Imprest Supply (Second for 2018/19) Bill

I move, That the Appropriation (2018/19 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2018/19) Bill be now read a second time.

It is my great honour and privilege to be able to present this third reading of the Government’s first Budget to the House. I want to thank all of the select committees who worked through the Estimates, particularly the chairs of the select committees and all those who spoke in the debate. It is an important part of our democratic process that the Parliament gets to assess the plans of the Government, put those under the spotlight, and then come back to this House and debate them, and I am very grateful for the work of the select committees.

This Government has brought to the House a Budget that provides the balance that New Zealand needs to continue a record of strong economic management and make the investments that we need to fix the long-term problems that are facing New Zealand. Budget 2018 is about building the foundations for the future; the foundations for a future economy that delivers productivity, sustainability, and inclusion for New Zealand; that leaves behind once and for all the belief that we can have a casino economy where we gamble on whether or not house prices will go up, where we leave ourselves exposed to commodity markets and we rely on population growth to fuel our economy. As the Governor of the Reserve Bank said at the weekend, the next three to five years are about making that transition, and this Budget is the Budget that lays the foundations for that.

In particular, Mr Speaker, I want to reference three key areas that this—Madam Deputy Speaker. You changed while I was looking down—and for the better, I might add. There are three key areas that are going to lead to a more productive economy within this Budget. The first of those is a $1 billion boost to research and development funding. I want to thank Minister Megan Woods for the work that she has been doing since the Budget was tabled—going around the country and working with New Zealand businesses on the detailed design of our research and development tax incentive. This will finally give the businesses of New Zealand certainty about their ability to invest in innovations and research and development that will drive productivity. It was an important step forward.

I also want to note the major investments being made in this Budget in the provinces and regions of New Zealand. The $1 billion Provincial Growth Fund will make the biggest difference to New Zealand’s regions of any single investment made in the lifetime of any member in this House. I’d encourage Mr Goldsmith to get out of Epsom and take a look around the country. He’ll actually see that in the regions of New Zealand they are excited that they have a Government that backs them and is actually going to get in there and help build sustainable economic development and jobs in our regions. From the Far North to the far south of New Zealand, people are responding to the Provincial Growth Fund as a way of building up our economic development.

The Green Investment Fund, which the Hon James Shaw has been driving, will start to leverage private sector investment in that transition to a low carbon economy. This side of the House is not prepared to sit on the sidelines and say it is other people’s responsibility for New Zealand to start to live up to the obligations we have when it comes to climate change. And it’s not just about those obligations; it’s actually New Zealand’s brand proposition. This Budget is about making sure that we actually start to live up to our clean and green reputation and use that to help drive economic opportunities, and the Green Investment Fund is an important part of that.

The other element of that is the infrastructure challenge. This Budget puts in place $10 billion more investment in infrastructure over the next five years than the previous Government had planned—$10 billion extra going into making sure that we actually unclog the roads of Auckland; that the $1 billion a year being lost in productivity because of congestion in Auckland comes back into the economy and delivers jobs. We’ll do that by investing in rail, by investing in roads, by actually getting coastal shipping going again, and by having a transport strategy that’s actually for the middle part of the 21st century, not looking in the rear view mirror, as some would do. So R & D, skills, infrastructure, and investment in the Green Investment Fund—all of these things are vitally important to supporting businesses to grow.

On the other side of the ledger, what this Budget does is begin to rebuild the critical public services undermined so much over the last nine years. An extra $3.2 billion is going into health services. I want to add to that: $750 million this year is going into capital in our health sector. When we look to what happened in the previous Budget from the previous Government, the equivalent figure was $150 million. This Government is saying $750 million. The reality of a $150 million commitment from the previous Government is mould in the walls and people not being able to use operating theatres unless they’re wearing hazmat suits. That’s the health sector that this Government inherited and we are turning it around. It will take time, but we have committed to a long-term investment to make sure that happens. We’re reducing GP fees by $20 to $30 a week for 540,000 New Zealanders on low incomes, and all under-14-year-olds will be getting free GP visits.

We’ve started sorting out things for the midwives, and since this Budget was put in place, I want to acknowledge the work of Dr David Clark in making sure we got a fair resolution for our nurses, because having the nurses in our workforce feeling that they’re valued is the first step to making sure we get things right in the health sector. In the Budget speech, I gave my commitment to the professionals who work in our health sector that we will work with them to rebuild. We are in that space now, and I’m very proud that we’ve been able to make that progress.

We also see in this Budget a huge boost for operational funding for education to ensure that our schools are fit for purpose into the future—15,000 more teachers. We are making sure that early childhood education services are funded properly—the first across-the-board funding increase for early childhood education in a decade, and that is what is in this Budget today.

When it comes to housing, the 6,400 community and State houses that will be built make the first dent in what has been a deficit that has built up under the last Government. Be absolutely clear: this Government stopped the State house sell-off and now we’re building 6,400 more. Never again will we allow that stock that is so important to the well-being of New Zealanders to be undermined so much.

There are too many other areas in the Budget to dwell on too much, but I do want to talk about two in particular. The first of those is the funding for conservation. It is true that among the three parties of this Government we have made a commitment to a significant increase in funding for conservation. It has been the record of the previous Government to not fund conservation properly and to look to the private sector to fill in where the public sector should be. Finally, we have a Government that is committed to turning that around.

The matter I want to spend a little bit of time on now is the Families Package, because from 1 July when this Budget came into force, $5.5 billion will be rolled out over the next four years to improve the living standards of our families. There can be few things more important than knowing that the basics will be there. There are few things more important for children than to live in a house that is warm and dry and for their parents to have the income they need. I have been humbled by the people who have written to us in receipt now of increased Working for Families payments, of the Best Start payment, and, in particular, of the winter energy payment. What we are hearing from New Zealanders is that it is these basics that have worried them. The thing that causes stress in families is that they don’t have those basics, and we’re finally getting it right.

I also want to acknowledge the fact that we are starting to address the inequalities that have grown in our society, with a $16.50 minimum wage lifting to $20, paid parental leave out to 18 weeks—22 weeks now, and then 26 weeks by 2020. We are looking out for future generations. We have restarted contributions to the super fund that were stopped in 2009, and we will have a fund worth $64 billion that will look after future generations of New Zealanders.

This is a Budget that I am proud of. It is the first of three for this term of a Government that will build on the foundations that we have laid. We know there is a big job to do. We know New Zealanders have high expectations, but we have the balance right in this Budget. We’re being careful with our money, but we are finally getting on with building the public services that New Zealanders want and deserve. I am immensely proud of this Budget and I commend it to the House.

Well, hello, fiscal hole; take a bow, Steven Joyce. The previous speaker, the Minister of Finance, the Hon Grant Robertson, should have started his speech with, “I am sorry.” to Steven Joyce and to the National Party, who pointed out exactly where we would be at this time. I can’t help but quote directly Cameron Bagrie who said, “I don’t like the term fiscal hole. Good policy should dominate over strict debt targets and economic cycles come and go which are often beyond government control. But the Labour-led Government’s fiscal hole is looking deeper by the day—and bigger than the $11.7 billion of additional borrowing that Joyce identified.”

This Government is not taking business concerns seriously, and they simply have to stop dismissing them. They don’t understand that for business it is the unknown.

💬 Fletcher Tabuteau: Isn’t a general debate, this slot.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes it is. Be quiet.

Businesses don’t know what is coming and they got nothing out of this Budget. Businesses don’t know what’s coming—hell, the Government doesn’t know what’s coming. Here we have working group after working group after working group out there. There are over 100 working groups, and they are looking at everything from tax to industrial relations to—I mean, you name it: the environment, climate change. You name it; they are looking right across it. And businesses don’t know what is coming next.

They also don’t know what dodgy deal will be done between the Greens and Labour and New Zealand First to get the next piece of legislation over the line—

💬 Hon Kris Faafoi: Who’s reviewing Simon? Somebody is; I know they are.

—and that unpredictability is doing real damage to business. You should take this really seriously, Mr Faafoi, because, actually, this means jobs for New Zealanders. Actually, this means whether or not a business goes out tomorrow and employs another person. When they don’t know what will be delivered to them by the current Government, through the Budget they’ve just seen—as I say, more than 100 working groups, and deals that have to be done with parties that have pretty much nothing much in common and have to do a dodgy deal—there is uncertainty, and uncertainty in the real world means jobs.

Uncertainty means that someone in—and I am going to take the great electorate of Upper Harbour. Each electorate has its little claim to fame. Upper Harbour’s claim to fame—and I want to quote it particularly—is that they have the highest number of people who own their own home, with a mortgage. So what they care about is business confidence. What they care about is their ability to pay those mortgages. They are my “tradies done good”. They worked for decades, they saved their money, they took risks in their businesses, and now they’ve bought good homes, and they’re doing quite well, but they’ve big mortgages. They care about those jobs, they care about their business, and they do not like the unpredictability that they are currently seeing.

You’ve got to say that with the deals that are going on—you can see it—principles are out the window, so we no longer have principles driving people like the Greens. I’ve got to say, I didn’t agree with them often but I actually did admire them for standing by what they believed in, what they stood on, and their own core principles. Well, they’re gone now if they have to do a dodgy deal with New Zealand First to try and get something over. But as the Deputy Prime Minister often likes to say, I believe, and quite often in private, this is the cost of being in Government. Well, the cost of being in Government shouldn’t be people’s livelihoods and their jobs. It shouldn’t be business confidence crumbling, like we’re currently seeing. It’s obvious that the current Government doesn’t know what to do, as they’ve actually, you know, almost contracted out the role of governing to the working groups. But they have to take seriously the fact that businesses are losing confidence, and as a consequence are not spending the same in their own businesses or looking at taking on new people.

I want to talk about things like—I mean, let’s just do the list—strikes and the expectations of the public sector. They were raised by both Labour and the Greens during last year. So they raised expectations within the public sector that they would be getting double-digit pay increases on a percentage basis. And that might be the right thing. They can’t deliver on those promises now, and we didn’t see that in this Budget. We did not see money put aside for a serious Public Service. So we haven’t even started addressing doctors or secondary school teachers. We haven’t got to police yet. While we’re on police, we didn’t see in this Budget the funding for the extra 1,800 police that we were repeatedly promised during the coalition and during the deal. It’s even in the document. So they haven’t actually funded them. All they’ve done is take the funding that National had already put in—the extra funding for extra police—but there’s no funding for them, so they’re not able to deliver on that.

But the effect that now we’re seeing on the public sector around the broken promises is we’ve got, literally, parents now having to take days off work tomorrow because those teachers are on strike. Take some responsibility for it. We didn’t see it in this Budget, we’re not seeing it being taken seriously by this current Government, and I think that’s really serious. It’s the effect of those pay increases into the private sector. So what does it mean for them? Well, we don’t hear those recognitions from this Government. We don’t see those recognitions in the Budget. So anything from strikes to pay increases to the questions around industrial relations are dismissed and made a joke of in this House, but, actually, they are very real concerns for the business sector as they’re moving forward. Tax more, spend more, borrow more—that’s what we saw in this Budget.

And some will say, on spending, that it is time. In fact, I might say, on some of the spending, that it is time. If only that spend had gone to education and to health, like was promised so much, but what you would call this Budget in terms of education and health is, if anything, ordinary—ordinary. There was nothing extraordinary. There was nothing extra. We saw the big announcement last week—the Prime Minister coming back for her first week after leave to make that big, big mental health announcement of—

💬 Hon Nathan Guy: What was it?

—six mental health units. And let’s remember this: they took $100 million out of mental health—$100 million out of mental health—and then they added six units. Well, I tell you what, that’s shameful. That’s the big announcement that we saw last week. And, yes, we did hear murmurings from the Labour Government—you know, the backbench, going, “This is actually a bit embarrassing if this is the best that we can do.”

What we did see in the spending was not spending in education and not spending in health. What we saw it on was on fees-free. By the way, Treasury in this Budget are forecasting fewer tertiary students into the future. So not more; they are literally saying fewer students in the future. We saw the “Provincial Slush Fund”, as we all know, and, boy, are we seeing a lack of process in how that is spent. I’ve got to say the regions are literally laughing—laughing. They’re going, “Well, we’ll take our wee bit. Why wouldn’t we?” But actually what will be dished out and how it will is anyone’s guess—the particular mood of the day.

What we’re also seeing, of course, is more diplomats and the spending in the Pacific Islands, and one might argue that there’s merit in that—but at the cost of education, at the cost of our teachers, at the cost of what is needed in mental health? I don’t think so. I think the spending in this Budget is completely out of whack with the realities of what was promised last year repeatedly; the expectations that have been built up, and where they’ve actually landed.

So if this was a Budget that was serious about New Zealanders, a bit of advice: start taking business seriously. Start listening to them. Start recognising that what happens in business actually affects everyday New Zealanders’ lives. They need to be able to afford that minimum wage increase. They need to be able to take on the extra people. They genuinely want to, but they need a Government that is predictable. They need a Government they can trust. They need a Government that will stand up for them. And, secondly, spend where you said you would. Put your money where your mouth is when it comes to education and when it comes to health. We didn’t see that in this Budget, and it’s deeply disappointing.

I think that member, Paula Bennett, might have been reading last year’s Budget. I have a fear that she flicked the wrong book open and was looking at last year’s Budget, because this year’s Budget put the biggest boost into health spending in a decade. It put the first across-the-board investment into early childhood education in a decade. This was a Budget that was about health and education. It’s also a strong Budget that projects surpluses into the future to invest in the infrastructure that was neglected under that Government’s watch; that prior Government that neglected infrastructure for so long that it sees our hospitals with rot and mould in the walls, and leaking operating theatres in one part of the country.

This Government is proud to have a Budget that invests in New Zealanders; a Budget that lays the foundations for the transformation of our society and economy to rebuild the public services that have been neglected for so long. We also see the pathway to a sustainable low-carbon economy laid out in this Budget—a just transition. The Budget builds on the 100-day plan, and, of course, the $5.5 billion that was put into the Families Package. Instead of the tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest New Zealanders, in the mini-Budget that came before the Budget that $5.5 billion went in to make sure that the most vulnerable New Zealanders were supported to help their children in the early years of life, and, of course, money into the super fund—those long-term things that have been neglected under the previous Government’s watch.

And, of course, the Budget itself tells us that GDP growth is expected to remain strong across the forecast period. It tells us that unemployment is expected to continue to drop, down to 4.1 percent at the end of the forecast period, close to the Government’s goal of 4 percent, and that wage growth is good—expected to be 3 percent, on average, over the next five years. This is a Budget that is good news for working New Zealanders. Of course, into the future, those surpluses will help this Government with its aims to ensure that we do invest in capital expenditure—the expenditure that had been neglected under the previous Government’s watch—that we correct the infrastructure deficit that we’ve inherited, and that we also reduce debt over time.

