General Debate

I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. I want to tell the House a story about the little 12-year-old girl I made reference to in my question to the Minister of Education during question time today. I preface my statements by saying that I do not have implied permission to talk about this little girl; I have the absolute permission of her mum, Julie Baker.

Brittany Graham is 12 years old. She was born prematurely, she is lucky to be alive, and she has struggled to survive her 12 years. Brittany and her mum are courageous individuals. Brittany, as I said during question time, has cerebral palsy. She requires the fulltime assistance, at Addington School, of physical therapy through conductive education every day.

Brittany is a girl who, to use her mum’s words, was not going to make it. The Government spent an inordinate amount of money helping Brittany into this world, looking after her special needs, and looking after her health needs, and at the age of 12, her mum tells me—and I have met Brittany—she is making it. For the first time she can stand up, with the aid of a ladder. For the first time in 18 months a little girl who has a blocked bowel and who has difficulties with her bodily functions is off her medication and is making it.

Brittany’s mum said to me: “You know, the Government has had its way, cutting $2.5 million annually, nationwide, out of the special needs budget—that is, $114,000 annually cut out of Addington School’s budget.” Brittany’s mum made an interesting point. She said the Government has spent a packet of dough on her daughter, but that the cost of Brittany going back on medication, as she fails medically because of the lack of physical therapy, will far outstrip the small sum of $114,000 that goes to Brittany and the other kiddies with the same special needs—the most vulnerable at Addington School.

That mother came to me and asked for help, and we talked about this publicly. I have questioned the Minister of Education, and I have asked the Minister why she is prepared to fund $35 million as an increase to private schools but is prepared to cut the knees out from under the most vulnerable; the Brittany Grahams, the mums like Julie Baker—the people who need it most. The Minister sent a letter, through her department, to the principal of Addington School—and in case there is a witch hunt, I tell the House that I got the letter through a parent and not the principal, so she should not be hung out to dry.

The letter was interesting because it confirmed a number of things. It confirmed that the package funding—that is, the therapy package—was introduced, ran for 3 years, from 1999 to 2002, and then rolled over annually. For the 9 years of the Labour Government this funding was available. There was no question about it. Then the letter, dated Budget day, went on to say that during the 2009 Budget process the Government looked at all the funding and decided to discontinue the additional physical therapy for students on the Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Scheme. It was as blunt as that—it was gone.

All the bleating from the Minister was to the effect that somehow 7,000 students eligible for Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Scheme funding would be treated far more fairly and the money would be spread around. Well, does she not realise that, yes, most of those students do need that funding but most do not have critically high special needs and do not have the requirement for physical therapy every day? Does the Minister not realise that most of those students do not have the requirement for conductive education, like a girl called Brittany Graham, who cannot stand under her own steam?

Julie Baker does not like talking publicly about her daughter—and what mother would? But she said to me and others—and this is graphic—that for years she has had to take care of six pairs of damp underwear from her daughter every day because she has not been able to control her bodily functions. Julie Baker reckons that in 2 years’ time, if this therapy went on, her daughter, Brittany Graham, would be toilet trained, to use her words. But the fear that she now faces is that Brittany will have to be withdrawn from school. Her fear is that mainstreaming—if that is the agenda for this little girl—simply will not work, given the intensive therapy she needs.

I say to another Cabinet Minister, Kate Wilkinson, who occasionally resides in my electorate, that she has done nothing about it. She is part of the decision, and she should front up to Brittany Graham and Julie Baker.

In a recent poll we saw that Mr Phil Goff was at 7 percent. What I do not understand is why, if one is accused of being invisible, one would wear camouflage for one’s photo in the Listener. If one is already invisible to the New Zealand public, why then go out and be like a lamb to the slaughter, as I have heard the photograph being described many times, and wear camouflage, which, quite frankly, makes one even more invisible?

We have heard from Mrs King in recent days, saying about her fine leader and colleague that the king is dead, but the prince is not quite ready yet. But like a lamb to the slaughter, he stepped up today. In the last 2 weeks we have heard about over a billion dollars of welfare spending in relation to what members opposite want to do for middle New Zealanders. In week 1, we heard that the wives or husbands of millionaires could be eligible for a benefit under Labour’s great plan for turning stuff round. The most recent proposed spending we heard about was the estimated $450 million to be spent on the in-work tax credit for those on a benefit. But as the Prime Minister said, there are no pixies in the garden. Money does not just come out of thin air. But, boy, do Labour members know how to spend; boy, do they know how to load that spending on to taxpayers; and boy, would they like to see this debt constantly increasing.

