Imprest Supply (Second for 2019/20) Bill

I move, That the Appropriation (2019/20 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2019/20) Bill be now read a second time.

Not long after the Budget was read on 30 May, the Salvation Army said the following thing: “The 2019 Budget heralds a change in direction welcomed by The Salvation Army. This wellbeing Budget, with its greater socioeconomic approach, is a step on the path towards lifting New Zealanders out of poverty. We”—this is the Salvation Army—“welcome the Government’s focus on our most vulnerable communities, including those with mental health and addiction issues, children and families in challenging situations, and Māori.”

That is the change in direction that this Budget is about, because, fundamentally, this Budget draws a line underneath the narrow focus on GDP as the only indicator of success for our economy. We, of course, need a growing, prosperous, sustainable economy, but, if we are simply to draw the line and say that that means is the end, then we let down and we leave out hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, and, on this side of the House, we are not prepared to do that. So we set out, in Budget 2019, to create New Zealand’s first wellbeing Budget. Not only does that Budget measure our success differently by moving beyond that narrow measure of success to look at the health and wellbeing of our people, the protection of our environment, and the strength of our communities; it takes the evidence and the indicators we have about those four areas and uses that as the evidence for what we will invest in as a country and through this Budget. That has not been done before in New Zealand. That is the change of direction that is being welcomed in this Budget. So having set that Wellbeing Budget up in that way, we are able to prove to New Zealanders that we are focused on the issues that will have the biggest long-term effect.

I want to make it clear: on this side of the House, we know that the issues that are priorities in this Budget—mental health, dealing with climate change, closing the gap in the disparity between Māori and Pasifika and the rest of the population, child wellbeing, and making sure that we’re adjusting to the future of work—are long-term issues. It will take sustained investment to be able to turn around the challenges we have, but we are not afraid to take on those long-term issues. Equally, we’re not afraid to fix the mess that we were left with, because in both of the Budgets that I have had the honour of presenting to this House, sadly, it has been necessary to spend billions of dollars fixing up the mess of the previous Government. So in this Budget, one of the really different things we have done is move towards a four-year capital allowance. What that allows us to do is give certainty, so that we have five years’ worth, actually, of funding for school building, and so the construction sector, schools, and parents know the certainty they’ve got.

But we’re also doing that in health. We’ve got two years of funding—$850 million a year—to invest in our hospitals. The sad reality for Dr David Clark as the Minister of Health and myself as we make the decisions about where that health capital goes: so much of it is catch-up. So much of it is fixing up the mess that was left from the previous Government. If members opposite want to know the detail of that, then we can go back to the year before this, in Budget 2017, when the grand total of expenditure in health capital was $150 million—that was it. The year before that, it was nothing—nothing at all. In the three Budgets that we put in place, we put in $750 million and then two years of $850 million, not only to give certainty but to start fixing up the mess that has been left in terms of our health capital—let alone the investment that we’re making in the rest of the health system.

So this is a change of direction for the way that we do Budgets. It’s about planning for the long term. It’s about intergenerational wellbeing. It’s also about having Government agencies actually work together towards these goals. In this Budget, I’m extremely proud of the more than $300 million that we are putting into addressing domestic and sexual violence. That proposal comes from a joint venture of eight different Government agencies coming together for one—one—outcome and one goal. Now, members of the public might say, “Well, surely that should have been happening for ever.”, but the reality is it hasn’t been—it simply has not happened. So I’m proud that in that area, in the area of mental health, in the area of getting more sustainable land use, we have brought together teams of Ministers, Government agencies, working with the private sector to make sure we’re delivering on those goals, not worrying about the silos but making sure that we actually get what we need done done. So this is a change of direction. This is a different Budget. This is one that takes on those big challenges.

One of those that I want to highlight today is the one around child poverty and child wellbeing, because this Budget contains, for the first time, a child poverty report presented by the Minister of Finance. The good news is—and I’ll give credit to the other side of the House—by a vote of 119 to one in this House, we agreed that every Minister of Finance from now on must report on child wellbeing and child poverty at Budget time, because what’s the point of a Budget if we’re not actually holding ourselves to account for those matters? In this Budget, based on the work that this side of the House has done in establishing the Families Package, and, indeed, in some of the initiatives in this Budget, including the indexing of main benefits to the average wage, and working on making sure that more benefits are retained for certain types of—particularly solo mothers—we have proof that we will lift between 50,000 and 74,000 children out of poverty as a result of what we have done, and I am proud of that achievement.

It’s been said before that a major focus of this Budget is around mental health, and it is: a $1.9 billion package. Now, the reason we did that is because the evidence showed us that we had not, as a country, invested in mental health to the extent that we needed. We know that nearly nine out of 10 kids who are under the care of Oranga Tamariki have experienced or been in a household where there have been issues around mental health and addiction. We also know that about those who are in our prison system as well. It’s time that as a country we came together and took that seriously. It’s time we got those front-line services sorted out, that we have proper support for addiction right around the country, that we invest not only in the services but also the capital and the infrastructure that sits behind that. If there’s anything about this Wellbeing Budget that we know has resonated with the public, it is that question of investing in mental health, and just this week we’ve seen the beginning of the work around the suicide prevention strategy, and the independent mental health commission coming on board, as well. I am extremely proud of those investments.

