Imprest Supply Debate

I move, That the Appropriation (2016/17 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2016/17) Bill be now read a second time. This debate is around the Estimates, which, for those in the House who have not paid too much attention, set out all the spending of the Government for 2016-17. I want to start by acknowledging the efforts of so many public servants and organisations that the Government funds outside the Public Service for the care and attention that they give to the sensible spending of public resource—that is, the taxation we gather off so many New Zealanders.

What lies behind the John Key - led Government’s approach is a simple reality: those people who got up at 4 o’clock this morning and went out to start work, those who worked all day in the cold and the wet and paid their PAYE at the end of last week deserve that we make as good a use of it as they would have if they had been allowed to keep it. There are households right across New Zealand where another couple of hundred dollars would make a big difference. So that is why the Government pays attention to how money is spent. We only have billions because people pay 15 percent when they go and buy their milk and their bread at the supermarket. That is how we end up with billions of dollars.

These Estimates are part of an ongoing process where this Government is trying to change the way public money is managed. Here is one of the challenges. It is related directly to our parliamentary process, which I know, Mr Assistant Speaker, you know better than most of us. Parliament has to work on an annual cycle, because the constitutional permission to raise tax and spend other people’s money has to be renewed regularly. It should be. At least every year—in fact, more often than that on confidence votes. But a whole lot of the issues that the Government deals with are not about annual cycles. When we are looking at the impact of Government spending on the environment, that could be intergenerational—or should be, in fact. When we are looking at educating our young, that is not about 1 year’s result or 10 years’ results: for too many of those children, it is the only chance in their lifetimes to change their prospects.

So a big part of what is going on in the refocusing of the public sector is to get the right balance of complying with the requirements of Parliament—as expressed through these Estimates where we have to be able to track every dollar—on the one hand, and making sure it is effective in a time frame that is relevant to the issues that the Government has a responsibility for, on the other hand. Because, frankly, the Estimates do not tell us a lot about whether we changed that young child’s life or whether we helped the prisoner not to reoffend, or whether we wrote the right quality of environmental regulation that will have an impact for a generation—because that is how long it takes fresh water to get from the farm to the river, carrying nitrates if that is what has happened.

That is quite a challenge, I have to say, because our Government agencies are hard-wired for compliance. If there is one thing they have to do, it is comply with the appropriations that this Parliament gives it—and Parliament’s watchdog, the Auditor-General—they have to do that. But at the same time, increasingly, they have to think in a framework that is relevant to the problem and, particularly, that demonstrates impact. This is because too often the spending that we are approving here disappears out into the wider community, and people, even with the best of intentions, are not quite sure whether it worked. Because the spending here is not for the teachers, it is not for the doctors, and it is not for the police or the NGOs. They are all very influential, sometimes too influential, on how the money is spent. The money, the spending, the support, is for the citizens, or—the word I like to use because it irritates people, including the Labour Party, is “our customers”—our customers. Not people who are passive recipients—and it annoys the Greens, because they, like Labour, want the New Zealand public to be grateful recipients of their good intentions expressed with other people’s money. That is what they like—people who just put up with what the Government gives them and say: “Well, it must be the right thing because nice people from the Government said so.” That model of Government is over, and if Governments do not change it, the evidence around the world is that voters will if they feel that the State can no longer be responsive and can no longer change when it should change.

So that is what lies behind a lot of the direction and changes in the Estimates. And, of course, it covers a whole range of issues, including spending on issues that have been discussed quite a bit lately, one of which, I will mention, is housing. I thought it was notable today that the Labour Party had nothing to say about housing. And do we know why? It is because yesterday the Government initiated the process for the biggest housing development the country has ever seen—like, ever seen—and it is only the first of a number.

💬 Chris Hipkins: How many houses? How many?

Well, in Tāmaki it will go from 2,500 to 8,000 houses. Here is a challenge for the member: if the Labour Party housing policy was so popular, Phil Goff would be using red billboards in Auckland, and Justin Lester would be using red billboards in Wellington. But the Labour Party policies are so popular that Phil Goff is making every effort to look like the National candidate for the Mayor of Auckland. And Justin Lester is so desperate not to be labelled as Labour that he is using the ACT colours for his billboards. Of course, the biggest issue for Labour is whether Stuart Nash or Nick Leggett is the most left-wing. That is the biggest issue. That is the one that really got them fired up.

So we are very pleased with the way that the Public Service is responding to the challenges that have been given to it. We are pleased with the progress on housing, because in this 3-year term of Government this country will rebuild Dunedin—this country will add to the number of houses that are in the city of Dunedin. And then, in the next 3 years, it will have to do that plus more. That is a combination of what we hope and believe will be sensible decisions from the Auckland Council, which has to produce a plan that shows credible, large increases in supply, and the Government’s building programme, which is getting up and going and—as the Labour Party will find out—on getting into the middle of next year will be running at scale. I can assure it of that.

So I commend these Estimates to the House. I want to thank all of the committees that have spent time scrutinising them. Sometimes in select committees very good questions are asked, particularly by the National Government members. Sometimes not so good questions are asked by everybody else. But it is part of, I think, in the select committee, a growing understanding of the way that public spending is being managed in New Zealand. And it is all about doing a better job for those New Zealanders who most need it—not doing crazy things like the Labour Party is suggesting, like “Get your student loan wiped if you join the Public Service.” I mean, what happens if you join the Labour Party? Is it going to—

Order! [Interruption] Order! The member’s time has expired.

Never has a truer word been said—that member’s time surely has expired. He devoted a large chunk of his speech to the promotion of various mayoral candidates around the country. Just to fill in one little gap there: Justin Lester, the most excellent Labour-endorsed mayoral candidate in Wellington, has billboards that are yellow and black. They would be the colours of Wellington, the city in which he is running. I would expect the Minister of Finance to know that, given that he has resided in Wellington for a very long period of time.

But he did not mention one mayoral candidate in Wellington who I think will be extremely disappointed that she was not mentioned by the Minister of Finance given that, I believe, he has endorsed her. [Interruption] That is right—Jo Coughlan. We did not hear about the colour of her billboards. I think you will find they—Jo Coughlan’s billboards—are actually green and red, but, look, it is fine. The Minister of Finance’s endorsement in Wellington will be hugely helpful for Jo Coughlan to scratch herself up from seventh or sixth place in the order.

As for Phil Goff in Auckland, a man whom I think most people would be laying bets on to be the next Mayor of Auckland—but feel free, National Party, to put up a third candidate. It has already got two on the go—Mark Thomas, a refugee from Wellington, is up there as well. Actually, do we count John Palino? Does he count as a National Party candidate? Well, he is Cameron Slater’s candidate, so that is three. They have already got three National Party candidates there. So Phil Goff is well and truly in charge of that—but enough about local government.

The Budget of 2016 got off to a bad start. It actually got off to a bad start the day before, when Paula Bennett, desperate because she knew that the Budget did next to nothing for housing, decided to make her own Budget announcement. Bill English did not know about it. He was remarkably relaxed when he heard about the fact that Paula Bennett was promising to pay $5,000 to people to leave Auckland. It was a little bit of a confusing policy because she also had another policy to pay people $3,500 to go to Auckland. So people were potentially getting themselves on the merry-go-round of that money, but, in the end, the success of that pre-Budget announcement that Bill English did not know about was for 12 people—12 whole people—to take the opportunity to take the $5,000 and move out of Auckland.

When New Zealanders take a look at a Budget, what they are looking for is whether the Budget helps them and their families and their communities to grow and to prosper. The Budget is the Government’s chance to say: “Here are the things that are important for New Zealand to go ahead in the next few years.” We look at the core areas that you do in any Budget—what kinds of jobs are going to be created, what kinds of housing are there going to be for people, what will the education system look like, and how will the house system be supported? They are the building blocks of opportunity, the things where New Zealanders look to the Government and say: “We’re trying to build a good life for us and our families—will the Government be there alongside us?”. They take a look at the 2016 Budget and they see nothing. It does not fix the housing crisis. It cuts health and education in real terms. It does not do anything to support New Zealanders in the transition to a changing, working environment in the future of work.

What is more, when we look ahead, the grand ambition of the Government, once naming itself as ambitious for New Zealand, is that wages—average wages—will not actually keep up with inflation for the next 2 years. The share of the economy that working people get is—

💬 Andrew Bayly: That is rubbish.

Andrew Bayly needs to catch up with the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update. Have a read of it and you will see wages not keeping up with inflation for the next 2 years. That is how little the National Government members know about what is going on. Just how out of touch they are is that they do not even realise what their own Budget says.