Let us talk about what we are really doing. This week we announced another 16,900 job and community work opportunities for young people. Let us not underestimate the problem we have here. The statistics are clear: about a third of those on the unemployment benefit are 25 years old or under. We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of young people going on to the unemployment benefit, and leaving them to languish on that benefit is not an option for us. If we leave them with no future ahead for them, that tells them that we do not care. It is simple, this Government certainly does care. So the Government has stood up and said that, first of all, there are 4,000 jobs under the job opportunities scheme. Job Ops will need employers to step up and say: “Here is a new entry-level role that we have been looking at introducing and that we need a young person to step into.” Let me give an example of a hairdresser in Taupō who owns a salon. Business has been a bit shaky for a while but it is starting to get a little bit busier, and she wonders whether she has the means to take on a new entry-level person. We will help her out. We will give her $3,000 upfront for that new-entrant role, then $2,000 at the end of that 6 months. That is a $5,000 investment that we are putting into that young person, to support the hairdresser’s business, and to provide those sorts of opportunities. There are 4,000 of those job opportunities.

There are 3,000 Community Max opportunities. That is for those projects in our communities that people would like to get done but they do not quite have the manpower—the people power—to get them done. That means iwi standing up and saying what could be happening around their marae and what they would like to see their young people doing. It means mayors stepping up for some of those initiatives, whether it is tree planting, whether it is painting something down the road, or whether it is a project that really needs to be done. It could be a Lions club that will get something together under this scheme. For example, the local Piha Surf Life Saving Club may have a project that it would like to do. It is actually limitless. We know that the ideas are out there in our communities; what we want to do is back those people to do it.

I am pleased to say that there will be Community Max advisers. They are the very people who were working on the Enterprising Communities scheme. We are taking the local knowledge they have in their communities and asking them to go out and speak to local community groups, to ask them about what needs to be done in their local areas, and to talk to them about their projects. We will pay the minimum wage for 30 hours a week for up to 3,000 young people. There will be a skills and training subsidy alongside of that for those young people, and we will also fund a supervisor for them. There is no doubt that the package is impressive. Members will hear from others about the Youth Guarantee. They will hear about service academies being doubled—about another eight of them are coming on board. Limited service volunteers are the way to go.

Kia ora, talofa lava, and warm Pacific greetings. I stand to speak in this debate with much concern and anger. I stand as Labour’s associate spokesperson on aged care, and I want to focus on the elderly: generations who have built and contributed to our society and economy, and generations that for many of us represent our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and us. It is the responsibility of the Government to look after the welfare and well-being of its citizens. Today we are focusing on our elderly, our senior citizens.

In my role as the associate spokesperson on aged care I have visited, met, and spoken with people in rest homes, people in hospitals, and people who are still living in their own homes with some home-based support. I have also spoken with doctors, nurses, caregivers, family members, and members of the community. I have also met and spoken with members of Grey Power and of Age Concern. As the spokesperson on Pacific Island affairs and the Interfaith Group, and as the MP for Mana, I have also spoken and met with church organisations, and with elderly people from Palagi, Māori, Pacific Island, Asian, and other ethnic groups.

Aged care is the collective responsibility of all of us. Surveys conducted by organisations like Age Concern have shown that the majority of people over 65 years want to continue to live in their own homes and to maintain independence as much as possible. Social isolation is also a major issue. The elderly have expressed their appreciation for having support in their homes, especially where they have medical conditions that limit their activity. There are currently around 28,000 older New Zealanders living in residential care, and a further 60,000 older people are receiving home support services. Reducing home-based services could result in more people ending up in hospital and costing health boards more money. People need better, not reduced, home support. Where that has become a cost-cutting service, it means we have rendered elderly people unsafe in their own homes. That is not acceptable, and it can also put tremendous stress and anxiety on them and their families.

We also know it can be more cost-effective to provide quality home-based support to our elderly while they are still able to remain in their own homes. In April this year the Southland Times reported in its headline: “Home support faces razor”, and we all know that Tony Ryall’s razor ain’t blunt! The media release also quoted David Crisp, the local district health board’s regional planning and funding general manager, who said that reductions were most likely to be where the boards funded domestic help to the elderly. It is very important that the actions follow the rhetoric, when the Minister of Health has publicly stated his commitment to moving health resources to the front line. Yet district health boards are stating they will make cuts to home-based services to the elderly. It is very clear that these cutbacks will be disastrous for our senior citizens, some of whom rely on those services in order to stay in their own homes and to lead relatively independent lives. The Minister of Health, Tony Ryall, has promised that he will improve front-line services, but it has become increasingly clear that the current Government does not see home support services as front-line or essential. Our elderly deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and not as a drain on resources, which is clearly the message these district health boards and the Minister of Health is sending.

Financial arguments for reducing home-based support services are critically flawed. Providing support for people to stay in their own homes is always going to be a less expensive option than providing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, residential accommodation. Without home support more elderly will have no choice but to look at the option of residential care. The elderly deserve more than to have their health compromised because of a call for financial restraint from a Government that promised better health care. Instead, National is delivering rhetoric and cuts to front-line services, and, in this case, to home-based services for the elderly.

Our elders deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, which is why last month and again this morning I have sought at the Health Committee, with Labour members’ support, to have a select committee inquiry into the quality of health care for older people. It is to ensure that older New Zealanders are receiving the appropriate access to health services, both in the community and in residential care.

