not correct when he said that it was the late 1980s and 1990s when this fall first started; it was the 1970s.

Since 1999 this coalition has increased public investment in our education and health systems. It has introduced far-sighted laws on paid parental leave and a minimum of 4 weeks’ paid annual leave for workers, and so on. These are programmes that both enhance the productivity of our economy and, at the same time, help working families to meet their employment as well as family commitments.

The Progressive Party and its predecessors have, of course, been leading players in all these key coalition Government initiatives since 1999. It is instructive for smaller parties in this Parliament to realise that being part of a coalition means that one’s own policy agenda can be progressed. This year we will be campaigning for representation in a historic third-term Labour-led coalition Government. We plan to continue to contribute to making New Zealand an even better place to live, work, and bring up a family.

The Progressive Party will work with all parties that have contributed constructively to the Government’s programme so far. I acknowledge the work of the United Future party, New Zealand First, and the Greens with the Labour-led coalition. Those parties have all played a part in the success of the Labour-Progressive Government’s constructive policy programme.

The Progressive Party stands for a New Zealand with growing opportunities for all New Zealanders, regardless of family background, inherited wealth, or privilege. We stand for social justice, and we believe that the time for the policy spotlight to fall on social justice is now. When was the last election year when social justice dominated the election debate? It certainly was not in 2002 when genetic engineering was the controversial issue of the day. It was not in 1999 when the election was dominated by the collapse of the National-led coalition. It was not in 1996 when immigration and MMP dominated the election campaign. It was certainly not in 1993 when the nation’s anger with the betrayals of the National Party was the key issue. It was certainly not in 1990 either, when the electorate was sick of the political betrayals of the Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble era.

It has been a long time since the foremost election issues were access to education, affordable high-quality health-care, and homeownership for all New Zealanders. It is time, in our view, that we put these issues back on the political agenda. We have unprecedented economic success to build on, and I congratulate my colleague the Minister of Finance on his extraordinarily wise and far-sighted oversight of the economic development and fiscal position of New Zealand. We are well hedged for any event that happens in a way that we have not been for many, many years in this country. The issue for New Zealand now is how we build on that success.

In spite of all the work that I have been involved in with my Cabinet and Government colleagues in economic development, I have never believed that economic development and growth are ends in themselves. We need economic success to produce jobs. We need innovation and creativity to increase the incomes of New Zealanders and to give us positive choices. The point of increasing our nation’s wealth is to ensure that all New Zealanders have the opportunity to share in the success of the economy.

As our economy becomes stronger, we need to apply our success to our social problems. We have to work harder, for example, on cutting student debt and de facto school fees, on helping every New Zealand family to buy their own home, on guaranteeing access to quality public health-care, on improving productivity through higher investment in economic development and particularly in research and development, and on reducing alcohol and drug abuse, particularly by young people. That is what social justice means to me. It is an opportunity presented to us by the economic success that this Government has overseen.

The moment for social justice to take centre stage, in my view, is now. But we have not heard a peep about these issues from the Opposition. Don Brash has given major speeches about the treaty and about law and order—the last refuge of those politicians who have no other ideas on life—and now he wants to take babies from women on the domestic purposes benefit and hand them over for adoption. This seems to be his idea of the future for this country. His potential coalition partners seem interested only in keeping the doors shut to new New Zealanders and giving tax cuts to the wealthy. That is the full bankruptcy of the Opposition’s policy platforms, and we did not hear any more than that today from the leader of the National Party.

We need an ambition for a socially just New Zealand, and this Government stands for that, in my view. We have an economic goal of returning New Zealand to the top half of the OECD, but that needs to be matched by a vision for a healthy, thriving, sustainable New Zealand society. New Zealand needs a vision of a socially just society, and that is the role that the party I lead, the Progressives, plays as an unashamedly pro business development party with a social conscience. We have devoted our energies to economic development because we know that the pathway to social development is built on the opportunities of economic development.

There can be no First World health system in any country, nor a First World environmental system, nor a First World education system, without a First World economy. The two go together—it is not one or the other. The pathway that we are following leads to a place where any young New Zealand family can expect to own their own home, and we have proposed to help them do that by capitalising family income support. Our vision for New Zealand is one where we can celebrate young New Zealanders gaining new skills without the burden of a lifetime of debt. I have to say, speaking as one of the generation that had a free education—I was paid to train as a teacher, and I had a very low-interest loan and a capitalisation of family benefit to get into the housing market—that I am eternally grateful for the softness in the New Zealand society that looked after me and virtually put me in the position I am in now. My lifetime in politics has been spent trying to repay the opportunities that a benevolent State gave to me. Other New Zealanders of my ilk feel exactly the same.

We have a lot of work to do in the health system. This Government has put almost half of all the discretionary income it has had into the health system. It always seems like a bottomless pit, but nevertheless we will keep doing our best and we have more to do. For the Progressives, this year will be a year of challenging issues to which we will propose ambitious solutions. We are committed to making 2005 a year for social justice. As this Parliament opens for business for the year, I assure the House that this will be the top priority for the Progressive MPs in our work in this place.

A vision for a nation must be founded in its very origins. The Māori Party’s vision for this nation is based on the covenant by which its first people—the people of the land; the tangata whenua—negotiated with the Crown about a model for developing a unified nation. The Treaty of Waitangi was not a party political manifesto designed to capture votes, nor was it a strategy to advise us how to respond to grievances, nor was it the beginner’s guide to establishing a treaty industry. In this respect it is very disappointing that the three times that the word “treaty” appeared in the Prime Minister’s address referred exclusively to a focus on settlement policy.

At its very core, the treaty is about a relationship that has been entered into. Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu referred to this. She said: “In 1840 a pact was signed with good and true intent and that was the beginning of a nation called New Zealand. It is time for our founding document to be set free and for the Treaty of Waitangi to be a symbol of unity, trust, understanding, and goodwill for all the peoples of Aotearoa.” In her focus on unity, trust, understanding, and goodwill Te Arikinui reminds us of the pivotal role Te Tiriti o Waitangi has in helping New Zealand - Aotearoa to mature as a nation.

Some members of this House would prefer to assign this document to the filing cabinet, suggesting that the basis for nationhood in this land is merely a historical relic of no significance to our ongoing future. I have difficulty with this approach of relegating our founding document to the back room on the assumption that it is now outdated. I wonder whether those same members would suggest that a marriage certificate signed at a wedding ceremony has absolutely no relevance to the ongoing relationship of a couple. If we are really committed to promoting and nurturing the sacred relationships that we have in our homes and families, we must demonstrate that same commitment to our key documents for nationhood. We must not forfeit the honour and integrity Te Tiriti o Waitangi was expected to provide by all its signatories.

Moving forward as a nation requires us to honour the promises made by our ancestors, and correct injustices of the past, in order to lay the groundwork for an equitable future. Respect for our ancestors is entirely proper; our ancestors have made us what we are. The architects of the treaty knew that what they were proposing would set a precedent. This is part of our proud history as a sovereign nation, and we must celebrate that. Te Tiriti o Waitangi challenged the British Empire to reaffirm and accommodate the existing rights of an indigenous culture amongst the onslaught of immigration. The writers knew that a framework of trust, respect, toleration, and diversity had to be set down and adhered to if the peoples of that time were to survive and grow as one nation.

The Māori Party’s position is that those principles and others still apply today, and even more so in an ever increasingly diverse and complex country. The courts have referred to the treaty as an embryo, rather than a fully developed and integrated set of ideas. I would encourage this House to see the treaty as a living document that provides the foundation for an ongoing relationship between Māori and the Crown—a relationship that must be capable of adaptation to new and changing circumstances as they arise. For the Māori Party, that is a vision for a nation that will withstand the vagaries of time, or the political opportunism that seems to come around at election time.

What New Zealanders are wanting is less political rhetoric about the treaty as “a tool of division”, less focus on closing the gaps between Māori and others, and less emphasis on race relations as our No. 1 problem. What we want more of is a vision of promise for our future. The treaty encapsulates that vision and must be promoted positively if we are ever to move forward. Nationhood is meaningless if we have not matured in our attitudes to, and decisions about, the past, present, and future role that the treaty plays in our lives. We believe that we have the capacity to be a bicultural nation, where it is possible to promote and validate the role of Māori as tangata whenua throughout New Zealand, and also to promote harmonious relationships amongst all New Zealanders.

I do not want us to forget that the deterioration of the treaty relationship has come about because Governments have behaved dishonourably. The legacy of land confiscation and the subsequent partition, fragmentation, and land alienation through the intervention of the Native Land Court must be addressed. The Waitangi Tribunal’s The Taranaki Report: Kaupapa Tuatahi described such an impact clearly in its 1996 report: “Through war, protest, and petition, the single thread that most illuminates the historical fabric of Maori and Pakeha contact has been the Maori determination to maintain Maori autonomy and the Government’s desire to destroy it. The irony is that the need for mutual recognition had been seen at the very foundation of the State, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.”

The New Zealand public should not be blamed for what the tribunal called “the Government’s desire to destroy” Māori autonomy. The relationship between tangata whenua and the Crown has deteriorated noticeably, especially in response to the current Government’s proposals on the foreshore and seabed. The principles of partnership, utmost good faith, reasonableness, reciprocity, mutual benefit, and active protection disintegrated. The Waitangi Tribunal’s Report on the Crown’s Foreshore and Seabed Policy stated that the policy breaches the Treaty of Waitangi in “fundamental and serious” ways that give rise to “serious prejudice”. We shall not forget.

In this Parliament we have a responsibility to compensate the losses, and we should be committed to fairness, justice, and reconciliation. If we have the courage to recognise the past for what it was and perhaps plant a seed for the future, we have the opportunity to change the very face of Aotearoa. In this Parliament, we must promote harmonious relationships between people by encouraging a notion of respect for the Treaty of Waitangi, and also other distinct ethnic groups that live in this country. This was the inspiration that was given to us by our ancestors—an inspiration for a vision for the nation. We are a young country and we can get this right. We can work it out together. We have been able to share common highlights in the past. We have done many great things together, and we can do so again. These are the essential elements of a vision for the future. For too long politicians and media have drawn a picture that Māori and non-Māori are separate, impermeable groups. Our struggle is not with each other.

Exactly 10 years ago, on 28 and 29 January 1995, Ngāti Tūwharetoa paramount chief, Sir Hepi te Heuheu, initiated the Hirangi series of hui to resurrect the issue of constitutional significance of the Treaty of Waitangi. I believe it is fitting to return to the recommendations laid down at that first hui, as a focus point for the next decade. Honouring the recommendations that were gifted to the nation from the Hirangi series of hui will require a careful dialogue between the parties to ensure the promises of article 2 are achieved. The interplay between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga is complex, but meaningful dialogue will achieve the success anticipated so many years ago. It is a vision worth pursuing, it is a vision we can attain, and it is a vision for a nation.

Nō reira, ka nui te mihi ki a koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

I think that what we have seen today is a very clear contrast between the two major parties in this House. From the Government and from the Prime Minister, we saw a broad vision for the future—a Government moving forward with renewed vigour. From the Opposition we saw a repeat, in essence, of that state of the nation speech at Ōrewa—the same old, same old tired story from a National Party that is narrow, divisive, crabbed, picky, and dealing with one part of one issue, in terms of the Ōrewa speech. Nor is it better today.

Dr Brash spoke in code, but the code is easily translated for those of us who have been around for more than a couple of years or so: asset sales, social spending cuts, tax cuts for the better off, and a return to the welfare policies of the 1990s. Those are the policies he remembers from the years when he was middle-aged.

Members will remember that last year we had Ōrewa I. Ōrewa I, of course, was followed by the loss of his spokesperson on Māori affairs, Georgina te Heuheu. Then this year, with great fanfare from the New Zealand Herald, with a build-up of at least a week and an almost Oscars presentation - type of approach, we had Ōrewa II. Then, within days, National’s spokesperson on social welfare, Katherine Rich, resigned. So there have been two speeches, two topics, and two spokespeople down the tube. The irony, of course, is that this year’s speech was a speech about forcing women back into jobs, and its immediate result was that one woman lost her job as a consequence of it.

I have to say to Dr Brash—and I am raiding Oscar Wilde shamelessly—that to lose one female spokesperson may be regarded as unfortunate, but to lose two does look like carelessness. And it is. In both cases the policies were formed without proper consultation with the spokespeople. Why? There is a simple answer to that. It is because they were women. Dr Brash gave away in his speech today that, fundamentally, he does not believe that women are equal to men. Of course—and adding to Oscar Wilde—for National to lose “power” is one thing, but to lose “rich” will prove to be another.

We now have a major Opposition party—the alternative Government, it assures us—with no women on the front bench. National is now the “boys’ own” party. It is back to the days when Jim McLay had to be the Minister of Women’s Affairs because it did not have any women to be the Minister of Women’s Affairs. Let us look at what has happened to two of the biggest portfolios. The Opposition spokesperson on social welfare has moved from the front bench to the second row, and the Opposition spokesperson on health has moved from the second row to the dimmest recesses of the third row, with Dr Hutchison. When Dr Hutchison takes one step to the left he falls out into the division lobby. That is how far back health is in terms of National’s priorities.

I want to congratulate John Key on his long overdue promotion—at least that is his view of what it is. I want to tell him that he should not settle in. He should keep most of the pens and stationery in his office because the chances of his staying there are not very large. The life expectancy of Opposition front-bench people in the National Party is very, very low. There are seven of them there now, but behind them there are eight of them who have been on the front bench—out of a caucus of 27—and seven of those eight within the last 18 months. On the Labour Party side six members of our front bench have been here for over 10 years, and I am very, very confident that some of us will be here a lot longer yet.

What caused the latest National disaster? What was Dr Brash’s great and stirring message? He said: “We must reduce the numbers of people on benefits.” This Government has reduced them by 100,000 in 5 years. His bold target was: “We should aim to reduce them by 100,000 in 10 years.” We have done it in 5 years. It is a bit hard to work out what the criticism was at that particular point. He then said: “We must get beneficiaries into jobs.” We have got more than 200,000 extra people into jobs under this Labour-Progressive coalition Government. He then told people that when their youngest child reaches the age of 5 they would have to do community work or get a job—be forced into it. If they tried to have another child to stop that happening they would have to get a job even earlier—so presumably they would have to take their child along to the job with them. It has all been tried before.

Why did he state the latter? When National did this previously some women did have another child when the youngest child reached about 4 in order to avoid being forced into paid employment. Now they have been threatened with being forced into a job when the youngest child is 1 or 2, or whatever it may be. It is an expensive, useless, counterproductive proposal—lots of money creating non-jobs to pretend something is being done about the social welfare system.

I have to say to Dr Brash—and this is probably the unkindest insult I could give him—that even Rob Muldoon used to give a better speech at Ōrewa about the state of the nation than Dr Brash has managed over the last 2 years. We heard some extraordinary things in the former Reserve Bank Governor’s speech today—the cracklingly dry Reserve Bank Governor. He said that he now supports homeownership. When he was the Governor of the Reserve Bank he was notorious for bursting out into a hot flush every 3 months while attacking New Zealanders’ obsession with homeownership and saying that we should not have so many people owning their own homes. He now says that he is in favour of homeownership.

He also said today that he is in favour of inflationary wage growth. He said today that wages are not growing fast enough. My God, when Dr Brash was Governor of the Reserve Bank scarcely a week went by without him saying: “You put those wages up, I’ll put your interest rates up, my boys—don’t you dare move in terms of wages.” He then said that he wants a loose fiscal policy. He said the Government has been operating too tight a fiscal policy and that we should loosen up. Imagine that from a former Governor of the Reserve Bank! Only 2 weeks ago Mr Key put out a press statement saying that I was operating too loose a fiscal policy and putting too much pressure on interest rates.

Nevertheless, National would cut taxes. If fiscal policy is too loose and National is to cut taxes, there is only one bit of the equation left—there would have to be savage cuts in expenditure at that point. But do we hear from the National Party what the expenditure cuts should be? No. National say that the nanny State is too big, but which bits of nanny will be chopped off—her legs, her arms, her head, or whatever it may be—is not explained to us because, of course, it is politically bad to tell people that that would mean cutting health, education, pensions, police, and all the major areas of Government expenditure, because we cannot nickel-and-dime our way to big expenditure cuts by abolishing the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. I have to tell Mr Key that that just does not add up to a real tightening of fiscal policy.

It is now only a matter of time until Bill English does a John Howard or a Kim Beazley. He must be looking across the Tasman. I see Wayne Mapp rolling his eyes, but he might get back on the front bench for another 3 months if Bill English came back. All the soufflés may keep rising again and again and again on the Opposition benches, one after the other. My advice to Bill English is to wait, breathe deeply, and this time wait until after the election. Dr Brash deserves to lose it. Bill English should not take the blame this time round, as he did last time.

I will contrast that with the Government’s record. In the last year growth has been the second best in the OECD, and one of the very best over the last 4 or 5 years. We have been catching up on the pack, although one would not think that from Dr Brash’s many speeches. Unemployment is down to its lowest level for 18 years, and crime is down to its lowest level for 21 years. There is a connection between those two, which the National Party may not understand. Get people into jobs and off the streets, get them feeling part of society, and crime rates will come down. It is a more positive thing than just keeping on locking everybody up for as long as we possibly can.

We have seen health waiting lists come down. We have seen the expansion and development of the primary health organisations. The fact is that health as an issue of major concern rates quite low on the opinion polling, which is remarkable because it is nearly always in the top two or three in most Western countries.

What is the programme? Members should listen to what has been said today. There are major initiatives on private savings coming up in this year’s Budget. What will National’s answer be to that? “Give them a tax cut!” That will not actually lead to more private savings. The Government has announced changes in taxation to help business. There will be benefit reform, in terms of the single benefit and a simplified structure being progressed.

We have announced initiatives in terms of early intervention programmes to really start to reduce the long-term causes of crime, and in forms in tertiary education to ensure that we are getting better value for money and that the money is going in the right direction. What is the answer to that? It is: “Let’s concentrate on those women on the domestic purposes benefit who have four children and somehow or other our growth rates will catch up with those of Australia.” If people believe that, they will believe anything.