Let’s not forget that that prior Government—the National Government—borrowed more than any other Government in New Zealand history. They borrowed more than any other Government in New Zealand history. They borrowed more than Muldoon’s Government. We have taken on that debt and we’re projecting surpluses into the future. They ran deficit after deficit after deficit, and now we’re projecting surpluses into the future. We’re also preparing for any economic shocks. This is a responsible Government that is projecting surpluses, that is growing the economy, and that is reducing unemployment. The debt will decrease into the future under this Government’s watch because it’s a responsible Government.

Let’s look at the capital spending. There is $10 billion more than the previous Government’s five-year window in the last Budget. So this Government is projecting more capital spending into the future and putting money aside for that purpose, because this Government looks to the long term, not just to the next election cycle like the previous Government did. We are going to fix that infrastructure deficit, because we can’t have leaky schools and hospitals that make people sick.

Of course I want to also, then, specifically talk a little bit about the health portfolio and the plan to rebuild our health portfolio and our health system, after years of neglect. Of course, the people that have worked in our health system over the last nine years have done that tirelessly and in challenging conditions, but they have continued to provide excellent healthcare for New Zealanders, and I want to thank the health workforce for continuing to do that under the previous Government’s watch. We know there’s been understaffing, and we’ve seen the discontent from the nurses as they faced the fact that they barely had a pay increase under the National Government’s watch and they had hospitals keeping vacancies open and stretching them beyond what was reasonable. Of course this Government wants to put that right. We are ambitious for New Zealand, for seeing our workers properly supported to do their jobs, and I am so delighted that the nurses have settled and done that, by a big majority, once they had confidence around the safe staffing arrangements that will be put in place to make sure that we do have fully-staffed hospitals in a way that we haven’t had over the last nine years.

In the health area in particular, this Budget set aside $750 million in capital expenditure to begin the rebuild of our health system—the biggest input in 10 years into the health system in capital terms—because the previous Government didn’t really invest in the buildings in our health sector. That’s why we have that rotten mould in the walls. The biggest amount they put in was $450 million, and that was in response to the Canterbury earthquake. Well, we’re putting in $750 million in our first year. In many of their years in Government, they put nothing in—no capital set aside in the Budget for our health system. Well, this Government takes a different view. We are looking out 10 years and seeing that there’s about $14 billion needed in the health system—$14 billion—and we are making a start, with the first capital allocation of $750 million, as we acknowledge that the workforce will need to ramp up to deliver a proper health system that will survive into the future, and that will provide the health services New Zealanders expect and deserve into the future.

We’re also making sure that people get the care where they need it. This Government invested in cheaper doctor visits for 540,000 New Zealanders who hold community services cards, meaning that their doctor’s bill will drop, on average, by $20 to $30 a visit—up to $50 in some cases. They will drop by $20 to $30 a visit for CSC holders—community service card holders—and that will make care accessible for those people. It will mean that they will be able to actually get the care that they need when they need it. But that previous Government did nothing. They were content to see GP fees raised by 44 percent under their watch. Well, we on this side of the House recognise that when over half a million New Zealanders every year say they can’t go to the doctor for reasons of cost, we need to do something about it. I’m very proud of the steps we’ve made in this Budget to address that issue.

Of course, also in this Budget we started to get real about a growing and ageing population in the health sector. We finally funded district health boards (DHBs) properly, after years of underfunding—the biggest investment into health, into the DHB funding, since the last year of the last Labour-led Government funding track. This Government takes healthcare for New Zealanders seriously, and that’s why we are making the biggest investment in health in a decade, because this Government cares.

Of course, we’re also going to make changes in the health sector. We are going to change it for the better, to make sure that our health specialists and our clinicians are supported to deliver healthcare that they want to deliver, not only with new funding but looking at the whole health system. There’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity, as we launch the review of the health and disability sector, to make sure that we’re fit for purpose for that growing and ageing population into the future.

In the debate itself that we had through this House, we heard various figures quoted by the previous Government about the investment that was needed and whether we were going to live up to our word on the investment. Well, we said before the election we’d put an extra $8 billion in, and we will deliver on that. This Government will deliver on its commitment over the forecast period to put $8 billion more into the health sector. We made that promise because we knew our political opponents would not match it, because they have underfunded health for so long. This was the first tranche of investment, $3.2 billion over the forecast period—$3.2 billion over the forecast period—and, of course, we’ve got two Budgets to come. We will get serious about the population and the need for support.

We’re also getting serious about mental health—something that the previous Government also neglected. They talk a lot about a $100 million contingency fund, and, of course, what many people out there won’t appreciate is that a contingency fund is a fund when you don’t have a fund. It’s putting money over to one side and saying, “Maybe one day we’ll spend it. Maybe one day we’ll sit down, have a conversation, and spend some of that money. Maybe we won’t. Maybe we won’t.” In this Budget, this Government spent $250 million straight up, not some “We’ll put $100 million over there and maybe we’ll spend it one day, maybe we won’t.” We spent $250 million straight up. We committed to spending that money.

This Government cares about mental health. We’ve got a mental health and addictions review that will report back in a few short months with some serious recommendations, I have no doubt, about change that’s needed in our system. But we’ve already chosen to invest in new models of care for integrated therapies in Canterbury and Kaikōura, putting mental health workers on the ground in primary schools, and rolling out nurses in decile 4 schools across the country. This Government is concerned with getting on with doing the things that we already know work in the mental health space. We’re not waiting around, but we will look to do more when the mental health inquiry reports back.

I’m proud of the investment we’ve made in mental health. I’m proud of the investment we’ve made in primary care, making sure people get those cheaper doctor’s visits, extending free doctor’s visits so that 13-year-olds now qualify for free doctor’s visits, and I want to acknowledge New Zealand First’s commitment to that, as well. On top of that, we, of course, have put in good capital spending to begin the rebuild of our health buildings, and we’ve funded DHBs properly for the first time in years. I’m looking forward to more. This was a great Budget for health; it was a great Budget for New Zealand.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I do of course want to take a call in this third reading of the appropriations debate, where we reflect on this first Budget of this Labour - New Zealand First - Greens Government.

In my first reading on Budget day, or just after Budget day, when I talked to this bill, I reflected that you had to see it as a Budget of wasted opportunities. The opportunities that this Government inherited—the economic platform, the strong and growing surpluses, the job creation rate, the GDP rate—made us one of the envies of the Western World and, frankly, across the OECD. Some people have said that you haven’t had a finance Minister as lucky as Grant Robertson since the Second World War. They have this tremendous platform of economic opportunity, and yet what we’ve seen is a waste of that opportunity and a squandering of the opportunity, and, actually, in the months since the Budget, the position has become so much worse, because not only are they squandering the opportunities that New Zealanders worked so hard over so many tough years to accumulate but they’re now ensuring that the growth machine slows down to a crawl.

It’s always seemed to me that as a finance Minister, you have two fundamental roles. One is to think very carefully about how you invest and spend the opportunities that New Zealanders have given you through their hard work and their taxes—and on that count, I label this Budget a fail—and the second job is to make sure that the actions of your Government, the policies, and the economic direction that you set are going to support that growth going forward. I’m going to come back to that, because there is no question to everyone now in this space—with the possible exception of Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern—that the economy is slowing down, the indicators have taken a turn for the worse, and the direction of travel is all wrong, and yet the very person who’s charged with ensuring that economic growth is asleep at the wheel. That is an unforgiveable sin being committed by this Government.

We’re hearing from the Government now that, somehow, the downturn in confidence and GDP and the upturn in unemployment and the very negative projections being released by our economic agencies and commentators—sometimes we’re hearing from the Government: “Oh well, it’s just part of the international cycle and a part of the international climate we’re in.” Well, that’s simply not credible, and I point very easily to the fact that in the rest of the world, the OECD growth average is still nearly 4 percent. It is 3.9 percent per annum growth, which is where we ourselves were just 18 months ago, and yet it has been squandered under this Government.

If this was the economic cycle of the international economy, we would be tracking with the world. The reality is we are going south when the rest of the world is still performing very well. Our biggest trade partner, of course China, is growing at 6.7 percent. Our second-biggest trade partner, Australia—their growth rate is continuing to improve. When you look at OECD rankings on business confidence, we have gone from the top of the world to, frankly, the bottom in 20 months. Now, that is not the story of an economy that’s going backwards because of an international climate; that is the story of a domestic economy that is going backwards because of the mismanagement of this Government.

Instead of coming to the House and acknowledging that there are indicators of concern and that we’re going to need to put plans in place to address it, what do we hear from the Government?

💬 Hon Tim Macindoe: They call them junk.

We hear that the businesses don’t know what they’re talking about. Business sentiment is “junk”, it is “biased”, it is “perception”, and it is “bulldust”. We hear: “Businesses are just wrong, and if they only understood the Government better, it would be fine.” Well, I put more faith in the opinions of the people who are actually running businesses than in the opinion of a finance Minister who’s never run a business. He’s never run a business. He has never, in fact—to my knowledge—even worked in a private sector business, and yet Grant Robertson has the arrogance to stand here and tell the business community that they are wrong. The Prime Minister has the arrogance to tell the business community that they just don’t understand it properly. Well, I’m sorry, I say to the Government, but that is unforgiveable dismissiveness of the core engine room of our economy.

There is no doubt that when you look at, for example, Treasury now talking down the growth prospects of this country and when you look at the Reserve Bank having come out last week saying that the official cash rate (OCR) is now going to be lower for much longer—and that is a very simple report card from the governor, which is him saying, “I now have less faith in the economy than I did three months ago.”, because when the economy starts to heat up and pick up, then the governor will move the OCR. The fact that the governor is now saying the OCR is unlikely to move until 2020 says that there is less faith now in the New Zealand economy. In fact, when he did talk about moving it, he indicated that if this slow growth continues, we could see the OCR drop by another 100 points.

Look at the dollar over the last few weeks. We have seen the dollar drop away sharply as, again, international markets are looking at New Zealand; they’re looking at our economic performance, and they’re not liking what they see. This is the vote of no confidence in this country’s performance from the international economy, and the only thing that has changed is the Government. The businesses are as hard-working and as focused as ever. The country has the same exquisite natural resource potential to sell to the world. New Zealand continues to make and sell what the world wants. We’re still getting very good export prices. The only reason the economy is slowing, and slowing rapidly and slowing patently obviously to everyone except Grant Robertson, is the change of Government and the uncertainty, the poor policies, the lack of process, and the dismissive approach to how the economy functions that we’re seeing from this Government.

I mean, to have a Minister for workplace relations who will say to business, “If they don’t like the extra costs and if they can’t handle the extra costs, well, perhaps they should go broke.”—it was an appalling statement. It was an appalling statement.

We’ve just heard from David Clark that, somehow, National borrowed too much money under the global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquakes. Well, I challenge Dr Clark to go to Christchurch and say to every one of those businesses that we kept going through helping them pay for their workers when they couldn’t return to their businesses that every single dollar that New Zealand put into the Canterbury recovery was wasted borrowing. That is an outrageous statement, and if this Labour Government can’t see the difference in borrowing through a global financial crisis and a series of natural disasters like we’ve seen in Christchurch, Canterbury, and Kaikōura, then they have no right to sit on the Treasury benches and claim to represent New Zealand.

Today, we’ve got BNZ coming out saying that actually New Zealand could now be looking at a period of stagflation. Now, I’ve become a bit of a pointy-headed watcher of the things but, essentially, stagflation—I know Madam Deputy Speaker will understand it well, but let me just talk through it—is a period in which we see inflation lifting at the same time the economy is going backwards. That is now the trajectory that independent economists are saying New Zealand is on. That is an utter disgrace and it lies fairly and squarely at the feet of this Government, but instead of acknowledging it, changing, pivoting, or thinking about what they might need to do differently, instead of providing the certainty that businesses are clamouring for, they stand here in this House and say, “Business is wrong; we are right. We, the Labour Party, know far more than anyone.” It’s fairly reminiscent of what they’re saying to us on the waka-jumping legislation, as well.

In this Budget, what we’ve seen is Labour locking in a trajectory of expenditure which will continue to ramp up in years to come, because Grant Robertson is already spending those large surpluses that we left him. But he forgets that they’re not promised to him. If economic growth goes backwards, revenue drops. Every 1 percent drop in revenue is about $800 million a year the Government doesn’t have to spend. I say to you very clearly, Madam Deputy Speaker and this House, that what happens when expenditure is going up and revenue is falling is one of two things. They’ll either put it on the credit card for future generations, add it to the bill—they’re already spending $17 billion more than we would have had under a National Government. They’re spending $17 billion of debt in the good times. When that economic growth line starts to deteriorate and when our income as a country goes backwards because Grant Robertson is asleep at the wheel and had his head in the sand about our slowing economic position, I tell this House now that they will come after the money of hard-working New Zealanders.

We’ve already seen $2.5 billion in extra taxes from this “no-tax Government”. Now we’ve got Michael Cullen beavering away in his tax working group. This Government is going to look to take more from the pockets of hard-working New Zealanders. They’re going to look to ramp up debt because they cannot control their spending. They’ve promised too much, they didn’t understand the costs of Government, and they paid way too much for the price for Winston Peters and his motley mob. This is a Budget of over-promising and under-delivering—far too much expenditure in coalition negotiations, poor quality spending—at the same time as doing nothing to support our economic growth room. Small businesses up and down New Zealand are worse off for it.

This is the most frustrating and inept contribution from the Opposition that I have heard in years. I’d take offence at being called motley, except that it came from the member who can’t get her arguments straight. So let’s just let that pass, shall we. She spoke about a governor leaving the inflation rate, as if it is some kind of indictment on this Government’s performance, and then she speaks about stagflation. And yet, if there was such a thing about to occur—previous speaker over there; I can’t even remember your name, my apologies—if there was such a real thing happening, the Reserve Bank Governor would have reacted to that with the adjustment of the official cash rate (OCR). What has actually happened is he has made the right decision. The economy is carrying on on its positive course of more than 3 percent per annum growth over the next forecast period. He has made the right decision, because you don’t want to over-stimulate the economy because then businesses do make the wrong decisions about what they’re doing, and you don’t want to send the OCR in the other direction, because then you are constraining businesses and the opportunity to invest. So the Reserve Bank Governor is incorrectly and inappropriately being attacked by that previous speaker, and it is incredibly, incredibly frustrating to listen to.