New Zealanders are very lucky people. We live in a democracy. Last year we had a peaceful transition of power from a Labour-led Government to a National-led Government. That may seem unremarkable, but there are far too many countries around the world where that would not have happened.

Democracy is fundamental to our society. Democracy is precious and we must protect it, but we should never take it for granted. Less than 2 years ago Labour attacked the very foundations of democracy with the Electoral Finance Act. In a desperate effort to get re-elected, Labour sought to pass a law that severely restricted the rights of New Zealanders to criticise it.

💬 Hon Annette King: We sought to stop the rort.

I led a campaign against the Electoral Finance Act, and I am sure one of the reasons, as Annette King is well aware, that she sits on that side of the House is the law she promoted and passed. New Zealanders did not accept it.

I say to Mr Williamson that the boot is on the other foot today. The previous Parliament also passed a law to amend section 59 of the Crimes Act. The law denies parents the right to raise children in the way they wish. One of the very basic protections we have in our society is the right to challenge Parliament and to bring an issue to the attention of politicians. That is a right contained in the Citizens Initiated Referenda Act.

Three-hundred thousand citizens went out and requisitioned a referendum. What has the National Government and, in particular, the Prime Minister done about it? They have derided and criticised those people, and their referendum has been criticised as confusing. I found it very interesting to listen to Mr Key on Breakfast on Monday. He said he accepts the law and that it technically states that if a parent smacks a child for the purpose of correction then it is against the law. I say to Mr Key that it is not technical; that is what the law states. It is against the law for a parent to smack a child for the purpose of correction.

A referendum is going on, and 3 million voting papers for the referendum have been posted out. Members opposite and all New Zealanders should participate and vote in the referendum. Democracy is precious and we should never take it for granted.

I found it very interesting to see that Colmar Brunton had conducted a poll on the referendum, and 70 percent of New Zealanders said they will vote. I congratulate those people, and I tell others to vote and participate in the referendum. They should express a view, because they never know when they may lose that right. I find it very interesting that 83 percent of people who responded to the Colmar Brunton poll said they do not believe a smack for the purpose of correction should be against the law or illegal.

We have a Prime Minister who has already told the people of New Zealand he will not listen to them. He is not prepared to change the law. He says the law is working and that the police are not prosecuting.

💬 Hon Darren Hughes: Is he right?

We have Child, Youth and Family going into people’s homes. I highlighted a case this afternoon in which a child laid a false complaint against her mother. She was taken away from her mother overnight while the complaint was investigated. The complaint was totally false, and I ask Mr Hughes how he thinks the mother felt.

The law is not working and there is no certainty. As Mr Paul Henry on Television One said to Mr Key, the police may not be prosecuting—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Has the member ever been with the family of a murdered kid?

I can understand the interjections from the Labour members. I pointed out that the very reason they are sitting on that side of the House is, in part, I believe, the Electoral Finance Act. New Zealanders, National members, and the Prime Minister should not make the same mistake Labour made when it passed the Electoral Finance Act.

Eighty-three percent of New Zealanders believe that the law on smacking is wrong. They want the law changed, and apparently 91 percent of National Party supporters want it changed. Next time those people are asked to participate in a poll, they should say they will vote for the ACT Party because the ACT Party is the only party that has stood up and fought for the rights of parents. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

I want to stand in the House today and talk about the really exciting package for young New Zealanders that our Prime Minister, John Key, launched in Christchurch on Sunday. What a fantastic package that is! It will create almost 17,000 opportunities for young people in this country, and it will spend $152 million. We should be out there applauding this initiative by this Government. It just goes to show that the rolling maul that our Minister of Finance, Bill English, and our Prime Minister, John Key, have been talking about as an answer to the economic recession is the right one. It enables us to wait and watch, evaluate what is happening, and move in and take action when we have identified where we are needed. We know that our young people are starting to suffer in greater numbers than many other sections of society.

I was on the radio this morning talking about the opportunities that this package provides for young people in Gisborne. Half the population in Gisborne are Māori. Many, many of them are young people. My electorate of East Coast has, I think, one of the highest proportions of young people in the country. We are an area that has suffered, over the last months, some quite severe shocks to employment. Grape growers have been told that their contracts will not be picked up this year by Pernod Ricard. A sawmill has closed, which has resulted in the loss of a large number of jobs, and Cedenco has closed its sweetcorn processing factory. So we have had a large number of shocks, which will have a ripple effect right throughout our rural community.

The ones who suffer the most are the young. They are first ones to be put off—Māori and Pasifika youth in particular. They do not get the opportunities. So I think the Government’s package is fantastic. Four thousand opportunities will be created through Job-Ops, a straight wage subsidy for employers. There is also Community Max. I know my community will respond, because they care about young people. There are lots of jobs around to be done, and I am absolutely confident that the community will come to the party.