I agree with two statements in the Prime Minister’s state of the nation speech today. The first is that this is a nation with huge potential, and the second is that to build a strong New Zealand requires leadership, commitment, and good policies. Those are the only two statements in the speech that I agree with; the rest is just platitudinous claptrap of the worst kind. Michael Cullen stands there and starts to use the rhetoric of centre-right talk, but his policies will not let him engage in centre-right action to make a difference for New Zealanders.

I want to go through the Prime Minister’s speech bit by bit, just to make it clear how difficult it is for the Labour Government to pretend that it is in any way visionary or has a concern about New Zealanders. First, the attack on Dr Brash suggested that beneficiary numbers are too big. We then had the admission from Helen Clark that benefit numbers have apparently tumbled and that under Labour those numbers have fallen by 100,000. If we dig just a little bit further into the speech we see that the Working for Families package will create 82,000 new beneficiary families. Michael Cullen said that he cannot give them their taxes back or give them a lower taxation rate, but that a Government handout is OK. So Labour thinks that making hard-working New Zealanders beneficiaries of the State is better than allowing them to keep the money they earn in the workplace.

Let us be very clear that one party in this country sets the agenda these days. It is the National Party, not the Labour Party. Let us just think of the last year. Dr Brash went to Ōrewa, and exposed some of the inequities in our society when it comes to the way we deal with race issues. Labour went into an absolute panic, and created a position for the Hon Trevor Mallard as the Coordinating Minister, Race Relations. He went out and promised to do all sorts of things to salve the concerns of ordinary New Zealanders, but what Labour has done is nothing. If one reads the newspaper today and looks in the employment section, one finds Government jobs advertised where the criteria for the acceptance of those jobs is that the applicant has an understanding of and a concern for the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. It is still there, 12 months after Trevor Mallard was supposed to get rid of all that stuff, because Labour talks about it but never does it.

Dr Brash then talked during the year about law and order. The truth in sentencing conference exposed some of the more ridiculous situations that exist in this country with regard to violent crime. What did the Government do? It went straight into a get-tough mode, promising all sorts of things but doing nothing, again. Michael Cullen stood in the House today and said Labour had got the number of burglaries down. Well, the fact is that people do not report burglaries any more.

💬 Pansy Wong: They have given up.

They have given up on the police, because this Government has accepted a police commissioner coming to Parliament and saying that if people want to receive an answer to a 111 call, they should make sure they scream. People know that if they ring up about a burglary, 5 or 6 days later the police will amble around to see whether they can do something. The only reason that figure has fallen is that people have lost confidence in the police because the Government has confidence in an incompetent Minister of Police. That agenda is set by Don Brash.

It is the same with regard to transport. Don Brash saw the problem in Auckland. He saw that there were some simple solutions that would get progress. He made some commitments about the Resource Management Act and about the funding track for roading in Auckland. Suddenly the Minister with responsibility for Auckland Issues was up there, the Minister of Transport was up there, and Helen Clark went home to Auckland. They wrapped their arms around the mayors, patted them on the back, and put together big packages. And what has happened? Nothing. The rest of country, though, is paying an extra 10c per litre on petrol in order to get those flash roads put in place. That money is accumulating in Michael Cullen’s huge surplus, which apparently the Government is better at spending than any individual would be.

We come to the issue of taxation. Here we have quite a dilemma, because the Government knows that hard-working New Zealanders want tax relief. They do not want to be made into beneficiaries; they do not want to receive a cheque from the Government. They just want to keep the money that they earn, week in, week out, from the jobs that they do throughout the economy. Michael Cullen will not allow that. But, knowing that is a problem, Labour thinks it will be clever, by sending John Tamihere out to give a tax cut speech and getting Jim Anderton to take out nationwide newspaper advertisements that state the Progressive Party wants to reduce taxation. Well, no one is going to believe that. No one will hold his or her breath and wait for tax cuts under this Government, and no one will be impressed with the rapid growth in the Government’s surplus while the taxation rates remain so high.

Then we come to the issue of welfare. Don Brash rightly raised in Ōrewa the difficulties that this country will face if beneficiary numbers continue to grow at the rate they are growing at the present time. The Government, of course, initially wanted to say that that was benefit bashing. Far from it, that speech had some aspiration in it for a better quality of life for those that Labour is quite happy to see dependent on benefits. No doubt the people who get the rawest deal in the benefit world are solo parents. Let us be very clear that most of them are women. They do a very good job over a large number of years of bringing up their children on the very low disposable funds available to them—the benefit. Then, when their children get to 18 they take off, by and large, and there are young women in their late 30s or early 40s, capable, competent people lacking in confidence and uncertain about what the world is going to offer them from that point on. All that we are saying to them is that we will have a regime that gets alongside them when their youngest child is 5, and there will be 11 years in which to do some part-time work, do some approved community work, or train for another job. What is wrong with that? Well, the Labour Party, it seems, thinks there is nothing wrong with that, because it is now out there proclaiming that as its own policy. Dr Brash has set the agenda again. But if anyone believes that Labour will reduce beneficiary numbers seriously, and if anyone believes that Labour will create opportunities for those New Zealanders who are caught on a benefit, then he or she is sadly deluded.

I want to leave my final comments for the issue that Dr Brash seems to have enjoyed so much today: the decision mutually agreed between Dr Brash and Katherine Rich that she should take on some other responsibilities on our behalf. Katherine Rich is an extremely capable member and will do a good job in those areas. But let me be very clear that in this party if someone happens to disagree with the leader, he or she does not get the John Tamihere treatment, the Ruth Dyson treatment, the Lianne Dalziel treatment, the Dover Samuels treatment, nor the Tariana Turia treatment. Is it not amazing that Dr Cullen can see a real problem in Katherine Rich moving back just a few seats, when he cannot see the problem that he and Helen Clark created in forcing Tariana Turia to take the extraordinary step of forming the Māori Party—a party that I predict will do enormous damage to Labour because of the patronising attitude it has to Māori in this country? I have seen in recent days, at various functions, Labour Ministers talking to groups of Māori. I tell members that if I were on the listening end, if I were part of the organising groups, and I were Māori myself, I would be absolutely appalled that anyone could think that they could get away with talking in such Uncle Tom Cobbleigh ways to me or to others.

Don Brash has set the agenda, Don Brash will lead the agenda, and Don Brash will lead the country after the next election.

As we learnt today, that was a short intervention from the leader of faction 2, made up, as Winston Peters informed us today from his very good sources, of three people within the National Party who see that voice as the voice for the future of the National Party. So I will leave people to judge that. I will leave people just to weigh that up in their minds, to say whether Gerry Brownlee has the kind of approach to life that might actually lead him into the position of leader. There have been so many in the last little while; there is no reason why he should not be the one.

Most people will know, if they have looked at the year so far, that social policy has been very busy already—it has been a very busy area, indeed. Most of that business comes from the programme that the Government has in place. But we saw a little bit of a sideshow recently at Ōrewa II. The sequel is always hard. Mr Brash was back for Ōrewa II. He went there after a massive build-up of the speech. It was so massive that the National Party had to try to get the speech down a little bit in terms of expectation.

What did we get? Well, we got the scintillating, inspiring new phrase that we should have less welfare and more responsibility. I think I have heard that ever since there was a welfare State, from virtually anybody who has been in politics, because no one in politics thinks that a large number of people who are in a position of not being able to independently get on with their lives is a good thing. So whether one is on the left, right, centre, or wherever one is, there is an agreement that a sign of a society working well is people getting on with their lives, taking responsibility, and getting out there and doing something. It was a yawn to hear it again from Mr Brash. It was sad to watch.

Let us be frank: welfare is a very difficult issue. Every country in the OECD struggles with the issue of welfare. Solutions do not come easy on those issues. They require a great deal of thought and sensitivity, because we are dealing with sick, disabled, unemployed, widowed, etc. people, who need assistance because they are vulnerable. So policies need to take that into account. What did we get from the PhD former Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Brash? In the run-up to Rātana he told us that 50 percent of Māori children were on a benefit. The reason he rushed out to say this at Rātana was undoubtedly that, for him, to get statistics like that was like manna from heaven. He believes that if he can demonise Māori, if he can make them look like they are the problem, then he is quids in with that shrinking constituency of his who like to hear that message. But unfortunately for him he found that the figure was wrong. This is a PhD former Reserve Bank Governor who prides himself on figures, and his 50 percent figure is wrong.

So off he went to Ōrewa to try to carry on his message, and he swapped from that to the domestic purposes benefit. He told us that teenage mums on the domestic purposes benefit should give up their babies; this should be the new lost generation. What do people do when they do not have contact with their biological parents? They spend the rest of their lives trying to get back in touch with those parents. That went down extraordinarily badly with people across the country who said to support those mothers to keep their babies and not to let them create a generation of young people who would spend their lives trying to find their mothers.

He tried to tell us that that is the domestic purposes benefit person—young mothers were always having babies. The typical domestic purposes person is in his or her early 30s, has left a relationship, has a couple of children, and quite often having a baby is a reason for leaving that part of the relationship. Often having had the baby is the last straw between the couple, and their relationship breaks up. They are on the benefit for 3 to 3½ years and they move off it again to get on with their lives.

What we need is positive assistance. Did we hear one thing about childcare and the domestic purposes benefit? Have we yet heard anything about childcare? I think that what we heard is an image that one adopts one’s baby out, one goes to work, and there will be no childcare. That policy simply did not work. That is a series of very half-baked ideas. One of the most interesting things was that when Dr Brash was challenged to say why he had re-run those ideas from the 1990s, he said “What ideas from the 1990s? I have not read anything about the 1990s.” He told the reporter: “I don’t know what went on in the 1990s.”

Well, that PhD, Reserve Bank man, who says that he likes evidence, has not read his own party’s policies from the 1990s and discovered that they were well gone. I have to say that other people knew he was wrong. Katherine Rich said she did not like those policies. She could swallow the speech but she could not swallow the policies. She is bright. She has studied that. She knows that the divide between the National Party and this Government is whether one creates those opportunities, or fails to create opportunities. She knows that childcare training, case management, and partnerships with employers that positively make a difference to people getting a job is where the action is. She wants National to debate those issues. She is right. Mr Brash is wrong. Her failure to endorse his speech meant that he wanted her to go.

Gerry Brownlee tells us that it was a benign discussion between Katherine Rich and Dr Brash, that she wanted to shift to the second bench, that she wants the only woman taken off the front bench to go back to the second, and that she was saying to Dr Brash to please humiliate her by firing her today. That is not what happened. I will tell members what actually happened. I think that what has happened is that she is a young rising star of the National Party. She knows that Dr Brash is dog tucker. She does not want to be collateral damage during the next few months, because she knows she has a future. When the National Party picks itself up after near annihilation after this election, she wants to be still standing, along with some of the others like the parked Simon Power, like Mr Key, who I know will move off that front bench as quick as he can if he gets into a fight with Dr Brash, because he wants to have a future as well.

That is what we are seeing here. We are seeing the future of the National Party get itself out of the way of the train wreck that is about to come. That is what is going on here. It is not some benign little change.

Now, Katherine Rich has been replaced with someone who makes Dr Brash look thoughtful. It is Judith Collins. Dr Brash may have half-baked ideas. She does not have any ideas. This is what she said about beneficiaries in a speech that was publicly reported. She knew it would be. The speech notes were available. She said, and I quote, that “beneficiaries sit around all day”—not just some beneficiaries, all of them, according to her—“watching Sky TV, living off the taxpayer, letting their children run riot, and getting stoned.” That is Judith Collins’ view of beneficiaries.

Does Mrs Collins know that 2,000 people left the sickness benefit last year because they died? They were people who she said sat around all day, let their children run riot, and got stoned. They died. That is how they left the benefit last year. I also tell her that 87,000 of those people sitting around watching Sky, letting their children run riot, and getting stoned, left the benefit last year because they got a job. I ask Mrs Collins, as the person who deals with welfare issues, how she will convince an employer to look at someone on a benefit if she characterises them to employers as people who sit around all day doing nothing, and are irresponsible, lazy, and useless.

We are placing tens of thousands of those people each year, because we are positive about them. We know they want a job. They want training, childcare, and a bridge into jobs. We have partnerships with employers. I am looking forward to Mrs Collins changing her mind, or following Mrs Rich on to the third bench, second bench, or wherever she should go, but we do not want people whose approach to welfare is to just use them as some way to kick their way into power.

We will continue with the good news. Two million and twenty-two thousand people are employed. Unemployment is down 58 percent. The number of working-age beneficiaries is down 20 percent. We are changing everything about welfare to keep those good figures rolling. We have seen the Working for Families package and what it will do for low to modest income households. Today the Prime Minister talked about the second stage of that package of shifts in welfare that will be a single benefit. It will be an absolute transformation in the way the benefit system works and it will be all about one simple, single principle, which is to go to work.

The benefit system over many years has become extremely difficult to run. It gets in the way of that transition to work. It ought to be about facilitating people getting on with their lives—getting trained, getting motivated, getting out there, and getting on with their lives when they can. Security for those who need it, and opportunity for those who can take it, is the motto of this Government. Mr Brash failed the test of providing a way forward on welfare and he has provided nothing for this Government’s overall future. He needs to know that this Labour Government intends to win the next election, not just to implement its own policies, but to stop any of that rubbish being foisted on New Zealanders who have enjoyed success now for 5 years. They are enjoying success. They have achieved a great deal, and this Government will not allow someone like Dr Brash to ruin what they see as a successful start to the 21st century.

I move, That all the words after “this House has no confidence” be omitted and substituted with the following words: “in the Labour-led Government because it continues to promote policies which keep New Zealanders at the lowest level of per capita earnings in the OECD, which fail to promote export growth and fail to meet the targets set out in the Labour Party’s 2002 election manifesto, and because it continues to offer no competitive future for the people of New Zealand, especially the youth of New Zealand. I shall concentrate most of my speech on what the Government did not say and did not address. First, although the Prime Minister indicated that a good deal more money than is allocated at present would go into health, I say it will not be enough to keep pace with the health demands of this country. In the long term it will not be enough to keep pace with a population that is ageing, with the modern technology that is coming on board, and with the modern drugs that this country needs now. There needs to be a significant increase in the health budget. Even if the sum of money that is being proposed, which I think will be about 6 percent of GDP, is added to with private health insurance, the amount will still be less than 8 percent of GDP. Additionally, the Government should be targeting the bureaucracy in the health system and skimming that back somewhat. What did the Prime Minister say? She made out that everything is nice and rosy. I can say to the honourable members on the Government benches that things are far from rosy when it comes to health expenditure. If we do not do something now, we will need to do a good deal more in the future.

From listening to the Prime Minister, I thought she made it sound as though many people who at an earlier time could not get a job are now employed and, as before, everything is rosy. That, again, is far from the truth. The minimum wage in this country is far too low.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: We have increased it by 39 percent in 5 years. It’s quite good.

The Minister tells us that there has been an increase. I can say to members that at $9—or at $9.50 an hour, is it; it went up just at Christmas time—the minimum wage is not enough. Electricity prices in the last 2 years have gone up by 40 percent. Petrol has gone up by goodness knows what percentage and will go up even more come April, or shortly after April. National says that Australians earn a lot more than New Zealanders, but National would not do anything about the minimum wage. It did not support the minimum wage going up. National would not support penal rates for people who work on a statutory holiday, and it did not support the provision for 4 weeks’ annual holiday. National does support that now, but it did not at the time of the legislation going through the House. I say that this Government has lost sight of its core support base—that is, the working people of New Zealand. By “working people” I mean low-paid employees, the people who work with their hands and hearts and who are the backbone of this country. I know that my good colleague from United Future will correct me if I do not acknowledge this, but I am also talking about employers in small businesses as being working people.

The Prime Minister did not say anything about the energy crisis we face in this country. We are desperately in need of more power coming on board on a regular basis. We are getting it bit by bit, but it is not enough. Electricity should be available to all who need it at the flick of a switch, and we should be generating it from all forms of fuel. By that I mean hydro, gas, wind, and solar generation, the use of fuel-cell technology, and, of course, generation from coal. This country sits on billions of tonnes of coal, yet coal generates only something like 5 or 6 percent of our electricity. We sit on billions of tonnes and export millions of tonnes of coal, but we will not use coal to generate electricity for our own well-being. I know there are problems with the environment in relation to coal, but if it is being used elsewhere in the world while we are waiting for the new technology to come on board, then we should be using it here to a better degree than we are at the moment.

An energy policy should guarantee security of supply. The Electricity Commission goes some way towards ensuring that. An energy policy should encourage further investment in the electricity industry in order to produce more and more electricity on an annual basis. The Government has shown little initiative—I have to give it credit for showing a little initiative—along those lines, but it is not enough to ensure that we will have further investment in the industry in any meaningful way. We should ensure that electricity is produced and supplied at a fair and reasonable price. The people of this country need to have a decent, sound energy policy. We have been mucking around for far too many years now and, as I stated earlier, we have seen 40 percent price hikes over the last 2 years. That figure is taken across the country; in some areas it is a good deal higher that that.

The Prime Minister did not mention in any meaningful way the problems we face with regard to our roading. She touched on the subject of infrastructure expenditure, but she did not actually get to the core of the problem. She stated that land transport has been underfunded for years, and that is about as far as she really got in addressing the problem. Her statement is true. Government after Government has failed to inject the right amount of capital into land transport, and particularly into public transport and roading. Land transport over recent history—and I am going back several years now; far more than I can remember—has been funded under a “pay as you go” – type regime. New Zealand First says that that is not good enough. Nobody would run a business like that. Roading in this country is valued at about $27 or $28 billion, and nobody would run a business with that sort of asset on a “pay as you go” basis. We should be borrowing in order to pay for future infrastructure development in areas like roading and those sorts of things. The expenditure is intergenerational. I see that the Hon Harry Duynhoven—the man who should be Minister of Transport—is sort of nodding his head. He knows that the economic gains to be made from having a properly structured roading network right throughout the country would be huge. We know from the Allen report that if we borrowed the money, injected it, and got on with doing the job, not only would we repay the money and the interest on it but we would gain economically very, very rapidly.