She should in fact heed the words of her two previous finance Ministers, who were in that party at the time they were in Government, who spoke about wisely quoting growth statistics and data at the appropriate time. The previous speaker spoke about a downturn in the economy. What she failed to highlight to the House was this was a short-term, perhaps even quarterly, projection, and the long-term forecast for this economy under this Government is for a long-term period of sustained growth, because economists from around the world and here in New Zealand all agree that in that long term we have the settings right and this economy will continue to grow as we forecast when we came into Government. So let’s get those facts straight, shall we?

She spoke of the dollar decreasing like it was an indictment on this Government, but yet again I ask her to reference her previous Ministers of Finance, who spoke of this very thing in their time when the economy was in a downturn. Imagine that, under National! Yes, the economy went into a downturn several times under their governance, and what happened? The New Zealand dollar decreased in response. Those are macro tools responding as they should to an economy that is functioning properly, which is almost quoting Joyce verbatim in response to questions in the House in his time as the finance Minister. That is exactly what should happen, and it is fantastic for New Zealand business that this is happening, because if you’re an exporter operating in New Zealand right now, you’re saying “I’m in for a windfall because”—again the Opposition hasn’t pointed it out. They talk about business confidence, and, yes, there’s work to do there, but they haven’t pointed out to the House that, actually, businesses are investing in capital, they are investing more in themselves than they have for a very long time, and they’re doing it right now despite the supposed confidence issue.

What that means is those very businesses who have made that investment in themselves and who are exporting overseas are going to reap the rewards of a low Kiwi dollar. They are going to make more money on every sale that they make overseas. What that means—again, not mentioned on the other side of the House—is more jobs at a time when unemployment is at its lowest rate we have seen in a decade. The fundamentals of this economy and the fundamentals set out by our finance Minister are the strongest and the most reasonably well-thought-through fundamentals that we have seen in a long, long time, and New Zealand businesses are actually reaping those rewards. So it’s fantastic for business, and I wish them the best of luck in such a wonderful period of time to be exporting overseas.

As the Opposition were speaking, I made some notes that I wanted to speak to. I quickly wrote down the words “district health boards” and “the health sector”. I wrote down “superannuation”. I wrote down “our provinces” and “our rural communities”. I wrote down “homes for Kiwis”, and I wrote the words “infrastructure from Auckland to our smallest city”, and I wrote the words “education and training”. And then I had the time to reflect on those words and realise that these are the issues that this Government has been handed from the previous Government, who did absolutely nothing in all of those things, and then they have the audacity—the audacity—to stand up and accuse us of not doing anything or not doing enough.

💬 Clayton Mitchell: Where were they?

Over nine years, where were they when New Zealanders were put out on the streets and became homeless and were living in cars?

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Building houses.

No, you were not building houses, Nick Smith. You were doing a tour of cemeteries and—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Actually, I wasn’t doing any tours of cemeteries.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I did refer to the member by name.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Don’t bring me into the debate.

I did refer to the member by name.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Are you arguing with me?

I’m simply—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: You’re wasting your time. Don’t bring me into the debate.

I apologise if I did so.

💬 Hon Judith Collins: Ha, ha!

Ha, ha! Judith Collins, jeez! Madam Deputy Speaker, it is, as you can tell, quite frustrating, and I get quite heated listening to inept contributions from the other side.

So Paula Bennett spoke about—what did she do? She dipped into the cliché bag from the National Party and spoke about tax and spend, all the while accusing us of not doing enough, not spending enough on education, saying that we hadn’t spent as much as they did in education. And yet that same cliché got pulled out about a tax and spend Government.

💬 Matt King: You’re spending it in the wrong places.

Well, contributions from this side of the House were very clear that, where it was needed, the money was spent. And in all those lists, in all those headings I read out—infrastructure, health, mental health, education, and superannuation—this Government has already done more in those areas than that Opposition did in nine years. So I’m glad I got to speak after those who presume to lead the Opposition voice in this area, because I am glad that I can highlight the flaws in their arguments, because they are frustrating to listen to.

Paula Bennett spoke about the regions laughing—

💬 Hon Judith Collins: Hon Paula Bennett. Use her title.

💬 Matt King: Honourable.

I’m doing it appropriately, thanks.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Actually, in fairness, her title is the Hon Paula Bennett.

Yes, it is. She spoke about the regions laughing. So I think it was Dr David Clark who got it right. I think she was reading the wrong Budget, because the regions were laughing when she was in charge of the Tourism Infrastructure Fund, when she announced $25 million over three years to fix the infrastructure problems of our regions—$25 million over three years to fix our tourism infrastructure problems. That’s when the regions were laughing.

I have had the privilege of travelling around our regions over recent months to talk about the Provincial Growth Fund, and it has been received incredibly well.

💬 Hon Judith Collins: Who were they?

And I tell you how I know this: everywhere I went, there was a National MP talking to me about how we could do more. That’s the reality of the situation, and so I am proud to stand up and correct the contributions from the Opposition and make the statement that this is a good Government, with a good Budget, and things are on the up. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Madam Deputy Speaker, thank you so much for this opportunity to take a call in this debate. Well, that contribution from Fletcher Tabuteau was enlightening. It was enlightening to me because I’ve always thought, “He’s a nice enough chap. He’s the Deputy Leader of the New Zealand First Party. Why is he not a Minister?” And his speech just enlightened me. Actually, to call across to the Hon Amy Adams and say he doesn’t know her name, I have to say, says it all really. He doesn’t know much. But, anyway, it’s good, because he probably doesn’t know my name either! And I’ve gone to all the effort of learning his.

First off with any Budget, I think it’s good to go back to the Hippocratic oath, really, for doctors’ training, which is “First, do no harm”. So did this Budget do some harm? Well, it certainly seems to have done a bit of harm, because we have been hearing today some excuses from the Government side—

💬 Hon Kris Faafoi: Maybe Simon should take heed of that too?

💬 Clayton Mitchell: Only Simon’s rating.

—oh, please, call out; I just love it when they do. When they say “Look, the economy is tanking because the world economy is tanking.”—the dollar coming down, Mr Tabuteau told us, was an excellent thing because that means we’ll have more money. Well, that must be why President Erdogan of Turkey is so thrilled to bits that the lira has tanked in a major way. If a low dollar was the reason for financial success, then Mexico would be the richest country in the world, not the United States of America. There would be a reason for that. The dollar has been tanking because of the lack of confidence in this Government. Yes, there will be some short-term gain by those who are exporting because they will immediately get more New Zealand dollars for their product. The problem is that those New Zealand dollars won’t buy them anything more when it comes to anywhere else. So if you’re looking at anything where fuel is used—petrol and diesel—not only have we got these massive taxes put on in the Auckland region, and also, no doubt, going to move to the other regions soon, but we also have the fact that oil and, particularly, petrol and diesel go up as soon as the dollar drops. It is almost that day. So what I am seeing around the country, and I’m sure that my colleagues have too, is that petrol prices and diesel prices have gone up under this Government. And they will continue to go up because they see these particular products as ways that they can grab more money, and also because the dollar has been falling.

It’s interesting also to hear today this contribution from the Government as another excuse for the effect of the Budget that, actually, the world is going through turmoil and the world economies are. Well, that must be why Australia’s economy is not tanking these days! Why would that be? Oh, probably because they have a sensible Government that’s doing its best, encouraging resources to be used and encouraging mining. Mining is getting itself back up again in Australia—infrastructure spend taking our carpenters, taking our tradespeople, being able to pay them what they’re worth. And what have we got from this Government? Oh, I know, we’re just going to—what? Nothing really, actually. We don’t want foreigners, we don’t want their money—oh, we do now because suddenly we’ve worked out that we can’t actually build anything without that money and without these people investing in New Zealand.

Why business is very upset with this Government—and bear in mind that this is only a matter of months; it’s not even a year since this Government came in—is that they’re not being listened to, and they’re being patronised by people who have never been in business. So they’ve got a Minister of Finance who’s never been in business, who’s never had to actually go out, sell a product, be able to look at whether there is a profit in it, employ people, and put his own money on the line. And you’ve got a Government full of people like that—people who have worked in places where they’ve been public servants, which is an excellent thing, of course, but that is all that their experience is, in most cases. And they’re talking around saying, and we had the Prime Minister doing it too, “Look, business confidence—it’s only confidence.” Well, actually, it’s that confidence that gives people, strangely enough, the confidence to go and put a mortgage on their house, borrow some money from the bank, and go and buy a business. It’s also that confidence that gives someone the ability to say to someone who wants a job, “I can take you on. I can take you on as an apprentice. I can commit to you for the next so many years because I believe my business is going to be thriving. It will be doing well.”

At a time when we’re supposed to have all these houses being built everywhere, why is it that we don’t have all these houses being built everywhere, any more than there were last year?

💬 Maureen Pugh: Why is that?

Why is that? And the answer is that there are no more tradespeople than there were last year. In fact, a whole lot have gone to Australia because they can get jobs there because, strangely enough, their economy is booming and, strangely enough, ours isn’t.

And then we have things such as “Is this Government going to back business when things go a bit wrong?” Well, I don’t think they are. I was very concerned to hear, the other day, Adrian Orr, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, talk about hoping and, basically, crossing fingers and thinking things might be OK. That’s not the sort of confidence that people want to hear. And possibly that’s because he’s telling the truth: that he’s not that confident about the New Zealand economy. We’re very fortunate that we have a diverse economy, that we have a lot of people who sell products overseas, that we are actually a very, very diverse economy. We don’t just sell dairy products; we sell a lot of different other things, including tourism. But all of those things actually rely on people who have the courage and the wherewithal to be able to put investments into businesses and to employ people. That’s what happens. And all they’ve seen from this Government is attack after attack after attack on business.

The latest one is, of course, these attacks on business using the unions. I saw today that Pacific Steel Group is now going on strike. Pacific Steel is, I think, one of only two steel producers now in New Zealand, based in Otāhuhu, in Auckland. That is actually a really big payer of people. It is an industry that there’s not much left of in New Zealand. It is a very valuable industry. We’re lucky to have it, because if we didn’t have that and the Glenbrook steel mill, we would have no steel being produced in New Zealand. That means that every piece of steel we get would have to come in from overseas, so we would not have this very high quality steel produced with very good efforts around the environment and also health and safety for staff, and we would instead simply bring in steel from China and other countries like that, where not necessarily all the same care is taken.

So why would any union want to bash up one of the very few steel producers left in New Zealand? The answer has to be because they think they can, because they have a Government that they know is going to support them. And when was the last time that we saw nurses threatening to strike? I don’t think I can recall that in my lifetime. We’ve got teachers striking tomorrow. A lot of staff in this building are taking some days off, some holiday time, because they’re going to stay home and look after their school-age children. I don’t remember this happening in my lifetime.

What I do see at the moment is a re-energised union movement, which certainly does have a place in a lot of big business, but also that re-energised union movement is not necessarily about their workers, and that’s what worries me. When we have people like the E tū union—I think that’s the one that Andrew Little used to run, isn’t it? Is that the one? Yes, I thought it was—running around trying to destroy an industry because they can, I am very concerned about why business confidence is dropping.

We’re hearing about some of the changes coming through, with union reps being able to demand and just move into workplaces, on to farms, into factories, and into businesses. No one else can do that. Everyone else has to go through a health and safety induction. Everyone else has to sign in. Everyone else has to get permission, except these particular people. And why should that be? Why should that be? The police can’t do that. The Search and Surveillance Act doesn’t allow that to happen, and yet anybody who’s a union rep can just go in and do it. I think business is right to be frightened of this Government, and they’re frightened of this Government not because there is any particular ability over there on the other side in Parliament but because they don’t know what they’re going to do next; because they believe, rightly, that this Government has not a clue about the effects of what it’s doing, and it’s all bad.

On the sensation of alarm and fright, the last speaker, Judith Collins, has obviously begun to project her ability to frighten the members of her own caucus. She has raised, in the context of this speech, confidence. I am confident that the breadcrumb trail related to the current woes that prevent the Leader of the Opposition participating in this debate, because he’s now worried less about the business confidence in New Zealand firms and boardrooms than about the confidence of the people around him—without a doubt, that information has been selectively used to destroy that particular politician. Now, we have our theories as to who’s doing the leaking, just as I have my theories as to who’s doing the leaking from the police, but I’ll speak about that at a later date.

Let me now dispel a few misconceptions about the $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund. I identified today—and I have to say, a number of the questions that were asked of me today are not unreasonable because they’re a reflection of the person on the other side of the House who has to hold me to account, and that’s not unreasonable, that the pint-sized representative from Epsom should try to extend the shadow of his influence over the provinces. I can actually provide him with the political form of a Shetland pony to arrive at these places, but he will find that a great locomotive called provincial growth, “modest Matua Shane Jones”, has already arrived in town.

Now, what are some of the provincial growth initiatives that this Government is pushing? I wait with bated breath to hear what my Labour colleagues will return back to Parliament with in several weeks’ time, as they venture forward into that area politically forsaken by the National Party of Eastern Bay of Plenty. I give my word that I will advocate with my fellow Ministers that we share the fiscal lucre, fiscal wealth, fiscal medicine, with that part of the country.

It pained me that we had to turn down a signature project developed by the last regime called the Ōpōtiki Wharf, but we had to stop at $4.85 million committed by the last regime in due diligence, which got out of control. Now, it’s not unreasonable that I show on a regular basis not only are we capable of saying yes to projects; from time to time we have to say no.

Now, I said earlier today that of the various sins referred to in the Good Book, in politics envy is a very corrosive one. Now, I wasn’t talking about envy of an anatomical nature; I was talking about the envy that drives a lot of the questions which are designed not only to trip up this side of the House—a physical impossibility, because we are like the trees that we’re growing: erect, roots down deep into the provinces, and regularly watered with appropriate measures of fiscal waiora, water. So I don’t mind that we’re being constantly challenged, because there is a robust process, and despite the list member for Epsom alleging that there is no transparency, there is not only transparency; there is a great deal of rigour.

Now, where he calls for transparency in terms of financial transactions between the Crown and a third party, go and say to the other organisations such as Callaghan Innovation and the Skycity Casino—no transaction that’s governed by confidentiality can be spilled out into the totality of the public. To do that reflects not only bad faith but a very shallow, short-term, and disappointing approach to growing the regions, because our approach is long term. That’s why the $3 billion fund is going to lead a host of legacy projects and legacy investments.

But I’ve spoken enough about the $3 billion fund, because it announces itself everywhere it goes, and the fact that we’re going to partially use it to drive KiwiRail—an organisation, an entity, driven into the ground, neglected, and forgotten about by the last regime. We, with our new chair of KiwiRail; we, with the body of people, an entity chaired by Wayne Brown, formerly our mayor of the Far North District Council—they are going to bring back further possibilities of how the Provincial Growth Fund can aid and grow infrastructure.