But across the board, we in this Budget can see this Government’s plan to transform our country. When it comes to making sure that there’s investment for business, we’ve got the $300 million venture capital fund being set up. Where we saw a gap, where we were told by entrepreneurs the investment support’s not there, we stepped up and said $300 million goes on the table to support those businesses to grow. We’ve got a plan to support our rural sector in the transition to more sustainable land use. Right around the country, New Zealanders called on us in the last election to do something to make sure that our primary industries could continue to grow, but do that in a sustainable way—a $229 million package in this Budget for sustainable land use that will do that. So on this side of the House, we know that it is the investment of an active Government alongside our communities that will make sure that we are able to deliver for New Zealanders.

This Budget also uses evidence to decide that we needed to significantly invest in supporting Māori and Pasifika aspiration. This Budget shows that if we get in behind Māori business, if we get in behind Pasifika business, we can grow jobs right across New Zealand. This is the Budget that delivers the second year of the Provincial Growth Fund. This is the Budget that delivers more social housing places, more places in the Housing First programme, and more support for transitional housing.

Across the board, this is a Budget that does things differently. This is a Budget that addresses the long-term challenges that New Zealand faces, and this is a Budget that truly delivers to the New Zealanders who have felt left out and left behind for the last nine years. I am immensely proud to present this Budget to the House and to see it come to fruition today. It is a Budget that lays further foundations for New Zealanders to achieve their wellbeing.

Well, it’s amazing to think that only four months after this Budget was delivered, the great so-called Wellbeing Budget, nobody has been talking about it, and it has been long, long sent off to the dustbin of history when people have been focusing on the so-called year of delivery, where there has been nothing delivered. The postman has never come and the only delivery that we’ve seen is a sharply slowing economy and fewer opportunities for New Zealanders to get ahead. What we’ve seen is no delivery on the things that matter to New Zealanders: getting home from work on time through all the traffic congestion—all the things that were promised and are not being delivered.

So what did we see in the Budget? Remember, we saw a massive increase in spending, and this Government’s obviously shown that it’s very capable of making announcements on spending. What we haven’t seen so much is good quality spending. We’ve seen a lot more money sent off to the free fees at university, which, of course, has led to no more students—in fact, fewer students. We’ve seen more money go off to Shane Jones, and Shane Jones has wandered around the countryside and he’s hung it out. We still actually haven’t seen any tallies yet of how many jobs have been created. I think I got to 54. I think he might be up to 63, maybe 72—who knows—but there’s $500 million gone into the one billion trees and we’re not sure what we’re getting for that other than destroying jobs in the countryside, converting land from sheep and beef to native forestry. So it is very marginal quality spending there.

Then, of course, we’ve seen the lack of delivery on the promises. They’re great at announcing things. This is the great gonna Government: “We’re gonna to do this, we’re gonna to do that, but we haven’t quite got round to doing it yet.” They’ve taken $3 billion in this Budget out of infrastructure spending for the next five years, because they haven’t got around to doing anything. What have they done on infrastructure?

💬 Hon Julie Anne Genter: Thousands of kilometres of road maintenance.

Julie Anne Genter—of course, she hates roads, hates cars, doesn’t like “car fascists”. So what they’ve done is they’ve cancelled a whole lot of projects that were ready to go, because they didn’t like them, and replaced them with a whole bunch of projects that are not ready to go and won’t be ready to go for five years. So what we’ve seen is a great hole opening up in the infrastructure. All the people with the diggers have got nowhere to go. They’ve got nothing to dig any more, and that is leading to a hole in infrastructure, nothing getting built, nothing being delivered.

We saw today the embarrassment—the embarrassment—of the Minister of Finance being asked “Name one project—one project—that they’ve started in the last few years.” One project, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He fumbled around and he fumbled and he flummeried and he ummed and he ahhed and he had nothing, because there is nothing. They’ve started nothing new. There’s been some continuation of work that started under the previous Government, and thank goodness we did some stuff. We’ve got the Transmission Gully and we’ve got a few major roads in the Waikato being built and completed, but once that’s finished there’s nothing to replace it, because this Government’s opposed to building anything. They don’t like the car fascists, and Mr Twyford said that we’ve overinvested in roads. OK, so they’ve spent a lot of money, or they’ve announced they’re going to spend a lot of money, but they haven’t actually got around to doing it half the time.

Then, we talk about wellbeing, and this is the great Wellbeing Budget. The Minister of Finance, again building great scarecrows, said, “No one says that GDP is the only measure. Nobody claims that GDP is the only measure of success in any country.” Of course nobody claims that. One of the greatest things about this country is that we live in a place which has a wonderful environment that we want to preserve and protect. It’s a place where there’s a strong rule of law, where we have strong social cohesion, where we have high trust, low corruption—all these things are precious to this country and they’re not measured by GDP. So nobody nowhere claims that GDP’s the only thing that matters, and every Budget that has been passed in this House has been focused on improving the wellbeing of New Zealanders. So the arrogance of this Government to assume that they are the first people to wake up and consider—the first people ever to think and consider—that they care about the wellbeing of New Zealanders is incredible. The arrogance of these people is unbelievable.