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: So where are we going to get all the workers from to do that?

The honourable member makes a good point; it is a point that must be considered. We need people who are able to do that work. Right now we cannot get more skilled people than we already have, so we will probably—and this is a sad testimony on previous policies—have to bring in people as immigrants to work as prison officers and construction workers. New Zealand First has always said that if we need people, we should bring them in. We have also always said that if we do not need people, we do not want them to be here. They should come here for a job. The number of people who are skilled to drive machinery on roading projects is probably getting to a low ebb, but—[Interruption] I cannot answer both members at the same time, so maybe they should talk to me privately and I will give them all the answers.

One further problem we have is that we are now getting rid of the frigate Canterbury, which is a training vessel for officers in the Navy.

Is there to be a replacement for the role of that frigate? I would like to know the answer to that.

New Zealanders have a lot to be proud of, and have every reason to be confident about our future as a country. There was 4.6 percent economic growth for the year to September 2004, and more than a quarter of a million new jobs were added to our economy over the last 5 years. Our present crime rate is the lowest in 21 years. In the past 5 years the number of people supported by benefits has dropped by over 100,000—a drop of 23 percent. Our Working for Families package has put significant levels of extra dollars into the pockets of families who need that help. There are nearly 7,000 Modern Apprentices and more than 126,000 people in industry training, and there have been significant boosts to funding in both health and education. New Zealanders in the provinces and in our cities want our country to be a confident, proud nation where people want to live, work, raise their children, and invest.

This year New Zealanders have the opportunity once again to determine our future path as a nation—whether we will continue to invest in our infrastructure, services, and people, or whether we will turn back the clock to the tired and failed old policies of the tired and failed old leader of the National Party, Don Brash. Some people may not remember the 1990s, but with every speech from the current National leader those memories come flooding back. His policies—a term that I admit is very generous to use in this case—would stifle growth, and that is reminiscent of Don Brash’s days as the Governor of the Reserve Bank. They would reduce the opportunities for jobs to be created, and would cause division and tension in our country.

I am privileged to be part of the Labour-Progressive Government, which rejects Don Brash’s policies and which offers a strong track record and a vision for the future. It is a future where families are well supported in secure and affordable homes, and where our young people can attend their local schools, be taught by appropriately trained and valued teachers, and leave school and move into accessible and affordable tertiary education, into an apprenticeship, or into a job. It is a nation where our work environment values the workforce as a critical factor to success. That is one of the reasons why our productivity work is so exciting. That work recognises the potential expansion of our economy by tapping into the potential of our existing staff and by changing the nature of our workplaces, in order to make them more attractive to New Zealanders who are currently not in paid work. Our unions and business leaders are committed and valued partners in that productivity work. What a contrast that is to the days of the 1990s, when the previous National Government was in power. It entrenched division between employers and unions, causing significant amounts of industrial unrest, and the words “committed” and “valued” just were not part of the language.

Do members remember the first Act that was repealed under the National Government in the 1990s? It was the pay and employment equity legislation. What a message to women in New Zealand that was. It was followed by the “mother of all Budgets” and by benefit cuts—although I have to say that Jenny Shipley appears to have been comparatively generous when we look at the current National social welfare spokesperson, Judith Collins. That was then followed by years of punitive, divisive, and, frankly, mean policy. The benefit cuts, the superannuation cuts, the Employment Contracts Act, and State housing sales—every policy and piece of legislation was, as is the case with every muttering from National’s current leader, punitive and divisive.

It is clear that the policies of the National Party have not changed. Mr Brash’s speech at Rātana recently was quite offensive to many Māori. He made implications of welfare dependency, but his figures were then discovered not even to be accurate. National’s former leader, Bill English, would never have given a speech in which he had relied on someone else; he knows the value of having good figures. One would think that a former Governor of the Reserve Bank would at least have added up the figures enough to make sure that he was speaking facts when he went to Rātana to insult the people who were hosting him.

Many women in New Zealand want to have the chance to be in a paid job, in order to contribute their skills and to get both satisfaction and income. Frankly, our economy needs to have their contribution. The Government’s policies of supporting substantial investment in childcare, and of introducing and recently extending paid parental leave, its commitment to pay and employment equity, and its support of out-of-school care programmes reflect how the Labour-led Government supports women in that role. The same goes for disabled people. When our Government was elected in 1999, the vocational services sector was despondent. The sector was weak, under-resourced, and unable to support disabled people into training and employment. There was the disgraceful treatment of 21-year-olds, who were told at the end of each school term whether their funding would continue for the following term. We can imagine how that felt for those families, not knowing from one term to the next whether their son or daughter would have enough funding to continue with his or her schooling, and having no options at all available for that young person’s vocational service. After 5 years of working in partnership with the sector, we now have well-trained and well-supported staff. We have good governance structures in their organisations, and there are now significantly more opportunities for disabled New Zealanders to get into training and work—to get paid work, which has been denied to them for so long. That is the way to move people from a benefit into a job.

The way to ensure that the gap that exists between a person on a benefit and one in a paid job is made smaller or eliminated completely is by looking at the individual, asking what the barrier is that stops that person from getting a job, and actively working with the person to remove it, rather than by portraying people on benefits as bludgers or as people who, as Steve Maharey quoted from the current National social welfare spokesperson, spend all their day ignoring their children and indulging in smoking dope.

Those are not the beneficiaries that I work with. Those people want to have the opportunity to work, and we will ensure that those opportunities are given to them.

The choice this year is very clear for New Zealanders. Our Government is working with and for our country, and we are getting results. We are building a stronger future for all New Zealanders to take part in our nation’s activities. The National Party is offering us failed and divisive policies of the past. As is the case with National’s current leader, those policies will take us nowhere. New Zealand is a great country. It is a privilege to be part of a Government that knows we have so much to be proud of and that encourages people to enjoy our great nation.

That Minister, Ruth Dyson, for all her political experience, had one of her major decisions of last year overturned by the National candidate for East Coast, Anne Tolley. Despite the fact that the Minister has hundreds of bureaucrats, she flaked in front of a little bit of pressure from a National candidate from the East Coast.

💬 Jill Pettis: Why wasn’t she higher on the list? Oh, that’s right, she’s a woman.

It is market day, is it? [Interruption]

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): There is to be no interjection between individuals who do not have the floor.

Last year at this time, the Prime Minister spent some time before her address telling the media that she did not want to do it, that she did it only because she had to, that it was boring, and that because she gave it to the Opposition it was easily attacked. This year she changed her story. This year was the opportunity to present a vision. The problem is that she did not change the speech. It was pretty much the same one—yesterday’s clichés dressed up in tomorrow’s spending.

💬 John Key: Plagiarising her own speech.

She plagiarised her own speech, and that should be banned. As Dr Brash said, her speech smacked of the view that every solution is a Government solution, and that every answer has to be the answer that Ministers and the Labour Government come up with. I noticed how often the Prime Minister tried to emulate Martin Luther King. We had a somewhat smaller crowd, and I have to say that it was to somewhat less effect. I think she mentioned the word “dream” six times in the first three pages.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: No good without a tambourine.

It was no good without a tambourine. The Prime Minister is now going on a “dream” trip. I would have to say that when it comes to education, she is retreating into dreams because the reality is getting so messy.

Education used to be the centrepiece of Labour’s economic strategy. If we go back through the Budgets from 2000, 2001, and 2002 they talked extensively about just how important the high-minded tertiary education strategy was, about how the Government was going to make dramatic changes to schooling, essentially because of Labour’s moral superiority on this issue, and all of it was focused on increasing skills and productivity. Today the Prime Minister was saying pretty much the same things about productivity, but she certainly did not point to the central importance of education.

I want to talk a bit about why that is. One of Labour’s dreams has been free State education, and if there is any man who is meant to believe in free State education, it is the new Associate Minister for schools, David Benson-Pope, whose previous responsibility was for fish. That seems to have qualified him to be now responsible for children. That is the man who, when he became an Associate Minister of Education, was interviewed by the media because they wanted to know what it was that drove his passion about education. He said: “There are no issues on the table.”

💬 Opposition Members: What!

Well, he might be right. They are not on the table, but, man, they are on the front page of yesterday’s New Zealand Herald! The headline reads: “Parents’ school fee burden”. Why does that matter? It matters because it tells us of the yawning chasm between Labour’s dreams and what happens when it tries to implement a policy. The paper has an excellent example of “free” State education. The table in the New Zealand Herald outlines what fees parents are asked to pay. When we look down the list we cannot tell the difference between fee-charging integrated schools and no-fee State schools. What does the Associate Minister say about this? Mr Benson-Pope says—actually he whines—that free education is enshrined in law and therefore it is free, so it is wrong to claim otherwise. He said that free education is enshrined in law, and therefore this does not exist—these parents are not paying these fees. Labour still believes in free State education.

That is the dream the Prime Minister has, and she sent her little Brownshirt bovver boy off to the media to pretend that the dream is happening. But it is not. For parents it is a nightmare.

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I hesitate to interrupt the member’s speech, but I do not think that that was appropriate language to be used in Parliament. The connotations of “Brownshirt” are fairly well known and not really acceptable in any sort of democratic Parliament.

Speaking to the point of order, I am advised through the media that “Brownshirt” is a term the Labour caucus has affectionately used for the Associate Minister. So if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for Parliament.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I must say I had reflected on the term the member used, and I would ask him to withdraw.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: There are all sorts of things that could be said in this Parliament in a way that someone might take offence to, and you would require the person to withdraw. If that were to become the norm, it would be a very simple matter for any member to decide that he or she was going to disrupt the proceedings on any given day, by simply waiting for the description to come from one member or another, and that would give the person an opportunity to engage in that disruptive behaviour. I think you have to be very, very careful about ruling in this way. It is well known that your caucus colleagues refer to Mr Benson-Pope in this way, and for Mr English to simply refer to a person having someone else operate on his behalf surely cannot be as offensive as all that.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I thank the member for his explanation. I myself am not aware of the term in that respect. I had thought seriously about pulling Mr English up at the time, but I tested the will of the House and did not do so. The reality is that exception has been taken and, on reflection, I ask the member to withdraw.

I withdraw.

💬 Gerry Brownlee: Probably brown trousers now.

Well, that is how the Minister will be feeling, because he has discovered there are issues. When he said there were no issues in education, what he actually meant was that there were no issues for him and the New Zealand Educational Institute. That is what he meant. There may be issues for parents and students, but they do not count. They are not issues.

Labour was going to close the gap on underachievement. The Minister says there are no issues. We have Third World achievement levels in literacy and numeracy in our schools—that is, for the bottom 20 percent of our students. There is no sign that that gap is closing and no sign it ever will, certainly from a Minister who says there are no issues in education. Imagine if one is a student—is the National Certificate of Educational Achievement not likely to be an issue?

The new Minister is completely ignoring what is going on with that qualification. The problem is that it depends on public confidence, not on the theological beliefs of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority or how robustly the Minister thinks he should defend it at all costs. I tell the Minister that that pool of public confidence is draining away and if he does nothing, the students will be left stranded. We know it is draining away, because his own public agency—the New Zealand Qualifications Authority—has done a survey that shows exactly that.

While it is draining away, the Minister is sunning himself beside the pool, bathing in self-congratulation and chosen ignorance of any issues in education. It is a disgrace. That is why the Prime Minister did not mention education much at all in her speech. Because she has put a second-rate halfwitted politician in charge of it, who is too clever for his own good, that shows that the Government is not taking our school students and their parents seriously. The Government will pay a price for that in election year. The Minister’s attitude towards underachievement is an absolute disgrace.

But this is just part of a track record. For two or three Budgets we heard all about the tertiary education strategy, hatched up by the most brilliant second-rate lecturers who left university because they could not make it, and came into politics, but it was the revenge of the middle management. They were going to run the universities the way they should be run! It has been a total failure, and that is why Steve Maharey got sacked. It was so bad that in a good-news speech today the Prime Minister even mentioned the bad news about tertiary education. The bad news is that for the expenditure of billions of dollars and millions of words, and half a million workshops and conferences and seminars, the tertiary strategy has absolutely and utterly failed. It was the centrepiece of the drive for productivity and it has turned into a quagmire of failed, low-quality courses that no one completes, but that cost literally billions—a number so big that people cannot get their heads around it.

That is why we cannot take the Prime Minister’s address seriously. Because for all the dreaming, the track record in education, which is meant to be Labour’s moral, practical, and policy strong point is dismal; it is a failure. They have underlined that by sacking their tertiary spokesman, by sacking their school spokesman, Trevor Mallard, moving a second-rate “Minister of Fish” in to take his position, and leaving Steve Maharey in welfare, where more dreaming about a single benefit will come to the same dreaded end as the tertiary strategy. I look forward to the education debate in election year, because Labour is losing it. Labour is losing the education debate, and it is on all the things one would expect it to lose it—that is: waste, incompetence, over-centralisation, no faith in parents, little faith in teachers, and not a care in the world for students. The new Associate Minister summed it up: Labour believes there are no issues in education. The Opposition believes it is the biggest issue for New Zealand.

That sad, flat little speech was from the National Party’s once—and he hopes future—king. Bill English has been wandering around, looking not for a sword in a stone—because he does not have the strength to pull out a sword—but for a dagger. He is looking for a dagger to be put in the backs of Don Brash and Gerry Brownlee. Bill English is hoping that he will be the whale rider who comes into Government on their backs. All I can say is that that pathetic little man was a Minister of Finance when a National Government closed 360 schools, refused to pay teachers and resource schools properly, slashed apprenticeships and destroyed them, and proudly talked about loser and winner schools. And what was National going to do with the kids who were at the loser schools? That was left again to the Labour Government, which believes that every New Zealander has an important part to play in this country. Every New Zealander is vital to the future of this country. The talents, the energy, the hopes, and the optimism of every New Zealander matter. I am proud to be part of a Government that will work so that every New Zealander shares a vision of a country that includes all of our energies—a country with energy, hope, and optimism.

What do we have from the National Party? We have a bunch of myopic, backward-looking, mean-minded, divisive, pathetic little people who are so frightened that they cannot even cope with free speech in their own caucus. Whom do they sack? They sack the women who have the guts to stand up for policies that they believe are good for New Zealanders—mothers who have children and who stay home and look after them. What happened to Georgina te Heuheu when the vicious, mean-minded attack on Māori New Zealanders was made in the Ōrewa speech last year? She was sacked. What happened this year to Katherine Rich, who was one of the few women on the Opposition side of the House who was prepared to stand up for working mothers? And mothers are working mothers, whether they go out to work or whether they stay at home and look after their children. Katherine Rich was sacked. The member talked about Anne Tolley. Where is she? She was here but she was sacked by the National Party, along with Belinda Vernon, the only transport spokesperson National has ever had who gave a darn about Auckland. Where is Annabel Young? She was sacked. Kathy O’Regan was sacked. Jenny Shipley was knifed in the back, and then sacked. So what do we have in the National Party? We have mean-minded little men who stand up and say that this Government is not doing its job because we have not fixed all the problems that they have caused in the last 30 years.

I am proud to be part of Helen Clark’s Government, and to be part of a Government that talks about economic growth. I am really proud to be an Aucklander. For the first time in 25 years we are seeing real economic growth in Auckland. Auckland has been a burden on the rest of New Zealand, because of the under-investment in infrastructure and the under-investment in allowing Auckland to do the job of serving as New Zealand’s only international city. Last year, for the first time in 25 years, we had 4.6 percent growth in Auckland. I am proud to be part of the Government that has caused that, and I want to see the benefits of that flow back from Auckland and this country to every New Zealander. I am proud to be part of a Government that has the lowest crime rate we have ever had. I do not have to go to my clinic every week and hear pathetic, sad, tragic stories from my constituents who have been robbed in their homes, because they are no longer being robbed in their homes. The police have gone out and caught the recidivist burglars. They have also got the young people who are in trouble. They are looking at alternative programmes, and are putting people who break the law into prison and keeping them there.

I am proud to be part of a Government that has created more than a quarter of a million jobs in this economy since 1999, when the visionless, hopeless previous National Government went the way that it should have gone many years before. I am proud to be part of a Government that has seen more than 7,000 people in Modern Apprenticeships and more than 126,000 people in industry training. I am proud to be part of a Government that is seeing the social infrastructure, the physical infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, and the transport infrastructure be put in place so that the innovation and creativity of New Zealanders, and the partnerships that they are forming, can result in real jobs, better incomes, better security, and a place for every New Zealander in society, in communities, and in the economy. I am really proud to be part of the Labour Government, because when I look at the members on the other side of the House I see a pathetic attack. Apparently mothers are bad, particularly mothers who stay home and look after their children. The National Party says that women should not look after their own children, should put up with violence and abuse, and should miss out on education. It also says that a National Government would have tax cuts for the rich, but then it talks about under-funding in things like health and education. I would love to spend more on health and education, but I cannot see how that could happen under National’s policy of spending over $1.7 billion on tax cuts for the wealthy, which would give nothing to anyone earning under $38,000.

What do we have? We have a Labour Government that is working in partnership with New Zealand, with local government, with business, with the community, and with the non-government sector. We are working together to find solutions to the problems of this country. The choice is absolutely stark. We talk about creativity on the Government side of the House. The National members say that they would cut funding for New Zealand films and New Zealand jobs in innovation—high-tech jobs and jobs in information technology; jobs in all those areas. A National Government would slash the money that goes into New Zealand music. Fifty thousand young New Zealanders turned up to the Big Day Out. Which party was the only party represented there? It was the Labour Party. Steve Maharey, Moana Mackey, and Darren Hughes were there, and I was there, with my earplugs. It was great music and great people having a fantastic day out.