I want to touch for a moment on the Hon Judith Collins’ references to the dollar. Now, she does not understand that the nature of our economy is such that the dollar floats. The dollar is a natural stabiliser—something that Steven Joyce, with tedious regularity, would point out to the House.

Now, I go back to do the days when the dollar fell to 39c. I go back to the days when in the fishing industry, the average long-run dollar was 55c. The fact that the dollar is dropping—it enhanced wealth opportunities; it improves the terms of repatriating earnings back from overseas—is positive for the regions, despite the best efforts of the Leader of the Opposition to go to every nook and cranny around regional New Zealand and become more unpopular. I don’t really care if he wracks up these bills. I genuinely accept that’s a part of what it takes to move around Aotearoa, but what I do object to is that people in his own caucus are now practising such a corrosive and destructive type of leaking behaviour, because I can’t see how they can be an effective Opposition when they’re turning to devour themselves.

We have every right to expect a formidable and reasonable Opposition to hold us to account. It’s only disappointing that they’re now falling and sinking their fangs—well, they’re not fangs, really; they’re false teeth—into the breasts of each other.

On the question, however, on particular industry groups, forestry is an obvious winner. Forestry is a key feature of why the Overseas Investment Office changes are overdue. The last regime allowed the process to remain grit-riddled. It remained stodgy. We’ve come in and we’ve said, in terms of foreign direct investment to grow this valuable sector, to increase the size of the botanical lung of the nation, to draw the carbon emissions out of the atmosphere so that future generations will thank us—that is a practical contribution.

Now I know for a fact, because I have the paperwork, that Graeme Hart and his associates did approach the John Key Government—I have the paperwork. That particular proposal bears a striking resemblance to the billion trees strategy that was announced in the formation of our coalition Government and led by our leader here, Winston Peters. So I don’t care how many statements the member for Nelson seeks to make, because at the point at which those statements of defence are uttered and laid out, if necessary, I’ll provide a small level of paperwork affirmation. So forestry is a definite winner.

We do also have profound development options for fisheries. We’re not going to follow the pathway of “NAIT’s Guy”; after failing to create decent system to track animals, he then decided to track—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I think you need to use the proper name.

—fishermen—Nathan Guy; apologies. Apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. We’re not going to follow that particular pathway and subject the fishing industry to some sort of State commercial surveillance; we’re going to support the Minister of Fisheries to deal with the legacy problems in the fishing industry that have been around for well over a decade. At that point, whether there’s a case for camera surveillance to augment electronic surveillance, then we will consider it at that stage.

Now, these are business-friendly decisions. These are pro-industry steps that we’re taking in terms of our narrative. Forestry—long-term approach, significant amounts of investment capital; fisheries—stripping red tape; aquaculture—a further area sadly abandoned and not tended well at all under the stewardship of the last regime, but already we are receiving applications for people wanting to grow the value of the aquaculture sector via the Provincial Growth Fund. Subject to it being consistent with the criterion of the Cabinet paper, subject to it passing muster with a robust set of decision makers, including the independent economic appraisal committee, I have every confidence that these key industry areas will grow in wealth, health, and jobs.

Well thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. So here we are. We’re talking about the legislation that follows on from the Budget, and we saw a lot of spending, a lot of borrowing, some extra taxing, and very little about earning more as a country. The number one challenge for New Zealand, as it has always been, is: how do we maintain our international competitiveness in a tough world? The rest of the world doesn’t care about New Zealand. We have to continue to provide goods and services that people want and that they’re prepared to pay for at the best price, so that we can make a living in a world and continue to sustain the high living standards that we have in this country and have the opportunities for young people to get jobs and to be able to afford to pay for good quality healthcare and good quality education and welfare when people get into trouble.

That’s why having a strong economy is so important, and this Budget was based on the prospect of 3 percent growth in GPD—a little bit less than what we had in the last few years under the previous Government, where we were getting close to 4 percent after years of strong, stable, predictable Government. We saw 245,000 jobs created in the past two years, which gave real opportunities throughout New Zealand and through the regions. It’ll be interesting to know whether all the efforts of Shane Jones will lead to anywhere near as many new jobs being created in the regions than we did over the past couple of years based on good, sound, sensible, fiscally responsible, and careful spending. So time will tell—time will tell—whether we see more jobs in the regions in the next couple of years than we have seen in the previous couple of years.

But one thing we do know is we’re not likely to be seeing the 3 percent growth in New Zealand that was predicted only a few months ago in the Budget. All the signs are that it will be somewhere closer to 2 percent, and why? Well, it’s certainly not the international situation, because the US economy is going gangbusters at the moment. New Zealand has the highest terms of trade, virtually back to the 1950s; we should be absolutely coining it at the moment and continuing to do well. But we’re not; we’re faltering—and why? Well, I think a big part of the reason for that is the growing lack of confidence—business confidence—that we’re seeing across this country as the result of all the uncertainty that this Government is bringing in.

People listening in to this debate on their crystal sets and TVs will be wondering, “What’s all this fuss about business confidence?” Well, the fuss about business confidence is that, ultimately, people get jobs and opportunities, and people get options to live a successful life, to care for their family and provide for their family, basically, if there is a good development of jobs and a strong economy. Jobs and opportunities only come from somebody making an investment. Whether it’s starting a new business, hiring a new person, building a new plant, starting something new, or taking a risk, it all comes back to somebody or a company saying, “I’m going to invest this money in this venture and I’m going to create a new job.”

Now, why would you do that at the moment when you’re not sure whether you’re going to have to pay capital gains on that investment?

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Don’t bring me into it.

Why would anybody? Why would you be so sure about making a major new investment if there’s so much uncertainty about what the industrial relations climate is going to be like—we got more strikes in the last nine months than in the last nine years—if you’re unsure about whether you’re going to be able to be internationally competitive and still pay one of the highest minimum wages in the world that will be developing in the next couple of years; if you’re unsure about the immigration policy; if you’re unsure about the foreign investment rules, in which we’ve basically put up a sign saying to foreigners, “Clear off. We don’t want your investment”—unless, of course, you have the special exemption such as Shane Jones has with this very strange and murky power that New Zealand First and Mr Jones have within this Government.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Power Ranger! Power Ranger! Power Ranger!

It seems—that’s right. He seems to have this dark hand that controls the levers of power in this Government in an unusual and strange way so that he can get anything he wants out of the Labour Government, out of Jacinda Ardern and the Greens. When Shane Jones calls, the money just tumbles out. So they don’t have enough money to keep their promises on mental health, on education—all sorts of areas where they haven’t kept their promises—but the money flows for him.

And the sad thing is, notwithstanding the money flowing for him, there has been little evidence so far that we’re going to get good value for the money that is flowing in his direction, and that is some of the questions that we had today. I’m glad the previous speaker, Minister Jones, indicated that those questions were worthwhile. That’s not what he said an hour or so ago. He said that they were, quote, “paltry and trivial”, and he has a long record of attacking me for asking impertinent questions in this House such as: what are we going to get for $3 billion? I mean, who would have thought—who would have thought—that anybody in this House would have the temerity to stand up on their hind legs and ask a Minister what we’re actually going to get for $3 billion?

We know that New Zealanders are uniquely resourceful and entrepreneurial people, and they could do something with $3 billion. We know that New Zealanders, if they had that money in their own pockets to invest in their own businesses, and to have that money to invest in their businesses and their decisions, they would create a lot of wealth and a lot of things would happen. We’re taking that money off them and giving it to Mr Jones to spend, so there is a high burden on him to ensure that he creates more wealth and more jobs out of that money than the money that was taken out of the hands of New Zealanders, and so far we haven’t seen much evidence.

We’ve got $485 million being spent on forestry, we’ve heard in the last couple of days; we don’t know what we’re getting for it. We know we’re getting—apparently, so he claims—2,000 extra jobs. Well, time will tell—2,000 extra jobs—I think that works out to about quarter of a million per job. That’s not very good. We’re going to get a few trees—we don’t know how many trees—and we’re going to save $3 billion, apparently. Where the figure comes from, who knows? He just sort of plucked it out of the air. I think he’s forgotten that there is the $3 billion fund that he’s talking about, but now he thinks he’s going to save $3 billion, based on something relating to the climate change proposition.

I think even with the best will in the world the amount of trees that might get planted under this scheme might—I don’t know—reduce our obligations by maybe 5 percent, maybe 10 percent. Is he saying that’s $3 billion worth? Is he saying that New Zealand, somewhere in 20 years’ time, is going to write a $30 billion cheque to somebody for climate change propositions? I can’t quite see that happening, and I don’t know who we’re going to be writing the cheque to. But anyway, so, what—

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Get to the point.

The point I’m trying to make, Mr Jackson, is that one thing we do know is that we’ve got $3 billion coming out of the pockets of New Zealanders and going somewhere. We know that there’s $3 billion, but we don’t know what we’re getting for it, and the Minister for Regional Economic Development refuses point blank to release any information about what we’re getting, any of the funding agreements, and any detail about what we’re actually getting for the money, and his idea of openness and transparency in Government is to tell nothing and say nothing of any information whatsoever about that money.

So we’re left here all looking and saying, well, interestingly, nearly half the funding is going to Northland. Well, that’s interesting. Only 2 percent is going to the whole of the South Island—well, that’s interesting. So there is a sort of a strange calculus going on as to how the decisions are made, and because of the lack of transparency that we are seeing in the whole approach that the Minister has taken and that strong hand that he has somewhere in the deep workings and mechanisms of this Government to pull various levers in his direction, we’re left asking the question: do we have any confidence that this money will be spent wisely?

I think the only point I’d make is, absolutely, we all back the regions of New Zealand, and we do want to see them do well, and we do want to invest in those regions, particularly in the area of infrastructure for tourism. About a quarter of the money that Shane Jones is talking about for the Provincial Growth Fund is money that the previous Government was spending already in helping local government help deal with the infrastructure costs of the tourism industry, for example.

So we agree with that, and we want that to continue to be funnelled through to the regions so that they can do well and deal with the costs of tourism particularly. But what we do worry about is the other three-quarters—a big chunk of that could be very poor quality spending, and it is not as if, as we’ve seen every week, there is more money than we know what to do with in this country. There’s a lot of pressure on this Budget. The Government is facing strikes in every direction. It’s not keeping its promises, and yet it seems to be quite happy to continue to have large amounts of poor quality spending in this area under Shane Jones.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. What a shocking contribution from that member, Paul Goldsmith. Particularly—

I’m sorry to interrupt the member. This is a split call—bell at one minute.

💬 Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Particularly, criticism of the—

💬 Hon Paul Goldsmith: It’s not even worth 10 minutes.

💬 Hon WILLIE JACKSON: —oh, I’d love 10 minutes, but you gotta play by the rules.

The “Hukapapa Man”, as we know him, Minister Jones—pure as snow, as he would describe himself. It was terrible criticism given the impact that that provincial fund is making at the moment. I absolutely compliment our Minister for Regional Economic Development in terms of what he’s doing, and we had no problems, unlike that member and other members of the Opposition, in terms of supporting people in the North. What—should he just give up, Mr Goldsmith; give up on your own because you’re related? Cut that out. There are no thoughts of nepotism whatsoever. It’s total support for good business and good strategies.

It’s ironic that I stand today, and it’s a sad state of affairs for us as Māori that we’re celebrating a Budget that supports warm homes, employment, and investment in health—all of that has been done with this Budget, and Māori are very pleased with this Budget—despite the nonsensical rubbish that we’ve had from the other side. We as a Māori caucus made a clear decision this time, despite all the condemnation from the other side, to embark on a universal-type strategy. As Minister Jones knows—and I’ve said this before in the House—most of our Māori people don’t speak Māori. Most of them are not with Waipareira and the Manukau Urban Māori Authority (MUMA), sadly—sadly. Most of them are not attached to the Ngāpuhi rūnanga in the North. They’re just normal people who go about their business every day, in South Auckland, in west Auckland—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: He tangata, he tangata.

💬 Hon WILLIE JACKSON: —he tangata, he tangata—and in Porirua, and what did they need? They needed assistance—they needed assistance. With all respect, the foreshore and seabed, who owns the water—all the different kōrero that goes down about who owns what and what Māori need and what Māori want is irrelevant to your average Māori out there. They need good housing. They need good health plans. They need good education, and we’re a Māori caucus who have delivered on that.

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Why are you closing charter schools?

💬 Hon WILLIE JACKSON: We have delivered on that. We don’t want to be worrying about 0.1 percent of the funding that National gave their ACT mates; we want to worry about the main population. That member, Nick Smith, over there knows that. National did absolutely nothing for people. They just threw the ACT member crumbs. They never really cared about Māori—whereas we care about Māori. So we embarked, Mr Smith, on a universal strategy that saw an accommodation supplement of $265 million go to Māori—$265 million went to Māori—$443 million went to whānau, whānau the National Party don’t care about; a winter energy payment of $274 million; and a Best Start payment of $250 million. But according to the other side, those sorts of numbers don’t count. They want to talk about nonsense; we want to get to our people.

We are absolutely rapt with the response from our people. We have people coming up to us in the streets thanking us for having a warm winter now. They’re sick of freezing and dying under the previous National Government. It’s terrible what our people have gone through. We have prioritised the things that are important and dear to our people. You can’t talk about the foreshore and seabed and other kaupapa like that—which are really important, might I add—while your people freezing and dying in cars. You can’t do that.

I don’t try to do it. Don’t bring me into it.

💬 Hon WILLIE JACKSON: You have to prioritise—my apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. You have to prioritise—sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, again. We have to prioritise what’s really dear to them. In saying that, this universal strategy has done well in getting to the majority of our people, and we are pleased particularly with Minister Robertson and his commitment to this. But we know that Māori organisations and groups are watching us, and we intend to deal with some of the requests that we have from Māori health providers, from Māori nurses, and from Whānau Ora groups—all of those groups remain a priority with this Government. They will form part of our strategy going forward, a universal strategy and a targeted funding strategy where we’ll get to all Māori. But in terms of this Budget, we celebrate it because our people are in a much better position and they’re in the right frame going forward. Kia ora koutou katoa.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I sense that this is a Government in trouble. It is a Government in trouble, because I think the most alarming thing I read was the very first statement in the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Statement that was issued last week. The very first statement stated, “GDP growth has slowed over the past year.” It goes on to say, “risks to the growth outlook are [on] the downside.”, and thirdly, it says, “Inflation remains below the 2 percent target mid-point, but there are early signs of inflationary pressure rising.” Those three things are what kill an economy, and that is why I think this Government is facing some pressures, even though it’s not prepared to admit to it yet.