I want to talk about two specific parts of this package that I am really excited about. The first is the Youth Guarantee. The National Party went into the election talking about the Youth Guarantee and about making sure that 16 and 17-year-olds have an entitlement to free education, so that until one is aged 18 one can attend school, polytech, wānanga, or a private training establishment—whatever suits the student. When we came to put that together in policy, we found it was quite complicated. It is not as easy as it sounds, for a whole variety of reasons, but out of the Job Summit came the idea that we needed a tightly focused, early roll-out of that Youth Guarantee to get the whole thing started.

So what has the Prime Minister done? He has topped up that fund and said we will fund 2,000 places next year and another 2,000 places in the following year. Those places are specifically for the Youth Guarantee and they are specifically targeted at our Māori and Pasifika youth, and I think that is fantastic. I can see that all around the country polytechs, wānanga, and private training establishments are working away to find how they can provide courses to engage with these young people.

The second part of the package that I really want to draw attention to is the service academies. Currently, a number of service academies are operating in schools around the country. Some are run by the Tertiary Education Commission and some are run by the Ministry of Social Development. Each has different criteria and each has different funding. We will bring all those into the Ministry of Education, because they are in-school opportunities for young people. I said to the people of Gisborne that a large number of our young people go into the armed services. I am sure that my Gisborne area can see an opportunity for a service academy in one high school or a collaboration between local high schools. These service academies will enable young people to get up to speed with the physical requirements for the armed forces. It will give them National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 1 in English and maths, which is the entry point, and it will give them some idea of the discipline and the requirements of the armed services. That in itself is great for our young people. I have met some young people who are in a service academy, and they say it is fantastic.

The Minister of Education has the audacity to come into this House and celebrate success by re-announcing Labour Party initiatives, and at the same time say to disabled children—constituents of Clayton Cosgrove—that they will not get the physical therapy support that has been funded year in and year out, enabling them to keep going to school, because she has put $35 million extra into what is clearly her priority over disabled kids, which is private schools. That is the choice this Government has made. It is taking money off disabled children and putting it into private schools. That is a total disgrace.

💬 Paul Quinn: Rubbish.

Mr Somebody or Other, whose name escapes me—

💬 Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Quinn.

Mr Quinn said that is rubbish. Well, I do not think Brittany, who lives in Kaiapoi and whom Clayton Cosgrove talked about in the House today, is rubbish. But that is how that member and his party are treating her, and that is the way she feels. She knows she might not be well enough to keep going to school in the future, because the Minister has cut her funding.

💬 Paul Quinn: Ha, ha!

The member laughs at that. Well, I challenge him and Minister Tolley to go to Kaiapoi, meet Brittany and her mother, and say to their faces that they are rubbish and do not deserve the very small amount of financial support they have been getting. For the whole country that fund is only $2.5 million. That is such a tiny amount out of the entire education budget. Out of the entire additional funding given in the same Budget to private schools, $2.5 million is a tiny amount. But for those children it will be the difference between them being well enough to go to school and staying at school or being ill and staying at home.

Those are the sorts of priorities that this Government has now made clear to the public. Day after day I hear people saying “That’s not what I thought we were going to get under a National Government. I didn’t think Kate Wilkinson, who campaigned in Waimakariri, would not front up to Brittany and her mother and tell them that they are rubbish in the view of the National Party. That is not what any of those members said before the election.” People will remember in 2 and a bit years’ time just what the Government has done on its promises, in the same way as Tony Ryall revealed in the House today how little substance there has been to his commitment of better, sooner, and more convenient health services. Seven times today the Minister of Health was asked to justify health cuts to front-line services and staff being cut in different district health boards around the country. All the Minister could say was that National inherited a terrible situation. Then he started washing his hands and saying “I didn’t make the decision; it’s the terrible, terrible district health boards. They made the bad decisions.” Tony Ryall gets to announce all the good decisions, and the district health boards are to blame for all the bad decisions. Frankly, that just will not wash.

MidCentral District Health Board had to cut $10 million out of its budget. It was a very high-performing district health board in the past. It is now carrying out a line-by-line review of services and has said, amongst other things, that the standard of health services may have to be reduced in order for it to balance its budget. It is predicting job losses on the front line, not that there are many backroom people in the health system. If there are people in the backroom, they are doing the clerical work for the doctors and nurses so that they can do their health work. They all work together as a team in the health system. There is not a lot of fat to prune in the system. MidCentral District Health Board has just announced that it will not be able to contract out its private hospital elective surgery procedures because of the health cuts. That is something National has been promoting as the answer to so many questions. But with Tony Ryall’s health cuts, MidCentral District Health Board has had to cut back that decision. These are not better health services; they are cuts to health services.