What is really great is to have all the jobs. Jobs in the arts are real jobs, and I am thrilled that under a voluntary quota system we have gone from less than 3 percent of the music played on air in 1998 under a National Government being New Zealand music to that being over 18.6 percent of the music on the playlists in 2004—and it is going to get better. We have seen great programmes in film and television. National members sneer about the Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment programme, which we launched in 2001. Last year there were over 2,200 placements into paid employment from the Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment membership group. It is not work for the dole and it is not a special deal for artists; it just recognises that creative Kiwis need to be given a chance.

I am really proud of what this Government has done in Auckland, and I am particularly proud of what we have done in transport. We are investing in Auckland—not in roads for Auckland alone, but we are building New Zealand’s international transport hub. We are putting in more than $1.6 billion over the next 10 years. We already have $390 million committed for the Auckland ring route—State Highway 20. We are building $356 million worth of new highways at “Spaghetti Junction”. Somebody actually rang me and said that the transport problem is already better than it was. There are two new lanes on the Auckland motorway. We have the Grafton Gully project, the Greenhithe Bridge and deviation, and the Puhinui interchange. Massive new money has been put into railways, into public transport and buses, and into traffic management. I am proud to see that we now have a 10-year plan for transport. We have funding next to that, and we have a training programme that means that people who have been on benefits and who want to upgrade their jobs are getting real jobs in the New Zealand construction industry. That work will go on unless a National Government is re-elected. We should look back to 1975, when Sir Dove-Myer Robinson’s light rail scheme had been agreed to by a Labour Government. Who cut that scheme? It was National. Don Brash says that he would cut the petrol tax, but that he would build roads. I do not know how he would do that, because we have had enough trouble in finding the money. We are really committed to making Auckland work and to making New Zealand work for every New Zealander. I am proud to be a New Zealander and to be part of this Government.

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

I rise for the ACT party in this debate, having listened carefully to the Prime Minister outlining her plans for this year and gloating about her achievements, or the Labour Party’s achievements. As she was speaking, I was thinking of how I felt at around 20 past 6 this morning at the top of Mount Victoria, where a friend and I ride many mornings. It was a beautiful, still morning, and the city was just waking all around when we were up at the lookout. We could see a panorama of Wellington with the sun coming across. I thought of all the people in the city who can live there today knowing that none need be hungry, none need go without shelter, and none need go unclothed. That has been the state in this country for many, many years.

But right in front of us was a panorama of a different sort—a noticeboard set up for visitors to Wellington and Wellingtonians to identify the things we were looking at. In other words, like the Byrd Memorial up there, it was something intended to add to the lookout as a place of beauty. Like the Byrd Memorial, it showed just where this country has really gone. That noticeboard was completely trashed. Some time the night before—I had seen it the previous morning—someone had come and left his or her signature all over it in spray paint. I suspect, because of what it is, that it will have to be replaced, which will take quite a time to do. Someone had also stuck a steel pipe through the bars that now protect the Byrd Memorial and tried to shatter some of the tiles.

This may seem just a triviality. We are all so familiar with this kind of mindless vandalism, with this kind of destruction, that it may seem that I am not addressing something very important or worth raising in a debate of this nature, but I heard the Prime Minister telling us that crime was dropping. What the Prime Minister did not say was that the amount of reported crime had reduced, and that this Government had declined to take part in the only survey that is internationally recognised as the measure of real crime rates—namely, the International Crime Victim Survey, in which 17 developed Western countries participate and which is run on their behalf by the Dutch Government. This Government instead ran its own survey, at a cost of $1 million, and then took a year and a half to edit the figures before it let them out.

We know that the incidence of crime is not falling. We know it because the number of crimes that really matter—the crimes of violence and crimes of intrusion—according to the Government’s own explanations for increasing prison populations, are not falling. If anything, in relation to youth justice—the best indicator of where our future lies—our crimes are getting worse. The number reported or recorded may be falling, but of the 35,000 to 40,000 apprehensions by the police in the youth justice area, only around 2,000 are going through a formal process. It is pretty easy to monkey with the figures when all they are recording is the number of offenders the police have actually decided to charge and put through a formal process.

This is serious for another reason. It is a shame that family group conferences tell young offenders three, four, five, nine, or 10 times that they can get up to 10 second chances. Family group conferences could seem funny, if it were not for some of the more serious offending. In the past month, as Rodney Hide explained to the Prime Minister, we have had nine homicides, and that is stretching the police. When Rodney Hide was born, we had nine in a year.

Among the nine homicides last month was an elderly woman in Marton, who had led a blameless life as far as we can tell but who was tortured and murdered. Just 40 kilometres up the road, a young woman on the morning of her 20th birthday was left bashed and naked, and it appears that more than one person knows something about that. We will probably find, on the odds, when the offenders are eventually caught, that they are repeat offenders who have been through a justice system that has taught them that crime pays and that the community does not really mean what it says. We see it publicly and privately.

It does not just concern youth. This month we saw that Te Kaha, on his way to delivering half a tonne of pāua, was caught for being in possession of 100 kilograms. Anyone who knows about catching and using shelled, shucked pāua knows that 100 kilos of shelled pāua is a lot of pāua. On a charge for which he could have received 5 years in jail or a $250,000 fine, he was told to go off and do some drug and alcohol counselling, or perhaps some carving. This is what Corrections says it will do: it will put him in front of young people as a model, as someone they should copy.

Is that a punishment? Is that a price for the crime? He probably could not ask for anything he would rather do. [Interruption] I am glad Dover Samuels is expressing his disgust at that. I am glad Mita Ririnui is joining in with interjections. [Interruption] I do not know which side they are on—the member is correct—but I assume they are disgusted.

What sorts of men are they in the Labour Party when they allow their Prime Minister to deliver a speech claiming victory, in essence, in the crime war, when we have just watched this travesty of justice? The broken windows principle is very clear: small crime does matter. It is all about getting on top of the environment. That crime pays, that the police cannot handle it, that the courts will turn a blind eye, that any feeble excuse will be accepted, and that the parole system will let offenders out when they get in, are the perceptions that create serious crime. The New York murder rate did not drop from 49 per 100,000 to seven per 100,000 because the authorities focused on murder; it dropped because they focused on small offences.

So the relatives of Tania McKenzie and Mona Morriss have the Labour Government to thank for the climate we live in that says crime pays. No Minister has fronted up and responded to the call by the Mayor of Marton for the death penalty. We can understand that call. What an outrage that someone can do that to an old lady and not expect the public to want the death penalty debated!

We have had no leadership on that from the Minister, and we have had no leadership from any Minister on Tame Iti. There was Tame Iti brandishing a shotgun in public, threatening judicial officers—the members of the Waitangi Tribunal—and gloating the next day on Morning Report about having got his message across—and he was not arrested. The Arms Act has three separate offences designed for that, punishable by 4 years and 3 years in prison respectively—possessing, carrying, or brandishing a weapon with no lawful excuse. Tame Iti set out to do precisely what the Arms Act says one cannot do, which is to threaten. Section 202A of the Crimes Act has another offence that incurs 2 years in prison for that.

But the Government would rather send the message that for a crony of the Government the law does not apply. The Government is perfectly happy for New Zealanders to see that might is right, that cheats do prosper, and that the police are scared. That is the message that has come out here.

Just think—in October, 4 months ago, one deluded, foolish, inoffensive, peaceful demonstrator for the National Front was arrested, charged, and convicted because he had a knife in his car, after his car had been trashed by people who did not like him demonstrating. That demonstrator was arrested for his knife; Tame Iti was encouraged to take his shotgun to politics.

I am a member of the Government and I agree that Tame Iti should have been prosecuted for brandishing a shotgun. I think many members of the Government would also agree. But the day that the Government makes individual decisions as to who should be prosecuted—whether it be to prosecute Shane Ardern for driving a tractor up the steps of Parliament, or whether Tame Iti should be prosecuted for what he did the other day—is the day that I will resign from this Parliament because those decisions should be made by the police, not by politicians. The reality that Mr Franks does not like is that the crime rate per head of population is dropping. Rates of violent crime remain problematic, but they are dropping in some of the previously worst-affected areas, such as parts of Auckland. But I will not focus too much on that because it does not warrant it.

💬 Rodney Hide: No, that’s right.

No, it is not right that it does not warrant attention, but I will not be diverted by the ACT party’s agenda because the more important agenda here is the economic strength of this country and the reversal of the slide in New Zealand’s fortune in prior decades. We should not forget that in 1980 New Zealand was positioned at No. 18 on the international GDP per capita rankings and Australia was at No. 10. We hear complaints that the gap that has since arisen between the fortunes of New Zealand and Australia is the fault, allegedly, of this Government. Yet the decade of Labour governance in the 1980s saw New Zealand go back one place in those rankings, while Australia went back six—from No. 10 to No. 16. So during the decade of the Labour administration, New Zealand fared better than Australia. During the 1990s—the decade of National and the policies that are still promoted by National and ACT—New Zealand dropped from No. 19 to No. 20, while Australia advanced four positions, from No. 16 to No. 12. That was the decade during which Australia got a jump on New Zealand, and it was the decade of National administration, and austerity visited upon this country by Dr Brash in his then role as Governor of the Reserve Bank.

We should not forget that between 1986 and 1999, 50 percent of New Zealand families went backwards in their net incomes, the next 30 percent stayed static, or rose a little, and all the gains were effectively concentrated amongst the top 20 percent of New Zealanders. So National and ACT should not cry crocodile tears when they complain about the position of New Zealand workers, because their position compared with Australian workers developed during the 1990s when National and ACT policies were at their height.

Since this Government has been in power, 200,000 jobs have been created and the number of beneficiaries has decreased by 100,000. The latest complaint is that wages have not gone up enough. I asked the Parliamentary Library to look at this. In 1999, the total compensation of employees in New Zealand was $44.7 billion. Since then, to the year ended March 2004—and it will have gone up in the year since—the compensation paid to employees had increased by 31.7 percent, to $58.9 billion—close enough to $59 billion. That increase is in part because we have 200,000 extra people in jobs and 100,000 fewer beneficiaries.

We have heard talk in the last 2 weeks from Dr Brash, at Ōrewa and since, claiming that the benefit load on the New Zealand tax system is terrible. The news for him is that the proportion of money spent on beneficiaries, as a proportion of the total amount earned in wages and salaries, has also dropped very significantly over that same period. In 1999, the amount paid to beneficiaries—excluding superannuitants—equated to 17 percent of the amount earned by those in paid employment. That figure has dropped by close to 20 percent in the succeeding 5 years, to 14 percent of the amount paid to employees.

So, far from social welfare becoming more of a problem during the tenure of this Government, it is absolutely clear that the situation is getting better. National members know that and that is why Katherine Rich is so dismayed at the extremism of Dr Brash’s policy that is so favoured by ACT and Rodney Hide—a friend of Dr Brash, whom he holidays with—but is so opposed by the middle-range and less extreme members of the National Party that it led to the demise of yet another woman member of the National Party. Last year it was Georgina te Heuheu and this year it is Katherine Rich, who is a moderate in National. At least she had the courage to stand up for her principles. It obviously shows that Dr Brash does not communicate with his caucus. He is used to sitting in his ivory tower, in charge of the Reserve Bank, and looking down on people but not communicating with them. I am sure that if there had been a problem and that had been addressed to Katherine Rich, or if she had been properly consulted on the content of his speech, they may well have been able to work through their differences.

But that is not Dr Brash’s style. He pushed on with his rigour and showed that the extremism of his policies in a way that, for someone as senior and as knowledgable on these issues as Katherine Rich, was too extreme for her. She expressed her viewpoint and she was dumped. So we are now in the position where there are no senior National Party women members. It is left with one spokeswoman of some seniority—Judith Collins. Of course, she showed her colours to New Zealand women when last year she tried to wind back the rights that New Zealand women had achieved over recent decades to access abortions. She tried to make that more difficult for younger women.

In addition to creating 200,000 extra jobs and having 100,000 fewer beneficiaries, the Government has also done a good job of managing the total Government book by reducing Government debt as a proportion of GDP. When this Government took office, debt to GDP stood at about 35 percent of GDP. That has reduced to 25 percent of GDP. In fact, it is quite a bit lower than that now. I think it is sitting at around 22 percent of GDP, which is a very prudent figure. The suggestion from ACT that we have a $6 billion surplus to spend is ludicrous. If we were to spend an extra $6 billion a year, New Zealand’s debt would rapidly escalate again and we would go back to the days that were visited upon us by Muldoon and the National Government. ACT and National would take us back there by cutting taxes in a way that, they say, would use the $6 billion surplus. That would then result in Crown debt increasing. We would head back up the debt scale and go back to the days when $1 in $5 of all tax collected was used to pay interest. We now have the situation where only $1 in $20 of taxes collected goes on interest.

Another thing that the Government has signalled for this year, and I agree that it is very important, is a move to encourage more saving for retirement. We already have the pre-funding of Government superannuation, to make Government superannuation at its level sustainable into the future. This is the so-called “Cullen fund”. It is interesting that the National Party, having railed against that for many years, now agrees it is a good idea.

New Zealand First, to its credit, has always approved of it and supported it, and I thank it for that. National has had a road to Damascus experience, and now approves of it. None the less, the amount people receive in superannuation is less than required for the standard of living that many aspire to. If people want a higher standard of living in their retirement, then they have to save more. That is important for New Zealand, for another reason. If we have a good savings base in New Zealand we are less susceptible to takeover of our profitable companies by foreign owners, because there is competition for the purchase of those assets by New Zealand companies, funded by New Zealand savings vehicles.

The Government has signalled that this year we will see more moves to encourage private sector savings, which I believe is very important. Through that, together with the prudent stewardship of the economy in terms of our gross debt levels, while at the same time improving our infrastructure, I think we will have a very positive decade ahead of us.

In the run-up to the Prime Minister’s statement to Parliament this afternoon, media reports once again led me—and quite a few others, I believe—to expect that we were finally going to be informed of the Government’s intentions with regard to major reform of our social security law through a universal benefit, among other things. However, as has happened over and over again in the last 4 or 5 years, the reality of today’s pronouncement has proved somewhat anticlimactic. Once again, we are told by the Prime Minister that “reforms to the whole structure of the benefit system” will take place, but at a time yet to be advised and of a nature that remains clouded in mystery.

Thus, we still do not know, after some 5 years, what the Government is actually planning and how it will impact on the reality of beneficiaries’ lives, or how it will differ from some of the proposals emanating, for example, from ACT’s welfare spokesperson, Muriel Newman, who also advocates for a single benefit. Although the Green Party certainly supports simplification of the welfare system and the creation of a single base benefit, with a second tier for disability, dependants, and so on, we are also quite apprehensive about the possibility that the reform Labour is talking about may actually mean a benefit cut for some people. We will certainly be opposing any universal benefit, unless it is established at a level that makes people better off, rather than worse off, than they are now. Twenty years of structural unemployment and a still-growing gap now between rich and poor in this country will not be resolved until and unless we have a Government willing to take steps that help lift all children and adults out of hopeless poverty, not just some of them.

This brings me to the second part of the Prime Minister’s very limited statement concerning welfare, that these reforms “will make case management of clients back into work the essential focus”. This only serves to accentuate all that Labour and National have in common when it comes to their attitude towards welfare and beneficiaries. While Labour is undoubtedly more progressive and compassionate in its overall approach to people on benefits, it is clear that Steve Maharey and his colleagues are playing both ends against the middle in trying to undercut National by playing to those voters who like nothing more than a political campaign that demonises beneficiaries. Helen Clark’s talk of increased case management into work sounds suspiciously like National’s Work First policy. Even Labour does not seem to recognise that some people, through illness or injury, or through the fact that they are responsible for caring for children on their own, simply should not be harassed into thinking paid employment is the only, or the best, option for them, if they are to be considered valid citizens of this country.

I thought Tom Scott’s cartoon in today’s Dominion Post was quite brilliant. It shows a woman slaving over the kitchen sink with a baby and toddler at her feet, amidst the sort of glorious domestic mess those of us who bring up children know all too well. The headline of the newspaper on her couch reads: “PM wants more women working”. Indeed, Labour does want more women working, but at what price will this happen? And why does the sheer hard work of bearing and raising children not count?

Like National, Labour continues to support systemic economic discrimination against the children of beneficiary parents through its Working For Families package, which perpetuates the system by which families, where one parent is in the paid workforce, automatically get more State assistance than a beneficiary family. Like Don Brash, Labour seems to think that we should do more to punish sole parents, even to the extent that Steve Maharey and Dr Brash are now in a bidding war over how much the penalties should be for mothers who cannot, or will not, name the father of their child.

Overall, Labour continues to say that sole parents should have as their primary goal in life a return to the workforce as soon as possible. This totally neglects the reality that bringing up children well is a full-time job, and traditionally has been for many parents. This neglects the fact that all children in all family circumstances are different, and that while a beneficiary family may be better off financially by going back to work, it may not be better off emotionally or physically. A stressed, unhappy mother trying to balance the demands of her children and herself with those of an employer who does not necessarily have much, or any, recognition of her personal needs, can only make a difficult family situation worse. This can become even harder when children have particular problems with physical or mental illness, injury, or intellectual impairment. Above all, this attitude—that paid work must come first—also flies in the face of a simple, human reality: that the job of looking after babies and children, and creating a loving, nurturing environment for them to grow up in is work, and should not be systemically denigrated by the State.

All this is not to disparage, however, the good progress that Labour is making on issues like childcare, out-of-school care, and paid parental leave. Women should have real choice, and that means the choice to enter, or stay in, the paid workforce while they have children, as well as the choice to stay at home. Progress on paid parental leave and real pay equity must continue, and I was interested in the Prime Minister’s remark about the move in the UK towards a whole year of paid parental leave. It is certainly worth noting that one of the most significant changes the Government could make towards ensuring the workforce is more attractive to women would be through increasing the minimum wage.