When New Zealanders look at that, they will be saying—Bill English says he is concerned about the people who get up at 4 o’clock in the morning. Well, he should be concerned about those people, because they are working harder and harder and not feeling like they are getting ahead. The reason for that is that the share of the economy that working people get is declining under this Government. We know that. Wages are not keeping up with the cost increases we are seeing in housing. Then we find out, in the days after the Budget, that the level of income and asset inequality in this country is getting worse. Statistics New Zealand has come out and told us that the top 10 percent of New Zealanders have 60 percent of the wealth, up from 55 percent just a few years ago. That is the New Zealand that this Government is creating: one where those at the very top do better and those hard-working New Zealanders who, as Bill English says, are getting up at 4 in the morning, are struggling to see their way forward. This Budget did next to nothing for them.

When New Zealanders are looking at a Budget like this, what they should have seen was a plan to fix the housing crisis. It is the biggest political issue facing New Zealand today, and the Budget was largely silent on it. A little bit after the Budget, it turns out the Government had a panic and decided it had better create a billion-dollar infrastructure fund—

💬 Hon Annette King: How long did that take to work out?

It took the Government 3 weeks to work it out. There was one sensible thing about that process: Government members did not tell Nick Smith until the very end. That was the sensible bit of the process. They told him a couple of days before the end. They did not even bother to tell the councils that they wanted to work with, and most of the councils looked at it and said: “This will get us next to nothing.” What that package should have been was a simple and plain thing: to have a Government that would be a partner in building affordable homes.

Bill English, in his pre-Budget speech, has acknowledged that only 5 percent of the homes built in New Zealand in the last 10 years have been affordable homes. That translates to about 500 homes in Auckland being affordable, when we need thousands and thousands. So the comprehensive housing plan that Labour has put forward is what should have been in the Budget: 100,000 affordable homes built over the next 10 years, making sure that we actually have an affordable housing authority that has got the mandate to get in there to work with councils, iwi, and developers to create good-quality, affordable housing right across New Zealand.

Somehow, in the middle of his speech, Bill English starting talking about rebuilding Dunedin. If only that was what he was going to do, because, actually, out of our Affordable Housing Authority project, we want to do the kind of urban regeneration that communities like South Dunedin, where I grew up, actually need—and that is what we will do. Making housing central to building strong communities—that is what Labour’s KiwiBuild and Affordable Housing Authority policies are about.

Then we need to make sure that we are providing adequate State housing. We heard Steven Joyce come out with his tweet to say: “We are not taking a dividend from Housing New Zealand.” That happened in the wake of the Budget as well. Next year, I understand that Steven Joyce’s Twitter account will be included as an unspecified fiscal risk in the Budget, because if he is going to make $90 million tweets, he is going to get right in there alongside the Earthquake Commission and a few other things that are already in that category. But the Government needed to have a commitment to State housing, it needed to have a real commitment to emergency housing, and that was not there.

Then we come to health where we have a continuation of the underfunding of health that has been a feature of the Budgets of the National Government. We have now reached $1.72 billion of underfunding right across New Zealand, which is having an impact.

Then we look at the education system where, remarkably, the Government chooses in this Budget to say “We will freeze the operational grants of our schools.”, at the very time when our schools need more support to be helping to prepare young people for the future. The good news is that in education the Labour Party has a plan too: 3 years of free post-secondary school training and education for every New Zealander—recognising that now and into the future the kinds of skills that people need to be developed and retrained and constantly upgrading. We are going to upgrade careers advice in school because every New Zealander deserves the right to have a career plan, to be supported to make the decisions for what they will do next. No New Zealander should be leaving school without that plan, and that is what you get from this Government: 87,200 people aged between 15 and 24 not in employment, not in education, and not in training.

💬 Hon Annette King: How many?

More people, Mrs King, than the population of Palmerston North—87,200. There is nothing is this Budget to deal with that.

So if the Budget was building the opportunity for New Zealand, it would have KiwiBuild in it, it would have health funding that keeps up with population change and backfills what has been let go in the last few years. It would have support for a strong education system, both in our compulsory sector and giving opportunity for training and education past then, and it would have support for our regions to start developing the jobs—the decent work of the future. They are the building blocks of opportunity, they are the things that would be in a Labour Government Budget, but we look at what is in front of us today and it is a tired Budget from a tired Government.

I am sorry to interrupt the member but his time has long expired—at least 30 seconds.

The Budget Estimates debate is a great time to look at the policy difference between the two political parties that have just spoken. I think we can tell that that last speaker, Grant Robertson, has a very negative approach to New Zealand. It is an approach of, basically, Grant Robertson knows better than any other New Zealander—that a failed academic who has made his life out of politics knows better than anybody else in New Zealand. He is somebody who can decide where to build houses. Grant Robertson believes he is greater than God. He can work out where houses go, he can build them at a certain price, and he can make everything happen at a certain price for a certain policy.

That is the Labour Party dream. It is a dream of socialism gone wrong. The Labour Party is continually harking back to its socialist roots: free housing, free university education, free Government jobs if you work for a Government department, no loans. It is all that socialist rhetoric that has gone and has been taken away from the rest of the world that has grown up and worked out that it does not work, and has actually moved on. That is what this Budget shows. It shows an open, progressive economy that delivers for New Zealanders.

I want to take a little moment to talk about immigration because I know that this is something that the other parties are going to come to in their speeches, because whenever they talk about housing, they link it to migrants. The National Government is proud to welcome people to New Zealand. We are a country that is proud to have people come to this country and become part of New Zealand and build their lives and their dreams here. We are not a party like New Zealand First, which is against migrants, we are not a party like the Green Party, which does not want any people in New Zealand, and we not a party like the Labour Party, which has sold out for the theory of housing—the once-proud Labour Party. When I first came into politics, at every event I went to the Labour Party said: “We are pro-migration. We are pro-immigrants.” Now it does not say that. Those members hardly go to those events because they know they cannot stand up in front of those groups and actually be honest with them and say “We’re cutting immigration.”, because that is what the Labour Party stands for. That is its policy: it wants to cut immigration. That is the true Labour Party that you are seeing come out now, and the Labour members are very quiet now—not one defensive comment. Not one—

💬 Iain Lees-Galloway: It’s because we’ve all gone to sleep.

Then they come back now, because they have just been called to talk.

New Zealand has a choice of how we run this country. We can be an open, free country that takes our opportunities or we can be closed and restrictive on our people and our future. The world is going through quite interesting times. You are seeing what is happening in Britain and what is happening in North America. There is a mood and there is a political class that is talking about restrictions, about stopping people—

💬 Hon Annette King: A class?

Yes, it is a class, Mrs King—a class based around those people like Bernie Sanders, who are true Labour Party members. That mood is a negative mood that is against progress and success. New Zealand has taken a different approach. New Zealand is in the heart of that Asian growth bubble that is, basically, the world for the next 150 years. As part of that, the last thing we should do is have a restrictive approach. If New Zealand takes the Labour, Greens, and New Zealand First approach we will deny ourselves the opportunity that our geographical position has enabled us to take in the next 50 to 100 years. We cannot let that opportunity slip.

I often talk to the public in Hamilton and ask them: “What is the biggest thing in Hamilton? What is our biggest strategic advantage?”. We always look at it and we know that it is our proximity to Auckland. Just like Hamilton is to Auckland, New Zealand is to Asia, and just like Hamilton has taken advantage of that link with Auckland through the expressway, New Zealand needs to link with the Asian development and growth and actually take advantage of our opportunities in front of us. We do not need to stop people coming to this country. We do not need to say that we need to have population stilled across our major cities. We do not need to restrict our people and our future. What we need to do is embrace that opportunity and take that opportunity. Every time the people of Hamilton look north, they look at it with success and pride because they know it is helping them grow, and every time they look east they look at it the same way. We look at that as being the next stage of Hamilton growth. It is to look east, just like New Zealand’s next stage will be to look east towards South America and America, as we grow. So you can relate Hamilton to New Zealand’s position, and it is very much the same.

New Zealanders must take that opportunity, and we must not go into that politics of fear and dissolution that you are seeing around the world, which pits people against each other just because of our race or our religion or where we were born. We must accept all New Zealanders and, more importantly, must welcome new New Zealanders and let people have a future in this country and not go through the petty politics of fear that the Opposition peddles through every election campaign, which we know those members are going to do again this time.

This Budget is so important in providing that impetus, and I think New Zealand has got a perfect opportunity in the next few years to take advantage of that. The one thing I fear is that we do not take advantage of that and our near neighbours do, and if New Zealand gets out of kilter with Australia in that regard. Then have a look at the housing market. Instead of worrying about 30,000 people leaving New Zealand to go to Australia, as was the case 10 years ago under the Labour Government, there will be 50,000 leaving to go to Australia. Cities like Melbourne and Sydney are projected to have populations of 9 million people each in the next 30 years—9 million people. Auckland goes to 2.4 million people in that time. Auckland needs to grow and be stronger than that to be successful. We need a strong Auckland for a strong New Zealand. A strong Auckland will come through population growth, and that population growth is imperative to our country taking its place in the future.

The Green Party may laugh, but the Green Party just wants New Zealand to be an Island State and thinks that everything will be fine and that everything—

💬 Grant Robertson: Well, we are an island.