I will tell the House about two really inspirational events I have attended in the last few days—not just the National Party conference. Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Porirua secondary schools’ Malaga production, and I am sure Winnie Laban would agree with me that the kids out there put in a great effort. After watching their dress rehearsal some weeks ago, it was fantastic to see their efforts pay off in a high-quality and enthusiastic performance. Last Saturday evening I attended the finals of the secondary schools’ chamber music competition in Christchurch. Four of the finalist groups were from Burnside High School, the former Prime Minister’s—the Prime Minister’s—old school. A Burnside High School trio eventually won the competition. I was wondering as I was watching both the groups just what makes them so good. The thing that turned them from enjoyable experiences to uplifting experiences was the sight of enthusiastic and positive young people putting their all into an enterprise and enjoying it. What a parallel is the attitude of those young people with the attitude of our Prime Minister! After 9 years of the brooding, Nixonian menace of a woman with chips on both shoulders, perhaps we have grown used to Helen Clark’s viciousness and unkindness. But John Key is a completely different character. He is bright, positive, and very enthusiastic. Has there ever been a time in New Zealand’s political history when there has been a greater difference between the two parties?

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: That’s a very old one—very old. Don’t use that, Chris. Is the member proud of Muldoon’s lines?

I regret to tell Mr Mallard that Labour is in worse shape than at any time in its history. I do not know whether the gravity of the situation has actually hit Labour members, but I suspect from their general look of despair and their braying that they know they face a very long time in Opposition.

New Zealand’s greatest political historian, Michael Bassett, wrote a book called Working with David, which could perhaps have been called “Working Against David”. He described the last caucus he attended in 1990 after Labour had been thumped, when Helen Clark stood up and promised she would do anything, no matter how unprincipled or vicious, to regain the Treasury benches. But that is the old Labour Party approach. The Listener tell us that Helen Clark is off in New York brooding, and plaguing her colleagues with texts. Indeed, she was so anxious to get the inside oil that she invited the Hon Darren Hughes over to visit her. So keen was she on having “Sir Darren” visit her that she arranged for Ministerial Services to take him to the airport in a Crown car.

She knows that the present-day Labour Party is in a shocking condition. It is in a worse condition than after Peter Fraser led it to defeat in 1949, after Walter Nash led it to defeat in 1960, and after Bill Rowling led it to defeat in 1975, and even worse than the state it was in after Mike Moore led it to defeat in 1990. The Labour Party really needs some advice, and, being the charitable sort of chap I am, I am here to provide it. I have some advice to offer the Labour Party. I offer it because I have great respect for the traditions of the Labour Party. I have great respect for the party. I believe that it has lost its way. So my advice to the Labour Party—and I hope the mother of the Electoral Finance Act listens very carefully—is to stop, take a breath, cut out the smearing, cut out the innuendo, and cut out the dirty tricks and the arrogance—

💬 Hon Darren Hughes: This guy just slags people off all the time.

—I tell Mr Hughes, because New Zealanders do not like it. They did not like it during the last 9 years and they did not like it during the election campaign. My advice to the Labour Party is to concentrate on policy, get some new ideas, communicate those new ideas to the public, engage with the public, and listen to them. But until that happens, no amount of Listener articles with good shepherd - style photographs of Phil Goff will help Labour’s poll numbers. It is time the Labour Party listened to the advice. This is not a speech about personalities; this is a speech about contrasts and about advice I really want to offer the Labour Party. We are a positive Government. We are an optimistic Government. We have a great belief in the potential of New Zealand. But the Opposition is negative. It is stuck in the past and it needs to change.

The Attorney-General is almost not even worth talking about. All he had to add to the general debate was to slag off people. But he did say one thing that is worth reflecting on—other than referring to John Key as the former Prime Minister; perhaps he knows something we do not know, but I am sure that will all come out in the fullness of time—when he said to the Labour Party that we should get some new policies and ideas. Well, quite frankly, the Government needs to listen to the Attorney-General’s advice, because the health sector has gone back to the 1990s. It has gone back to the time of Health Cuts Hurt and the 1990s policies we saw that ripped the guts out of our health system.

Before the election we heard ad nauseam that we would have “Better, sooner, more convenient health care”. That is what National was going to deliver. It was going to deliver “more doctors and nurses and less bureaucrats”. Besides my personal abhorrence for the way National maligns the English language with some of its slogans—so much for literacy on the Government benches—those slogans have systematically been unpicked over the 9 months National has been in Government. They are broken promises. We will not see a “better, sooner, more convenient health system”—whatever a sooner health system is. We will see fewer health services, which are understaffed and more expensive. That is what we are getting from Tony Ryall and the National Government in the health sector.

Tony Ryall came up to my electorate of Palmerston North not so long ago. He swaggered in and read the Riot Act to the MidCentral District Health Board. He said: “Find $10 million worth of service cuts. I am telling you that you have no option, no choice.” He sat down with the district health board and told it in no uncertain terms that that is what it must do. It must find $10 million worth of service cuts. Then he walked away. He went back to Wellington and he washed his hands. He got to the soap as fast as he could.

💬 Hon Clayton Cosgrove: He minced away!

He might have minced away; I do not know. But he got as far out of Palmerston North as possible, so that he could leave the onus of making those decisions on the district health board. He does not want to be anywhere near the tough decisions that the MidCentral District Health Board will have to make as a result of his strong-arming and his demands to it.