Anyway. So they’ve brought in this Wellbeing Budget, but the problem that we have with it is that it’s just a smokescreen. It’s just vague and billowing. The point of a Budget is to say: this is what we’re going to spend and this is what we’re going to buy for it and this is how it’s going to improve the life of New Zealanders. That’s what Budgets are about. But when they bring in all the sun and the moon feelings and all these things, the potential that it has is just to make it harder for people to hold them to account, and that is unfortunately one of the hallmarks of this Government: avoidance of being held to account.

So in the year of delivery we wanted to know, “Well, what happened in this Budget? Where did they talk about extra money for cancer drugs?” Well, there wasn’t any—there wasn’t any. So we’ve got all this extra spending, no extra money for cancer drugs. And once—

💬 Hon Dr David Clark: The member’s wrong—the member is plain wrong.

The member is not wrong. There has been no increase. There was no increase of any substance to the Pharmac budget. In fact, it was less—

💬 Hon Dr David Clark: There was $10 million in the Budget.

—than the increase in the population that was required. So in real terms—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just to remind the Minister: he does have a turn next.

Thank you. In real terms and in per-person terms, the Budget had less money going into pharmaceuticals, including cancer drugs. With all the money that they’ve got, they’re actually putting less into that area, so they had to make some changes now out of embarrassment, because they realised that it was out of touch with what people expected.

What about the food parcels? We heard the Auckland City Mission. Remember, the Prime Minister was going to solve all those problems? And yet we’ve got the largest queues ever for food parcels. We’ve got more homeless on our streets. Why is that? Well, it’s primarily because they’ve greatly added to the costs of rental properties. They’ve laden costs on to the people who provide rental properties and—surprise, surprise—quite a few of them have decided it’s all too hard and they’re going to get out. So there’s been a reduction in supply of rental properties, the prices have gone up about $50 a week, and fewer people are struggling to get into houses. Surprise, surprise, there’s more pressure on food parcels and more pressure on homeless people in this country as a direct result of the things that this Government has been doing.

Then they’ve added petrol prices. The first bill that was passed after this Budget was an increase in petrol prices, making it difficult for New Zealanders to get around and to get ahead. But there was no tax relief at all—no tax relief to be seen anywhere. The Minister of Finance has quite clearly declared that over the next three years, there will be no tax relief for any New Zealanders. So any extra money that comes into Government because of any growth or inflation, “We’re going to take it all, and we’re going to take it all because we know how to spend it.” No tax relief, in contrast to what National has offered. The only people that got any kind of relief out of this Government were the deadbeat dads, because the mothers no longer have to name who the father is if they want to go for a benefit, which is a disgraceful policy. Fathers should always be held to account for their children.

So what have we got in this Budget? We’ve got lots of spending, lots of flummery around wellbeing, but no growth plan—no growth plan. The biggest growth policy in this Budget was a $1 billion subsidy for rail, and Shane Jones—you’ve got to hand it to him. He’s very good at getting the money—very good at getting the money—but he’s not so good at spending it. And, yet, with the extra $1 billion going to rail, the question that’s on everybody’s mind in Auckland is “Why on earth don’t they get on with building the third rail line through Auckland so that commuters don’t have to wait for freight trains all the time?” So the one job that they should be doing on the rail, they’re not doing, and I’d love to hear an explanation from the Minister about that—why he thinks it’s so important to spend a billion dollars everywhere else on the rail network but not make any progress on the one job that needs to be done.

Secondly, the other thing that this Budget hasn’t focused on is a growth plan for this country. So what we’re seeing is a rapidly slowing economy. We were in the top half of the OECD in growth in the last five years of the National Government—11th—and that was per person, because that’s the only thing that really matters. If you’ve got the population growing by 2 percent every year, then, if your economy is growing by only 2 percent every year, well, you’re not making much progress. Under National, we were growing, on average, 1.7 percent per person over the last five years. That has fallen away under this Government to barely growing at all per person, and the reasons for that are not, as the Minister of Finance claimed today, all Donald Trump’s fault, or the Chinese’s fault, or the Iranians’ fault—or any number of people they’ve blamed for what’s going on. It’s not all international causes. Of course, there’s an element of what’s going on internationally, but the main reason is domestic, and it’s the fact that this Government, through all its combination of policies, has driven down business confidence to the extent that nobody’s prepared to invest. Well, people are holding off investing because they’re too scared. They don’t know what’s happening.

The third thing is that this Government keeps every week adding costs to business and to families, and making it harder for people to get ahead. Secondly, they’ve created so much uncertainty, with all the 230—I can’t remember how many—working groups we’ve got at the moment. They’ve tossed all their things up into the air; everybody is wanting to see what’s going to happen, where it’s all going to land, and in the meantime they’re keeping their hands in their pockets, not investing, because they don’t know what’s going on. They’ve added costs, they’ve created uncertainty, and the third thing, Dr Clark, is that they have demonstrated incompetence in some of the key areas which they’ve had responsibility for. KiwiBuild is the most dramatic. They came in and Phil Twyford was going to solve the housing problem—we’re all idiots; he’s going to solve them! And, two years later, he’s admitted that it’s a complete failure. We see that same failure in their transport policies, and that is why New Zealanders have lost confidence in this Government, and the sooner they get replaced the better.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. There was a lot to say about that speech. I don’t want to dwell too much upon it other than to note that, of course, years of neglect and under-investment in our health services will be a theme of my contribution, but also a reflection just around the nature of the economy we inherited. That was really being pushed by population growth—huge immigration during the previous Government’s tenure—and also from people selling houses to one another. Those were the things that were propping up the economy, and that is not a sustainable plan for an economy that we want to see. We want to see a prosperous economy where the benefits are shared across the population, where the wellbeing of our citizens is at the core, not just GDP but also looking more broadly, looking to the environment and looking to social connection, looking to education and skills, looking to all of those things that make a good society that everyone benefits from.