Well, an Island State in the sense of not having that strong economic basis. Oh, we are all an Island State, if you want to look at it that way, Mr Robertson. Mr Robertson can be cute around the facts, but he cannot actually understand any of the details when it comes to things.

So it is important that we follow the course that New Zealand has set itself on, and this is a course that gives us an amazing opportunity to be a very successful country. If we do not follow that choice and we do not follow that course, then we consign ourselves to what New Zealand First, the Labour Party, and the Green Party want, and that is not something New Zealanders want to see. We do not want to see—oh, Mr Ron Mark is laughing as well, yes. Mr Ron Mark, who has never won a seat, who never can win a seat, and who has back-pedalled into this Parliament for his whole career on the coat-tails of one leader of his party, and who has never been able to convince the people of one electorate to vote for him—so it is big of you to come in here and tell us what to do, Mr Mark.

Going back to that population change, which is so important for Auckland as well, if we do not have that population growth, Auckland will not have the world-class university of the future. Auckland will not have the base for that economic growth that we need so that our young people stay in this country and want to be part of New Zealand. Auckland’s strength will mean that Hamilton and Tauranga are strong and as those regions grow, then the rest of New Zealand will prosper and succeed as well, and you are seeing that through the rest of New Zealand at this moment with a strong economic base in the north of the North Island.

New Zealand has a clear choice next year as to whether we take an open approach—which this Budget represents—that is aspirational for our people and that gives us opportunities and takes the opportunity we have in that new world order, or whether we take the restrictive, negative approach of the Bernie Sanders of the world, the Don Trumps of the world, and the Lenins of the world, who would actually want us not to take our chances but to consign ourselves to being a State that does not believe it needs to compete and does not need to actually offer the opportunities to all New Zealanders. I see New Zealanders as deserving and needing those opportunities, and they should not have them taken away by a negative, restrictive Labour - Greens - New Zealand First Opposition. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. What that previous speaker, David Bennett, really exemplified was the extent to which this National Government is all about spin and not about substance, and is not willing to debate substantial issues on how we can actually create a fairer, greener New Zealand. I know that most New Zealanders want to live in a society where everyone has a fair go, where we do not have people sleeping on the streets or sleeping in cars, or kids going to school hungry, which limits their opportunities in the future. I know that most New Zealanders, even the ones who voted for this National Government, do not want that, and I know that most New Zealanders—probably all New Zealanders—love our precious natural environment, as I do. This is the reason I emigrated to New Zealand and made it my home. It is because I absolutely love the native forests, the beaches, the mountains—it is a fantastic place to live. And I know that—

💬 Andrew Bayly: And the people.

All the people who live here want to protect it for the long term, for their children and grandchildren. They do not want to see it be lost just to get some short-term economic growth. They want a long-term strategy that protects our people and protects our environment.

The reason I got involved in politics is that I was just trying to be a problem solver. You know, I focused on urban planning and transport because I could see there were a lot of opportunities to get those win-wins in that area, where we could get a better environment, save money, and get a better outcome for people in cities. Healthier, happier cities—what a fantastic opportunity. I had to get involved in politics because politicians in New Zealand were making the calls and deciding to put lots of money into really outdated, uneconomic motorway projects. It was such a missed opportunity. In fact, this National Government is continuing to do that. So I joined the Green Party because I could see the Green Party was the party with these smart, forward-looking policies that will actually deliver a much more successful society and will deliver more jobs for New Zealanders that will protect our environment and enhance the well-being of our citizens.

I know it is very easy for the members in the National Party to get up and claim that the Green Party members are a bunch of loonies who do not understand the economy. If there are 59 of them going around saying that, I do not doubt that people have the impression that the Green Party does not have a serious economic policy. But when you look at the reality, the substance, the Green Party is the most economically realistic party in this Parliament, and I have to say that some of the Opposition parties are not too bad, and we want to work with them.

💬 Hon Member: I’m glad we got that one in.

We want to work with them.

Although the National Party spin is that it is the best party for jobs in the economy, the reality is becoming glaringly obvious. Just look at the Reserve Bank statement today. That was a damning indictment of 8 years of National’s short-term approach that has mismanaged the economy. That is its short-term approach to governing. National is unwilling to take the courageous hard calls. National went against popular public opinion and went off and partially privatised the energy companies with asset sales. That was not popular, and it was also a fiscal and economic failure. It barely raised any money. We flooded the market with energy shares at one time, which drove down the price. It meant we got less revenue. And now, the cost of those forgone dividends has almost exceeded the amount that we received from those sales. So it was an economic and fiscal failure.

But what could National have done instead? It could have listened to Treasury and implemented a comprehensive capital gains tax back in 2010, when Treasury was begging it to. That would have raised a lot of revenue, which we could be using to invest in infrastructure, to deal with our population growth. It would have been a fair way to raise that revenue. It would have helped reduce the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. It would not have solved the Auckland housing bubble—there is no question about that—but it would have dampened it a bit. At the very least it was a fair way to raise revenue. It is not fair that New Zealanders—middle New Zealand—go to work, collect their pay cheque, and pay tax on that, but that rich, elite class who are able to own lots of properties can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in Auckland, not lifting a finger, in tax-free capital gains. That is not fair. It is not right. It is not good for the economy. That is why we are pretty much the only country in the OECD that does not have a capital gains tax. It is not economically sensible.

So if this Government was really serious about governing for the long term and creating a sustainable economy that looked after everyone, it would have dealt with the housing crisis in the last 8 years. But it has not. Government members’ statements in this House are pretty much fact free. They do not even really believe in objective reality. If we take the Prime Minister seriously, he thinks that he can find a scientist who will give him whatever opinion he wants to hear. I do not doubt that he thinks that. But it is not true. Unfortunately, this fact-free approach to politics really undermines the public’s confidence in politicians and in our political system. As a result they are less likely to participate. That is bad for democracy, and it is bad for our society.

This is how we know that things are not going well, despite National’s protestations to the contrary. They say that GDP growth is great and the economy is going gangbusters. We know it is not working for everyone, because homelessness is at an all-time high. For the first time we are getting enormous reports of people having to live in cars and live on the streets. We know it is not working, because 62 percent of our monitored rivers are not safe for swimming. That is not right. That is not the New Zealand that we want to live in, where the majority of our monitored rivers are unsafe for swimming in. We can do better than this. We do not have to trade away our rivers in order to have jobs. That is rubbish. The GDP growth is not a solution for the increasing number of children who are growing up in poverty and going to school hungry.

Although there have been a few tinkering solutions, the reality is that this Government has not done everything it could do to eliminate child poverty. There is no reason any child in New Zealand should grow up in poverty, without a warm, safe, dry, and secure home to live in. There is no reason they should go to school and be hungry. It is not in our short-term or long-term interests to allow this to continue. The Budget is all about priorities. Budget 2016 did nothing to address child poverty. It did nothing to address climate change. It did nothing—actually, it probably made the situation worse, when it comes to our rivers, by subsidising irrigation, which does not make economic sense and will lead to increased pollution in our rivers. Government members shake their heads, but the truth is they are in denial. They are unwilling to confront the facts.

I am here, as all my colleagues are, to bring these facts to the public of New Zealand, who can see that things are not working for all New Zealanders. We can do better. Even in Opposition the Greens have delivered smart, practical policies that are already benefiting New Zealand. There is the home insulation scheme—over $300 million on making homes warmer and healthier. That was only one-third of what the Greens proposed, but it was our idea and at least National went ahead with it. Urban cycleways—over $300 million over 3 years to make it safer for people to walk and cycle in towns and cities, which reduces congestion, is great for health, and it is great for our cities. That was a Green Party idea. The electrification of Auckland’s rail network has been enormously successful. Now there is the City Rail Link, and even though the Government has not committed funding to it, it has realised it has to happen, after dragging its feet for years.

Predator-free New Zealand? What a good idea, National, but you actually have to fund it if you want to make it a reality. The Green Party has proposed a perfectly logical, eminently doable way to fund this predator-free New Zealand goal. We launched it today—the “taonga levy”, which would be a small amount of money from all the millions of tourists who are coming to our country. It would help to fund protection of our conservation estate and ridding New Zealand of predators. Would it not be great if the Government actually followed its promises through with actual policy that would deliver on affordable housing, smart green transport, carbon-friendly jobs, and protecting our rivers and our conservation estate? We can do this. It is absolutely possible. That is why I am here, because I know that it is a possibility. But it is only a possibility if we change the Government.

At the start of Julie Anne Genter’s speech, she started off in quite a generous and kind-spirited way, talking about how parliamentarians across the House actually agree on a few things that would make New Zealand a better place: that children should not grow up in poverty, that we need secure housing, that we all agree we need jobs and economic growth, and that we need to think about how we protect New Zealand’s natural environment. That is actually true. I think all parliamentarians here actually agree, when you boil it down, on the type of New Zealand we want to live in.