I think the worst thing that the Reserve Bank identified on Thursday was that it had downgraded the GDP growth—this is the economic growth of the New Zealand economy—from 3.1 percent in the last year to September 2018. Through the four quarters to September 2019, we’re seeing a drop from over 3 percent to just over 2.5 percent. I said to this House not long ago—to the Minister of Finance, who happened to be sitting in his chair over there—that I believed that this economy would be generating only a 2.5 percent growth rate by the end of this year, and he laughed. The worst thing is the impact that has on New Zealanders trying to get a job, trying to save for a house, and trying to actually provide for their families. That’s the implication of a declining growth rate.

Also, the other thing that’s starting to bite is the issue around what’s happening with imports. As a result of what the Government is doing, the foreign exchange rate—the New Zealand dollar to US dollar rate—has fallen out of bed 2c over the last month—2c. It doesn’t sound like much, but, in percentage terms, it is very significant. The result of that is that all of our imports are substantially harder to buy. We’re spending more money to buy things like fuel, fuel, fuel. And that’s the issue.

On top of this, we have got a Labour - New Zealand First coalition Government imposing $2.6 billion of new taxes on New Zealanders, who didn’t know about it in the last election, but, somehow, these new taxes have been imposed. The worst one, in my view, in my electorate is the fuel tax—the fuel tax—because in my electorate there is very little opportunity to use public transport. I can guarantee there’s no opportunity to use the tram from the CBD to the airport. So what’s happened is the good people of my electorate of Hunua will be funding all this other expenditure in different places. That is why they’re going to be worse off. Their discretionary income is going to be diminished—not demolished yet, but diminished. I think that’s the worry for New Zealanders, and that’s the bit that really annoys me when I think about the impact on the good people of New Zealand.

It was interesting hearing the Minister, just before, talking about jobs—he is the Minister of Employment. Here we are: we’ve got a Provincial Growth Fund that sucked $3 billion out of the Budget, on top of the billion for the Rt Hon Winston Peters’ billion dollar “cushions and curtains for Stockholm”. So 4 billion bucks has been ripped out of the Budget, and, on the other side, what the Government has done is rip $5 billion out of rural roads—rural roads. If you’re talking about economic development, putting money into good infrastructure is one of the best things you can do.

When you look down in the south where I am in Auckland, taking the billion dollar Mill Road project off the agenda and trying to substitute it for Redoubt Road is, in my view, a very poor investment. Again, what we’ve got is a short-sighted slush fund being directed to things that are not going to generate jobs for people in New Zealand.

Tēnā koe, Te Mana Whakawā. Well, what have we got here? We’ve got an Opposition full of fear. It’s no wonder people want to know what’s going on when all we have from the other side of the House is scaremongering and doomsaying. You know what? What we have in this Budget is a new direction, a “New Hope”—it’s not the “Return of the Sith”. What we have are a whole lot of new initiatives to pick up the huge deficits and the decrepit economy that this Government was left with. What’s more, it’s a sustainable approach. It’s an approach which is looking at the long term. We’re not looking at the very next election, we’re not looking at your road for your constituents; we’re looking at building a New Zealand for all New Zealanders which is sustainable, which has wise investment, which will be here for years to come, and which recognises that we’ve got to change the way we do things.

We’re going to do it responsibly. We’re going to do it within the fiscal constraints that exist, within the fiscal constraints that we have recognised New Zealanders need so that they will have certainty looking forward—keeping our debt within constraints, having responsible spending. And you know what this is really about? This Budget is about the real hard-working New Zealanders, the New Zealanders who are working day in, day out—many of them in very low-paid work—doing work which is of critical importance. They’re not just our care workers, our teacher-aides, but also some of those people who are in professions that really aren’t being recognised well enough, and we’re working on that as well.

We’ve got to look at those people who work full-time jobs and still can’t make ends meet. That’s where we are looking. That’s why we raised the minimum wage. Let it be noted here that when that minimum wage was raised, there was no increase in unemployment—quite the opposite. Employment is high, participation rates are high, and employment is right at its sustainable level. Employment is higher than it has ever been, and we’re still creating more jobs for New Zealanders—for hard-working New Zealanders who need to get on. So we are focused on those people, not the high-income earners but those people at the bottom.

We need to lift wages. We are committed for every working New Zealander, over time, to get a living wage. It’s no good to have a minimum wage which is less than the living wage; we need a living wage for all New Zealanders, to give people the dignity and the mana in work, and that’s what we are aiming for. At the moment, we need to assist people. That’s why we increased Working for Families, which puts an average of $75 a week into families’ pockets, and a winter energy payment as well, because we know how tough it is out there for those working families. And you know what? Don’t be afraid of paying a fair wage. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be fearsome of having a fair employment arrangement.

The employment reforms that are on the books—the right of a union member to enter into a workplace has been there for years. All we are doing is removing the entirely unfair and inappropriate constraints on that. No, a union delegate should not have to ask for permission. Let’s recognise what unions do. They are advocates—advocates for workers who may not have a voice for themselves. So let a delegate enter a workplace and enter into a conversation, and let’s stop pretending it’s about conflict. It’s about cooperation. It’s about making that workplace better for employers and employees. We know that we could be more productive. The best way to have a productive economy is having workers and businesses working side by side for a common objective. That’s what this will do. This will enable a meaningful conversation and stop the suggestion that we are at loggerheads with employers and businesses—we are not. We want good businesses, just like everyone else does.

It’s simply not the case—it’s fatuous to suggest—that entry into the workplace is at any time and without constraints. Have a look at the Act—have a look. Already, in section 21 of the Employment Relations Act, entry has to be reasonable and within working hours. It has to be done in a reasonable way, on a normal business basis—through the front door—and expressly must comply with any health and safety requirements or any security requirements. So it’s simply inaccurate and it’s pernicious to suggest that this is someone swanning into a workplace to disrupt what’s going on there. What’s more, there’s an obligation to notify the employer that the visit’s happened and the purpose of the visit, so it’s highly constrained.

So, look, let’s get this economy more productive. That’s what this is all about. This is about smart growth, and to do that we need to work together, and that’s what’s going to happen. We’ve got a whole lot of other initiatives in this Budget, which is aimed absolutely at growing the economy, but not growing it in a false way, not growing it by adding more people to it or simply adding meaningless consumption, but adding genuine innovation—a green fund to say, “Look, if you’ve got a project which will both return a dividend and progress a carbon-free environment and economy, let’s hear about it. There’s money we want to spend on you.” I recommend every entity out there look closely at it, whether it be local government, whether it be entrepreneurs, or whether it be social enterprises. This is money that this Government wants to spend, because it’s going to be better for everyone.

The fantastic Provincial Growth Fund recognises that the provinces are a powerhouse of our economy but sometimes they’re left behind, and that we need to be putting resources in there to enable the people in the provinces to take their place at the top table of our economy and really get on and move it—whether it be through forestry, whether it be through improving ports, but improving our economic infrastructure in a meaningful way.

Research and development is somewhere where we have fallen behind. We don’t spend nearly enough on improving the way we do things, on thinking carefully, or on innovation. This Government has put $1 billion aside in tax incentives—$1 billion—for people who will invest up front in research and development, in those amazing people, the innovators of this world, who will also reap the benefits as they come to patent or copyright their inventions and what have you.

What’s more, we’re going to get infrastructure right. There is $10 billion of additional funding into infrastructure, but we’re not going to build meaningless roads that we have to tell everyone are of special significance. What we’re going to do is we’re going to address genuine infrastructure problems in an innovative way. What we need are safe roads, and I was horrified to hear the member for Hunua hollering again about his roads in his electorate. Rural roads are important and they do need upgrading. We need a genuine network. It’s not just about how fast you can drive from Ashburton to Christchurch; it’s about all around the country—north to south, from Bluff to Cape Reinga.

So, look, what we have here is a hopeful Budget—a Budget which gives us a new way of doing things, where everyone can participate in the economy and where we have an innovative approach. We’re supporting people to do things—a new way, a more productive way, and a way which includes all New Zealanders. I’m very proud to be part of a Government that’s doing it. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It is interesting to see some of these discussions, and I just pick up on that most recent point from Dr Duncan Webb with regards to the roads—having absolute disregard for the value of the significant investment we’ve seen in the roading over the last stage of Government.

💬 Hon Member: That’s right—“meaningless roads”.

“Meaningless roads”—meaningless roads—I encourage that member to get out to the regions to understand the value of that contribution. In my electorate, the Waikato has been a recipient, very gratefully, of significant investment in infrastructure in that regard, and so I would encourage that member, as I say, to look a little bit deeper and realise there is much more to the nationwide economy, the strength of what New Zealand has to offer, than his so-called meaningless roads.

In addition to that, we have seen this Government now shifting that focus away from the regions. Business confidence is slumping, and there is growing uncertainty within the provinces. Again, we see that in the rural towns. What we really need to see—if we’re looking to grow the economy, to encourage investment, to have prosperity, then we should be encouraging that through a much more collaborative, clear, direct message from this Government, and that’s clearly lacking. Investment is dripping away from the provinces. We see a $3 billion regional slush fund. We’ve no idea where that has been allocated at this point.

💬 Andrew Falloon: Northland—Northland.

Northland’s getting some of it, and that’s great for them, but, actually, what’s the process around that? And then there are the trees. We still don’t know where that’s looking either. This lack of clarity is a significant concern and what’s underpinning a reduction in business confidence across the country.

As we’re seeing that business confidence slump, the Government continues to fail to provide any transparency around that funding and those allocations. As a result, businesses again are unsure where to go, what sort of investment they will make. They are some of the basics that we need to be considering. The Government get up and they say, “Hey, look, this is fantastic. We’re doing all these wonderful things, investing a few extra million here and a little bit over here.”—a lot into foreign aid, by the way, but not so much into health and education. But aside from that, what we are not seeing is ongoing support.

💬 Dr Deborah Russell: Not so much into health and education?

The member across the Chamber seems surprised by that statement, and yet tomorrow we’re going to have teachers protesting in the streets because of lack of support and investment into their futures from this Government—a Government that campaigned long and hard on raising their incomes massively, and yet what is it now, now that they’ve actually ended up in Government, where they didn’t expect to be? They’re failing to deliver again, not just on the salaries of teachers but actually on a whole range of other aspects: the fees-free tertiary education, but even schools. They were going to wipe school donations. That was going to happen in the first Budget. Where is it? It’s a broken promise this Government has not delivered.

We have instead seen $2.8 billion towards tertiary education—and untargeted in that the first year of tertiary education’s where we already experience the highest number of dropouts in that education space. Why couldn’t they be more targeted? If for whatever reason they were determined—and obviously they were—to progress with such a path, it should have been the final year of study, to encourage people, to actually reward their hard work and determination. That’s what would have been seen from this side of the House: constant reward for hard work and determination. We’re not seeing it from this Government, and it’s no wonder now we’re seeing more people on benefits as a result of that as well.

The economy is struggling as a result of this Government. I’ve mentioned it already with the economy and the lack of confidence in businesses, and we are now facing uncertain times in the agriculture space as well. If we look at the changes in priorities there, we’re moving away from water storage projects—projects that were going to provide significant benefits into those regions, benefits that were economic, social, and environmental benefits. When you can help to regulate the minimum flows of those rivers, this provides huge environmental gains for those areas. On top of that, it’s additional jobs into our horticultural sectors, into our agriculture sectors, and yet this Government has just turned off the tap—no more water for those projects—

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Oh, sit down.

—and that’s disappointing to see. Mr Jackson pooh-poohs that. He clearly doesn’t care about the regions—not at all. Here’s a great opportunity for that Government to have demonstrated some support, and there’s no one on that side to stand up for the regions. Mr Jackson perhaps could get out of Auckland and go and see what else happens around the countryside. I welcome him down to the Waikato anytime he wants to see the impact of some of this Government’s decisions on the people at the coalface working day in, day out to provide the best they can for their families and yet not being supported.

Although, I suppose in the Waikato it could be a lot worse; we could be in Auckland and have a regional fuel tax to pay. We’ve seen that, again, the Auckland Council failed to actually meet their stated promises of reducing their costs, which would have negated the need for any regional fuel tax, and yet we’ve seen that implemented to bail out that council when they haven’t been able to meet their own standards. That fuel tax is hurting the people who are working the hardest. Those families on low incomes having to perhaps travel a bit further in a car that’s not as economical—they’re now facing significant more cost to do that. They’re not earning more, and that’s another reason why we’re seeing confidence around the country starting to waver. There’s a lot of uncertainty. What is this Government going to be doing? Those are the sorts of questions that people are asking. There’s no clarity, and ongoing question marks continue to be raised across a whole range of sectors.

Now, I touched briefly on the transport before, and that’s one I want to come back to as well. We heard Dr Webb pooh-poohing those investments into the roads of national significance—four-lane projects that have provided huge incentives and stimulus into the regions. They have a massive opportunity to provide connectivity within the regions, and that was the extent of what was being delivered, along with a whole range of safety benefits, reduced congestion, and better access within the communities that those roads connect. We’ve seen projects such as the extension of the Waikato Expressway from near Cambridge down to Piarere, in my electorate, and also across to the Kaimai Range. Those two projects would have been instrumental in helping to support the growth that we’re seeing in the wider Waikato region. What we’re seeing now is a focus on a couple of trams trundling up the line from Hamilton to Auckland, and then a few more back and forward in Auckland itself. Well, actually, that’s not going to fix the problem. The capacity that those transport options will provide is absolutely insignificant in terms of the greater issue, and we are seeing, unfortunately, a significant under-appreciation of where the challenges are from this Government.

This continues to be a broad-ranging issue that they’re facing across all sorts of portfolio areas. Quite frankly, it is disappointing when we sit on this side of the House and see that lack of initiative. Just look at the number of working groups that have been set up, for example. There are far too many out there, which clearly demonstrates there was a lack of work done in Opposition by the now Government in determining where their priorities would be. We have seen now all sorts of ad hoc policies being thrown out without actually understanding what the consequences of those are.

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Give us an example.

Oil and gas would be a great example of that—again, hurting the regions.

💬 Hon Member: No thought given.

No thought whatsoever; no analysis, and yet we’re hearing from this Government they’re supporting the regions. Well, unfortunately, they’re not, and what they’re doing is, time after time, demonstrating a lack of support. They can talk all they like, but you cannot talk your way out of something you’ve acted your way into. That would be my message to Mr Jackson and his team. I’d encourage you to get out there, to understand what’s actually happening in rural New Zealand, and to provide an appropriate set of policies to support that.