It is instructive to compare Dr Brash’s Ōrewa welfare proposals with Steve Maharey’s policies over the last few years. While Dr Brash is leading a disgraceful right-wing surge on welfare, Labour has nothing to crow about. For example, not only does Mr Maharey have a bill currently before the House to increase penalties against domestic purposes benefit recipients who will not, or cannot, name the child’s father, he has also proposed in the past 2 weeks that sickness and invalid beneficiaries be subject to more stringent health tests, including extending the use of accredited doctors in a scheme similar to that of the Accident Compensation Corporation. What is more, he has recently announced another plan whereby Work and Income case officers will visit the homes of all long-term unemployed beneficiaries in certain categories, without, it appears, giving them an option of alternative arrangements. This is quite reminiscent of the intrusive activities of the benefit control units.

The current dissolution of the Community Employment Group is also a disgrace at a time when Labour says it is making helping the long-term unemployed into work a priority. The Community Employment Group has 15 years of experience in working with community sector organisations, creating jobs for long-term unemployed people, especially in our more disadvantaged communities. Yet much of the Community Employment Group’s institutional knowledge and most experienced field staff are now likely to be lost, simply because Government last year caved in to an attack from the right. We are going to be left with no part of the public sector that understands, or can actively support, genuine community economic development as one of its tasks. That is an indictment of Labour’s current direction. The consequence of the Community Employment Group’s disappearance will hit home only when unemployment begins to rise again, as it inevitably will. It is the unemployed and the community sector itself that will suffer again. This is highly ironic from a Government that talks so much about understanding and supporting the third sector. Earlier than this, we also saw the Jobs Jolt initiative with its “limited employment locality” no-go zones, work testing of 55 to 59-year-olds for the first time, and the use of drug testing as a benefit enforcement tool. Unfortunately, Don Brash and Steve Maharey do seem to be engaged in something of a bidding war against the poor.

Beyond the welfare issue, the Green Party had also hoped that the Prime Minister’s statement might contain some detail about housing, and how more low and middle income people might have more of a chance of achieving homeownership in this generation. Unfortunately, like welfare, no detail seems to be forthcoming at this time. Access to decent, affordable housing is one of the biggest social and economic issues facing New Zealanders at the moment, yet no clear solutions beyond what the Government has currently put into place are yet on offer. I am looking forward to the announcement, when the Government does make it—I just wonder when it will be.

Ideally, the Green Party would have liked today’s speech to contain initiatives such as a new social security Act based on principles of sufficiency, simplicity, and equity; a universal child benefit that would not only help all families—low income ones, most of all—but also could assist with capital for home deposits; the announcement of a rise in the minimum wage to at least $12 an hour; increased resources for State and third sector social housing, where income-related rents could apply; more help for families trying to buy their first home; and a universal student allowance system. However, it is clear that these and many other measures of basic social and economic justice are not likely to happen until there is a rather more significant Green Party presence here in Parliament, and perhaps even in Government, than the one we have today.

Finally, I would like to say just a few words about National’s treatment today of Katherine Rich. While Miss Rich and I clearly reside at very different points of the political spectrum I believe she has a genuinely compassionate approach to social welfare issues and more understanding of them than many in the House. It is a real pity that her empathy and experience have been cast aside as yet another woman is treated so dismissively by her party’s current leadership.

After listening to Dr Don Brash’s opening speech in this debate, I was left with this question in my mind: why would any reasonable New Zealander vote for him or his policies? He is a man past his time, a man who lives in the past and has no future, a man whose speeches since taking office have only inflamed division and despair in this country and within his own caucus, and a man whose wedge politics agenda seeks to curry favour with New Zealanders’ baser instincts by demonising the most vulnerable.

Last year at Ōrewa it was Māori who, despite their massive gains in welfare in the last 5 years, are still, unfortunately, overrepresented amongst our unemployed and our imprisoned. This year it was that old saw—beating up again on “DPB” mums. Who will it be next year? Who will be the lucky spokesperson who decides that he or she can no longer put up with the kind of right-wing rhetoric that seems to serve for policy on the far side of the House. Perhaps we should say the increasingly far side of the House.

To support Dr Brash one would have to believe that the only reason New Zealand had 5 percent growth last year was that, once again, we were lucky—for the fifth year in a row! To support Dr Brash, one would have to believe that the only reason more Kiwis were working than ever before is that we got lucky again, and we would have to ignore the fact that it is their hard work, enterprise, courage, and enthusiasm that has got them to that level. One would have to believe that real wages have not grown, which was something that Dr Brash said, and we would have to ignore the fact that real wages have risen 10.6 percent in the last decade since 1994—that is, after taking out inflation—and that the minimum wage has risen six times under this Government, up 20.3 percent since 1994.

To support Dr Brash one would have to believe that we have done nothing but grow the Government—another contention he made. The facts are that core Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has fallen under this Government from 33 percent in 1995 to something around 29 percent currently. While the economy is growing faster, the Government is actually shrinking as a proportion of the economy, not growing as Dr Brash would have us believe. To support Dr Brash one would have to believe that we are a profligate Government frittering away the public’s hard-earned savings. But the facts are that we are saving to protect New Zealand’s future. Net Crown debt has in fact fallen from $36.8 billion in 1995 under National to only $8.7 billion currently, and we are on track to be a net creditor nation for the first time since Julius Vogel borrowed to build the railways a century ago. We will be a creditor country by 2008.

None of the foundations of Dr Brash’s speech stands up to scrutiny. They do not stand up to the facts because they are not about facts. That gentlemanly, bespectacled “Presbyterian” is actually an ageing snake-oil salesman selling one very simple recipe—division. But the public are not buying it. Members of the public are not buying it because they can see the contrast between an agenda that is narrow, hard, and selfish and one that is broad and positive under this Government.

I had the opportunity to drive through some of New Zealand’s country towns over the summer break. I was really pleased to see that a bit of new paint had been splashed around and that a few flash boutiques have opened in places like my old stomping ground of Te Kūiti and a few other little towns like that. It drove home to me the sense of optimism and positivism that is around in New Zealand at the moment. Why would any sensible Kiwi, standing on the brink of one of the best decades in our history, change the Government now? Why would they buy the age-old recipe that the other side is selling, which, in the 1990s, saw the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the hard-working middle classes miss out? It has been tried and it has failed. There is no reason to return to the failed policies of the past when New Zealand has not done this well in decades and decades.

The Prime Minister’s opening address set out some of the many things that we still have to do. We have to work smarter, not harder, by improving productivity in the workplace. We have to help Kiwis save and build wealth and assets so that they are protected in their retirement. We have to ensure more first-class education, training, and job skills so that we can add value and compete in an ever-globalising world.

We also have to provide a First World infrastructure. In the 21st century, that means an intelligent information and communications technology infrastructure with broadband to every New Zealand home, school and workplace. Fast forwarding the information and communications technology sector to the benefit of our broader economy and community is the purpose of the Digital Strategy that the Government will be unveiling and funding this year. That strategy recognises that that issue is not just a technology issue; it is a people issue. It is about having the confidence, the capability, and the content—as the Minister responsible for the National Library, my good friend and colleague Marian Hobbs has said—to ensure that Kiwis get the best use out of “life online”, that we live a truly connected lifestyle where we can live, learn, and work in ways that our parents would never have dreamt possible, and that our kids will teach us new dreams, a new way, a new sense of nationhood, and we will have a New Zealand that is as proud in virtual worlds as we are here in the physical world.

I am so optimistic when I travel around New Zealand and see a beautiful environment with every potential to be a high-tech paradise and support a high standard of living for generations to come. When we compare that future to the one that we saw a sad picture of today from the Opposition, we see that New Zealand faces a stark choice but an easy choice, and a historic choice in 2005.

Today we heard the Prime Minister talk about the need to mobilise the unused capacity in the workforce by providing incentives for mothers to place their young children in care while they go out to work. The justification was framed in interesting language for a Labour Prime Minister. Normally, talk of increased productivity, labour-force capacity, and OECD rankings is the kind of thing we expect to hear from Dr Brash. However, when we hear it from a Labour Prime Minister it kind of evokes images of the planned economies of the former Eastern bloc where people were treated as production inputs in a national drive to build a smoke-stacked society that was bigger and better than any of their neighbours.

However, both the right and the left are missing a crucial element—that is, the economy is there to serve and to sustain families, and not the reverse. Let me say it again: the economy is there to serve and to sustain families, and not the reverse. As a consequence, they both seem to ignore the fact that raising children is work. It may not be included in our GDP figures or our OECD rankings, as Marilyn Waring pointed out, and although politicians claim that the wealth of our nation is its children, the creators of that wealth do not seem to deserve economic visibility for their work.

In my opinion, raising children is the most rewarding job that an adult can have. However, in the view of the major parties it appears to be the least rewarding. Why else would Dr Brash launch an attack last week on those single women who find themselves, for some reason or another, on their own with children to feed? Because they are not only deemed to be a loss to the economy they appear to be also considered a drain on it. Dr Brash’s answer is to contract out parenting, quite literally, by adopting those children out.

Again, the Prime Minister’s drive to get mothers back into work implies that raising children is not productive, and it may even be a waste of resources compared with the need to meet national production targets. Like Dr Brash’s response, her response is also to contract out parenting, but this time to childcare providers.

This response to the skills shortage can only ever be a quick fix, because it fails to address the underlying demographic causes. A more proactive immigration policy has been tried, with the Government seeking to prioritise new migrants with job offers relevant to their skills. However, in doing so we have discovered that when it comes to taking on skilled workers the real competition does not occur between migrants wanting to settle in New Zealand but, instead, between countries in the international marketplace vying for skilled labour. In that case, New Zealand is just another player.

The alternative of persuading women back to paid work may add to the labour force in the short term, but in the long term it may have the opposite effect. In the coming decades the population dynamic will become increasingly top heavy, as those who are reliant on State support grow larger in number at the expense of those who support them through work. Couples are already delaying childbirth longer, whether due to financial pressure or a generational shift in lifestyle choices. Our birth rate has fallen to 1.9 children per family—below the replacement rate of 2.1.

The Prime Minister has argued that if we could get the level of women’s participation in the workforce up to the level of that of the top Scandinavian countries we would close the gap between the OECD average of income per capita and New Zealand’s position by a third. Perhaps the Prime Minister would be interested to know that the birth rate in Sweden is 1.5 children per family.

The Government’s current drive to provide childcare for new parents gives the implicit message that raising children is an economic disadvantage to be overcome rather than a life change to be savoured. Let us borrow a line from The Simpsons. If one can imagine, the Government’s advertisements for this scheme would begin with words such as “So you’ve ruined your life.”

I am sure there has been little discussion in Government circles of the chilling effect that these policies and the message they convey are likely to have on the growth of families. There is already significant societal pressure on women and men to return to some form of work after a child is born. Parents raising children at home already feel like second-class citizens—even more so in the case of solo parents after Dr Brash’s recent tirade.

Yet we do not know what the societal impact of the contracting out of parenting to childcare providers will be. A Ministry of Women’s Affairs report last year referred to international evidence suggesting that maternal employment had negative effects for very young children. The Prime Minister referred to the “dawn to dusk” childcare to be available in the UK, yet educators over there are concerned that extended hours of childcare will create psychological issues for children who spend up to 10 hours a day in school and who do not have breakfast or valuable after-school time with their parents. These are not vampires; these are our children. We simply do not know what the long-term impact of extended non-parental care will be on our children. Yet in trumpeting this option the Government generates the underlying message that if couples want to have children then they had better both be prepared to continue working.

United Future would argue that the role of Government is to ensure that parents have realistic choices and are in a position to decide for themselves how to configure their lives, based on what they think is best for them and their children. In some cases the parents’ decision will be to rejoin the workforce after they have had children, and the Government does and should continue to support that choice through assistance with childcare, and the like. But in other cases their decision will be to stay at home and raise their children, and the Government should support that choice with the same kind of vigour in the interests both of family and of country.

The key for the Government should be to remove some of the obstacles that families face rather than simply stacking the alternative with incentives. A good place to start would be to take a hard look at the impact of student loan debt on life choices such as starting a family and buying a home. As demographer Professor Ian Pool has noted, that has to be the most antenatalist policy ever developed, and United Future is committed to reducing the burden of debt on our best and our brightest.

If those parents who choose to re-enter the workforce are doing so largely to make ends meet, then we need to address that issue before we embark on a call to comradeship in order to power the great leap forward. The goal should be to create a level playing field so that parents have as much freedom as possible to choose the best path for their family they see fit. The Government’s call is to make it possible for people to make the choice—not to tell them what the choice has to be.

Ā, tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi o te tau hōu ki a koe. E tū atu ana ki te tautoko i te pānui a te Pirimia ki te Whare i tēnei rā me āna nei tautoko, mihi hoki ki te whānau o Āhia. Kei te tautoko i āna nei mihi aroha ki te taupuketanga o te ngaru nui i te moana o Āhia ki runga i ngā whenua o tāwāhi. Kei te tautoko atu i ngā mihi aroha ki a rātou katoa. Moe mai, haere atu, haere, haere koutou.

[An interpretation in English was given to the House.]

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. Greetings of the new year to you. I rise in support of the Prime Minister’s address to the House today as well as her support and acknowledgments to Asian families. I endorse her moving tributes in respect of the devastation upon those distant shores by the tsunami of the Asian seas. I endorse the loving tributes to them all. Rest there, you who have passed on. Depart, move on, farewell.]

I rise to support the Prime Minister’s statement. It certainly has been an interesting evening listening to the responses. The main reason why I support the statement is that in it the Prime Minister spelt out good news: good news for the people of this nation, good news for families, good news for working people—ordinary Kiwi families. I realise how difficult it is for politicians, especially members across the other side of the House, to challenge good news. As a politician I wonder sometimes how one could actually challenge that, because some of the matters put forward by the Prime Minister are facts, and they cannot be disputed. So how does a member of Parliament rebut or rebuke good news?

Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith: Sit down and listen.

It is appropriate that Lockwood Smith says: “Sit down and listen.” Perhaps he could say to his colleagues that after 6 weeks of holidays they should be defrosted by the time they come back to this House, because clearly they are not.

I have been listening to some of the responses, because it is difficult to dispute good news. I understand the difficulty of Opposition politicians trying to misrepresent and misinterpret facts. In terms of the economy we are cooking with gas not hāngi stones anymore. Things are moving forward.

I want to pick up on a couple of comments made by my colleague David Cunliffe. Firstly, employment figures are one of the major indicators as to how the country is going. They are the true signals to the people of our country. Opposition members from the National Party and ACT should listen and learn a few things, and perhaps give credit where it is due. When I first came into Parliament the unemployment figure for Māori was 21 percent. Does anybody dispute that? The general unemployment figure was 11.5 to 12 percent. Is there any dispute about that? No, so they are major indicators. I am proud of this Government, because the unemployment rate in our nation today is about 4 percent. But more work needs to be done, and I would like to see that figure go down to less than 1 percent in the current term of this Labour Government and the next.

I look at Māori unemployment. At one time it was 19 to 21 percent and now it is below 9 percent. How can anyone argue against such good news? How can Mr Lockwood Smith argue against the facts? Like my colleague David Cunliffe, I travel in the far north. I have a warrant of fitness on my car, but gosh, some of the roads! We have tar-sealed a few, but a lot more work needs to be done. We are getting on with the job; we are doing that.

Rural towns are buzzing. If one goes to a place like Kawakawa, it is so busy the trains cannot get through. People should go to Kaitāia, Hokianga, Kaikohe, Moerewa, and even down to Kaipara; and also Warkworth—the Remuera of Northland—and Wellsford too, where Lockwood Smith comes from. When he was a Minister, and some of my colleagues from Northland will remember, two-thirds of the shops were boarded up. Nothing was happening. The place was so depressed. Now, there are no more boards, the shops are open, with new windows, and painted. The place is buzzing. It is an indication to rural members of just how well things are going in this country. I realise how hard it is for members opposite to dispute the facts. Right now, even my colleague over there does not dispute the fact that we have the lowest unemployment in umpteen years.

In 1984 the Hon Koro Wētere held a hui taumata—21 years ago—bless his soul. Many members here will remember, and acknowledge, the contribution he made, whereby 180 delegates turned up to the hui in Parliament. It was a 2-day Māori economic conference and a number of objectives were set out at the conclusion: I shall quote some—“to reach an understanding of the nature and extent of economic problems facing New Zealand, as they affect Māori people; to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Māori people in their current position; to discuss key policy issues and to seek endorsement of the policies which will lead Māori people to truly equal status in the economic and social life of New Zealand; to obtain from those participating in the conference their commitment to assist and cooperate in dealing with the difficulties facing the Māori people.” That was in 1984. It stated further: “A total of 76 background papers were presented at the hui. It was presented by iwi, rūnunga, federation and Māori businesses.”

The document concluded with these comments: “Our fate as a people is intertwined with the economic development of New Zealand.” I shall repeat that, because it is very important in terms of the vision of this Government. “Our fate as a people is intertwined with the economic development of New Zealand.” It continued: “If there is no growth, we realise we will slip behind further and that our people will be the major sufferers. In terms of our land, we need to fully utilise and maximise its productive capacity. To do this we need to equip our people to have the management skills and development initiatives. We need to have access to resource and funding.”

In March this year the Government will hold another hui taumata. We will see what progress Māoridom has achieved in those 21 years. Not only that, but we will be looking forward to the future to see how we can actually build on the opportunities and incentives our people have put into place.

I thought the National Party and the Leader of the Opposition, Don Brash, would support this initiative. It saddens me that Don Brash saw fit, once again, to put down the Māori people in his recent speech made in Ōrewa, in part of my electorate. He attacked the more vulnerable in our society—the beneficiaries. Who will the National Party attack next? One has already been dethroned, but who will be next? Will it be the more vulnerable in our community or will it be the old-age pensioners.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Before I call Mr Woolerton I advise the House that New Zealand First has split its 10-minute speech and there will be two 5-minute speeches.

I am pleased to follow the Hon Dover Samuels in this debate, because he has said that it is hard to criticise success. I do not want to be critical; I admire the member and I am sure that he will do very, very well. I am sure Mr Harawira does not have a show in Te Tai Tokerau electorate.