I do want to concentrate my contribution on a few of the issues—the long-term challenges—that we’ve inherited in health and the investments that are being made in this Budget to tackle those long-term challenges. It is true that the previous Government under-invested in health, and independent research suggests that was about $2.3 billion worth of under-investment. And, of course, you cannot strip $2.3 billion out and not see service levels drop. That’s what we’ve inherited as a Government and we are absolutely committed to investing more.

So, in our first Budget, of course, we put a record amount into DHBs—$2.3 billion—and then, in our most recent Budget, we went higher again, at $2.8 billion into our DHBs to make sure we have more doctors and nurses, because those workforces had been stretched for far too long under the previous regime and were showing the signs of stress and strain, and certainly I had plenty of people come and talk to me in Opposition about the difficult situation they found themselves in in our hospitals. We are investing in those workforces, and we’re going to make a difference, but, of course, we can’t train the workforces overnight; that neglect has a long tail. We have to build up workforces. Some of them take five years to train, some of them 10 and 12, but we’re getting on with that because we’re determined to address the problems that we’ve inherited, to make sure that we are investing in our nurses and doctors.

Another area where there’s been significant neglect that we have put more money into is cancer treatment. The previous member, Paul Goldsmith, raised this and tried to claim that no money went into the Budget into Pharmac—after the prior Budget was a record amount. A huge amount went into Pharmac and this most recent Budget put another $10 million in. We know that hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders have benefited, in just two Budgets, from more access to medicine. And then, subsequently, we’ve put yet more money in—another $60 million into Pharmac more recently, in recent weeks, alongside our cancer action plan—and much of that money will be spent on cancer medicines, and I think that is a really good thing.

But, of course, we’re looking at the whole spectrum of cancer care. So we’ve also invested $25 million in the linear accelerators to make sure that the fleet of them is upgraded, because they, again, were not funded or supported under the previous Government, and that postcode lottery that we inherited in cancer care is something that we are determined to address, to get on. We’re not going to crawl over the troubles that led us here—the neglect of the system under the previous Government—but we’ve inherited that situation and we are determined to make sure that we are investing. So, for the first time, we will have linear accelerators in Taranaki, in the Hawke’s Bay, in Northland—areas that had not had that level of cancer treatment available to them. People have had to travel—or haven’t travelled, because they couldn’t neglect their families—to go and get that cancer treatment.

We’ve also rolled out more bowel screening, and we continue to roll that out so that now hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders can access that bowel screening, and that programme has already revealed 320 New Zealanders had bowel cancer detected in the two years the programme has been up and running, and many more have had polyps removed that could have developed into cancer. So that programme—the screening and prevention aspects—that we’re promoting and funding through the Budget will continue to grow, and I’d expect more investment in future Budgets in that area, because we are committed to that programme.

Another area that I noticed the finance Minister touched on was the huge capital investment that this Government is making. And, in the area of our hospitals, many people will remember that we inherited hospitals with rot and mould in the walls, and in some cases sewage in the walls, and that is largely a result of under-investment under the previous Government’s watch. Well, we have decided to turn that around, and, in two Budgets—just our first two Budgets—we have put more money into our public hospitals, in total, than they put in in the whole nine years that previous Government was there, for a point of comparison. Not just more money in two Budgets than they put in in nine years, but twice as much money in just two Budgets as they put in in the whole nine years they were in office, and shame on them, because our public health system has been neglected. But we are determined to build it up again, so that we have the kinds of facilities we think New Zealanders expect and deserve when they’re wrestling with cancer, when they’re needing the care that they need, when they’ve got other health conditions—whatever it is. When they show up at a hospital, they should have access to modern facilities here in New Zealand. We are a First World country.

We’ve better funded our ambulance services. We’re paying family carers what they deserve in the Budget, and, of course, I mentioned the cancer care—the range of areas we’ve invested in. But on top of that, in cancer care, one of the significant things is meeting our promise of establishing a national cancer agency. We’ve got an interim director in there who is going to set tumour standards across the country, and that will make a significant difference. We’ve already seen with bowel cancer tumour standards that some DHBs are providing better care than others. It’s difficult for DHBs to hear that, but it’s actually a part of finding the solutions, working out where we’re doing better, and how we support those areas that are not doing so well. We are going to tackle those challenges, those long-term challenges that we have inherited.

Of course, recently, I had the privilege of going and launching a couple of new helicopters that were funded out of the additional money we put into helicopter services to ensure a better level of care. The previous Government seems satisfied with single-engine helicopters, where people couldn’t be treated in the back of the helicopter. The previous Government seemed satisfied with that situation. They were not interested in raising the standards around the country, making sure everyone had access to high-quality care no matter where they were. In fact, some of them argued that some areas should have access to lower-quality services, just because of a parochial interest, but we won’t say more about that now.