That’s exactly what’s been happening on this side of the House. We have a very strong team that has been working long and hard throughout our relatively short time in Opposition to ensure that it is indeed short, and our leader has been driving that through a range of roadshows that have demonstrated a real connection with New Zealand. Up and down the length of the country, we’re understanding, we are listening to what is needed, and I would encourage this Government to do the same.

This Budget has been an absolute disappointment. Regional New Zealand—all of New Zealand—can and should feel let down by this, and it’s disappointing in the first effort from this Government.

That speech had all of the dynamism and energy of a lobotomised sloth and it was still one of the best contributions from the Opposition benches. It took that member, Tim van de Molen, nine minutes and 30 seconds to get the obligatory mention of support for his leader in there, but that’s better than many of his colleagues have done. That’s a bit of a warning sign, speaking from some experience—I’ll let the members of the Opposition know that.

I want to move not to talking about the past, as that member spent most of his speech on doing, but to talking about this Budget and its vision for the future of building the foundations for a better and a fairer New Zealand. I want to start off by talking about a small meeting that was held in my electorate office at 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon.

💬 Simeon Brown: The member only has small meetings.

That member may have been lying on the couch at 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, but this member was hard at work in his constituency. That meeting was a gathering of local residents who are volunteering their time to take part in Auckland’s Homeless Count. What’s happening in September in Auckland is, in response to the housing crisis, Housing First and other organisations who are deeply concerned about homelessness in New Zealand’s biggest city are getting together to actually count the number of people that we have sleeping in cars and sleeping on park benches in our city. If nothing else speaks to the legacy of neglect that this Government inherited and the challenge that we faced in that Budget, it is the very fact that in our biggest city we have thousands of our fellow New Zealanders—men, women, and children, who do not—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: There are more sleeping on park benches.

Men, women, and children are sleeping in cars and on park benches, and that member, the member for Coromandel, can belittle that if he wants to, but I invite him to join me and others on 20 September on Auckland’s Homeless Count to see with his own eyes the legacy of his Government, because that is what happened under that Government and their failure to do anything about that issue as the problem grew, and grew, and grew. That previous Government put their heads in the sand, and they still continue to do it. They cannot utter the words. They cannot even accept that there is a housing crisis. It is denial and deflection, even when the problem is staring us in the face.

So that’s where we’re at. This Budget is about laying the foundations to make sure that every Kiwi family can have a decent, safe, secure, healthy, and stable place to live. One of my favourite thinkers and theologians, Jim Wallis, tells us that Budgets are a moral document. Budgets are moral documents, because they go beyond what you’re saying: where you put the money actually tells you where your priorities are. One of this Government’s top priorities, as expressed through this Budget, is that fundamental right.

💬 Simeon Brown: Tell us about school donations, Mr Wood.

The member can speak and disagree with this, the member for Pakuranga, if he wishes, but this Government believes that it is a fundamental moral duty to ensure that every Kiwi family has a decent, safe, and warm place to live. That member may just like to reflect a little bit on the way in which his party got into such grief last year because of their failure to recognise that problem—but there is no learning whatsoever.

So what do we see in this Budget and these appropriations? We see a range of very, very serious measures. We see 1,400 new emergency places funded. We shouldn’t be having to fund 1,400 emergency places. We’re having to fund them because of the crisis—because there are not enough houses for people. It is a legacy of that previous Government’s neglect that by the end of their term in office, as the housing crisis mounted, we had 1,500 fewer public houses than we did at the beginning of their term. As people were living on their streets, as people like Keith Johnson died on a park bench in Onehunga last winter, they were busy selling off public houses. That is the legacy, and that is what this Budget begins to overturn.

So we have the 1,400 emergency houses funded—that’s a crisis response to that situation. But we’re about doing more than just managing the crisis, which is the most that that lot ever got up to. We’re actually about providing decent and sustainable housing. So one of the things that I am most proud of is the investment in 6,400 new warm, modern State houses for our families who so desperately need them. Not only have we stopped that shameful sell-off of public housing, we’re investing in modern State housing for those families who need it, and in electorates up and down the country there are families who are going to be so much better off for that.

Through this Budget, we’re investing in building 100,000 affordable starter homes for Kiwis who have been locked out of owning their own home under that housing crisis. That’s the policy: building those affordable starter homes under KiwiBuild for young couples, particularly those living in Auckland, where the average house price spiked to nearly $1 million under that previous Government’s watch, bringing homeownership rates down to the lowest rate since the early 1950s.

One thing that I will say about the National Party throughout most of its history—most of its history, perhaps until the last 10 years or so—is that the legacy of “Kiwi Keith” Holyoake was they did have a vision and they did have a belief in New Zealand as a property-owning democracy. Along with the Labour Party, over successive Governments from the 1950s through to relatively recently, there was a belief—there was a belief and there were policies to support the belief—that people who worked hard, people who saved a bit, people in decent, middle-income jobs should be able to afford a place of their own. But that has just slipped out of the grasp of so many New Zealanders, so I am so proud that in this Budget we are rebuilding the foundations of that dream of a young Kiwi couple being able to afford their own home through KiwiBuild. We are so proud that those first homes are going to be coming on stream this year—1,000 built in this first year. That’s going to make a huge difference.

We’re rebuilding the foundations of justice and decency and dignity for our working families. It shouldn’t be the case that 40 percent of the children living in poverty in this country are living in working households. How is it that people can go to work in this country and not earn enough to escape the clutches of poverty, to not have kids growing up in material hardship, lacking the things that they really need to do to be able to thrive in our community and reach their full potential?

That is why I am so proud of the Families Package that came in during the mini-Budget late last year and carries through in Budget 2018. It is going to ensure that 380,000 of our families are $75 per week better off. That is going to make such a difference to those people who are battling away—hard-working people who try and do the right thing but have just been struggling, struggling, struggling for nine years to keep their heads above water. That is going to make a huge difference to those families.

I’m proud of the cheaper doctor’s visits which come through, because one of the things that I hear from my constituents is that some of those people are just sort of keeping their heads above water in an ordinary week, but when a problem hits—when the car breaks down or when someone gets sick and those unexpected extra costs come in—that is when it gets difficult; that’s when people get into debt and problems. So that’s going to make a big difference.

One of the additional measures I’m incredibly proud of, and I know has made a huge difference over the last couple of months, has been the winter energy payment. It’s a great coalition Government policy that speaks to the values that all three parties bring into this Government, about ensuring that none of our older folks and none of our lower-income people who are on main benefits have to go cold over winter. It’s been estimated that around about 40,000 additional hospitalisations occur every year in this country because people haven’t been able to keep warm in their own homes over the cold winter months. That is not right and it is not necessary in this country, and that winter energy payment is going to make such a difference to those families.

That’s been made possible—going back to this point about a Budget being a moral document—because this Government made different choices. We chose not to give members of this House a tidy little tax cut; we chose to ensure that people had the winter energy payment and our families had the benefit of that Families Package, because it’s those lower- and middle-income, battling families who need the support of this Parliament. That has been the priority of this Government in Budget 2018.

This has been a Budget which has been about looking forward, looking after those issues that we face today, but also looking ahead for New Zealand. I am so proud of the fact, for example, that after nine years of failing to pay into it, this Government restarted payments into the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. We’re not just concerned with the political circumstances now and trying to make the books look good so we can present them at the next election; we’re concerned with the fact that every single New Zealander should have the security of New Zealand superannuation now and into future generations. Restarting those payments is going to make that possible.

This is a Budget which has been about rebuilding the economic, social, and infrastructure foundations of New Zealand. They were badly neglected over the last nine years and there’s a heck of a lot more work to do. We can’t do it all in one Budget, but this Budget has made an incredible start. It’s making a difference for New Zealanders and it is helping to make this a better and a fairer place for all of our people. I very much commend it to the House. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

What a statement from the honourable member Michael Wood: that this Budget is about a fairer New Zealand. Well, let’s walk through that, actually. What is fairer about $2 billion extra in taxes when your party campaigned on no new taxes? What is fairer about having inherited a situation, from an economic perspective, where 10,000 jobs were being created a month, to see that slashed to 4,000 jobs and business confidence tanking? What is fairer about half a million businesses in New Zealand facing an extraordinary situation—after the National Government left an economy that was doing well: jobs were being created, lower taxes, less regulation—that sees those businesses staring down the barrel of an uncertain environment in terms of foreign investment, a difficult environment in terms of industrial relations. And it’s not just a difficult environment; people are saying it’s worse than the 1970s—increased costs in terms of petrol taxes, and increased costs in terms of minimum wage?

We all agree on raising the minimum wage. National did it every year that we were in office, but if you do it at a pace that is so fast, we see jobs lost. The 90-day trial was scrapped for businesses with employees over 20. What is fairer about that country that sees our economy now stalling? What is fairer, honourable members in the House, about the average middle New Zealand family being $2,500 worse off, in our estimates, as a result of this Budget? They don’t get universally cheaper doctor’s visits. There were a lot of broken promises from Labour, where they raised massive expectations in the campaign, and the reality is they have not delivered them in areas like education and health. They have also then gone and put on these taxes, borrowed more, and the reality is there is nothing fairer about $2,500 additional for New Zealand middle-income families.

The thing that I would say to members opposite—and I would also say this to the Prime Minister, is for a party that claimed to be one that cares about equity and aspiration and enabling young people and all New Zealanders to get ahead to be delivering a scenario whereby business confidence is tanking—actually, take the area of education, where there are more than 18 broken promises. We have a scenario where the Minister of Education goes on national television and says that donations are going to be scrapped within the first Budget—doesn’t deliver that. We have a scenario where, tomorrow, teachers will strike. And we all accept that we dealt with very difficult situations, including the global financial recession and the Canterbury earthquakes, but to have a scenario where $2.8 billion was doled out to students instead of teachers is not a fairer New Zealand.

Ultimately, this was a Government that had huge opportunity handed on a plate, and what they have done is they have squandered that opportunity. It is not necessarily the members of this House that will feel that; it is the mums and dads who go to work every day that will be paying higher taxes. They will see their mortgage rates potentially going up because this Government is spending more and they are wasting more money, and because we have a situation where businesses aren’t confident to employ people.

Take the area of education—a situation where there was an opportunity to pay teachers more. There is an opportunity to do more in this area. They have bad priorities, and to dole out what is equivalent to nearly a 15 percent increase for every teacher in New Zealand to all of the students instead is extraordinary.

That’s why, on this side of the House, we do not agree with this Budget. We do not think that this is a Budget for middle New Zealand. We do not think that this is a fairer Budget. We think this is the Budget of squandered opportunities. What do we believe in? Well, we do believe that, actually, you get to be able to fund your public services, in areas like education and health, when you support those small businesses to get ahead. It is those businesses that create the jobs and that earn the income. When you support trade and when you support them, ultimately we get additional tax revenue for the Crown and we’re able to have choices to spend more on public services.

The extraordinary situation is that we have a Government that has taken these brilliant and beautiful opportunities and squandered them through bad spending priorities—not all, and I would say I think learning support is a great area, and it’s good that we saw that in the Budget. We’ve seen a bad set of priorities; we’ve seen a whole lot of broken promises—again, hence why we also have the teacher strikes tomorrow, because from their perspective, and I’ve talked to a number of teachers and principals out there, there was this massive expectation raised and there hasn’t been the delivery, in terms of this Budget, around education.

In fact, one little fact for you is that in this Budget, we’ve seen the compulsory sector share of the Vote go from 13.2 percent to 12.8 percent. So at a time when the Labour Party campaigned on caring about teachers and our primary and secondary school system, they’ve actually managed to shrink that share of the Vote. Why is that? It is because they have New Zealand First tugging on their reins in terms of some of those spending priorities. We’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars in this Budget given to diplomats rather than to teachers. We’ve seen a situation in this Budget where some of that slush fund that the Hon Shane Jones has is, again, being given to New Zealand First members to keep this Government and hold it together, rather than to deliver on scrapping school donations, as they promised, or potentially many of the other education promises.

I mean, for instance, we heard over the last couple of weeks that Ginny Andersen went out there and campaigned on lower teacher ratios and smaller class sizes. We know that that is very unlikely to be delivered because the Government can’t even deliver 18 of its education promises, and that is because—and I hesitate to use this language in this House, and I will be very careful and I hope that Madam Assistant Speaker won’t pull me up—the gap between what they’ve promised people was very, very misleading. I’m not going to say “dishonest”—I’m not going to say that they were dishonest. I am not saying that.

But I am saying that when members go out to the public and say “We’re going to promise billions and billions of dollars in health and education spending, but because it’s not in the Speech from the Throne, it now maybe doesn’t exist.” at a time when they have more than 20 percent more cash than we had, this is the extraordinary thing. They have more than 20 percent more cash than the last National Government had, yet they’ve not delivered on about 18 education promises.

They’re taxing us more and they borrowing more, and this is the extraordinary thing. As I have said at the outset to members, this is a situation where this Budget is squandered opportunities for our country. At a time when National did the hard yards with a whole lot of other New Zealanders to lift us out from a decade of deficits and we did the best that we could with the envelope of cash that we had, they got given the greatest opportunity ever, and they’ve managed to mess it up. Thank you.

I am proud to be part of the Labour - New Zealand First - Green supported coalition Government. I am proud to be part of this Government that cares. I am proud to be part of this Government that has delivered this Budget—this Budget that is about recovering, this Budget that is about restoring, and this Budget that is about regrowing. This Budget is about rebuilding and putting our economy back in a better place, after nine long years of neglect and after nine long years of the winner-takes-all mentality.

The previous speaker, Nikki Kaye, talked about doing the hard yards. Well, I tell the previous speaker and I tell this House who was doing the hard yards: it was the children sleeping in cars, it was the people dying on park benches, it was the families living in cold, damp, mouldy homes, and it was the people whose incomes were being stretched and stretched so that they were going into food banks, begging, to get by week to week. That’s who was doing the hard yards.

I can tell you where that idea that you might be doing the hard yards comes from. You see, the party on the other side of this House, they believe that the market will fix it—that somehow, by the great magic of the market mechanisms, everybody will be OK. Well, I tell you that the market does supply solutions. The market does come up with results. The market supplies a market solution. It’s just a shame about the people who get left out. On this side of the House, we care about the people, and that’s why we have delivered this Budget—this Budget that is about caring for New Zealanders.

Let me just talk about some of the things that we have done in this Budget that actually matter. First up, we have put $3.2 billion into health—$3.2 billion. We’ve used some of that money to make sure that our nurses are properly paid. We’ve used some of that money to make sure that our wards are properly staffed. We are using that money to ensure that New Zealanders can access decent healthcare. We’ve put $750 million into capital budgets in the health system—no more mouldy walls in hospitals. The neglect of Middlemore Hospital was absolutely shameful, especially a hospital that serves one of the poorest communities in our nation. The other side of the House ought to be ashamed of what happened there on their watch.