I am telling my friends in business that they will never ever see a year like 2005. If they have any problems with cash flow, or they are worried about the economy, or anything like that, I am telling them to forget about it. What we are looking at with this election, on the Labour Party’s part, is something I recognise: good, old-fashioned pork barrel politics. It starts in April with a $1.2 billion families package that was announced last May—we will wait until April to see it. I presume it will be May or June by the time that money flows through the economy, by which time we will face another Budget and there will be another dollop of cash, which will start coming through the economy 6 weeks later. Then there will be more in August or in early September, or whenever the election is called. It will be looking real good.

I suggest to members that right now the world economy could fall to pieces and New Zealand would not know the difference until after the election. Then, look out, whammo, it would all be hauled back again. But it is pork barrel politics and the people of New Zealand should know that. It is modern pork barrel politics, guided by spin doctors and daily polling. It is very, very sophisticated pork barrel politics, but that is what it is, nevertheless.

But people should understand as we talk about those things that we are looking at a consumer-driven economy at the present time. The proof of the fact that the economy is consumer driven—and I am not sure that anybody knows this, although most people should—is that we faced a record trade deficit last month, in a time when our consumer products that we send overseas are reaching record prices. The people of New Zealand should know that we are in trade deficit. Why are we in trade deficit? It is because despite our poor beleaguered farmers working double and triple overtime to produce more and more off each hectare of land—for which they are being criticised, I can tell members—despite their doing all of that, the economy is still not keeping up with the profligate spending of New Zealanders. I could add that it is not helped by increased immigration, etc., which would only add to my case.

But the case I want to make is that not all is as it should be. I have a brother who lives just outside of Hamilton. He is not exactly a poor man. He is farming 1,000 cows on 1,000 acres less than 5 kilometres from the centre of Hamilton, and he is making a living. But that is what is happening all around the country; we are getting bigger and bigger farms, which is hiding the fact that farmers cannot make it on 100 acres any more. They cannot even make it on 200 acres any more; they have to have in excess of 300 acres. If they have been going for a few years, like my brother, they will have up to 1,000 acres.

I do not take anything away from the enterprise of those people; I just sound a warning for what is coming in this country in the future. I hope that will not be so, and I hope we can see through those times ahead. But I answer Mr Dover Samuels by saying that if things were as good as he says they are, we would not be having trade deficits month by month.

As I listened this afternoon to the Prime Minister softening us up for, as my colleague Doug Woolerton said, pork barrel politics, I was woken from my almost slumber by a little bit of surprise. Then I was somewhat flattered to hear what the Prime Minister was saying. I would like to quote from a speech that was made in this House on 29 August 2002. The quote is from my maiden speech, and I would like to quote a few lines: “Over the last 10 years an increasing number of young New Zealanders have not come home. Educated in New Zealand at the expense of the taxpayer, they are lost to their families and to the economy. Even more importantly, the tremendous international experience and skills they have gained are also lost.” I continued: “These young people enter our education system with high expectations, they graduate, and they leave New Zealand with a large debt burden. We then do nothing to encourage them to return. They are quickly replaced, often by people needing support and retraining. That all makes it harder for our talented, highly trained and skilled young people to return here to live and work, and they are completely overlooked as a potential source to fill job vacancies.”

I now bring us back to the Prime Minister’s statement to the House today, and I quote from that: “We also want better value for money than we have been getting in some areas of further education and training spending.” I quote from the next paragraph: “Net migration is heavily influenced by the flows of New Zealand citizens. Many of the hundreds of thousands currently offshore have skills this country needs.” Is that sounding familiar? “The Minister of Immigration is looking at how to encourage more migration back by expatriates.” “Hello!”, I say to the Prime Minister. She has finally woken up and realised that the real Opposition of this Parliament—New Zealand First—does have something to say, does have the right answers, and does have the policies and best ideas for this country in order to go forward.

💬 Dail Jones: Just a plagiarist.

It is obvious that this Prime Minister is a plagiarist, as my colleague Dail Jones is calling out. She has copied that from my maiden speech. I am flattered. I find that rather well done by the Prime Minister, and I forgive her for taking it from my speech, because she actually realises that New Zealand First does have policies and ideas that will help this economy.

The future for this Prime Minister is to ask her other Ministers to listen to the real Opposition, New Zealand First, and to listen to the real Opposition leader, the Rt Hon Winston Peters. We heard him speak this afternoon. Others were calling out and claiming to be the Leader of the Opposition. We heard Winston Peters refer to three factions within the National Party. So the Leader of the Opposition is not Gerry Brownlee, it is not Bill English, and—did I forget somebody? Oops! It is irrelevant. I am sorry, but it does not matter. We all know who the real Leader of the Opposition is. It is the Rt Hon Winston Peters, and he showed us that here today in his speech.

There was one thing that the Prime Minister failed to recognise today, one of the most important parts of this economy—the volunteer. Page 2 of the New Zealand Herald this morning shows a good example of volunteers in this country. It shows the members of the coastguard and sea rescue organisations, who go out for hours. There are hundreds of them—a figure of 700 in the Auckland region was noted in the New Zealand Herald article—who go out in their own time, on shifts of 27 hours at times. They eat, sleep, and live sea rescues, because they want to put something back into society and do something for the safety of people on the water in New Zealand. I wind up my speech by saying that this Government needs to look at those volunteers and provide funding, particularly for the coastguard and sea rescue.

It gives me great pride to make my contribution to the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement of this afternoon, the only real and authentic state of the nation speech to be given by a political leader this year. I will briefly quote from the conclusion of the Prime Minister’s speech, where she states: “Later this year New Zealanders will determine the course the country will take for the next 3 years. The choice this year is straightforward: stick with the Government they know works, is getting results, and is building a stronger future for New Zealand; or run the risk of lurching back to the division, the unfairness, and the sheer nastiness of the 1990s. That is no future for our country. … We are building a nation that offers fairness and opportunity, is tolerant and respectful of all, and is economically dynamic, creative, and committed to a sustainable future.” She also mentioned that this is a nation with huge potential.

Now, I want to invite members to turn on the 6 o’clock news on Television One and reflect on the lead item, because that gives us the absolute contrast to that. Yet again, the item relates to the leadership of the National Party. I acknowledge the previous speaker and agree that I do not think it is appropriate to call Dr Brash the Leader of the Opposition, but he is leader of the National Party. Members know that Dr Brash started his career with Nick Smith as deputy leader. He did not last very long. Then a year ago Dr Brash lost a spokesperson, Georgina te Heuheu. Now, of course, Katherine Rich has been forced out, and forced to fall on her sword. Dr Brash also suggested on television tonight that it was somehow PC to question why—how many front-bench slots does National have, now that Winston Peters’ party takes two chairs; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—out of 51 percent of the nation’s population, no one can make the top seven slots in the National Opposition’s line-up. I have to agree that something is seriously amiss if it is “PC” to ask what is wrong with the major Opposition party when it cannot find even one woman, given that women are 51 percent of the nation’s population, to occupy at least one of the seven slots. Frankly, that beats me.

The previous speaker talked about the real Opposition leader, and I have to concede, in terms of this afternoon’s performance and other performances, that obviously the real Opposition leader is certainly not Dr Don Brash. I acknowledge the contribution that Winston Peters made in that area.

💬 Dr Wayne Mapp: A ramble!

I ramble, yes, because I am actually rambling through the new spokespersons’ line-up, and if we are going for a ramble we have to take a very long ramble before we even find the new spokesperson on health. I think that it is without parallel and precedent that the Opposition spokesperson on health is—dare I say it; I had to ramble a long time to find him—“Dr Paul”, Dr Paul Hutchison. He is not even ranked. National gives such importance to health that Dr Paul Hutchison is not even ranked. He sits in a chair from which if he fell he would be out in the lobbies. I deliberately went to the National website over the tea break to look for “Dr Paul” and the health portfolio, and he is not even ranked on the National Party website.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): People will use a member’s full name.

I congratulate “Dr Paul”—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): There are two things now. The member has said “Dr Paul” three times. He must use the member’s full name or his title. He must not bring the Speaker into the debate, either.

I refer to Dr Paul Hutchison. I am not referring to the famous radio doctor that those of us of a certain age will remember. There was a radio serial entitled Dr Paul. I think that some of the skills displayed by Dr Paul in that 1960s “back to the future” radio serial will have to be employed by one Dr Paul Hutchison. Before he looks at the nation’s health, he has to help his own caucus. Let him look at the health of his own caucus. I say to Dr Paul Hutchison that he has some immediate surgery—some immediate GP work—to do. Dr Brash must sit on the couch; he is not a medical doctor. I say to the medical doctor, Dr Paul Hutchison, that he should have a session with the non-medical doctor, Dr Brash. I believe that tonight Dr Hutchison can help his caucus.

The National caucus is in amazing disarray. What a day this is, when it was supposed to show National’s great vision and its response to our Prime Minister’s wonderful state of the nation speech. Yet again, Dr Brash—I say to Dr Hutchison that he needs help—has today handed the mantle of Opposition across to Winston Peters. Quite frankly, it was an incredible performance today. Even Lynda Scott, the retiring member of Parliament, has been quoted on Television One as not being happy with the demotion of Katherine Rich. Other people have said to television reporters tonight that they are also not happy. National members can put on all the brave face they like in this House tonight, but any sort of momentum they may have taken from Ōrewa II, or whatever it is, has completely evaporated this evening. I say very sincerely and genuinely to Dr Paul Hutchison that he is a medical doctor, and that he has to do some work to help his party.

I am very proud to be part of this Labour-Progressive Government. Indeed, let us tick off the achievements. Without wanting to provoke my good mate Doug Woolerton, who spoke previously, I say that I sense that in his heart of hearts—and he will vehemently deny this—there is a pang of jealousy. He would never admit it—not even in his dreams, because he would have to wake up and apologise to his leader; apparently even dreaming is under the monitoring of the leader, and that is fair enough—but there is some really good news up on the board. This Government provides sound, stable leadership. We in this Government are proud New Zealanders. We believe that this country has every reason to be confident about its future. We are proud of the fact that we have economic growth of 4.6 percent; I ask Dr Brash what he does not understand about that. More than a quarter of a million jobs have been added to the economy since 1999; I ask Dr Brash what he does not understand about that. The crime rate is at the lowest level it has been at in 21 years. We did not hear very much about that. What does Dr Brash not understand about that? The Working for Families package is out, benefit numbers are down, there are almost 7,000 Modern Apprentices, more than 126,000 people are in industry training, and there has been a significant boost to health and education spending.

Winston Peters said a very interesting thing earlier. I want to reflect on the stability we would see with a National-led Government that, I humbly suggest to him, I believe would give his party and others great cause for a degree of troubled reflection. Winston Peters quite accurately said that Dr Brash should not even dream of leading a Government unless he was going to include New Zealand First. Basically, all the numbers and polling that one can stack up show that Dr Brash could not do it without Winston Peters’ help. The problem, of course, is that New Zealand First has, I believe, far too much integrity to contemplate sharing the Treasury benches with the ACT party, if it is still here. Let us imagine the sight of Rodney Hide. How would New Zealand First accommodate Rodney Hide as part of that numbers package?

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: You can’t.

Winston Peters says that he does not and could not. I think that is a very clear message to Dr Brash. Speaking from my side of the bench, as a Government member, I say that that is a recipe for instability, in that Dr Brash could not get the numbers.

Finally, I say I am proud and delighted to be part of this Government. It is doing great things for the Waikato, the region I represent, and I am proud to be a New Zealander at this time of great hope and optimism.

That contribution reminds me of a movie I saw years and years ago—I think it was called The Mouse that Roared. This afternoon Don Brash, in his reply to the Prime Minister’s statement, noted a key challenge facing this country that the Prime Minister chose to ignore—that New Zealand is bleeding talent. Week by week, month by month, hundreds upon hundreds of our skilled people are leaving this country. Sure, they are being replaced by immigrants, but our skilled people are going.

One of the reasons for that is the gap in incomes between New Zealand and other countries. This Labour Government has done nothing to resolve that. If we look at its 5-year track record as we go into election year, we see that the average, real, disposable income for New Zealanders has stayed flat. We have had 5 years of a Labour Government, and the average, disposable, real income has not lifted under this Government. The gap with Australia is not closing and, what is more, it will get worse.

This afternoon Helen Clark spoke of her Government’s dynamic trade agenda. I would say that she has certainly learned a lot since she made her anti-trade tirades when in Opposition. But it is in that area that we see Helen Clark’s most massive policy failure. What a lame statement she made in her speech. She said: “We remain ready to enter into negotiations with the United States.” But where is the deal? It was Labour’s No. 1 foreign policy goal. What a failure!

It is 1 year since the negotiations between Australia and the United States on a trade deal were finalised. From 1 January this year, Australian beef farmers have been getting 6c to 7c per kilo more for their beef—the same grass-fed beef that New Zealand farmers send to the United States for the hamburger trade. From 1 January this year Australian beef farmers have been having tariff-free access; we have not. It is worth millions and millions of dollars to Australia, and New Zealand farmers are missing out. Within 2 years Australian beef farmers will send 20,000 more tonnes of beef tariff-free, while New Zealand farmers will get nothing. The gap with Australia will get wider.

Why is that? It is because Helen Clark has single-handedly stuffed our relationship with the United States of America. It is not just about the insulting comments on the Bush presidency and about whether a Gore White House would have gone into Iraq. The insults just keep on coming. Just yesterday, in response to the historic elections in Iraq, Helen Clark said—despite the unexpectedly high turnout in those elections—that she was concerned that if the Sunni community were not seen to be voting, it would not give the winners of the election a mandate to rule. What arrogance! She went on to say she hoped there would not be a civil war.

How does Helen Clark think that Washington—not to mention Canberra—viewed those mean-spirited comments made by New Zealand’s Prime Minister? How does she think they viewed the Labour Government’s consideration that the fledgling democracy in Iraq was so unimportant it did not give the 7,000 Iraqis in New Zealand a voting booth? Did Helen Clark and those Labour members opposite have such little belief in democracy that they thought it was good enough for Iraqis in New Zealand—7,000 of them—to have to go to Australia to vote? Iraqis in Australia could vote in that historic election—the first for 50 years in Iraq—but Helen Clark did not care enough about democracy, so hard won in Iraq, to even bother to provide a voting booth for the Iraqis in New Zealand. Even the interim President of Iraq commented publicly, noting that the New Zealand Labour Government had failed to support the elections, and that as a consequence Iraqis in New Zealand had no option if they wanted to vote but to go to Australia.

American, British, and I believe also some Australian servicemen and servicewomen have risked their lives, and many have died, to give the Iraqi people a chance for democracy. It is the first time in 50 years that the Iraqi people have been given a chance to have a say in their own future, and they courageously grabbed that chance despite the risk of terrorism to every one of them who voted. To see their determined faces on our television screens as they lined up to vote, and to see the private joy on their faces after they were able to exercise their right to vote, leaves me feeling damned ashamed of our mean-spirited Prime Minister. It leaves me with little wonder that Washington has no time for her, and it leaves me with little wonder that Helen Clark has failed New Zealand in achieving the most important foreign policy result for New Zealand—a trade agreement with the biggest, most important economy on this planet. I am ashamed that our Prime Minister cared so little for that fledgling democracy in Iraq—democracy so hard won with the lives of so many servicemen and servicewomen from countries that are our friends: America, Australia, and Britain—and could not have cared less but left it up to the Iraqis in this country to have to go to Australia if they wanted to vote.

Then she said publicly that the winning Government in Iraq would have no mandate if not enough Sunnis voted. Goodness me! Plenty of people in this country do not vote for Helen Clark, and will never vote for Helen Clark, yet when she won the last election we accepted that she had a mandate to govern. It is insulting of her to tell the Iraqi people that whoever wins the election over there—with a huge voter turnout—does not have a mandate to govern.

What is quite clear in this country today is that Don Brash and National are setting the agenda. Labour should not forget that, with the election this year. It is interesting that when Labour members leave the Labour Government they get an improved perspective. It is interesting to read what a former Labour Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Mike Moore, wrote a little while ago in the Australian Financial Review. He said: “The labour movement was once about the dignity of labour; now too often it is about the dignity of welfare.” He said that Labour members do not care enough about labour any more.

The Rt Hon Mike Moore reminded readers in Australia that one of the great Labour Prime Ministers in New Zealand cared when people just used or abused the welfare system. I am talking of former Labour Prime Minister, Peter Fraser. According to Mike Moore, he told this Parliament in 1945 that the treatment of loafers should be to put them in a large tank, to pour water into it, and to give them a pump to keep the water level down. If they did not pump continuously, they would drown. That is what one of the greatest Labour Prime Ministers said about people who used the welfare system to do nothing. That is what one of the great Labour Prime Ministers believed—in the days when Labour was a great party.

New Zealanders do care about the welfare system and how it is destroying the culture and integrity of people in this country. That is why New Zealanders believe that Don Brash was on the right track and is on the right track with his concerns about the way the welfare system is destroying the attitudes and aspirations of so many New Zealanders. Just as Don Brash was right about the separatism being created by the treaty industry in New Zealand, so New Zealanders see him as right on this, and that is why Labour will lose the election this year.

It is hard to believe that the previous speaker, Dr Lockwood Smith, was once a TV announcer, because he does not seem to realise that we have microphones in this House, that one does not need to shout quite so loudly to be heard, and that one is heard on the radio just by speaking through the microphone and not trying to bring the walls down. There was a lot of noise about nothing in that speech. I think that Dr Lockwood Smith was a former Minister of International Trade, and I cannot think of one treaty or agreement that he signed when he was the Minister. So I do think that speech was a lot of hot air about nothing very much. I cannot even think, since he was not mentioned by Winston Peters today, of what faction of the National Party he might belong to. Perhaps he does not belong to any of the factions in the National Party, since Winston Peters failed to mention him this afternoon.

Lockwood Smith did not refer to his own leader in any way at all. He did say that National had an agenda but he did not annunciate what that agenda was. He just seemed to get louder and louder.

💬 Darren Hughes: Yes, he did. He was angry about everything.