There are many more areas where we are cleaning up after the previous Government. The Holidays Act provisioning—I know, in the DHBs, the work that’s going on there. You know, that was an issue that they had the whole time they were in office and didn’t address, and that’s meant that New Zealanders had been underpaid for years. We’ll hear more about that. We’re also going to have to be writing off money associated with the National Oracle Solution—a failed IT system, a failed project of the previous Government. All of that money will come through the DHB funding system.

So as a Government, we are determined to tackle mental health, and I want to say a few words about the recent announcements we’ve made on mental health. In the past couple of weeks, we have, firstly, rolled out the first funding for services that had already been piloted across New Zealand, supporting 170,000 New Zealanders to get supported at primary care level. It was, of course, one of the central findings of He Ara Oranga, the inquiry into mental health and addiction, that we needed a primary care service available to those with mild to moderate distress, and those with anxiety or depression, and, as a Government, we are determined to ensure that every New Zealander in distress, every New Zealander with anxiety, can access the support that they need to wrestle with that mental health challenge.

So, shortly, there’ll be a request for proposal going out—it’s just gone out, in fact—that will call for more projects around the country, so that we can expand these services and make sure New Zealanders—no matter who they are, no matter where they are in the country—can access primary care support, be it through an NGO—$62 million of the $455 million associated with that initiative is for kaupapa Māori services, recognising that while most Māori continue to access mainstream services, kaupapa Māori are becoming increasingly important. So we’re going to grow our kaupapa Māori services, so that people can find support where they would normally go in the community to find support: through community development agencies, through youth one-stop shops, through their GP, through kaupapa Māori services, and so on.

Of course, beyond that, we’ve also announced a suicide prevention strategy. Of course, there was a gap. That last one ran out in 2016. Again, He Ara Oranga said that we needed to get one in place sooner rather than later. That is now in place, and there is support for the bereaved associated with funding in the Budget, because that has never been supported in the past adequately. Beyond that, we’ve announced the Suicide Prevention Office, which will drive accountability across the sector. We’ve announced a Mental Health Commission and the initial commissioners for the interim period—another promise delivered on. There are so many promises that we’ve delivered on already in health. A very busy Government, and a big mess we are cleaning up.

This is almost like comedy hour. The last speaker in this debate, David Clark, said there were so many promises delivered on. Well, this isn’t the year of delivery; it’s a year of non-delivery. That Minister in health can’t even arrange for babies in Lumsden in the South Island to be delivered in a hospital. He stands in front of us and he talks about the National Government. Well, what he doesn’t tell anybody is $16.8 billion of extra, additional funding was invested in health by National over the last nine years—$16.8 billion. You know what we’ve seen over the last two years under this Minister as the health Minister? See, National Party in Opposition had to drag him, kicking and screaming, towards an announcement on cancer treatment in New Zealand.

What he’s announced, amongst a few other things, is a very small amount of extra money at the same time having delivered a cut for Pharmac—less money for Pharmac. He’s announced slightly more than a working group: an agency, but an agency after two years. Well, where were you, Minister, for the last two years, when New Zealanders were wanting you to deliver on your promise of better health service and better delivery and cancer treatment for New Zealanders? That’s right; we hear nothing at all, as the door slams on New Zealanders who deserve more—$16.8 billion under National. What do we hear from the Minister? He’s bought a whole lot of helicopters. Actually, when it comes to emergency services in New Zealand, the Government doesn’t own a single helicopter. They don’t own them; the private sector and their trusts do.

You know how they’ve got a few more helicopters? They have canned services. They got rid of the rescue helicopter in Rotorua that was paid for by the people of Rotorua through fundraising. Did he turn up? No, he didn’t. He said to the people of Rotorua, “If you want your answer, look at the slamming door.”, because, actually, when it comes to delivery in the health service, this Minister is the Minister of deferred achievement, and that’s just not good enough for New Zealanders.

Actually, this was the “botched Budget”. It was a botched Budget, and it’s leading to a botched economy. Do you know, when they talk about wellbeing and caring, what was the first piece of legislation passed under this Budget in urgency?

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: Bet it was a tax. It’d be tax.

It was a tax increase. So they care so much about New Zealanders that they went into urgency, and the very first thing they did to show New Zealanders they care—they put taxes up, and it was on petrol. Now what we’re going to hear is, actually, the reason petrol is so expensive in New Zealand is all the things that are happening overseas. Well, actually, what we heard from the Prime Minister today is that the reason that GDP has fallen from 4 percent growth under National to around 2 percent, if they’re lucky—it’ll only be 2 percent, because, over the last two weeks, they haven’t been paying attention to the economy. So actually, businesses’ confidence has probably gone up, because the Government have been so useless in this area. So what did the Prime Minister say? The reason the economy’s slowing is because she can’t control African swine flu in China, and I agree with her.

Now, the only reason we know that she is sure of this is that she didn’t promise it at the last election. What we’ve heard from the Prime Minister as the reason the economy is slowing is because of what’s happening in Iran. The reason, she said, the economy is slowing is because of uncertainty around Brexit, and, of course, the reason the economy is slowing is uncertainty because of a trade war between the US and China. Well, to the Prime Minister: none of those things are correct, and none of them are true, because, if you look at what our export sector is doing, exports are at record levels.