I am yet to speak to one person at the district health board, or to extract one answer from the Minister that suggests we will not see cuts to front-line services. To find $10 million worth of service cuts in their budget is a lot to ask. It cannot be found through administration and the much-maligned bureaucrats that the Government likes to go after. The cuts will come from front-line services. Doctors and nurses will lose their jobs as a result of the Minister of Health’s policy and his strong-arming of the district health board. But he just walks away. It is not his problem. The people of Palmerston North, Horowhenua, Manawatū, and Rangitīkei will get fewer health services. They will see their services cut, but the Minister just walks away.

It is happening not just in Palmerston North, either. Just up the road, the Whanganui District Health Board will be closing hospital wards on the weekend, so that it can cut back on nursing salaries and nursing overtime. How will that affect elective surgery? How will that affect health services for Wanganui people when they cannot access health services on the weekend, and when surgery that needs to be done cannot be carried out? The Taranaki District Health Board has not had its annual plan signed off, but it has already signalled that the hospital is preparing for cutbacks. At the South Canterbury District Health Board the number of patients it will be able to see in its emergency department is being cut back by 5,000 people a year. It has also looked at axing 200 elective operations per year because of the cut in Government funding.

That sounds just bizarre to me, because this Government has been quite clear in saying that it is looking to produce some good numbers. It has eschewed all public health aspects; it has taken the focus right off anything that is preventive, anything that might actually have an effect on the health of our nation 20 years down the track. Why? It is so that it can produce some good numbers for the 2011 election. That is what it is all about. Yet, it still cannot get that straight, because we are seeing elective surgery being cut down in South Canterbury.

Recently, the Law Commission produced a fantastic issues paper on alcohol issues in New Zealand. Although that paper focused heavily on legislative aspects, it also focused on health aspects. With cuts to mental health funding, there is no way that can be implemented.

I acknowledge, as Mr Lees-Galloway resumes his seat, how difficult a transition it is from Government to Opposition.

💬 Hon Darren Hughes: You’d know!

I do. I remember it well in the year 2000, and I know that we transformed into an effective Opposition far quicker than that member is doing at this stage. I guess what is making it hard for the Labour Opposition members is that they look over to this side of the House and watch the ever-rolling success of this National Government. Nine months on and we are tackling the issues, and the voters of New Zealand respect that.

I never thought I would stand here and honestly say that I have had a wonderful weekend at a National Party conference in Christchurch. But it was a wonderful weekend. There were 700 delegates present, all enjoying the success of a National Government. They waited with bated breath as the Prime Minister, John Key, came in to deliver his keynote address. We wondered ourselves what the Prime Minister would announce. He had the opportunity, in front of 700 delegates, to announce yet another initiative that is being well received by all New Zealanders. For young New Zealanders, 17,000 job opportunities have been created through new initiatives—17,000 new opportunities for the youth of this country. Was it well received? We had the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations, which was the first off the block to praise the initiatives, and welcoming the opportunities for youth. The union was especially pleased with the move to implement the Youth Guarantee scheme. The Tertiary Education Union, which is hardly a normal friend of the National Party, said that it welcomed the opportunity and the package. New Zealand Aotearoa Adolescent Health and Development came out and welcomed the package. The Foundation for Youth Development, the Mayors Task Force for Jobs—everybody came out and said that John Key had done it again, and that it was a wonderful opportunity.

I will talk about another mess we are tidying up for Labour. On Friday, there was another decision from the Land Valuation Tribunal, whereby the previous Government had attempted to increase the rents for high country farmers by some 2,000 to 3,000 percent. In some cases, the rents were greater than the gross farm income. That is how stupid it was. The previous Labour Government said that if it was to be taken to court, it was confident that that policy would survive. The decision was released on Friday. What did the court decide? It said that the rents were against the law and would not stand. That is yet another mess that we have tidied up for the previous Labour Government.

I will also talk about the Labour Party and how it is going. It is struggling, struggling, struggling. There was a recent article in the New Zealand Listener on the transition of leadership of the party from Helen Clark to Phil Goff. Do members know what deal was done? It is unbelievable! The deal was that Goff would not be challenged for 3 years. That was the deal that was done. It was negotiated by Helen Clark. To make sure it stands, she texts Labour members on a daily basis. Who is in charge? Is it Helen Clark in New York, or Phil Goff in Wellington? Good question! I do not know the answer, but the next Labour member can stand and tell us. One Labour member has been particularly busy, the Hon Trevor Mallard, the member of Parliament for Hutt South. I know what he did on 17 July. He went to a company called Celcius Coffee. Having been there, he got an email from the company complaining that it could not sell coffee to the Government. So Mr Mallard comes into work the next day and writes a letter to Mr Martyn Dunn, Chief Executive and Comptroller of Customs, and he effectively wishes in that letter that the Customs Service could consider buying the coffee from his constituent.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: What’s wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with that! But if Mr Mallard wants to become a coffee salesman, he should go and do it, and stop being a member of Parliament.