He was angry about everything, but he had no agenda for the National Party, and I found that speech to be a lot of hot air about nothing. Towards the end of last year in Hamilton—I have the privilege of being the member for Hamilton East—there was an unveiling of a statue in the middle of the main street, a statue of Riff Raff, which was really controversial. To unveil that statue we had a function, and a whole street full of people ended up by dancing to “The Time Warp”. This afternoon, when I heard Dr Brash speak, I really felt that “The Time Warp” was what he was referring to.

The statue we unveiled in Hamilton was a tribute to a song that was written at least 30 years ago by a former Hamiltonian, but I could not help thinking of Don Brash. He is in a time warp. He does not look like a 1970s man; he looks like a 1950s man. He speaks like a 1950s man, he thinks like a 1950s man, and I believe he reasons like a 1950s man. In fact, he looks to me as if he could have come straight out of The Stepford Wives, especially in the way that he has been treating the women in his party—he is demanding unthinking allegiance. He dumped Georgina Te Heuheu, which, I think, was an extremely rude thing to do to someone from a family that gave a national park to New Zealand. Now it is Katherine Rich’s turn, for neither confirming nor denying, for not toeing his party line, and for not being obviously in the right faction within the National Party.

I find it absolutely amazing that, like Dr Lockwood Smith, Dr Brash has no real analysis of welfare, no policies, and is not even listening to international precedents. Dr Brash is constantly falling back on his own old, outdated positions. I think Don Brash should listen to Riff Raff—Richard O’Brien. Richard O’Brien came to the unveiling of his statue, and I was very impressed by his speech because it brought out some of the values that Helen Clark brought out today—Kiwi values. He said that one of the reasons he was able to get ahead in the world and become world famous was his Kiwi values. He was referring to Kiwi values around class, around colour, and around creed. He said that because he did not understand class—he was brought up in what he believed was a classless society—he was able to walk through the classes in Britain. He ignored them. Why? It was because he had been brought up in the society we have today, where there is decent housing, where there is a decent education system, and where there is a welfare system for those people who are unable to participate in the way that those who are more fit are able to do. We as a Labour Government are continuing with that.

Richard O’Brien also talked about colour and ignoring colour as a barrier. I will say, as Jill Pettis said tonight, that when we have been sitting in the House listening—

💬 Darren Hughes: A very good member.

A very good member. We have been listening to the Opposition and it seems that every time the word “Māori” is mentioned there seems to be some kind of knee-jerk fit reaction as if it is no longer appropriate to talk about Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.

💬 Darren Hughes: They’re embarrassed.

As a Kiwi with Kiwi values, I find the Opposition embarrassing. It is even worse when we talk about new immigrants. I heard Dr Brash talk about the changing face of New Zealand, which I found rather strange. I think it was a rather subtle reference to the fact that there may be people from Singapore or other Asian countries in our country. I found it a very strange reference for Dr Brash to make in his speech.

The third thing that Riff Raff talked about was creed. I have listened to a great deal of what I call really strange comments in our society of late when people have been extremely intolerant of other people’s religions and beliefs. I find it really strange that family values have become a euphemism for any kind of right-wing knee-jerk reaction to anything in our society. I find that insulting to families in New Zealand. We are all part of families, and not just nuclear families. We are part of extended families. We are all somebody’s son, daughter, brother, sister, mother, or father. We all have families, and we all respect our families. Even bad families or dysfunctional families are still families with values, and we have to respect those as much as we respect other people’s religions and beliefs. We need to respect everybody in this country for what he or she believes and how he or she believes it.

The Prime Minister mentioned a number of things in her speech today, in particular the crime rate. I am particularly pleased that in Hamilton we have a very much reduced crime rate. She also mentioned the funding going into education and in particular into early childhood education. I thank the Minister of Education for two new pre-schools in our area, which is a growing area. I thank the Minister of Education for the new teachers. I am very proud that in the Waikato we have below 3 percent unemployment, which is lower than the national average. That is something that this Labour Government has delivered. Not only that, we are getting nearly $200 million to upgrade our hospital and improve emergency services.

Labour has put new funding into science and technology. In all the time that the National Party was in power I did not see that funding going into science and technology in my electorate. I am very pleased with the improvements in accessing health care for young people and old people, and through primary health organisations. I do not have people coming to my electorate office, as I used to in the past when we were in Opposition, talking about being on a long waiting list.

One thing that has been very good is the increase in public housing and affordable rental housing. That has made a tremendous difference to people. One of the most horrible things we inherited from the National Party was the lack of the 13,000 State houses for lower-income people. Those houses, which we are now rebuilding and putting back into our electorates, give security. They mean that children stay at the same school, get some stability, and get a better education, and that is showing in educational results. Even in the lower decile schools in my electorate the children are getting very good results, which is to the credit of the Minister of Education.

I am also pleased that a considerable amount of money is going into infrastructure—into roading. I heard someone say that no funding is going into roading. Well, I am getting a bit tired of roadworks between Auckland and Hamilton. It is never as much as everyone would like, but millions and millions of dollars are going into that four-laning.

In terms of what is happening in relation to social work, the Social Workers in Schools programme, and support for families, we have at least 17 new social workers in Hamilton and more are on the way.

Tremendous things are happening in this country at a local level and at an electorate level as well as nationwide. The Labour Government is delivering and is continuing to deliver. We will be offering greater security, more for families, more in terms of saving, and more in terms of people acquiring their own homes and having greater stability. I was talking this afternoon to one of the leaders of people who are concerned with the retail industry. I was told that they are very, very happy with the way the country is going and they foresee that it is to continue, and the polls are telling us the same thing. I look forward to a Labour Government at the 2005 election.

After listening to that member, Dianne Yates, members of the public might be inclined to ask whether that was the face of political correctness. It is a little bit like pornography—often we do not know it until we see it. What we heard from Dianne Yates in her criticism of family values is that she is not prepared to judge anyone at all—total relativism prevails. So she is not prepared to say that the family of “Lillybing” might have had bad values. For that member, all families are equal and all values are equal, and I suggest that that will ultimately be the crucible upon which this Government fails. The people of New Zealand are tired of being told by the Government how to think, what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, and the Government will be judged on that.

I want to talk about the issue of productivity. Behind that issue is this question: will New Zealand ever catch up to Australia? It is topical because hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders make the choice, and can make the choice, of which country they live in. Most often that choice is actually made on living standards—on which country provides the best opportunity for people’s families. That is the competition New Zealand is involved in.

I suggest that under this Government’s policies New Zealand will never catch up to Australia. It does not have a single hope of ever doing that. We are squandering the best economic times we have had for a generation, and the truth is that the Government knows that.

I want to refer to the Prime Minister’s speech, in which she made much of productivity and the things that have to be done to catch up. In fact, she admitted that unless we have productivity gains that are the same as those of the United States we will lag. It is worth knowing that Australia and the United States have essentially the same productivity increases each and every year. That is why they grow better, and that is why in the last 5 years family incomes in Australia, compared with those in New Zealand, are now $5,000 greater today than they were 4 years ago. That is the real difference between our two countries, and that is why New Zealanders lose hope.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Bollard, gave a speech late last week in which he said that we need to boost productivity from 1.5 percent per annum to 2 percent per annum. That would mean we would be on a par with the United States and Australia, and we would then be able to start to catch up. That is the test he has put before the Government, and Helen Clark actually seems to recognise that that is the test.

What is the Government’s solution? It is twofold. The Government has set up a productivity working group—very noble. The Prime Minister is very proud of that. The productivity working group was a major part of her speech. The other aspect is a change in microeconomic policy, particularly in the area of employment law. The only problem is that the changes the Government will make are the very things that harm productivity growth. The Government may say pious words about boosting productivity, but it is doing everything it can to make it harder. So the truth is that we do not hear from the Government any more now that it is going to catch up with Australia. It knows it is not going to achieve that, because it is doing all the wrong things.

One might have thought that the issue of productivity would have inspired Business New Zealand. I am sure the Government was hoping to get its endorsement today. Let me read directly from the Business New Zealand media statement of today: “Many businesses would find it hard to agree with the Prime Minister’s statement that recent employment relations legislation will improve productivity.”

It is not surprising, is it? Right around this country during recent statutory holidays, one-third of service businesses in the restaurant and entertainment industries were closed. This country relies on tourism, which is now our largest overseas export earner. But what do we do? We pass laws that make it hard for those businesses to open. How will that boost productivity? Air New Zealand, a State-owned company, said in its annual report that the Holidays Act would add 14 percent to its wage bill—a cost of $7 million—with no gains whatsoever in productivity.

The Government cannot use pious words and expect them to be a self-fulfilling prophecy just because that is the sort of thing it happens to believe in. The Government thinks that saying the words, establishing the committee, and using the centre-right language will somehow make it happen. I have news for the Government: it will not, and the Government will fail. That is why we will see—as, indeed, my colleague Dr Lockwood Smith pointed out—a continuing drain of New Zealanders over to Australia. People are voting with their feet.

I want to refer to what National would do—because that is the choice, really, is it not? The choice is between Labour’s formula—committees, bad workplace legislation, and increased taxes—and National’s. Those are the choices we have.

National believes in more flexible workplace law. We know we will not be going right back to 1991; we know the world evolves; but we also know that the legislation passed last year harms productivity. Every business owner knows that and they say so to me. They write to me, and I absolutely guarantee that they are writing to Labour members saying precisely the same thing. If the Government needs further proof, it needs only to look at today’s Business New Zealand statement about that.

The second thing we would do is introduce a 90-day trial period, particularly for new employees. Businesses want to be able to take a chance. They want to be able to employ, perhaps, people who have had some difficulty in the work force—people on benefits, for instance. The way to do that is to give people the ability to make those choices. A 90-day trial period is actually about giving people opportunity.

Finally, and most crucially, we will reduce taxes for every working New Zealander. That is what we have said. [Interruption] Just wait—we will tell members in due course. We will do that, and it will be on the table for the public of New Zealand at the general election. Labour’s junior whip knows that the cool chill of electoral defeat is staring at him, because when the public get to know the real choice—high taxes and a $7 billion surplus from the Government, or tax cuts for every working New Zealander—frankly, it will be a pretty easy choice to make.

National has a plan. We will roll out these policies. We will do so in a systematic and staged way and, just as with Ōrewa I and Ōrewa II, it will turn the public mind because it will focus on the real issues. That is the contrast, fundamentally.

Labour certainly has the pious language. The Prime Minister’s speech today was absolutely full of it. But Labour does not know how to deliver. Its policies harm New Zealand.

National will have a series of policies that deal with the serious and focused issues, which will give us the real opportunity we need to catch up with Australia and make this country a wonderful place for New Zealanders to choose to stay in rather than have to make the choice for themselves and their children as to which country offers the better future. We ask people to give us the chance. We will show the way, and we will have our country growing and catching up. If people vote for those guys in the Labour Party, they will see a continual desertion of New Zealanders to Australia.

That speech shows the dichotomy faced by the National Party. It has a dilemma. It wants on the one hand to convince the public that it can manage the economy. But the interesting thing is that its leader, Don Brash, cannot manage his caucus. Every time he gives a major speech, someone gets the sack. Georgina te Heuheu and now Katherine Rich have gone. Not only that; there are more rats leaving the ship. Lynda Scott is leaving. Roger Sowry is leaving. Why would so many people be leaving the National Party if they felt they were on the brink of making Government and having the opportunity to realise their dreams and ambitions for their party? Of course, they are leaving and being sacked because the National Party is in disarray ideologically, politically, managerially, and in every other way.

Let us look at one simple example. On the one hand, the National Party tells us that people are leaving New Zealand to go to Australia, and it is saying that this is bad. The next thing it says to us is that the Holidays Act, which gives workers 4 weeks’ annual leave, is bad and should be scrapped. That is what it says. But many workers have left New Zealand to go to Australia because there they get 4 weeks’ annual leave, they get superannuation guaranteed, and they get all these other things. So by proposing to cut the advancements this Labour Party Government has made, the National Party is creating the grounds for more people to want to leave New Zealand and go to Australia.

I just want to say to the public that if they want the brain drain to Australia to accelerate and people to leave, they should vote the National Party in, because it will do again the things it did in the 1990s. Let us recall the 1990s. National gave us tax cuts in the 1990s, and the first thing it did after that was cut superannuation. It made the poor old pensioners pay for the tax cuts. It cut money going into health and education. Tertiary fees went through the roof. State house rentals went through the roof. Legions of people who came to my office were completely impoverished by the policies of National. Market rentals impoverished people in my area.

Little wonder that 71 percent of the public today support the notion that this Government is a good economic manager! They do so for a range of excellent reasons. For example, youth unemployment is down by 79.2 percent in my East Coast region. This means that parents, instead of worrying about what their kids are going to do for a job, have confidence that the kids will get a job. And they are getting good jobs in my area. Almost 8,000 people across the country are now in apprenticeships. There are 6,000 young people in my area, the eastern region, in training and apprenticeships.

National under Bill Birch, supported by Dr Wayne Mapp, legislated apprenticeships out—abolished them. It was Labour that reinstated apprenticeships and gave young generation New Zealanders hope for the future. It also gave them the opportunity to train for the jobs that this growing economy is developing. That is what Labour has given. Young people I know are now training to be apprentices—mechanics, builders, carpenters, electricians.

None of this happened in the miserable 1990s, which the National Party is so proud of and wants to drag us back to. The public will see through that. [Interruption] Mr Mapp goes on about economic growth. The Labour-led Government has, year after year, generated the best economic growth in my memory. Through the 1970s to the 1990s we dreamt of having 2 percent growth rates. Now we have an average of about 4.5 percent.

💬 Steve Chadwick: It’s 4.6.

It was 4.6 percent in the last year. These are fantastic numbers and they will get this country going forward.

💬 Darren Hughes: But they’re against it.

Of course they are against it.

The other thing that has been most remarkable in my estimation is that I have never seen such a turn-round in the number of people on the unemployment benefit. When this Government came into power, about 160,000 people were receiving the unemployment benefit. That was the inheritance we had from the National Government and its policies—60,000 people flung on to the heap of misery by National. After 5 years of effort we now have registered unemployment down to less than 65,000 and falling. We are not satisfied with getting 100,000 people off the benefit. We want much better. Our ambition is much greater than Don Brash’s. It has been good news all round for New Zealanders.

In Hawke's Bay we have had fantastic improvements to the health system, where $12 million has been spent on front-line services. Because of the primary health organisations, everybody over the age of 65 in my electorate is getting cheaper doctors’ visits and $3 prescriptions.

In education, 65 centres are being grown for free early childhood care for 3 to 5-year-olds. Ten schools in Hawke’s Bay are receiving nearly $2.2 million in extra funding to upgrade school properties. There are 27 extra staff in my area over and above roll growth. Everywhere I look things are better.

This investment in staff and infrastructure has a flow-on to jobs. Every school I go to has better facilities throughout, including libraries, administration blocks, halls, and information technology. All of this means jobs, because people have had to go and build those things. When we create a thriving economy it means that we will have plenty of jobs.

The other thing that this Government has done very well is invest in infrastructure. We have spent a substantial amount of money on roads. The Opposition scoffs, but I am amazed that every time I go to Auckland there is a line-up of tractors, diggers, and bulldozers making new roads in Auckland. When the National Party was in power during the 1990s nothing happened at all. The Auckland members could not get anything done. This Government has made huge changes.

The infrastructure investment also means that we have spent $69 million over the last few years on the East Coast roads, which will help get logs off the East Coast and, hopefully, to ports for export. This is helping to develop our exports, which makes our economy grow. This has been very good.

This Government has also led the way on free-trade agreements. Free-trade agreements are good for Hawke’s Bay. Several of my farmer friends have told me that if we can get a free-trade agreement with China, then it means millions of dollars of extra revenue for them for their wool sales. That is millions of dollars of extra revenue coming into Hawke’s Bay, because of its agricultural production. This will mean substantial extra growth for Hawke’s Bay, and I think it will be a great thing.

The National Party has negotiated none of these things. It has no ideas at all. All we have heard from Lockwood Smith, who speaks on foreign affairs, is his blackguarding this country. Everywhere he goes he blackguards this country. In his dismal speech he made some reference to the fact that New Zealand would not have a polling booth for Iraqis. Well, that is not true. In fact, there was a threshold set, and New Zealand had so few Iraqis that we did not warrant one. I am given to understand that there were only three polling booths in Great Britain, where there is a substantial number of Iraqis. In fact, there were only 14 countries around the world with booths.

New Zealand likes to play a positive role in international affairs, and no one can say that Helen Clark has been anything less than an outstanding leader for this country in international forums. No one can say anything other than that she has been a very, very proud New Zealander who has advanced the causes of this country in every forum possible. New Zealand can feel rightly proud of the leadership given by Helen Clark and this Labour-led Government. We have led on almost every front, including arts and culture. We are developing pride in New Zealand.

We have been indefatigable in trying to reduce the numbers of people on the unemployment benefit. We have increased job opportunities for thousands and thousands of New Zealanders. The average wage has gone up substantially in my area, and that is a reflection of what has happened across the country. For example, in my area—the East Coast—the average wage in 1999 was $401 a week. Last year it was $507. I think it will go up much more. The National Party tries to say that that is not the case, but friends of mine who were driving trucks in Hawke’s Bay in the late 1990s were getting paid $8.50 an hour, and now they are on $16 or $17 an hour. Carpenters in the 1990s were getting $10 an hour; they are all earning over 20 bucks an hour now. I know young people who have left school and have been in a job for only a couple of years who are pulling $15 an hour. Everybody I look to has had an improvement in his or her economic well-being.

Unemployment is well down and those who are in jobs have got better pay, they have more money in their pockets, and the economy is booming in Hawke’s Bay. I would like to believe that it is all due to the local member, but a lot of others have helped. It is not only in Hawke’s Bay; it is everywhere that I have been in the country. Provincial New Zealand is doing extremely well. When it gets to the election, people will have a choice: the nasty 1990s and the National policies that failed then, or the policies of this Government with a positive future.