This is a Government that inherited a strong economy—4 percent growth, falling unemployment, benefit numbers going down as more people were being trained and going to the workforce—and what have they done in two years? Created more uncertainty in the business community than existed during the global financial crisis. Now, the Prime Minister is right: her Government’s not responsible for the global financial crisis. But they’re responsible for the business community having less confidence than when the whole world’s economy was up against the wall, and that’s, frankly, not good enough.

So what we’ve been having this year between the Prime Minister and Simon Bridges, as Leader of the Opposition, is not a debate or an argument about whether the economy is slowing—the Prime Minister accepted that—it’s a debate and argument about who’s responsible. If you look at this Budget—the “botched Budget”—clearly, responsibility sits on that side of the House, with this Government.

You know, you say to the Prime Minister that you can’t go out and just make decisions like “Let’s go out and get rid of all exploration for gas in New Zealand.” because you want to flip off to Paris and talk to a number of your international friends and make a great big grandstanding speech, and it doesn’t have an effect upon confidence in New Zealand. Go to Taranaki, where, actually, they are in favour of exploration for gas because it’s good for their economy, and what do we see in this Budget: $20 million to replace the lost revenue that that part of regional New Zealand will lose. You know, there are people who had invested there and who were buying houses there and their kids were going to school there. Well, $20 million to look for some other type of energy just won’t make it.

We have seen uncertainty around tax increases, and, to the credit of the Opposition, the Government didn’t go ahead with their capital gains tax. It wasn’t in this Budget, not because they didn’t want to, but because they got rattled and they got scared because they saw what it was doing to their polling numbers. But you can’t promise it, then say you won’t do it, then promise it again, say you won’t do it, then actually come forward and ask Michael Cullen, the man that will always find more tax for a Labour Party, to put together a group to come forward with a Government report that proposes it—18 months of uncertainty of people in New Zealand not knowing whether, if they invest in their businesses, if they buy another house, or if they have a small lifestyle block, they will be hit by the Labour taxman—and then, all of a sudden, say “We’re ruling it out, and that’s it.” In the very next breath, the Prime Minister said that she had always been in favour of a capital gains tax, but it was just not possible at the moment.

Well, do you know what New Zealanders know? Because it is a Budget, you just can’t trust Labour on tax. You can’t trust them to deliver their promises. You can’t trust them on tax, because the very first bill and piece of legislation passed in the “botched Budget” was not about wellbeing; it was about a tax increase.

When we were in Government, in our last term in Government, there were 10,000 jobs a month being created—jobs for hard-working Kiwis to get ahead and to deliver for their families. There have been months this year where we went backwards, where the economy was actually doing so poorly that fewer jobs were being created than were being lost—

💬 Hon Julie Anne Genter: What’s unemployment, Todd?

—10,000 jobs a month. Well, the Minister over there—the “Minister of Everything But Having People Allowed to Drive at the Speed that They Should or They Want to on Our Roads”—asks what’s happened to unemployment. It’s really straightforward. There are businesses up and down New Zealand who are crying out for workers, skilled and unskilled. They need them to pick the fruit, to work in their factories, to—I don’t know. It’d be good to build a couple of roads—there would be some. What happens? We’ve seen the unemployment benefit numbers go up by 15,000. They were falling under the last Government because jobs were being created. So that’s right: unemployment levels, through the statistics, are at a record low because that party and the Government opposite inherited a strong economy with a falling unemployment rate.

But I tell you what will happen next year: all of the predictions from the experts around the country of a slowing economy will come true. The ANZ has just said that later this week, there’s a 30 percent chance that in the second quarter of this year our economy was going backwards and GDP growth had fallen below zero. I hope that hasn’t happened. I hope that hasn’t happened, because it’s a bad signal for the economy, and it’s an even worse signal for businesses who want to invest and they want to grow. But it’s the ANZ that have said this, and if that is the case and if our GDP growth rates are not on the way up and if they are falling, it’s got nothing to do with African swine flu and it’s got nothing at all to do with Iran. It’s purely all of the decisions that have been made by that Government opposite.

I would say, finally, that there are some signs of optimism around as spring comes. We know that in the kiwifruit industry, they are feeling very, very good. But I would say to every member over there: get off your chuff, get out of your list places in some of our electorates, and talk to businesses. They need workers. They need a plan. They don’t need a “botched Budget”. They need a growing economy. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

It is time to inject some optimism, time to inject some facts into this—well, to the extent that it’s a debate, it’s contesting ideas, because the ideas that I’m about to elaborate upon lie at the heart of the legislation empowering this side of the House to take stewardship with $97 billion worth of expenditure. Our economy is about $300 billion, so let’s just very modestly go through some of the highlights.

A key feature of New Zealanders’ sense of wellbeing is whether or not they feel secure, whether or not they feel confident that in the event—God forbid—of some element of criminality, some offences committed, then they can call the police or they can see a greater level of visibility in terms of our police force. Now, these kinds of developments and these issues don’t loom large in terms of the media’s coverage of what we’re doing, but the numbers do not lie: an inordinately larger number of sworn police officers, trained police officers.

Now, it is a sad indictment that as we pick up the pieces from the last regime, we’ve inherited in that particular area an awful legacy of neglect to come to terms with the drugs and the P culture. Now, I give this speech, obviously, as a Cabinet Minister but also as a Māori. If there’s an area where we wished there had been a more robust approach and a host of more critical interventions in rural New Zealand, we are now left to pick up the pieces because, Lord knows, the downside of having allowed the gang culture and the P culture to spread is very, very costly and it’s cruel, and having more police officers actually is a key feature in terms of dealing to the supply side.