Where we disagree is on the methods. Where we disagree is on how we get to that point, and too often, I think, in this House—and, actually, we hear it a lot from other Green members—members on this side of the House, on the Government benches, get accused of hating the poor.

💬 Julie Anne Genter: I didn’t say that.

You did not say that. That is—

💬 Julie Anne Genter: I just said you’re not helping them.

That is my exact point. You did not say that, but too often your colleagues say that. Members on this side of the House get accused of hating the poor and of enjoying the fact that people live in poverty and need a helping hand in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. The disagreements are around the methods. So I want to commend Ms Genter for the start of her speech.

Around the world, the values of openness and multiculturalism, and the idea that countries should engage and be interconnected with each other in the world—those values are under attack. Whether or not it is the rise of “Trumpism” in the United States, with metaphorical and literal walls being built to shut America off from the rest of the world; whether or not it is “Brexit” in the United Kingdom, where one of the subtexts of that debate was a rebellion, in some ways, against migration into the United Kingdom and globalisation; whether or not it is the rise of Pauline Hanson in Australia, with, quite frankly, very alarming and distasteful rhetoric about people of the Muslim faith and other ethnicities; or whether it is the rise of the right in Europe and people like Marine Le Pen in France—the values of multiculturalism and tolerance, of engagement with the rest of the world, and of being welcoming of foreign capital and labour are, in some ways, under attack.

We are in an interesting time in global history, because globalisation, I put on record for the House, has been manifestly and overwhelmingly a force for good in the world. In the last 15 years, extreme poverty has been halved, largely due to globalisation. Countries engaging in trade, companies and individuals engaging in trade, and interconnectedness in the global economy have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in Africa, in China, in South-east Asia, and in poor parts of the world that have, for far too long, been trapped in a poverty cycle. We need to make the case for globalisation as a force for good, but, at the same time, we also have to be cognisant of the fact that there is angst and disquiet in many communities around the world—in the United Kingdom, Australia, the States, and including New Zealand—from people who, perhaps, have missed out on the gains of globalisation.

That is a challenge for all Governments, but it is a challenge that is accepted by this Government. It is a challenge that Bill English, Steven Joyce, Paula Bennett, and the finance team absolutely accept: to take all New Zealanders with us, so that we all share in the gains of growth, but also realise and be cognisant of the fact that, as many speakers on this side of the House point out repeatedly, New Zealand’s future cannot lie in returning to the 1970s-style Fortress New Zealand economy of that era. It does not lie in putting up the shutters and trying to wall ourselves off and insulate ourselves from the rest of the world. It absolutely must lie in things like trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, in free-trade agreements like the one with Korea and like the economic partnership with Taipei. It must lie with interconnectedness with the rest of the world so that our exporters can sell more on the world stage and so that our fast-growing IT companies can get access to markets offshore and sell their products and employ Kiwis, who then provide for their families.

It has to lie in that, because we discovered in the 1970s that trying to subsidise our way to prosperity and trying to put up tariff barriers so that we could protect and defend our domestic industries just led to inefficiency and, in the end, led to job losses. The transition to being part of the global economy was all the more painful because we denied for far too long that we could do that. We pretended that we could just live behind tariff barriers and live in a world in which we did not need to engage with the rest of the world.

The Labour Party led the charge for New Zealand entering the world economy from 1984 onwards. That is its proudest legacy. If Labour stands for nothing else or if Labour is proud of nothing else, it should be proud of those changes. The unfortunate reality and the great big divide across the House these days is between who stands for an open, confident, trading New Zealand and who stands for a return to the politics of the past. I call it the politics of nostalgia, because there are a lot of people in New Zealand who have tried to present a revisionist version of history and tried to imply that New Zealand in the 1970s was a nirvana, when in reality it was anything but.

The Economist magazine says that the big divide in politics these days is between open and closed. It is not about left and right, not about rural and urban, not about the other traditional dividing lines—conservativism or socialism on the liberal side of the spectrum. The big dividing line is about open and closed, and this Government stands on the open side of the ledger. It absolutely stands on the open side of the ledger. Our future lies as an open trading nation that welcomes foreign capital and welcomes foreign migrants to New Zealand and knows that our future lies, as David Bennett said earlier, in that Asia-Pacific growth hub that we are so connected to. We are an Asian nation and that is where our future lies.

It is regrettable that the Labour Party, which has such a proud history of opening New Zealand to the world, is now opposed to the TPP agreement, is increasingly opposed to foreign migration, and actually, very sadly, is resorting to childish and, frankly, deeply unpleasant stunts like the Chinese names debacle from last year, which I think even Phil Twyford regrets. Unfortunately, he cannot undo the damage he has done and the hurt he has caused to Chinese communities—the hurt he has caused to people of Chinese backgrounds who have lived in New Zealand for over 150 years. It was Helen Clark who apologised in 2002 to the Chinese for the poll tax, and that has all been undone, unfortunately—

💬 Hon Annette King: Rubbish.

—by Mr Twyford. Oh, Annette King says “Rubbish.” Clearly Annette is not going around to events in her electorate. She is clearly clearing the way free for Andrew Little to run in Rongotai, because if she had bothered to talk to people in her community she would know that that was deeply offensive to Chinese people—deeply offensive.

This is a Budget that continues New Zealand’s path to being an open and confident market economy, the pathway of the last 30 years. It increases funding for taking advantage of those trade agreements that the New Zealand Government has signed. It funds things like the New Zealand Story, which helps our exporters. It increases funding for Education New Zealand so that we can attract international students into New Zealand—a very large export industry for New Zealand. It increases funding for tourism, a sector that is going extremely well and welcomes people into New Zealand to take advantage of our natural environment and take advantage of our outdoors. It increases funding for innovation in our economy, which is increasingly the motor of our economy—our fast-growing ICT sector and our technology sector, like we have out in the Hutt Valley, or, as I call it, Technology Valley. It increases funding for the pre-seed commercialisation fund. It increases funding for science and innovation, that increasingly important part of the economy.

This is a confident Budget delivered by a confident Government. It is just a shame that parties opposite that have been so strong in the past on an open New Zealand are actually standing up for a closed New Zealand.

Once again, it is very interesting listening to some of the speeches from the Government benches. You really would think, off the back of that speech, that everything that the National Governments did prior to 1984 was bad and wrong. They must have been such a useless bunch of governors, administrators, Ministers, and Prime Ministers! That is what Mr Bishop thinks of the legacy of his old National Party. Up in Pahīatua, in the Wairarapa and Mangamutu, we do not think that way, because the Rt Hon Sir Keith Holyoake came from Mangamutu. He is dearly loved, and people did not think he was an idiot, Mr Bishop. They thought he was actually a very kind, generous man who stood by the old principles of the old National Party—something that has been replaced by the “Liberal Party of New Zealand”, which is very evident in this Budget and very evident in the speeches that we hear today.

This Budget and these Estimates do not reflect the National Party; they reflect a neo-liberal party that has managed to take over what was once a grand old party—a party that was strong on social conscience, that was firm in its head about personal responsibility, and that managed with fiscal prudence the economy of the nation and the development of all of its people. This is a Government that thinks it is better to divest itself of such onerous responsibilities as providing housing for low-income New Zealanders—for New Zealanders who struggle because of the very low wages they earn and because of the very competitive, trickle-down, free-market economy that we have created.

This is the new National Party—the new “Liberal Party of New Zealand”—that believes in the fiscalisation of our economy, as opposed to managing the nation’s economy to the benefit of all people and not just the wealthy, elite few who happen to own, personally, millions of dollars. These are the very same people who benefited the most from the magic tax cuts that so undermined this Government’s ability to deliver competent, capable, efficient, and effective public services to the people of New Zealand, like being able to run a prison where prisoners are safe and being able to run a justice system that keeps the citizens of New Zealand safe. But, no, that does not matter to this neo-liberal party, because such things do not matter to it. It is all about the bottom line, the fiscalisation of the economy, return on investment, and to hell with ordinary New Zealanders.

It is probably reflected when one goes and looks at the pecuniary interests and sees just where these people come from. The neo-liberal National Party of New Zealand parachutes people into rural New Zealand who are not from that area. What does it say to every rural National Party member—

💬 Hon Member: What are you talking about?

What does it say, Alastair Scott? What does it say to the people of the Wairarapa that the National Party would prefer to have a banker representing—

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: He lives there. He runs a vineyard there.

He does not live there. Mr Bridges, the man responsible for WorkSafe, who does not know that when you climb a big ladder on a digger and you get to a certain height above the ground—Mr Bridges, you should have a harness on. But that is—

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Oh, this is cruel.

Ha, ha! But that is Mr Bridges, who brings a law to the House and then demonstrates “Well, you know, do what I say and not what I do.” It was a good morning, Mr Bridges, but you do understand the impact that your legislation—the occupational safety and health legislation—is having in terms of compliance for those businesses that you trumpet that you so support.