The worst thing about listening to a speech like that is that one gets the impression the speaker believes himself. I heard Rick Barker say that someone, on average, in the Hawke’s Bay in 1999 earned $401 a week and now that person is earning $507 a week. That is a $106 increase. What he failed to tell the House and New Zealand is, who has it all. It is not the average person in the Hawke’s Bay. When the extra taxes, charges, and inflation are taken away, that person has gone backwards. But the member would not understand that.

Tonight I will talk about something that I think is important to New Zealand. I want to talk about some of the history that we see in this House and in this Parliament. If I look across the Chamber I see memorials on the walls to Alamein, Crete, the Atlantic, and other places. I want to talk about the proud history that this country has had in the past, its contribution to world peace and, where necessary, its involvement in peace enforcement. There is a saying that if one wants peace, prepare for war. The people who served in the past in this nation’s defence forces were the finest New Zealanders. Those who serve today are the same. Those of us who have had the opportunity to meet with the people in our defence forces are proud of the people who represent us. They are fine, fine New Zealanders and I, for one, am proud to know a good number of them.

Of course, defence is more than just defence. It is about what and who we are—it is about our nation. It is one of our showpieces. It is about peace and security, but it is also about trade and foreign affairs—it is about our nation. This country has never in its history been able to defend itself on its own. It has never had the ability, the resources, or the population to be able to. Our shores are too big, our population is too small, and our resources are not sufficient. We have never in our history been able to defend our shores against anybody who may have wished to attack us.

We have always had a collective defence. We have always been in cooperation with our allies—traditionally Australia, Great Britain, Malaysia, the United States, and a number of others—

💬 Hon Mark Burton: Singapore.

Singapore. A whole number of nations have been part of our collective defence. Historically, New Zealand has always played its part not just in peacekeeping, but in peace enforcement. These walls are a memorial to, and a history of, the part we played. But unfortunately, with this Government, and the way in which it presents our defence policy, sadly one cannot say that any more today. This country and this Government in particular are now seen to be bludgers. The Government has made this country a laughing stock with regard to defence.

💬 Hon Mark Burton: Absolute rubbish!

That Minister sitting over there interjecting knows it. He is embarrassed by the fact that he is the Minister of Defence at a time when this country’s defences are at their absolute lowest. I would not ever want to be that Minister of Defence in this Labour Government. It is a disgrace. This country now, absolutely and totally, depends on everyone and anyone else other than ourselves to defend itself.

Oh yes, it is true to say that we have played some peacekeeping roles in the world. To be fair—and let me make this very clear, because I know that this Labour Government will try to twist my words—the people we have sent overseas in the last 10 to 15 years, both under this Government and previous Governments, have done an outstanding job in their roles, proudly representing New Zealanders. But this Government, not our defence forces, is an absolute disgrace when it comes to defence. It has led our defence forces to a stage where they are ill-equipped and under-trained. It is this Minister and the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who are absolutely and totally responsible for the demise of our defence forces, not the defence forces themselves. They are great people, but they are expected to survive on pittances and with inadequate equipment.

Just recently we started taking part in helping people in East Asia to deal with the tsunami. What happened to our Hercules when we sent them over there? What a disgrace, and what has this Minister done about it? He has done absolutely nothing. What he is now trying to do is to patch up and put another sticker on it. The Government has had more than 5 years now to get it right, and he has allowed the whole thing to run down. He has allowed our forces to go out there, poorly equipped. He has allowed things to break down. He has allowed our defence forces to be under-trained. He and the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, are “peaceniks”—we know that—and they do not want New Zealand to have the reputation of being there not just in peacekeeping roles, but also in peace enforcement.

Unfortunately, this Minister and this Prime Minister will allow that to continue. The only reason that our current forces—the people from New Zealand who are serving overseas—are as good as they are, is because of their own individual tenacity. They are incredible people, but this Government does absolutely nothing to help them at all. This Government’s reputation and our country’s reputation is the lowest it has ever been, and it is an absolute disgrace. Let me tell the House that this Minister and the Chief of Defence report that we are having problems with recruitment and retention. Why is that? Who would want to join an air force, for example, only to hop on a plane and it breaks down? What an embarrassment when they are delivering things to help people. What about if people want to go out there to try to help but they do not have the proper equipment? This stuff is a disgrace, and this Minister knows it. He has some loopy schemes that are not actually helping us at all. He then wonders why we cannot recruit or retain people. The Minister needs to look at his own policies and at the fact that this is not about just peacekeeping. This is about peace enforcement, and this country should be continuing its proud history of being involved.

When National becomes the Government after the next election, New Zealand will be seen to do its bit again. We will be seen to do our part. National will ensure that we rebuild our commitment to international security. New Zealand will be seen as a country that plays its part when called upon. We will make sure that the people, who are the finest New Zealanders, have the proper equipment to do the things that their predecessors have done in the past. We will be proud of our defence forces once again, like we have been historically, and we sure as hell will not let this lot continue the rundown of our defence forces, with the disgraceful attitude that they have. National will start the rebuilding, and make the commitment to international security that we would expect this country to contribute.

“National will start rebuilding.” Well, that is a very surreal line to stand up and have to follow on from.

What a day this has turned out to be. I was watching television last week while National members were basking in the lukewarm post - Ōrewa II glow. They had a bounce in their step as they went along to their caucus, thinking that this was it, this would close the gap, this would give them the big boost that they had had from Ōrewa Mark I—but what did those members do? They scored the biggest own goal I think I can remember in my life’s history of watching politics.

It seems that Dr Brash did not feel it was necessary to consult his social welfare spokesperson on a social welfare speech that was outlining social welfare policy for the National Party. If he had, he might have worked out a little earlier before the speech that Katherine Rich did not support his backward approach to welfare dependency, and he might have saved himself a little bit of pain today. Maybe, if he had run both of his speeches, Rātana and Ōrewa II, past her in the first instance, for a start he would not have accidentally over-inflated the number of Māori children dependent on welfare that he told us at Rātana.

💬 Hon Mark Burton: Well, that’s true, because she knew about it.

Katherine Rich knows about that, and she would have picked it out and told him it was not the truth. He found out about that, but I also note that he was a little bit slow in correcting his Rātana speech in respect of the over-exaggeration of the number of Māori children on welfare dependence. Obviously the truth is a little bit less important to Dr Brash than he would have New Zealanders believe.

I register my disappointment at Katherine Rich’s demotion. I know it is not usual in this House to show much cross-party affection, but I have a lot of time for Katherine Rich, both personally and professionally. We have been on the Social Services Committee together. I have always enjoyed the debates we have had. She has always been above board and really committed to the portfolio. I have always found her a very tough opponent in relation to welfare, because I know that she has a real idea of what dependence on the domestic purposes benefit is like and what welfare dependency is like. In that respect, she was far more likely to get it right than anyone else in the National Party. So I hope that Mrs Rich is doing OK tonight, and I register my disappointment at her demotion. It might end up being quite good for this Government, but personally I was extremely disappointed to see it happen.

It is always amusing to hear the National Party’s doom and gloom merchants out in full force when everything is going well and when the rhetoric will just not wash in New Zealand. When I was back home over Christmas, I found that all the retailers were absolutely ecstatic with the way New Zealand was going, because it was the biggest Christmas and New Year period they had had at the cash registers. Does that fit with an image of a New Zealand that is falling behind every other country in the world in terms of how much disposable income we have and in terms of standards of living? I am afraid that the National Party rhetoric just does not live up to the reality. It does not live up to the smiles I have seen on the faces of people down the street when they have come up to shake my hand and say they have never been traditional Labour supporters but they think we are doing a really good job and to keep doing it.

I notice that Disney is putting out a new animated movie this year called Chicken Little, and the tag line is: “This time the sky really is falling.” I wonder whether Dr Brash is providing the voice for Chicken Little. He certainly has a lot of experience in that area.

Ōrewa II was classic “the sky is falling again” scaremongering, except this time New Zealanders are not buying it. They are not buying it because they know that National relies on stereotypes of welfare beneficiaries. It relies on stereotypes of low and middle income New Zealanders. According to the National Party the way to motivate wealthy people is to give them more money through tax cuts, but the way to motivate poor or low to middle income New Zealanders is to take money from them. That has always been the National Party way. It has never managed to explain that discrepancy in its philosophy—punish poor people and they will do better, and reward rich people and they will do better.

In the Labour Party we know that all New Zealanders have the same kinds of aspirations. We know that it is not easy on the domestic purposes benefit. It is not easy to provide for children. The National Party does not tell people that the average age of a domestic purposes beneficiary is 32 years. By the way that National Party members talk about it, people would think we were talking 18 or 19 years and paying young girls to have babies as an alternative to entering the workforce.

💬 Hon Mark Burton: How long do they stay on the benefit?

They stay on the benefit for an average of between 1 and 3 years.

💬 Hon Mark Burton: Not 13 or 15 years?

No, not 13 or 15 years, and not a lifetime. They stay on the benefit for 1 to 3 years. The average age—

💬 Government Member: That’s not the impression Don Brash gave.

That is not the impression that Don Brash gives, because the reality does not work for the National Party and that will be its problem coming up to this election.

National wants to tell New Zealanders that the economy is going to fall over, and that New Zealand does not have the same standard of living as overseas countries. But that message does not stand up to the reality that New Zealanders are enjoying today. National wants to tell people that domestic purposes beneficiaries are just bludgers—mothers who want to have more and more babies to get the extra few dollars a week they might get for that. Maybe it is because Dr Brash is a male and therefore cannot have children, but the impression I get from the members of my caucus is that what a woman goes through when she has a child is not worth an extra $20 a week and is not a good career move. But Dr Brash does not want people to know that.

I visited a school recently that had had a National member speak to its students a few months before I was there. The school said that the National MP had raised domestic purposes benefit dependency as an issue for young people, but had said that those young people in the audience were doing a great job and getting their education. The MP had also said that those particular young people would go out there and get jobs, so they should be resentful that other young people were choosing to go on to welfare dependency and the domestic purposes benefit rather than face the same challenges as themselves. I asked those young people what they thought the average age of a domestic purposes beneficiary was, following that National MP’s address. They said they thought the average age was 18 or 19, or the age of someone just out of high school. I asked them whether they realised that it was 32 years of age.

I told them that the average domestic purposes beneficiary is a woman who has just left a long-term relationship—usually a marriage—where she has been the primary caregiver for the children. She needs a bit of time to get herself back on her feet, time to get her children back on their feet, and time to make sure that the family can work again in the new separated environment it finds itself in. I think that that is a good thing.

In New Zealand we should be extremely proud that we care enough about the children in our society—all children, and not just those from families who manage to stay together and who have happy and wonderful nurturing lives. No children should fall through that welfare gap in the most traumatic time that children can have—the time when their family is falling apart around them and their primary caregiver does not have enough money to send them on a school trip, to buy them a school uniform, or even to let them buy their lunch at school once in a while, just so that they can feel as if their normal life and ordinary way of living are carrying on as much as possible.

We have to think that the National Party has not learnt anything from its last disastrous stint in Government, because the punishment approach to welfare that we are seeing being touted again this year was a disaster for Jenny Shipley. It was an absolute disaster when she was Minister of Social Welfare in the 1990s.

She cut the benefit, and who suffered? The children of the beneficiaries were the ones who suffered. They were the ones whom the National Party again thinks should be punished for the decisions their parents make that it disagrees with. It was landlords who lost rental income because their tenants could no longer afford to live in their houses; it was local businesses who lost millions of dollars in potential income when people could no longer afford to buy food and luxuries over the counter; it was businesses that suffered when we plunged into a recession again.

I cannot wait to hear the new National Party spokesperson on welfare and family matters explain how punishing children for the decisions their parents make helps families. I cannot wait to hear her explain how cutting benefits will help families. I cannot wait to hear her explain how liberalising our workplace legislation again, so that families no longer have job security, will help families. I want to know how slashing spending on health will help families, particularly those who cannot afford private health insurance and who cannot afford to go to a private doctor. I want to hear how the National Party spokesperson on families will try to convince New Zealanders that what happened in the 1990s, which was an absolute disaster for families, will work this time.

The Labour Party has a long history of having to mop up National Governments’ messes. It seems all one has to do is look back and see that every time there has been a National Party in Government there has been a Labour Government that has had to come in afterwards and clean up the mess. Well, I think this time the Labour Party is saying enough is enough. Labour members want to cut out the middle man; we do not need the extra work. We want to tell New Zealanders that if they elect another National Party to Government, supported by the ACT party, and we see some of the legislation reintroduced that failed miserably in the 1990s—which was devastating for families—the Labour Party will just have to come in and clean it up again.

So why do we not just cut that bit out? Why do we not just cut out the middle man? This Government will continue to provide for all New Zealanders—not just those at the top end of the scale and not just those whom we happen to agree with on everything. We urge people to stick with a Government that works. That is my message to New Zealanders tonight.

The Prime Minister’s statement today can be described as a triumph of spin over substance. The Prime Minister claimed credit for the buoyant economy, but everyone knows that the economy is doing well in spite of the Labour Party. Labour has done everything it can over the last 5 years to pull down the economy. It is an anti-business party. It has put up taxes. It has introduced dozens of extra charges, taxes, and levies. It has re-regulated the workplace to satisfy the demands of its union mates, and that has taken away flexibility. It has increased compliance costs, and it has introduced punitive penalties on small-business employers. This anti-business Labour Party is determined to punish the small-business sector. It says the right things but its actions show it does not actually care about small business, which is the engine room of any country.

Under Labour, the massive increases in rules and regulations have made it harder for businesses to do well, and that is why it has been truly bizarre today to hear the Prime Minister bleating about the need to increase productivity. All the Labour Party had to do was to stop meddling, stop penalising small business, and let those hundreds and thousands of small-business enterprises—mum and dad enterprises—get on with their job of building a strong economy and taking this country forward. But no, after 5 years of interference we have Treasury now forecasting that growth in New Zealand will halve this year. We have international surveys telling us that our standard of living has dropped to that of Korea, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, and the gap between living standards in Australia and New Zealand is growing wider as each day goes by.

One has to ask oneself: “What’s the effect on families?”. Well, the reality is that families are struggling harder and sliding backwards. They are overtaxed by the Labour Party—a Labour Party that gloats about the massive tax surplus, and schemes and plots as to how it can best spend it in this election year in order to win votes and try to get itself elected for another term, rather than giving some of it back to the families that earned it. Yes, the Prime Minister has categorically ruled out tax cuts. It is a bit like a shopkeeper who overcharges his customer. The Labour Party is overcharging New Zealand families—New Zealand taxpayers.

If New Zealand taxpayers think it is wrong and unfair that the Labour Party is overtaxing them, then they should sack the Labour Party at the election and support a Government that believes in lowering taxes, rewarding families for hard work, and helping the country to get a strong, firm foundation to grow into the future. I tell the Labour Party that ACT has always advocated lower taxes. We believe in rewarding workers, not punishing them.

The Prime Minister tried to tell us in her speech that the crime rate in New Zealand is falling. I say to the Prime Minister that her soft-on-crime Government has done enormous damage to this country. The public know that the crime rate is not falling. The public are fearful for their safety, not only for their own safety but for the safety of their family members, including their grandmothers and their children. We have a whole country that is now scared of crime. Already this year there have been nine homicides, from grandmothers to babies, up and down the country. Innocent New Zealanders have been raped, beaten, and tortured, and in many cases the perpetrators are walking free in small-town New Zealand. The people who live in those communities are scared.

Keeping citizens safe is a core responsibility of the Government. The Labour Party has failed in that crucial role. Not only is it failing the public but it has failed the police. Having George Hawkins as the Minister of Police has been an absolute disaster for the police force. He has allowed public confidence in the police to be totally undermined. He is turning police officers into traffic wardens instead of crime fighters, and their big job these days is to collect traffic fine quotas in order to collect more money for the Labour Party, instead of getting out and stopping crime and catching criminals.

The Labour Party has understaffed and under-resourced the police, and now the police are overstressed. Labour has weakened our laws, and it is the public that suffer, as always. In a recent case in Northland, an offender with a history of violent crime raped, abducted, and beat a young woman. He had her bound in the back of his car and told her he would kill her. Fortunately, some locals heard her screams, and as a result of their intervention she was able to escape and was saved, and the man was arrested.

The police did a good job. They opposed bail. They said that the man was violent and a danger to the people in the community, and particularly to the young woman. What happened? The bail laws allowed that man to be bailed. Sure, he is on a 24-hour curfew, but how can one officer in a large rural area hope to keep an eye on one isolated house with somebody on a 24-hour curfew? He cannot. The reality is that one police officer cannot keep an eye on that man. What happened? Immediately, he breached his bail conditions. One thinks to oneself: “That’s fine—he will be remanded in custody until his hearing.” Did that happen? No, he was bailed again. I say that one police officer does not have a hope of keeping an eye on that man. The only reason we, the public, can think of as to why that man was bailed and not remanded in custody is that the prisons are full and there are not enough prison or remand beds to keep a man like that in custody for a length of time. That is another failing of the Labour Party.

The police hate what is going on. They deserve better, but they are powerless to do anything about it. The public deserve better. The public deserve to be safe, but we are powerless. Again, I say that it is election year. If we think that the Labour Party has failed us when it comes to its crucial role of keeping us safe, then let us sack its members at the election and get a Government that actually cares about safety, will put more police on the beat, and will ensure there is better policing, tougher laws, and stronger punishments in this country.

I am ashamed of the way in which the Labour Party has run this country. It has undermined the social fabric of New Zealand. Its values are out of step with mainstream New Zealand. It has been driven by political correctness and it is totally obsessed with winning power. That is all that matters to this Government. Rather than make New Zealand a better place for our children and grandchildren, it has undermined this country. When the economy turns down—which it will—we will find that more and more people will be flocking on to the welfare rolls. The Government talks tough about welfare, but the changes it has made have simply made the welfare problem worse. The number of sickness benefits and invalid benefits is up 30 percent, and the number on the domestic purposes benefit has not moved. We have 110,000 women and children wasting their lives. The only thing that is better is the fact that the economy is doing well. I am ashamed of this Labour Government, and I hope it is beaten at the next election.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 9. 57 p.m.