Then, in terms of education, we have increased the operational grant to schools by 50 percent. There are 1,500 more teachers coming on our watch. We have doubled the pay offer to teachers—doubled what the previous National Government ever offered to teachers.

The other side of the House has been complaining about teachers going out on strike and about nurses going out on strike. They are saying, “Why, why, why are they doing it under a Labour Government?” I’ll tell you why—because the National Government had them tied down so hard and made it so hard for them to press their claims that at last, with a Labour Government, they can press their claims. You know, it’s hard managing strikes in the public sector, but we are negotiating in good faith, first of all, with nurses and, now, with teachers because we do want to ensure that our children and the people in our health system have access to professional staff and that they are well served. So we are entering into those negotiations in good faith.

The previous speaker also worried about our fees-free policy for tertiary students. There were a couple of complaints. One was that we’re doing it at all, and the second was that we should have done it for third-year students, not first-year students. Well, that second reason is very easily dealt with. It’s not just a policy for university students who do three-year qualifications. It is a policy aimed at any post-school education: polytechnic education, trades education, apprenticeships, and university education—not just university education.

When it comes to that fees-free policy, it wasn’t just about increasing enrolments. You know, students come out of our universities and out of our polytechnics with huge student loans. It creates a real burden for them. The reason for this fees-free policy is to ensure that we decrease the burden on our young people and that we commit to the value of a free education, so that every member of our society has the opportunity to access a decent level of education—the education that is required to have a thriving, democratic nation. That’s why we went for fees-free.

But let me focus specifically on housing. There was a crisis in housing. There still is a crisis in housing—it isn’t going to go away in one Budget. I have yet to hear a single member of the Opposition ever admit that there might have been a problem in housing. All we got was futile running around in Crown cars, looking at cemeteries as possible places to build houses—that was their sole effort in terms of housing. They simply closed their minds to it. They closed their minds to the families sleeping in cars. They closed their minds to the cold, damp homes. They closed their minds to the outrageous price of houses that shut young people out of the housing market.

We are taking action right across the housing portfolio, across the whole range—right from the people who need emergency housing through to people who are trying to buy a house. Let me talk this House through the actions that this Government is taking. In emergency housing, we are providing 1,400 more emergency places. You know, we shouldn’t have to provide emergency housing, but we are because we want to make sure that people at least have a secure place to lay their heads at night. So we are funding the Housing First programme. That’s a fascinating programme. The idea is that you sort out people’s housing and then you help them to work on all the other issues. So, first of all, get them into a house, and then it’s possible to help someone to work on, perhaps, addiction issues, to work on, perhaps, mental health issues, and to get them the assistance they need. Sort the housing first and then the other stuff. It’s a really good programme.

We are building more State homes. The previous Government in the midst of a housing crisis sold State homes. We are building them. We have an enormous commitment to ensuring that New Zealanders have secure housing. We are taking action with respect to the outrageous housing market, where we propped up the economy by flipping houses on to each other. Those of us who had housing sold it to each other, and somehow we thought this was success. So we have expanded the brightline test from two years to five years to slow down that outrageous rate of turnover in the housing market, and we are bringing in restrictions on who may buy homes in New Zealand. You know, if someone is coming to live here in New Zealand, fantastic—you’re welcome to buy a home here. But no more non-citizen, non-resident, overseas owners of our homes—homes for people who are living in and are committed to New Zealand.

None of these actions, perhaps, would have mattered by themselves, but taken together as a suite of actions across the housing market, they are designed to ensure that New Zealanders have secure homes, and secure homes matter. A person who is secure in their our own home, a person who knows where they will sleep that night, a person who is part and parcel of a neighbourhood and a community—that’s when that person can flourish. That’s when someone can coach their child’s sports team. It’s when their child can stay at the same school. It’s when they can get a job—because they have secure housing. Secure housing is not a reward for having a job; it’s the other way around. The first thing is secure housing for a person, and then we can help secure the structure of their lives so that that person can be a thriving part of New Zealand.

If nothing else, I hope that this Labour Government will be remembered for its commitment to housing, it’s commitment to ensuring that New Zealanders have a home, because that way we have a successful and thriving society.

Madam Assistant Speaker, it is absolutely a pleasure for me to take a call in this three-hour debate, the third reading of the Appropriation (2018/19 Estimates) Bill. But first of all, I want to accept the challenge that’s just been issued by Dr Deborah Russell when she said she has not yet heard any member of the Opposition acknowledge there’s a crisis in housing. And I want to say today I do acknowledge there is a crisis in housing, and that crisis goes by the name of the Hon Phil Twyford. We watch him day after day. First of all, I admit, there’s not a lot of level of confidence for any of the Ministers on the other side, but to watch the Hon Phil Twyford stand day after day and attempt to justify his KiwiBuild programme, which I’m reliably informed is 100,000 houses over the next 10 years, which equals 10,000 houses each year, and we’re nine months through the first year—and the last time I recall the Hon Phil Twyford putting a tally on how his KiwiBuild was going, I think it was one-eighth—18 houses. So, Dr Deborah Russell, there is a crisis in housing, and that crisis is the Hon Phil Twyford.

I’ve had the pleasure of listening to most of this debate in the House this afternoon, and what intrigues me about the debate is there’s clearly two perceptions as to how successful the Budget was. One is the Minister of Finance and “Professor” Tabuteau and Michael Wood and Dr Deborah Russell saying there’s nothing wrong with the economy. We had the Labour member for Christchurch Central come into the House in the debate and say that the current Labour - New Zealand First - Green Government inherited, and I quote, “a decrepit economy”. Well, let me remind Dr Duncan Webb that this Labour - New Zealand First - Green Government inherited one of the strongest economies in the OECD. Not performing so well now, but it was one of the strongest economies in the OECD, and, if you want to compare it with any country at that time, look how it was outperforming our nearest large neighbour, Australia. And now they are outgunning us successfully.

💬 Jamie Strange: What was the economy based on?

And Jamie Strange interjects and says, “What was the economy based on?” Let me tell him. It was based on sound economic policies.

What we’ve seen is the politicians on the Government side arguing everything’s fine, and, as I’ve listened to the Opposition members, they’ve pointed out that things aren’t quite right with this economy. I say to Jamie Strange, who’s a new member and not renowned for his economic credibility: listen to the business people. Listen to the people who are out there trying to make the economy work, because what that member will learn, if he survives the next election—and that’s doubtful, but on the assumption that he does, what he’ll learn—is that governments don’t make the economy go round; it’s business that makes the economy go round.

If he wants further proof of where this economy is going, have a look at the latest figures from Treasury. The apolitical Public Service, that the Prime Minister announced yesterday was now eligible for another award—that was the big announcement post Cabinet. The apolitical Treasury has revised down the growth figures for the New Zealand economy. Adrian Orr, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, came before the Finance and Expenditure Committee last Thursday, and I quote for Jamie Strange—who’s now gone quiet and hangs his head in shame—let me just repeat what Adrian Orr said, chapter 3, page 13—

💬 Jamie Strange: Teach us.

Listen to this, Mr Strange: “GDP growth slowed in … March 2018 quarter. We expect recent weakness in growth to persist in the near term.” So you’ve got business lacking confidence. You’ve got the Reserve Bank saying that growth figures have changed and turned down, and you’ve got Treasury saying growth figures have turned back down, and the Labour Government refuses to accept it. I say, there’s a looming crisis for this economy, and I don’t make that prediction lightly. Let me take you through a few reasons why.

The first one’s debt. I remember the last campaign—I wasn’t actively campaigning, but I remember it well—and the then National Minister of Finance came out and talked about a fiscal hole of $11.7 billion. Everybody, mostly pushed by the media, said he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and no economist would back him. Yet we’ve recently had the revelation that $6 billion of debt was hidden—hidden, and I use that word in the kindest way I possibly can—by the Minister of Finance, the Hon Grant Robertson, transferred into the books of the New Zealand Transport Agency and Housing New Zealand. And then you’ve got respected economist Cameron Bagrie coming out and saying, “I think I got it wrong.” He’s honest, this man. He thinks he got it wrong, and he thinks we’ve got a looming fiscal hole of probably in excess of $11.7 billion. Is it any wonder that business confidence is declining?

The next problem you’ve got is the quality of expenditure. Take the free fees for tertiary students for the first year. Let me tell you, as a dad of two students who aren’t in their first year, they’re pretty annoyed about that. Why should one particular small echelon of those attending university get free fees? But the more important thing is that there’s been no increase in students enrolled in tertiary education. In fact, there’re 900 less students enrolled than there was. So that $2.8 billion expenditure is questionable, in my mind.

And then I turn to the $3 billion slush fund called the Provincial Growth Fund. But all members in this House know it’s nothing more than a slush fund, and to listen to the Hon Shane Jones question time after question time attempting to justify some of the projects he’s spending his money on—50 percent of it so far in one province alone, called Northland. We all know it’s a slush fund, and I think taxpayers, who are working hard day after day after day and paying their taxes, deserve to know that their taxes are being well spent, and that is not happening with that Provincial Growth Fund, or slush fund. So who’s winning in this Budget? Who’s really in charge of this economy and this Government? It’s the Rt Hon Winston Peters. Who got the big expenditure items? It wasn’t the Labour caucus; they got rolled. Three billion dollars in a slush fund, another billion dollars to diplomats and for foreign aid in the Pacific Islands—all questionable expenditure.

I want to conclude now briefly on why business confidence continues to fall and will continue to fall. It’s all around industrial relations. And what we saw today in the House during question time is that the Prime Minister hasn’t got a grip on what the proposed legislation is going to be. We’ve got teachers on strike tomorrow. We had nurses on strike recently. The nurses got double-digit pay increases. Education support workers, apparently, today have received a 30 percent wage rise—probably some of that is well justified, I suspect. But what you’re going to see is the public sector pay increases continue because the Labour Government, during their campaign, overpromised. And that’s only going to continue to add to the lack of business confidence, and when businesses lack confidence—and Jamie Strange should listen to this—they stop increasing employment opportunities. And that’s the next thing that I predict you’ll see: a rise in unemployment. And, again, you can disguise it any which way you want—work for the dole, which you don’t believe in, and which the Government’s recently brought in—but if businesses lose confidence and stop employing, then this economy will continue to grind, grind, grind. And there’s a plus for that: it makes it easier for the National Opposition—

Order! I apologise to the member, but your time has expired.

So I’ve ended up with some minutes to have a good ramble in, and ramble I will.

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: You always do.

I know. It’s a part I love about my job—the member was just saying. We’ve actually been doing it all wrong, to be honest, and the world is starting to know this. The world is starting to realise that we have actually been doing economy wrong. What we have been doing is we have been taking into account a narrow definition of what the economy actually is, and we have been measuring using narrow indicators to measure well-being in terms of how well our country is doing economically. The world is understanding this. Aotearoa is definitely understanding this. And what I wanted to do, in this time, was talk about some of the indicators where some of the Budget announcements and estimations are going to put us on track as we start to realise what the people are saying: that we have been doing the economy wrong. We need to be extending our well-being indicators for how we say, “How are we going? How are we doing? How are people? How are communities? How is our environment?” And, therefore, really, “How is our economy?”

So what we ended up with over many decades, and actually generations, is a narrow “economic success” definition that talked about GDP, that talked about balance sheets, and that talked about fiscal measurements, all the while housing was going down the toilet and our environmental degradation was going down the toilet. We are losing species and indigenous species at a rate that should be alarming all of us. We are having people and families in our country in living situations that should not be acceptable in this country. We are having workers and low-income paid workers who are in dire financial situations where that should not be happening in our country. We have a health crisis with our hospitals where that should not be happening in our country. We have key workers in our communities who can’t afford to live in our communities. That should not be happening in our country. So I am pleased with the direction that the Estimates has started to track us on to. Absolutely.

We can just take as an indication the huge boost in funding—$181 million—in conservation to target predators, restore our native ecosystems, and support conservation activities. We can take that huge boost, also, as an indication of the neglect over the entire nine years of the previous Government and a narrow attitude that looking after our environment was not a core part of our economy. So we absolutely need to understand why that massive injection of funding was necessary. We have to transform how we think our country is doing when it comes to the economy.

We can no longer operate in a vacuum and with an isolationist understanding that says, “As long as we are making those massive surpluses, and that GDP hit, whether our kauri trees are dying around us, whether there are people living under bridges and in cars and in boarding houses, whether people are having to move seven times a year because they cannot find secure, affordable, healthy homes”—we will no longer separate those issues out from how well our country is doing. So I was pleased to see the signs in this Budget that put up a flag to say we don’t accept that definition any more. We understand that our country and people around the world are saying that it is no longer good enough. It led us down the wrong path.

I was, of course, celebrating Minister Twyford’s budget investing $2 billion into getting affordable starter homes built, because, at the moment, our country has been saying, “Only a few with wealth can afford to own a home and put down roots in your community. Only the wealthy and privileged few can own quite a few homes, actually—many homes—while over 50 percent of the country is still renting.” and that number is growing higher and higher. So we are sending a different message. We are saying that that is no longer good enough. We cannot shout from the rooftops about a good economy while all of that is happening around us. More importantly, we are sending a message about what this country needs to value and where we are going to put our money behind our talk. That is the important message that was coming through in the indications and some of the Estimates that have come through. The Greens are very clear, in fact, as are our colleagues, that this is just the start. This is not the end of where we mean to get to. This is the start of saying “We don’t accept that definition of economic success anymore.”

I think the previous speaker, David Carter, mentioned how the previous policies were built on sound economic review. That’s not good enough any more, and everybody knows it. We know that you can’t get away with it any more. And I’m celebrating that. I’m so proud of Minister Shaw’s launch of the work on well-being indicators. That is transformational stuff. That is going to set our economy and the way we think of well-being in this country in a direction that will take us into the future—into a sustainable future—where we understand that our economic, environmental, and social outcomes are all connected; that cannot look at any one of those in a vacuum. That is what the various Estimates, the various initiatives in this Government’s first Budget signalled. We will say, from this point, that housing is a human right. We will say, from this point, that ensuring people are in good, warm, affordable, secure homes is crucial to our economic well-being. Ensuring that our biodiversity, our ecological species, and our native species—many of whom we are losing at an alarming rate and are threatened at an alarming rate—are core to our economic well-being.