We were standing there at that particular event wearing hundreds of dollars of safety equipment. I kid you not—Mr Scott was there, I was there, Mr Bridges was there—we got out of that bus at the Waingawa Log Hub and we must have walked 10 metres from the bus to the area where we congregated so the Minister could have the photo opportunity, but we wore the most expensive, flashest high-visibility jackets, padded and insulated as they were, all at the cost of Centreport, all at the cost of the logging industry, all at the cost of the truckers—the people who put on the event that day. We had brand-spanking-new hard hats. We had steel-capped boots. Thousands and thousands of dollars on us dignitaries—apparently we were—who turned up to watch Mr Bridges cut the ribbon with a pair of scissors.

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: They were sharp!

You know what, I did say to Mr Bridges—as he took the scissors and he walked across that uneven ground towards that big loader, I said: “Mr Bridges, have you had a safety briefing on how to use those scissors? I don’t want you cutting yourself.” He had not—he had not. The irony is not lost on us that this Government would pass onerous legislation that the Labour Party might be proud of passing. This is not lost on New Zealand First. But I did attend the civil contractors’ conference, where, again, Mr Bridges and I—he made a comment to me that we were probably seeing too much of each other that week. But he did open the event, and opened it well. But it was interesting listening to the—

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Now you have told everyone our secret.

No, no, we have not talked about it. We did attend that conference, and one of the things that came out from that conference, sitting there, listening to the debate and the discussion and the workshops, was how onerous the occupational safety and health legislation is now proving to be, and how it has got people thinking, not about productivity, not about getting efficiency—it is about every second of every day sweating over whether the procedures are exactly right and identifying each and every risk, no matter how stupid and nonsensical that risk might actually be. Such as 15 or 20 dignitaries getting out of a bus, stepping down that step on to a piece of prepared ground where they could observe someone cutting the ribbon, and having to wear hard hats, big, expensive high-vis jackets, steel-capped boots, and not being allowed to actually go and have a look at the loaders operating and the train carriages being loaded, because that would have exposed them to risk. What a load of absolute nonsense and drivel. So let us talk about some other things.

💬 Andrew Bayly: Let’s talk about the Budget.

I could talk about these things for hours. Last year Mr English said of the 2015 Budget: “We are also starting to see the impact of Government social investment in approach.” With burglaries in mid-Canterbury and South Canterbury up 40 percent, and where burglars in Northland have a 97 percent chance of getting away with it, he is right—he is right. We are seeing changes in social investment.

In 2008 Mr Key promised that there would be one police officer for every 500 Kiwis. Well, when New Zealand First was in the coalition Government, we had the ratio down to one police officer for every 488. Now it is one police officer for 526. So, the Government, after 8 long years, has failed to hit its own very modest and pathetic target. It has failed to even keep pace with what it inherited from 2008. As the Rt Hon Winston Peters said, we need up to about another 1,900 police just to get to a point where we are comparable in police per capita ratios with the United Kingdom.

As for the party that professes to be rural, it is full of MPs who could not tell a cow from a bull, or the bull from the bull. And they are just about as out of touch as a tsunami of rural crime goes unreported because there are no police. Look at Carterton. We might well have a police station—Martinborough—but there is no sense in having police stations if there are no police officers rostered on. In Carterton, there has not been a police officer rostered on at the Carterton Police Station for over 6 months, which worries me as a former mayor, because Carterton District Council is contributing half the wage for someone to sit at the desk, to allow that place to be manned. Clearly, it is not being manned by police officers.

It does not matter where we look in this Budget. If I was to address some of the questions—some of the comments made thus far by the Government members. I just want to draw to their attention that when they want to address immigration—we know what the Government’s view is on immigration: open the door, allow people to be poured into this country, to help their business mates to increase their profit margins. It is about driving the minimum wage down, and we said back in March 2016 that New Zealanders were having to compete with people who were coming in and accepting below the minimum wage, paid under the table. People who were competing for jobs—jobs that Kiwis should have been taking.

When this Government says we have a shortage of low-skilled workers, well, whose fault is that? The free market, apparently, was meant to provide all of those skilled workers and those apprenticeships. Well, quite clearly, the free market model has failed, and that is why we believe the Government should have picked up its responsibility and funded trade training, just as it used to do in the days when, actually, Mr Holyoake and Mr Muldoon—National Party Prime Ministers—were doing so.

I am so pleased to be able to speak in the third reading of this debate, at a very important time of night, when so many people are listening to this debate. But I am so disappointed with the contribution from the National Party. It has been half-hearted, lacklustre, and fact-free. I think that Paddy Gower has finally got it right—they are on the way out. They are on the way out.

I want to take a serious look at this Budget, because it deserves a serious contribution in the House today. I want to look at the health budget of 2016. All those members opposite who are filling the seats over there, I want them to take notice of some of the facts I am going to give them, because they are not mine; they are independent facts about the health of our nation.

This Budget, in my view, was a missed opportunity. It was full of half-baked ideas. There was wilful neglect, and there was a lot of political grandstanding. It was a budget that had plenty of doctored figures, with a combination of smoke and mirrors. Vote Health needed $635 million to keep up with demographics and cost pressure. What it got was $579 million and a whole heap of political grandstanding. Of that $579 million, district health boards (DHBs), where the services are provided, got $400 million. Minus the $11 million taken off their baseline to pump up the Pharmac budget, it comes to $389 million, minus $89 million that they have to find in efficiencies.

The ministry provided the Health Committee with an answer to the actual cost pressures just a few weeks ago. They started at $489 million, just in the DHBs. What we have got from this Government is a lot of hype about how much money it has put into health, but it has not met the cost pressures and demographic growth of this country.

In a desperate attempt to cover up 8 years of failure in the health budget, Jonathan Coleman got his hapless leadership of the Ministry of Health to produce the biggest con in figures that I have seen for a long time. Jonathan Coleman claimed that funding for health over National’s time in Government was ahead of all cost pressures. Well, I have to tell you that the health sector fell about laughing, before weeping. Treasury fell about in despair at such incompetence with the health figures, and the patients—well, they just fell over, waiting for their hip, their knee, and their eye operations. You see, Jonathan Coleman’s figures did not include ageing or the wage costs that come from multi-employer agreements that make up the health sector: the doctors, the nurses, the allied health services, etc.

So here we had a Minister of Health trying to con the public that there was more money in health over 8 years, under this Government. That is demonstrably untrue. I have to say that I was pleased that Treasury itself recognised that the way this Government was adding up the figures was not the way they are counted, by it or by anybody else.

Then we got to wilful neglect by Dr Coleman. For months GPs have called on the Government for additional funding for primary healthcare. They wanted to see improved access. They spoke of the growing inequities and the rising costs of doctors visits that have happened in the 8 years of this Government. When Labour left power the average cost of a doctor’s visit was $29. It had been brought down under a Labour Government, by investing into primary healthcare over half a billion dollars to make it fair and equitable and easy to access. Today it is $40, and up to $70, per visit for people to go to their GP. The Government was warned that these increases in costs that patients were facing and the lack of additional funding were going to mean that GPs were going to be putting up their prices.

I found it interesting to watch Dr Tim Molloy, somebody whom the Minister himself respects and whom I have great respect for—he is the president of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners—who said: “Having to decide whether you eat or go to the doctor is actually a reality.” It is actually a reality today.

Why I am raising this is that the Minister had the ability to seek additional funding for primary healthcare. In fact, Treasury urged him to seek additional funding for primary healthcare. I happen to have Treasury’s Budget-sensitive document here. This was in February, when it started urging the Minister of Health to apply for more money in the Budget for primary healthcare. It says: “This briefing provides our … views on work underway to improve access to primary health care for high needs populations. … The 2014/15 New Zealand Health Survey results released in December … indicate that access is still a significant issue. There is still a prevalence of 27% for rates of adults experiencing unmet need for primary health care. There continue to be higher rates of unmet need for Maori and those … most socioeconomically deprived areas.”

It went on to say: “We are supportive of changes to improve outcomes for those with high need” and “We understand that issues with access and funding arrangements have been known in the sector for some time and we think the sector needs to show … urgency to resolve them. We [have] pushed [the ministry] to prepare something on [very low cost access] in time for the Budget … the Ministry has not signalled anything [yet].”

It never signalled anything, and the Minister never signalled anything. He never sought additional funding for primary healthcare. That is going to mean, if you listen to ProCare Health, the biggest primary health organisation (PHO) in New Zealand, that it is going to do what it calls “cap busting”. That means it intends to bust the cap that is on the price you pay, because it cannot afford to continue to provide primary healthcare.

What I found pretty disappointing was to have the Associate Minister of Health, the Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga, in the House this week, when answering a question about funding for primary healthcare, stand up and say that $25 million extra had gone into primary healthcare, in answer to my question of what went into reducing doctors’ fees and reducing inequalities. Not one of those dollars goes into doing that, and he knew that, and in this House he was making it sound like that money had gone in to reduce the cost of primary healthcare. Dr Andrew Miller is the chair of the Manaia PHO. He said this is “an appalling inequity, entirely unethical and illogical.” That is what he has said about the Government’s approach to primary healthcare, and I think it pretty well sums up the Minister, as well.