On Monday our Government will announce in Bonn the climate change target it is prepared to accept for the year 2020. The latest science tells us that target needs to be 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels for developed countries if we are to have a hope of stopping dangerous climate change. But the Minister for Climate Change Issues, the Hon Dr Nick Smith, has been softening up the public to accept a very low target. On the one hand, the UK is offering 34 percent, Germany is offering 40 percent, and Scotland is offering 42 percent. On the other hand, Australia is offering 4 percent, unless everyone else has a high target, in which case it will go to 14 percent. New Zealand looks set to follow Australia’s pathetic example, and to cover our embarrassment the Minister is making extravagant claims about cost that he simply cannot substantiate.

Nick Smith needs to tell us where he lost the $13 billion; that is right, $13 billion. That amount is the difference between what he told the House yesterday the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research report says, and what it actually says. Yesterday he told the House that the report advises that reducing our emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels would cost us $14.5 billion. He has said this a number of times. Sometimes he has said it is $15 billion. This is clearly rubbish. Even if we purchased all 48 million tonnes overseas and did nothing at all to reduce emissions here, and even if we paid $200 a tonne for them, it still comes to far less than that.

What the report does say is that at a carbon price of $25 a tonne it would cost us $1.2 billion, even assuming—wrongly—that we could not cut any emissions in our own economy. Where is the missing $13 billion, I ask Dr Nick Smith. New Zealanders want it back, please. Maybe the Minister should enrol in one of his colleague’s literacy and numeracy courses.

Yesterday he told the House that four departments had done significant work on opportunities to reduce New Zealand’s emissions cost effectively. Where are those reports published? What do they add up to? Why can we not have them, to inform the current debate on targets? I ask why he told the public consultation meetings on the targets that if people wanted an ambitious target, then they should tell him where the reduction should come from. Is that not the Government’s job? I ask how he expects unfunded non-governmental organisations to do that sort of modelling.

Yesterday the Green Party published our analysis of the savings we could make at negative, zero, or low cost. We showed that replacing the Huntly coal-fired power station and two-thirds of the Taranaki gas-fired station with renewables stations, like geothermal and wind, would save 61 percent of emissions from electricity. Those are already in the Electricity Commission’s statement of opportunities as being cost-effective.

Did the Minister engage with us when we asked him? No. Instead, he held forth about how expensive it would be to go to 100 percent renewable electricity, which is something that the Greens have never proposed. We can only assume that this is because he could only agree with us and with the Electricity Commission that retiring the Huntly station and two-thirds of the Taranaki station is highly effective and not costly.

Turning to agriculture, the Minister failed to engage with the interesting issue that lower-intensity dairying would give farmers both lower emissions and higher profits. This is according to published research from AgResearch and Dairy New Zealand. At the milk payout for this year, which is $5.20, for next year, which will probably be $4.50, and the average over the last 10 years, which is $5.20, high-intensity stocking rates are a loser. It costs farmers more to buy the extra urea, feed, off-farm grazing, and animal health remedies than they get from the extra milk. Is the Minister supporting hard-working dairy farmers to farm more profitably? Of course not. Instead, he attacked the idea of cutting a third of our farm animals, which is another thing that the Green Party has never proposed. Finally, bereft of all arguments, he attacked me personally for the work I have been doing in energy efficiency.

This is not a Minister we can afford to have representing us internationally. What will our trading partners say when he turns up at Bonn and says that we are prepared to offer only a very low target because it is really hard for us, because we want to keep pretending that there is nothing cost-effective that farmers can do to reduce emissions, and we want to keep burning coal, even though renewables are more cost-effective?

It is interesting, as the years creep on, to reflect from time to time on where we find ourselves philosophically with regard to where we have been in the past. Over the weekend I had the opportunity to listen to a keynote address from John Key, as he outlined a policy for the development of opportunities for our young people. I was reminded of a time when I leaned significantly to the left, and of a time when I made a decision to start leaning a little more closely to the right. It was an unusual time for me. It was in 1987, and it was at a time when the Government of the day decided that it would treat people who were unemployed as a commodity.

The Minister of Labour at that time decided that he would stop trying to find work opportunities for young people on the dole under the then Project Employment Programme, or PEP scheme, and would just pay the dole because it was too expensive to do anything more than just administrate the unemployment benefit. Thousands and thousands of people around New Zealand found themselves with nothing to do, having been turning up and looking for job initiatives on a day-by-day basis. I was a sole charge police officer stationed in a small Taranaki town called Pātea. The Minister’s decision had an immediate effect on me, as everyone went out on the turps, got drunk, and started fighting one another, and I was johnny-on-the-spot. I made the decision that I would join the National Party. I have to confess here that it took me some time to complete the change of horses, but I look back to that particular day and realise that that was when I started to change my philosophy.