I am very pleased to be able to stand on this side of the House and support the fact that we are making a start on mental health with funding for youth services and putting more nurses into more schools. I am very pleased to be able to say that this side understands the importance of mental health in our young people and in our communities and the importance of providing those services as core to the overall sustainable well-being of our country. I am very pleased to be part of the side of the House that understands where we need to go to stop ourselves from heading down a dark path that we were on, including from the nine years of the narrow economic well-being definition that the previous Government tried to hold up for so long.

That’s falling down around their ears now, and they know it—they know it. They know that they can’t harp on about that while there is mould in hospitals. They know that they can’t harp on about that while teachers, nurses, police, and firefighters are struggling to pay the rent in the communities that they live in. They know they can’t get away with that any more, and I’m very happy to be on the side of the House that understands that. Thank you.

Well, I’m very pleased that the—

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: This will make up for not getting those questions.

Sorry, what was that from the Minister of Finance?

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: This will make up for not getting any questions.

I’m very pleased to see that the last speaker, Marama Davidson, who is now part of the new coalition Government, is in a position to change all those things and take some positive action on it. We’re almost 12 months into this new Government, and we haven’t seen a lot of things actually happen or occur.

It’s a great privilege to take a call on this, the Appropriation (2018/19 Estimates) Bill at the third reading, and I’m going to talk about three areas. The first is defence, the second is justice, and I’m also actually going to talk a little bit about how this Budget related and has had an impact directly on my own electorate of Rodney.

So on defence: the Limited Service Volunteers (LSV). The LSV announcement was a very good one. The Limited Service Volunteers programme—a programme that I’ve been a huge supporter of myself—

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: I was a patron.

A patron? Me too, so well done. I think we would acknowledge across the House that it is an excellent programme that’s delivered outstanding results for young people. I want to acknowledge the members of the defence forces that work in that programme, social development, and also the police—they have police mentors involved in it as well.

So I was very pleased to see that the Minister of Defence went to Whenuapai recently and turned the first sod on the new facility that was approved through the National Government, because we obviously saw the importance and were making a very big investment, a big capital investment, into supporting that programme. I was very pleased to see also that there was an announcement made around expanding the LSV programme, but I was disappointed to see that the funding required to actually expand the programme has not been allocated.

So I’d be very keen for someone on the Government benches to take a call and explain why the funding hasn’t been allocated and when it’s actually going to come online, because at the moment within LSV they’re finding it very difficult to actually implement the wish of an expansion without the funding to back it up and make it happen. So that was very disappointing to see in this Budget, and I’d be very happy for someone to take a call on the Government benches and explain why that has happened.

The P-8A Poseidons—what a great decision. The finance Minister, the Hon Grant Robertson, is in the House. Well done. Good decision on funding and purchasing those P-8A Poseidons. I had to listen to the defence Minister stand and tell us all about how we’d kicked the can down the road and hadn’t made the decision and it was his decision and puff his chest out and sort of thump his chest a bit like the little Napoleon and all the rest of it. But the fact of the matter is this: I was very pleased to get feedback from our coalition partners to say, “We recognise that actually the heavy lifting and all the work that was done to make the P-8A Poseidons a viable option for the incoming Government was done by the previous Government.” And if anyone wants to stand and take a call and refute that, then I would welcome you to do that.

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Heavy lifting! You and I have got quite a different definition of heavy lifting.

That’s the feedback that we got from—look, maybe you want to get at the gym with “Nashy”, and push some barbells around with him. The phone just looks a little too heavy.

So I was very pleased to get that feedback and see that they’d acknowledged that actually we had put a lot of hard work in.

I want to acknowledge the staff at the Ministry of Defence that actually worked very hard, particularly with their counterparts in the States, to put that deal together and make sure that it happened. It’s very important. It means that we’ve closed the capability gap, and we’ve got interoperability with our partners, and they’re going to be a great aircraft for us into the future.

💬 Deployments: it would be nice to see some decisions around deployments, because I noticed that in this Budget there’s been no provision made for the ongoing deployments of our troops in the Sinai, in Afghanistan, or in Iraq.

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: The contingency that you guys put in. It’s still there.

It’s the contingency is it? I just wonder why the decisions are being pushed off until November. I think that in the Sinai, we’ve had a long commitment up there—a very important one in terms of a UN-led mission that is definitely, without a doubt, making a major contribution to maintaining stability and peace in the region.

The second deployment: the deployment to Iraq—this is a critically important one. Not only am I very proud of what our troops have been doing up there for the last 2½ years—they’ve trained over 30,000 Iraqi combat troops, who have been fighting on the front line against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and who take on enormous risk and suffer huge losses. Their increasing capability—actually, the important work around rules of engagement that our troops have delivered up there to these front-line troops has been enormous, and I want to acknowledge them, the work, and the contribution that they’ve made overall with our coalition partners and the Iraqis in actually really taking this fight to ISIS. And, really, now they’re in a bit of a mop up stage in terms of heading down through the Euphrates River Valley.

But the most important part of that deployment is yet to come, and that is the stabilisation. If you look at our history over the last 20 or 30 years with the West and deployments and these coalitions, it’s that we go in, we do some very good work, we can remove the threat, but then we move—this is my view: we leave too early. We actually need to stay, and we need to remain committed to the stabilisation. And this is what’s going to be critically important now. We’ve got an important role to play in that, and it’s also very important that we stay united with our historic partners and we remain committed and have the intestinal fortitude to stay there and help Iraq stabilise and not allow that vacuum to reappear where groups like ISIS will very quickly fill the vacuum and will see the problem—a global problem—emerge again very quickly. So I’d like to see the current Government take a call and just give us an indication and say, “Actually, we recognise the importance of this and we’re going to recommit to leaving our troops up there in support.”, especially in Iraq over stabilisation.

Justice—the disappointing thing about the budget for justice was this: the biggest increase in allocation was about the review of the general election. With everything else that’s happening inside the justice portfolio, the biggest increase was around reviewing the general election, which is really about us, right? So that was it. That was the biggest increase.

The other thing that we’ve seen in terms of justice is that we’ve got the Criminal Justice Summit coming up next week. We’ll be attending that, and we’re committed to going along there with an open mind. When you look at the agenda, it’s very weak. It’s very flimsy. There’s nothing there in terms of desired aims, goals, or outcomes. It really just appears to be a talkfest. But we’ll go in there with an open mind, and we’ll make a genuine contribution where we think we can in terms of what this Government’s plans are.

But to us it’s already emerging. It’s already become pretty clear that the investment into corrections has not been the investment that’s needed to be able to deal with the capacity that’s going to be required. There’s no plan—there’s no serious plan that’s been forward around how to deal with meth, how to deal with organised crime, or how to deal with the gangs. These are the issues that should be discussed—these are the issues after nine, 10, 11 months should be starting to emerge and we should have a clear idea around.

Instead, what we’ve seen is a half-hearted effort—or, actually, on the part of the justice Minister, a committed effort—to get the three-strikes legislation repealed. But that got shot down before it got to Cabinet because the coalition partner pulled their support for it when they saw how unpopular it was with the general public and they let their feelings be known.

So the only thing that we can see happening in the justice portfolio at the moment is a determined commitment to diluting our bail laws, our sentencing laws, and our parole laws. And what that basically equates to, what that means, is that the offenders, dangerous offenders—and make no mistake: the people that go to prison should be in prison. On average, they have about 46 convictions—

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Not all of them. That’s not true.

—before they go. Well, if that’s not true, someone take a call and point out to me the people that shouldn’t be in prison. I know that you immediately point at the remand; yeah, let’s have a look at the remand. But I can tell you right now the side that I will always fall on, and that is balancing up public safety and community safety against having someone actually sitting in remand. The Government should take responsibility for that instead of outsourcing and passing the responsibility back into the community, and we will continue to take a stand against that.

So, unfortunately, I’ve run out of time, but I would welcome anyone from the Government benches to take a call and respond to any of the issues that I’ve raised in my speech. Thank you very much.

Well, Mark Mitchell—the Hon Mark Mitchell—I would be absolutely delighted to take a call. It is an absolute privilege to be the final speaker on the Government benches side for our first ever Budget in nine long years. I want to acknowledge—take my cap off to—the Hon Grant Robertson for your diligence and patience in pulling together something that’s absolutely exceptional for the people of Aotearoa New Zealand. Goodness me, I’m so proud—so, so proud—to stand here today.

Now, I must say, for many of us, particularly the new MPs that came in on this side of the House, we sat there alongside the rest of New Zealand in watching our colleagues in the House while we watched New Zealand go from a country that we could all be proud of—a country that looked after the little guy, a country that punched above its weight—to a country that stagnated, to a country that wanted to sell down State homes, and to a country that couldn’t be bothered investing in its young people, the next generation of New Zealanders.

Well, what we’ve had to do, and what our executive has had to do, in the last very short amount of time is work swiftly to pull together the beginning of a new financial direction to ensure that New Zealand’s economy is on track. I want to also just make acknowledgments about how our economy is on track. We have the wages going up, we’re projected to grow our GDP by 3 percent, and our exporters—they’re looking pretty chuffed right now.

You know, there’ll be a few comments from the Opposition—we’ve heard it all afternoon and we heard it all through question time: “Oh, but business confidence—business confidence.” Well, I want to refer to the Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr this week. When he looked at the business confidence and when he released his quarterly financial Monetary Policy Statement earlier this week, he said, “Well, you know what, to be honest, we don’t take notice of the headlines when it comes to things like business confidence. What we do do”—the Reserve Bank, what they do, and what I encourage the Opposition to do—is look to how those businesses are actually tracking internally. The reality is with the wages going up, with GDP projected to continue to go up, business is actually pretty chuffed.

Now, I must acknowledge the colleagues of my contemporary over in the Opposition benches the member for Waikato, Mr Tim van de Molen. Now, he sat here with a straight face and turned to this side of the House and said, “You don’t care about the regions.” We don’t care about the regions! Well, I tell you as an absolutely proud regional member of this Government that we absolutely couldn’t care more about the regions. And what the regions are saying—if the Opposition would like to take a little bit of time, particularly their spokesperson for regional economic development, who lives in Epsom; if he’d like to come out and spend a little bit of time in the regions, I would be more than delighted to take him around the mighty East Coast electorate. What I am hearing from cardholding blue party members, what I am hearing from the Opposition’s own members, is they’re wanting to tear those membership cards up, and you know why? And why is that? It’s because they haven’t felt more heard in the last decade than what they are right now. They’re seeing more of our senior Cabinet colleagues out in the regions.

Now, I refer to the comments of the Hon Paula Bennett. She said, “The regions are laughing at ya.”—referring to us. The regions aren’t laughing; the regions are standing alongside cheering—cheering because for nine long years we have been kicked and shoved about like you wouldn’t believe. Now, for those of us that live in the regions, we find that absolutely abhorrent, and we—for example, in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, over the last 10 or so years, we have gone backwards by about 3.5 to 4.5 percent of GDP compared to the rest of the country. That is a shame—that is a shame.

Now, when we look to the previous Government’s economic growth plans for the East Coast region, know what it was—know what it was? It was oil and gas extraction. Oil and gas extraction was going to be the saviour of the regions. Well, I’ll tell you right now: we have a mobilised the region right now. There are 65 projects that are coming up from the Eastern Bay of Plenty alone seeking the support of this Government to see our region stimulated. And goodness me, to the champion of the region, the Hon Shane Jones, and to the executive that is backing him: kudos; hats off. Te Kaha will be proud when they see their horticultural expansion. Ōpōtiki will be proud when they see their aquacultural expansions come into fruition. Kawerau will be proud when they see that inland port, supported by KiwiRail, up and off the ground, stimulating places like Murupara, places like Minginui. The Opposition might not know where these areas are, but they used to be, in times not so long ago, the backbone of our country. Well, this side of the House, we say it is.

Now, apart from the amazing things that we’re doing in terms of stimulating regional economic growth, I want to turn to the vision that Labour has for our people, and it has always been the same. Norman Kirk articulated it many generations ago: “Someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to hope for.” If you boil it down to its quintessential basics, what this Government’s first Budget has done, and it will be the first Budget of the Hon Grant Robertson’s very long tenure, is set the foundations for a transformation in the way that we care about people, for the way that we provide the basics for people—not for the top 1 percent, not for the top 5 percent, but for the majority of hard-working New Zealanders out there in the regions and in the urban centres.

This is a caring and compassionate Government, and we see that in the way that this Government has pulled together and put its first bastion project, the Families Package. It was the first time that we had seen a substantial increase in funding for those families since the families package was introduced under the previous Labour Government.

When the Families Package came into force on 1 July, I had the opportunity of visiting a little school, Waiotahe Valley School in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. Its principal is Pat Carrington, the father of the East Coast icon Lisa Carrington. I had the opportunity at that time to go into their school, and, that weekend prior, the website had come live. So I heard from young kids—you know, I was asking them what they knew about what this Government had done. One kid put her hand up and she said, “Oh, I know what the Government does. It helps families like mine.” And I said, “What do you mean by that, young lady?”, and she said, “Well, my family and I, we all sat around the table last night and worked out how much our family was going to benefit from the Families Package.” She said to me that her Mum cried, and I must say that when you have a Government that is enabling over 384,000 families, ordinary Kiwi New Zealand families—from an injection of $5.5 billion into ordinary Kiwi families, and we know the amount of assistance that that will do—to put food on the table and gas in the car, I can only say, as a Government backbench MP, thank you to my senior colleagues.

In the few moments that I have left I want to turn to—this week in the Finance and Expenditure Committee we heard from the Auditor-General. We heard from the Auditor-General this week, and what they told us was that in 2009, in 2013, and in 2016 they were advising the previous Government of the infrastructural needs that our schools and hospitals would need. That was in 2009, 2013, and 2016—and what did they do? They failed to heed the advice of the Auditor-General—one of the most independent advisers in the country. The reality is that the previous Government for nine long years could see that we had an imminent crisis in district health boards and in schools—and what they do? They turned a blind eye. There was a housing crisis on the rise, and what do they do? They turned a blind eye. So to the Hon Grant Robertson—

Order! Order! The member’s time has expired. The Hon David Carter.

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: I’ve had my go.

What? Oh, the member’s had a call—no one else? All right. OK. The question is that the motion be agreed to. Those of that opinion will say Aye, to the contrary, No. The Ayes have it.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Sorry, Mr Speaker. We didn’t hear the call for no.

💬 Hon Member: There wasn’t an option for a noes vote.

💬 Hon Members: There was.

💬 SPEAKER: “Those in favour say Aye, to the contrary, No.”—that’s what I said.

Sorry, Mr Speaker. It was too quick.

Oh, well, I’ll be exceptionally generous. I mean, what I’ve got sounds like it’s getting infectious.