Then we get to wilful neglect. There has been wilful neglect of mental health in this Budget. There is a lack of funding that has gone into mental health in this country. You see the reports of failures. You see the cuts in services. You see the staff lay-offs. You see the police frustration at having to pick mental health patients off the street and take them to the emergency departments of hospitals, and you see emergency departments right around New Zealand saying they are being inundated with acute mental health patients. It is wilful neglect of a very important part, as well.

Finally, we come to the half-baked ideas. We hear that this Government is going to continue with its social bond experiment. It has wasted millions of dollars, with no results—no providers willing to get into bed with it, and no bank willing to put up a dollar to run a crazy scheme where it is going to have the banks fund mental health patients getting a job, and if the providers, who are not the banks, manage to get them into a job, then the bank gets a dividend.

What did the banks want? They wanted to make sure that all risk was taken away from them. It was a social experiment that has wasted millions that could have gone straight into the provision of mental health services and primary health services. I have not even got to those poor people out there who are living with sore knees and hips and one eye needing a cataract because the Government will not do two of them. These are the people who want a health system that provides health services when they need them—when they need them—not, in sum, on the never-never, with the Minister saying: “We are doing more because we have to do more.” I will come back to that issue very shortly to show what you can do with bodgie figures.

Mr Deputy Speaker, at times like this I feel sorry for you. Some of these speeches we have heard today are just—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Do not bring me into it.

I do not even know whether Mr Ron Mark has actually read the Budget. He did not even quote anything from the Budget; it was totally dislocated from anything we have talked about this afternoon. I was also very disappointed with the Opposition member talking about finance, because we are missing a context and the context is how New Zealand is progressing economically. I just have not heard that from anyone over on the other side of this House.

May I just take the opportunity to talk about a few of the facts. GDP growth—well, we are very lucky, are we not, because we have got very positive GDP growth. As the Opposition spokesman on finance would have heard this morning from the Governor of the Reserve Bank, and if he had read the new monetary statement, we have, in fact, got higher projected levels of economic growth over the next 3 years—3.4 percent of GDP growth, a great average that most countries around the world are absolutely envious of. Secondly, we are returning to surpluses. We have gone from $18.4 billion of debt 4 years ago to a surplus last year, to an even greater surplus. I note that in the 11th-month result of this year, the operating balance before gains and losses account was at $2.3 billion in surplus, and that means that we are going to have an even greater surplus this year if we can take that forward through to the June month. That is a great achievement by our Minister of Finance.

We have also reduced debt. No one seems to talk about it, but I love talking about it because we have reduced our Government debt from 25 percent to under 20 percent. That is a good thing. Most people who own a house or whatever know the importance of reducing debt, and we have done it very diligently during a period of great economic upheaval around the world.

We have also reduced the Government sector. I noted that the Minister of Finance complimented our Government sector and the hard-working people in it, but we have reduced the cost of it from a bloated 34 percent, as it was under the last Labour Government, to now just under 30 percent. That is a great achievement, and at the same time we are delivering better outcomes.

Also, we are turning this economy towards an export focus. Against the backdrop of a declining dairy industry, we still reported a $2 billion increase in exports coming from a whole range of export industries: tourism, construction, the beef industry, wine, ICT—shall I go on? Maybe not. We have got a growing, diversified economy.

I can say to you that this morning I have just been down to visit this fantastic little business here in Wellington. It is an animation business. It has world-leading technology. It has been developed here by creative New Zealanders. That is the type of people whom we want to see. That is the type of business we want to see being developed in New Zealand. And here it is, only just down the road here on Cambridge Terrace—an outstanding example of creative New Zealanders diversifying, creating real value for New Zealanders, and, in the process, actually creating high-value jobs.

Just talking about jobs, there have been 200,000 new jobs over the last 3 years. Even by Treasury’s forecasts, there are an extra 170,000 jobs forecast to be achieved over the next 3 years. Against that there are growing wages. Contrary to what Mr Grant Robertson said—I do not know where he got his knowledge from. It was just unbelievable misinformation. But since this Government came to office in 2008, the average wage has increased by $16,000 and is now at $63,000.

💬 Grant Robertson: Do you want me to table the Budget? Do I need to table the Budget?

Turning to the monetary thing, which I think you talked about this morning, Mr Grant Robertson, look—we are all aware that inflation is remarkably low at 0.4 percent, and it is forecast to go to 0.2 percent in the September quarter. In real terms it is virtually zero, Mr Grant Robertson. Even against that, wage-price inflation over the last 3 years is—let us quote—1.7 percent in 2014, 1.8. percent, and 1.8 percent. In my terms, that means a net increase of really just under 2 percent, and, going forward, all these figures, Mr Grant Robertson, are showing positive, until perhaps 2019 when they forecast inflation finally getting to 2.1 percent. Even you were sceptical about that this morning, Mr Grant Robertson. So we have got growing wages, and that is great for New Zealanders.

What does all this mean? It means options. It means options for all of us to be able to spend on the things that we really want to spend on to improve New Zealanders’ outcomes, and it is also about sharing the benefits with all New Zealanders.

I just want to go back to the Budget—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Good move.

There has been $761 million put towards growing an innovative economy. We are making a remarkable investment in science and innovation. We put in another $411 million in this Budget, and we are hoping to get it to $1.6 billion by 2020. We are absolutely committed to the science and innovation sector.

There is $257 million into our tertiary institutes. Also, we have got regional development—$100 million thrown into that.

But I just want to turn to the issue of skilled workers. We know that a skilled workforce is the powerhouse for a thriving economy. Budget 2016 allocated $14.4 million over 4 years, which means that we are going to get another 5,500 new people into apprenticeships. I want to remind you that there are already 42,000 people in apprenticeships; this will take us close to 50,000 people. But what is more, we have put in more money to help Māori and Pacific Islanders, and we are hoping to get another 2,500 into apprenticeship schemes. This is about creating the opportunity for people to get great jobs, get paid well, and be able to afford the houses that they need to look after their families. I am fully in support of all those initiatives around that.

Education—huge investment. There is nearly $900 million into building new schools. I was just going back through some of the press releases. The Hon Nikki Kaye is just perpetually going to new schools, telling them how much we are going to invest in them to improve their lot. We are absolutely committed to creating the right environment for our children to learn and benefit from a great education outcome. This is a huge investment in the Budget, nearly $400 million into early education centres, and already we have got significantly high participation rates in it. I fully endorse the approach and the investment in that area, because we want to see our young toddlers going into early education centres, getting the right groundwork for schooling, and then carrying on through our great schooling system.

Health—it was great listening to Annette King talking before. She has got a good point that health is really a growing investment for New Zealand. We are investing. We are putting $16.1 billion into it. A staggering $2.2 billion was invested or allocated in this Budget. The whole argument around health that I hear is that because we have got 69,000 new immigrants, on a per capita basis we must be going backwards. On my reckoning, $2.2 billion is a significant increase over the existing population and current budget. Most of that is going into district health boards—$1.6 billion. There is $170 million million into disability support. There is $100 million into elective surgery, making it 148,000 new surgeries that we do every year, mainly for our older people, which is great. Bowel cancer, tobacco prices, and the increase in Pharmac Ms King acknowledged.

The other area I want to talk about is the environment. I think it is great that we are starting to turn our minds to a significant investment, carrying on with the $100 million that we already invest. I greatly appreciated the announcement by the Hon Paula Bennett on the emissions trading scheme changes. The additional $100 million that was set aside in this Budget for cleaning up our waterways, the targeted pest control, the investment in reducing or eliminating wilding pines, and the more recent announcement about being predator-free by 2050 are, I think, phenomenal and courageous and wonderful initiatives that we should be pursuing.

Also, I should acknowledge the Minister of Transport, who is sitting in front here, for the wonderful initiatives around electric vehicles—trying to increase them and get them up to about 60,000-odd by 2020.

I think those are great initiatives, and when you think about all of the other good stuff in this thing—the policing, the $300 million that the Hon Judith Collins got—I could just go on, but, unfortunately, I have got to sit down. Thank you.

I think perhaps the greatest revelation in this debate so far today has been that the biggest issue occupying the mind of the Minister of Finance is the colour that local government candidates are using on their billboards up and down the country. He has taken the time to go and do a detailed study of the colours that mayoral candidates are using on their election hoardings. That seems to be Bill English’s greatest obsession. I was interested to learn that he did not seem to realise that yellow and black are actually the colours of Wellington, seeing as he has lived here for most of his political career.