I want to now turn to the infrastructure space. For a long period of time—in particular, the last regime of nine years—they had an infrastructure consultation committee. It was located in some obscure corner of the empire otherwise known as Treasury. It came to this side of the House—and I have to say that as a consequence of the obvious emotional quotient I have, I secured the support of the other side of the House to create an infrastructure commission, but behind that commission lies a whole lot of infrastructure projects that I will now elaborate upon.

For nine years and beyond that, KiwiRail was the unknown political cousin, economic cousin, held at bay in the attic of the National Government. It has now come out into the open. It is now being substantially funded by nigh on $500 million just from the Provincial Growth Fund—of course, I’ll have more to say about that very shortly—so at long last, we’re renovating KiwiRail. We’re building tracks to the future which will enable the relocation of business and industry and the expansion of employment in neglected areas.

We don’t have this cult-like mentality that you’ve got to tarmac your way to prosperity. We think that there’s a place for coastal shipping, for rail, and for roads. We actually prefer the integrated approach, which is why in some parts of the country, unfortunately, there’s a lemming-like effect. People are listening and, unwisely, following empty promises with no pūtea—no money.

Now, I’ve heard a number of the rural MPs make these bold promises that they’re going to four-lane certain regions into a high quality of prosperity, but where is the money? With $4.5 billion and a system that we pay as we go, and the promises that were made at the last election, I guarantee you’ll hear those promises again next year: no pūtea—no money. So if you contrast what this Budget represents in terms of infrastructure: this time around, a huge amount of money put aside for KiwiRail. Now, I know that there are antagonists and there are people very hostile, on the other side of the House, to rail. I will gladly contest that space at the end of next year politically, but at the moment I’m too busy taking responsibility for driving the development of KiwiRail, with my colleagues, and allocating the pūtea. It is quite tiring work. Let me just elaborate as to when, most recently, we’ve done that.

So there are allegations that this is not the year of delivery. Helensville may not loom large in the mind and the consciousness of the other side of the House. Of course, part of that town’s name, Helen, does loom large over here, but the less said about that the better at the moment. The actual fact of the matter is not only are we remedying historical neglect; we are opening up vast new opportunities. Of course, in the paper today I observed that the Provincial Growth Fund has made an allocation of several million dollars to Northport to begin the relocation process of the naval presence and all the assets that it represents out of that valuable site in Auckland. We’re starting, with our due diligence, to effect the relocation of the dry dock facility, which will be sorely needed as the bigger vessels come into the naval fleet, as we seek to replace the interisland ferries, and as we seek to create an Australasian commercial hub for that part of the maritime industry. But that takes boldness. That takes an appetite for risk, something that was, sadly, absent on the other side of the House.

Now, let’s just quickly move through a sum of $3 billion—1 percent of GDP—a massive financial impulse. By the time that this House rises for the next election, and in the event that there’s munificence in the mind of the treasurer—highly unlikely—I would like to add to that $3 billion and dedicate it to infrastructure as we prepare for the next Budget. But, of course, those things are shrouded in a level of secrecy denied the other side of the House because we won and they’re in Opposition. So you don’t get to know that information, irrespective of how you exaggerated certain leaks earlier this year. Now, that was a tiny episode where people mistakenly thought on the other side of the House that they’d won Lotto. No one remembers that. No one even gives it a second thought—a tiny, small episode which has largely been forgotten about.

Now what people are focused on out in the provinces is us working very effectively with the leaders of local government—funding their key projects. Just go to Tai Rāwhiti. Go to Southland. For a long period of time, despite the National Party complaining unwisely and with great factitiousness—there’s no threat to whitebait. The only white-baiting going on down there is trying to pick on the local Pākehās. Now, that’s probably not a good idea.

Southland—handsome endowments already announced there. Then go to West Coast—fantastic endowment. I’m not responsible for the fact that the Mongolians—Simon Bridges’ new friends—bought the local dairy company. I didn’t do that. He might know about African flu in China, given he’s spoken about every single thing in his interview about China. Actually, I know a lot of backbenchers are angry about Simon for doing that interview.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: This hasn’t actually got a lot to do with the Estimates.

Oh, very well, OK. Well, I’ll leave that matter to my leader, who’s probably more authorised to speak about such matters, perish the thought.

Now, let’s go further. For the edification of the members of the other side of the House—which may be of some assistance when they go out to the provinces—we have funded artificial intelligence. We often see evidence of it on the other side of the House in terms of artificial attempts to come up with policies and ideas and philosophies that will take the country forward.

More recently we’ve put money into roads, because I’m a pro-road politician. We’ve put hundreds of millions into the roads associated with Te Tai Rāwhiti. That particular area has been starved for a long period of time while the roading money was sucked out of the more provincial, marginal areas and plonked right into the middle of the Waikato. They have feasted long enough, hard enough, richly enough; now we are effecting a redistribution of that roading pūtea. In Tai Rāwhiti, it is running up into hundreds of millions. In addition to that, we are going to restore the robustness and the usefulness of maritime infrastructure so more Kiwis can earn their living from the interface between the land and the coast.

It’ll be nice to see some.