I believe that young people who find themselves unemployed at the moment, through this recessionary period, are some of the most vulnerable people in the country. We know that these youth, these people aged between 18 and 24, make up about 35 percent of the unemployment statistics, and that Māori and Pacific Island peoples are well and truly overrepresented in those statistics. I am so pleased, then, to be part of a Government that will not treat these young people like some sort of butter mountain it needs to deal with and get rid of, or to sell to the lowest bidder. The Government is prepared to take steps that will work increasingly in a way that will see these young people get into a line of work that may well set them up for a life that will change their chances and their perspective on life.

For instance, the programme called Job Ops will place 4,000 people in employment. Within the first day of being back in my electorate from that announcement having been made, I was approached by employers who were wondering how they could access that programme, and they were telling me about the positions they would create for young people within the community. Another initiative that will go down very well within my electorate is Community Max, which will place 3,000 people on programmes where the Government will provide a supervisor and pay the minimum wage for 30 hours a week, in order to get young people involved in working on projects within their communities. Some of those community projects are around kōhanga reo and marae, and other community projects have been identified already by the Ministry of Māori Affairs in respect of our community.

Whanganui has a particular vulnerability, because Wanganui City has traditionally had a workforce engaged in relatively low-wage manufacturing and parallel agricultural enterprises, and the entry of young people into the workforce has traditionally been through things like the freezing works and other manufacturing enterprises within the city. With the very difficult times through the 1980s, which continued on through the 1990s, those jobs were significantly rationalised, and the people who had been working within those industries tended to stay there. If we go around those workplaces now, we see very few young people entering the workforce and taking up work within those types of occupations. A lot of the people there have tenures well in excess of 20 years; they are not moving on. So young people within my electorate are particularly vulnerable at the moment if they are leaving school in respect of their finding work opportunities within Wanganui, and a lot of the young people who are out of work do not have the option of moving away. To then find we have $152 million to be put into this work enterprise and initiative, which is designed to getting young people into work, is absolutely fantastic.

The Government has a real problem.

💬 Paul Quinn: Make it good.

This will be good. The Government’s real problem is that it does not know where the front line is. If it does not know where the front line is, then I wonder how it will fight the war. How will it know whether it is fighting the right wars? The Government believes that because there is a recession that gives it licence to peddle its particular brand of policies, which will create winners and losers. Rather, this is the time to do much more.

The Government first created the public perception that there were far too many people in the public sector, working in the back rooms and doing things the Government says have little value, and it now wants to move them into the front line. The Government now has this big mantra that its members are reciting. I wonder what the Government is doing under that particular mantra. No comprehensive definition has been presented to us about what is the front line. The definitions the Government has given are not sustainable, and none is being provided in any detail. In the meantime, the Government simply asks us to believe that it is doing the right thing.

True leadership at this time would be taking the opportunity in a recession to be quite aggressive about creating a workforce for the future, training our young people, not losing the jobs that are already there, and preparing for the economy that will come. Instead, we get a push of the Government’s own particular ideology that privileges only some people.

Let us have a look at some examples that are supposed to be those the Government has rejected. There have been casual and callous cuts to disease prevention programmes, to future-looking health promotion programmes that have been helping our youngest Kiwis adopt healthy lifestyles, and to home support for our older citizens and people with disabilities. Those programmes are being cut, but the Government refuses to realise that that is the front line of the best services we can provide at this time. With those services we will create a much better citizenry for the future New Zealand we will have to cope with.

We know that in the area of health cuts, MidCentral District Health Board is to cut $10 million from its budget. What does the general manager of corporate services, Stuart Wilson, say? He says that a line-by-line review will reduce the standard of services. That is what it will come to. Where will Southland District Health Board and Otago District Health Board get the $10 million from? They will produce it by cutting services for the elderly. That population has done everything it can do for society, and we are cutting services to them. That is mean and callous. Those people are at the front line, they ought to be looked after, and their needs ought to be met.

It is heart-wrenching to know that the great work teachers do with children with disabilities in our classrooms, aided and assisted by the support staff in those schools, is under threat. What do we do? We take away those services, we threaten them, and we say they will be cut. That is mean and callous, and it will take away the one opportunity that those young children have at this time to meet their developmental needs. The opportunity comes only at this time. We cannot make the children wait 5 years for their developmental needs to be met.

What is the front line for this particular Government? It is the $35 million going into the classrooms of the most privileged children in our society. Private schools are to be privileged. I have not seen anybody on the Government side really defend that policy. The Government’s front line is to further privilege those who are already privileged, while those who are not privileged and who could benefit much more from that money will continue to suffer.

Let us see what else is happening at the front line. I wonder whether the Government realises that the sector will reframe the front line and present it to the Government in its terms. Social workers in Child, Youth and Family Services are working up and down the country, raising the awareness of child abuse. As they raise that awareness, they are working at the front line. The children are those whom we constantly worry about. If we take away the social workers and expect a very busy workforce to take up that role internally, they will be unable to do that.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.