But I digress, because at least that is more substantive than the issues occupying the time of the National Government backbench, whose biggest issue for the week thus far appears to have been the way airports advertise lost luggage—lost luggage. The advertising of lost luggage is the biggest issue on the minds of the National Government backbench. Forget about the children living in poverty or the people living in cars—“No luggage left behind” is going to be the campaign slogan for the National Government at the next election. It is going to free the airports of all that pesky red tape about the way they advertise lost luggage, and the economy is simply going to take off. It is going to take off as a result of this revelation coming from the National Government backbench about the advertising of lost luggage. We are confronting the reality that many aspects of the economic system that we currently have are broken, and the National Government’s best attempt to fix it is to change the way the airports advertise lost luggage.

But it is actually a very serious issue—the economy, that is, not the luggage—and it is not being addressed by this National Government. We have to accept the reality: there is a large proportion of the New Zealand population that is feeling left behind and forgotten under this National Government. And we have to accept the reality that, in the current economic environment, effort and contribution have been decoupled from reward.

There are a lot of people out there working really hard who are not getting ahead and who are not being rewarded for that hard work, while they see other people doing exceptionally well who are not making as much of an effort. Those at the top continue to get richer, while those who go to work every day to help create the nation’s wealth, who toil away, feel that they are being left behind and that the Government is simply ignoring them. They have had enough of John Key and Bill English telling them that things will be better tomorrow—things will be better tomorrow—and that there is a brighter future on the way; that brighter future that never seems to arrive. Eight years into the tenure of the National Government, the voters are still waiting for it to deliver on the promises it made in 2008.

But, of course, we know that the National Government is governing in the interests of those at the top and not the interests of the hard-working New Zealanders who generate this country’s wealth. While families up and down the country see the fees that they are being asked to pay for their kids’ education going up and up, in early childhood education and in schooling, they see that this Government’s priority is to increase the funding for the kids who attend private schooling. And they see that while they are shut out of the housing market, while they cannot get a foot on the property ladder, this Government is quite happy to see those houses that are available hoovered up by property speculators. This Government has no real plan to deal with this.

These families see that while there are people desperately in need of specialist appointments so that they can get the healthcare they need, those who can afford health insurance can go straight in and get the healthcare they need while those who cannot get left behind, languishing—not even on waiting lists, because they cannot get on to health waiting lists under this Government. While hard-working New Zealanders have been clobbered by increases in GST under this National Government, they see the vast bulk of the tax cuts that the Government has dished out going to those on the highest incomes who least needed it.

And, of course, then we see that the biggest priority coming out of the Government this week is the recovery of lost luggage—in fact, not even the recovery of lost luggage. If it was recovery of lost luggage, I would have some sympathy for it, but it is not even that. It is just the advertising of lost luggage.

We have to confront the reality that prosperity and the benefits of economic growth have not been shared in the current economy, and, as a result, trickle-down economics has been exposed as a massive lie. Let us put some numbers into this—70 percent of New Zealanders are earning less than $48,000 per year.

So when the National Party comes along next year and promises a big bribe in the form of tax cuts, bear in mind that the vast bulk of New Zealanders probably will not benefit at all from that. Any benefit that they might have had from that has more than been taken away by the other charges that they are encountering when it comes to their kids’ education, when it comes to their healthcare, when it comes to their transport options, because under the user-pays environment the people at the bottom pay more while the people on the highest incomes do significantly better.

Here is another revealing statistic about the economic track record of this National Government. Working families’ share of GDP growth, under this National Government, has fallen by $50 per week. There are 50,000 more unemployed New Zealanders than there were when this National Government took office. It inherited the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD and it has added 50,000 more people to the unemployment queue.

Let us compare the track records. National Government members think that they are brilliant economic managers. Well, they might be brilliant economic managers if you are on the highest income and at the top of the economic heap, but not for the vast bulk of Kiwis. Fifty-one percent—more than half of GDP growth—went to workers during the tenure of the last Labour Government. Only 37 percent of the growth has gone to the workers, the people who generate the wealth of this country, under this National Government. Forty-four percent of Kiwis—that is just under half—did not get a pay rise in the past year, and there are now 82,000 young New Zealanders under the age of 25 who are not in education, employment, or training; they are doing nothing. Their future has been written off by Bill English, who calls them “pretty damned hopeless”. Rather than actually backing them and providing support so that they can get ahead, Bill English would rather simply say that these guys are “pretty damned hopeless” and are not worth any support.

This is a Government that promises to make progress rather than actually delivering progress, because progress requires a plan. It requires leadership, it requires vision, and it requires a bit of humility. None of those things are present within the current National Government. It has no plan to fix the housing crisis. The biggest issue, the biggest challenge, facing the Government is the housing crisis, and it has no plan to fix it, because Nick Smith thinks that the crisis is simply a figment of people’s imagination. John Key thinks that the use of the word “crisis” is simply emotive. Anne Tolley says that people living in cars is nothing new. Steven Joyce thinks the housing crisis is a good thing. That is what he has actually come out and said—that he thinks the housing crisis is a good thing.

So what are the solutions that National has proposed to this most pressing issue? Well, it has got the $1 billion fund, which actually turns out to be only a $30 million investment of Government funding because the rest of it just simply recirculates. It had the flying squad stunt. Whatever happened to that? It was these flying squads that were going to identify any people—which turned out not to be flying squads at all. Perhaps they were out looking for their luggage as well.

Then, of course, it has got the emergency housing grants that cover 7 days of accommodation, when it takes 155 days, on average, for somebody to find a home if they are homeless. But that is OK, because they will get a week of hotel accommodation. It is only the other half of the year that they are going to have to find somewhere to live, maybe a bridge or a shopping trolley. It is paying the homeless $5,000 to get out of Auckland. Well, how many people have taken that up? Very, very few.

Then, of course, we have got the special housing areas that have resulted in fewer than a thousand houses being built. It is cutting the building tariffs, which resulted in the price of building materials going up. We have got the surplus Crown land promised by Nick Smith. That was going to deliver 500 hectares of land, and it delivered 13, once you took out the substations and the cemeteries and Government House up in Auckland. Then, of course, we have got the selling off of State houses to the merchant bankers and the offshore investors and pretty much anyone who will buy them, because the Government is desperate to get rid of them, no matter the cost. But I think the pièce de résistance of National’s housing plan is its selling of P houses to unsuspecting first-home buyers. I think that that really deserves a special mention because not only does it show it has not got a plan; it shows that it is spectacularly incompetent.

I did not get the chance to go into the National Government’s failures in the education area, but I will simply point out that every parent in the country is going to pay more for their kids’ early childhood education and more for their kids’ schooling, because this Government, again, has frozen the budget, which means that that funding is going backwards.

While Nuk Korako might be looking for his lost luggage, the Labour Party continues to carry around its old baggage. It has not adapted. It continues to live in the past. It has no new ideas, and any new ideas are shot from the hip. In fact, some of the rhetoric, the speeches that we hear, from the Opposition members across all three Opposition parties—one wonders what country they are living in, because they continue to talk the place down. They continue to say that New Zealand is doing so badly, that there are so many bad things happening here. Things are miserable, woeful. But the opposite is true—the opposite is true.

We are in a construction boom—a construction boom. More apprentices are involved in the building industry and across the trades than ever before. That is what is happening. More people want to live in New Zealand, and Opposition members call that a problem. People are voting with their feet. They are choosing to stay in New Zealand. Why is that? Well, that is because there is opportunity here. Kiwis are coming home from the UK and from Australia, and, most importantly, they are not leaving, because they realise the opportunity is here.

The Opposition members blame the immigrants for the apparent “problem” of this construction and apprenticeship boom that we are in. They blame the immigrants. But, in fact, the number of immigrants that we have brought in as a country over a very long time has been relatively stable—around 40,000 to 50,000 a year. We bring those people in to fill the gaps, to fill the skills gaps that we are not able to fill here today. We do that because we are building a nation. We want to enable those skills to be used and utilised effectively and efficiently, and particularly in today’s climate and around the IT sector. If you look on www.seek.co.nz there are a lot of jobs available for people and highly skilled sectors of the economy.

So that is what is happening. The economy is growing—the economy is growing at around 3.5 percent. That is an increase in the projected growth rate. That was announced just today by the Governor of the Reserve Bank. That is good news—that is good news. It is incredibly good compared with other countries of the world, and that is why we have an official cash rate of 2 percent. Other countries in the world have negative interest rates. That is how poorly run their economies are. It demonstrates the strife that the European economies are in—when one puts money into the bank to keep it safe, the depositor pays the bank to look after their money. You do not get any interest at all, such is the deflation and the pessimism that is out there.

Here we have a positive growth rate, projected to be 3.5 percent. We have projected unemployment to continue to fall. These are all signs of a positively growing economy. Just today in the select committee we heard from immigration people that there was increased inquiry. More people want to join this economy; more people want to come into New Zealand. They are coming from countries like the UK and Australia because of things like the Brexit situation. The instability of some of the other countries around the world is driving people to economies that are stable, that are reliable, and that have opportunity for their families.

These people do not have Chinese-sounding names. These people have American-sounding names: names like Chad, Brad, Angelina, and Chuck. Now is that a problem? Is that problem for the Opposition, and will that be a problem for Phil Twyford? Perhaps it might be.

💬 Grant Robertson: I don’t like the name Chuck.

Well, you might develop a policy around that, Mr Robertson. American-sounding names may not be accepted here based on a shoot-from-the-hip policy derived from the Labour Party.

The alternative is not an option. In the Green Party, Miss Julie Anne Genter suggested that there was credibility on that side of the House, in her party, around its economic views and economic policies. But then her co-leader wants to halve the value of houses in Auckland—halve the value of houses in Auckland. How she is going to do that was not explained, but that is the endgame. That is the sister; the brother in the partnership—or what can we call the relationship nowadays? The green-red—what is the relationship now described as? Is it a relationship still? But the Labour Party does not support that policy—and rightly so. It is ludicrous. So when Julie Anne Genter suggests that they have credible economic policies on that side of the House, unfortunately, the proof is in the pudding, and they do not.

Then we had Ron Mark. Well, that was an interesting contribution. I could only describe his contribution as quaquaversal. Just to help you, that means he is going off from the centre in all directions—meaning nothing, saying little, but aiming with his shotgun approach and hoping to stick something somewhere. Of course, the closed-door policies, the anti-immigration policies, the anti-growth, the anti–Chinese, the anti - free trade—the “No. No. No. Party”—is what makes that party lack credibility, lack aspiration, and is another example of a party living in the past. No aspirations and no aspirational goals for Kiwis to aspire to.

So, as the Minister said earlier, this Government is careful about how it spends taxpayers’ money, because the Opposition parties do not consider whose money they are responsible for. So, for example, Grant Robertson’s 100,000 house programme—let us say 10,000 houses a year. That is $5 billion of taxpayers’ money. Even if he was to able to recycle that at half a million dollars a house, let us say, that is a lot of money. That is a big amount of money, and he forgets that the taxpayer is going to have to pay for it. Where are those houses going to be built? Well, there are going to be thousands of rugby fields compulsorily acquired by Andrew Little, because that is what he said would happen. He would compulsorily acquire private property to fulfil his dream of being the largest house-building company in the country.

Realistically, what is going to happen when Mr Little turns up to the auction sites, bidding for land to build his houses, under his design and in his colour schemes, and whom is he going to compete with? Whom is he going to compete with? He is going to be competing with first-home buyers. He is going to be competing with people who are in the queue, waiting and bidding for a property. He is simply going to increase the demand for housing, and we understand that increased demand can do only one thing, and that is to put prices up.

The housing ripple effect is affecting the Wairarapa. It is affecting provincial New Zealand. It is enabling people to be in jobs. It is creating confidence in the regions. People are building, with more sparkies and plumbers and construction. Capital Precut Solutions is an example of a business in the Wairarapa that is doing very well by exporting pre-cut framing from the Wairarapa to Auckland. This is an example of how provincial New Zealand is doing well under the confidence and the stability of this Government. Software companies in the Wairarapa are exporting throughout the world. That is because we are connected through the Rural Broadband Initiative, and Fab Lab is another example—connecting to the world using high-speed ultra-fast broadband, enabling schoolchildren in Pongaroa to be connected to their colleagues across the world, anywhere in the world, anywhere on this planet.

This is a very good Budget. It is coming from a stable and reliable and aspirational Government, and that is why I commend it to the House.

Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. In this debate we have actually touched on some pretty interesting ideas, concepts, philosophies, and history, and I would like to touch on that in this last contribution of the session this week.

The contribution I want to talk about is what Chris Bishop talked about, because it is rare that we actually talk about things like history and ideology in this House. He was talking about neo-liberalism and he was talking about issues like globalisation. These are really important because they are live issues in terms of the debate of what has happened in our history, but they are also critically important around how we go forward as a nation and what are the values we take in terms of our governance, our institutions, and our economies, so I think it is important that we spend a little bit of time debating it in this House.

Mr Bishop was trying to frame it as a choice between the current ideology, which is neo-liberalism—which you can characterise around the primacy of markets, powers for corporates, rent-seeking behaviours, ignoring some of the externalities, and a lesser role for the State. We see this classically in the housing market at the moment, where, at a time of a housing crisis and when people are sleeping in cars and on the streets, the Government is literally still selling its traditional role, which is providing housing for those who needed it with State houses. So those are some of the factors, and he tried to portray it as a simple choice between the status quo, which is this economic and governmental philosophy, or Fortress New Zealand of the 1970s. It is not that cut and dried, and it is actually a false dichotomy to try to present it like that, because it is not a choice like that. In fact, we live in a complex world where we can make choices—and do make choices every day—about the values we bring.

The same dichotomy was brought in when it came to globalisation. It was a choice between either globalisation or a head in the sand isolationism, which, of course, is not a true choice. We can have a more globalised world without some of the more negative impacts—what “big G” globalisation means. Basically, in the last 30 years, it has been about growing powers for corporates to dictate rules and laws and take judicial cases to international tribunals, which we see once again in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. We see laws that are favouring capital mobility, but not the mobility of individuals. There was a theory that everyone would be brought to the same standard, but, in fact, what we have seen is a global 1 percent now that owns as much wealth as the other 99 percent—1 percent owns as much wealth as the other 99 percent.

Mr Bishop tried to argue that there were only the choices between neo-liberalism or Fortress New Zealand and between globalisation or isolationism, and then he tried to argue that, in fact, it was a good choice that had been made because we had brought everyone with us. I do not know whether Government members are seeing what is happening outside, as they speed by in their Crown limos or hang around in the Koru lounge or at glitzy events with the mates who donate, but when you look at New Zealand, we have not brought everyone with us. In fact, what we see is that the richest 10 percent now own 60 percent. We were one of the most equal and egalitarian countries in the world, but we have seen the fastest growth in inequality. We are literally seeing people begging on our streets. We clearly are not bringing everyone with us. We are not bringing everyone with us when we have got 15 kids dying every year and 42,000 kids hospitalised every year as a result of cold, damp, unhealthy housing. What we have seen is wage growth stagnating, in real terms, over that period that Mr Bishop was trying to defend, yet productivity is growing magnitudes more. What we have seen are the gains of that globalised, market-driven, corporate rule - driven world going to a minority. We have not brought everyone with us. In fact, we have left a huge number of people behind.

Mr Bishop also said that you cannot subsidise yourself to prosperity. We do not have to look to the past for inspiration. I think we can look to some of those values and set a bit of an exemplar. But no one is talking about going back to the 1970s and republishing all the old laws and regulations and having price freezes that the National Government brought in in the early 1980s. It is ironic, because this Government is one that is the most political that we have seen in a long time, and the most short-term - focused we have seen in a long time. It is a Government that makes these vacuous, empty, long-distance promises that we see—of being pest free, or having a 50 percent reduction in emissions while our emissions go up. It is ironic because, in fact, this Government has been the most interventionist—interventionist, of course, with its friends, be they Skycity, or the oil industry, or Saudi sheiks.

What we have seen as a result is that we have left people behind. We have seen fragmented communities and a reduction in democratic trust and engagement. We have seen a country that has given up on the idea that everyone in this country deserves a fair go, on egalitarianism, and on the old concept that jack was as good as his master. We are seeing a more stratified New Zealand—a different New Zealand where some kids never get to see the sea, where kids do not learn how to swim, where kids do not learn how to read, and where they are sleeping in cars or in garages. We are also seeing a concept where we are putting the environment in conflict with economic growth—as if that was a true choice, because we know we cannot mine or pollute ourselves to prosperity. The result has been a whole generation locked out of homeownership.

I talk about these issues because my generation has grown up with these concepts and has not known anything else. We cannot remember those old reforms. New Zealand has had a number of these periods of change, and this is why I am interested in talking about them. In the 1890s we saw the first revolution, with the Seddon Government, with the old-age pension and universal suffrage. In the 1930s, of course, was the first Labour Government, and then in the 1980s we had the fourth Labour Government dismantling it. New Zealand operates from these 40-year periods of transformational change. My generation has grown up entirely within it. When you look at this generation, it could be the first generation in a couple of hundred years that is poorer than their parents were at this stage. This is a generation indebted with $15 billion of student debt, and a generation that cannot get into housing.

The difference is that for my parents, an affordable education, a job for life, and State support to get into a house were just considered the norms under that values set. Today they are considered luxuries for my generation—a job, a house, and an affordable education. We are seeing a population that is sicker, poorer, less equal, more isolated, more marginalised, less participatory in our democracy, less happy, more medicated, and living in crowded, dirtier cities, and there are people begging on the streets.

It is something I think we need to debate more, instead of the point-scoring to and fro. Let us talk about history, because there were benefits from the reforms. But let us also honestly look at the costs and wonder what could be the next change for this country. Could it be one where we incorporate those old values of looking after people, of not leaving people behind, of actually working together and designing more modern, open, democratic institutions—perhaps using digital technology? There is a host of exciting changes—

I am sorry to interrupt the member, but the time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.