Well, this Estimates should actually not be called “Tracks to the future”; it should be called “Back to the future”. That’s right, because we have a Government that is more ideological than we have seen in decades.

It is important that I set out the context of this Estimates with regard to former Governments. When we look at the previous Government—and Budgets don’t lie—we were handed a decade of deficits. That’s right. We had the Canterbury earthquakes. Now, despite this, we saw 10,000 more jobs a month. The economy was growing. We saw Māori and Pasifika achievement rising. We saw a significant drop in crime. That’s right; with the toughest fiscal circumstances in a generation, this was a Government that left this Government with a growing economy and some social indicators improving.

So what have we got here? We’ve got a Government—and ultimately, Governments are kicked out when they lose the trust of the people. What have we seen over the last few weeks? We’ve seen major issues of trust and leadership, and I would argue that this Budget sets out very clearly a few reasons why. The first reason is that in this Budget, ultimately, there is nothing for the economy. That’s right; we’ve got an economy that is slowing, despite the former Government having 10,000 per month. The reason for that is—and the Government can’t hide behind things like the international circumstances. It has to own up to these things. It has to own up to the fuel taxes: 24c. It has to own up to Draconian employment law. This Government has to own up to cancelled infrastructure projects.

We can see that in this Budget. We can see that in the education infrastructure underspend. That’s right; we’ve got tens of millions of dollars that the Government can’t even spend on schools and classrooms. We can also see that in plummeting business confidence. I saw the other day, in terms of Auckland business confidence, a 25 point drop. So what we’ve got is a situation where New Zealanders are increasingly not trusting this Government on the economy because of their failed policies: increases in fuel taxes, Draconian employment law, the skates put on a number of infrastructure projects, including roads, and not even being able to deliver the basics around school property—that’s new schools and new classrooms.

The next reason why this Budget is a botched Budget and it is a failure is what I call false hope—false hope on the major flagship areas that this Government campaigned on. Firstly, KiwiBuild: it was supposed to be 100,000 houses. Literally, a few hundred houses have been built, and next minute it’s cancelled. One of the biggest reasons why I saw that a group of young people did vote for this Government was on the principle that Jacinda Ardern was going to be Robin Hood and redistribute to the next generation. Well, they choked on capital gains tax, they’ve scrapped KiwiBuild—

💬 Dr Shane Reti: Fees-free.

—ultimately—and we’re going to get to fees-free; I acknowledge my colleague Shane Reti—major flagship programmes, false hope, canned.

Fees-free—let’s talk about fees-free. Again, massive PR campaign about how fees-free was actually going to mean free education for everyone. What we know with Labour is pretty much divide it by 10 and that’s what you’ll get, and this is what we saw with fees-free. Miraculously, they’re not talking about the second and third year. Miraculously, they’re not now talking about actual take-up in participation, to the extent that in this Budget a number of those funds that were allocated for fees-free have now been put into vocational reform, which nobody agrees with. So, again, major flagship policies botched and canned.

The next thing that is a hallmark of this Budget is a Government that can’t be trusted, not only because its flagship policies have failed and the economy is tanking but also because it can’t fulfil its basic promises and it can’t deliver. So if we take the education area—we’ve got 37 broken promises that have not been delivered, and it’s not OK, Shane, to say that this is because it was a decade of neglect. The reality is this Government was left with extraordinary circumstances in terms of the economy, with growing surpluses and a growing economy. So the reality is that this is a Budget of broken promises, whether it’s the early childhood education ratios, whether it’s 100 percent qualified teachers, whether it is, actually, the donations policy—again, another example whereby Labour say one thing and promise parents that, somehow, donations are going to be scrapped, then next minute it’s deciles 1 to 7 and it’s a very complicated policy and it won’t actually cover all costs. Typical Labour—they break their promises and they can’t be trusted.

This is a Government that is the most flaky when it comes to policy and delivery. The reality is there are huge amount of slogans, and there’s enough in a line item to make sure they sprinkle a bit into communities so they hear the headline. But when it comes to actual delivery, actual infrastructure, be that road, be that rail—under the last National Government, actually, in infrastructure, let’s take Auckland, my electorate. The Victoria Park tunnel—talked about for decades but actually delivered under National. Electrification of rail was delivered—yes, that is public transport—under National. The City Rail Link—put up, again, under National. This is a Government that is failing on infrastructure, despite billions and billions left for them by the previous Government.

I mean, ultimately, what New Zealanders are saying to me is that when it comes to this Budget and these estimates, how could they be so incompetent? That’s the feeling that I’m getting from New Zealanders. How could the Government be left an economy that was growing—strong business confidence, social indicators heading in the right direction—be handed piles of cash in capital and operating areas, and then somehow not even be able to deliver their basic promises, but also see the country going backward from an economic perspective and also from a housing perspective? We’ve seen waiting lists increase in a number of areas. Learning support is one area which I’ll be talking about shortly where, again, the promises don’t match the delivery.

So from National’s perspective, when we look through this Budget we put aside the PR spin and we say: is this a Government that can ultimately deliver, or has a record of delivering, their promises? The first answer to this question is no. Education is an example, and you can go to Labour’s report card online and see the 37 promises that haven’t been delivered. The second question we ask is: on the major flagship areas like fees-free or KiwiBuild, have they demonstrated that they can do the mahi and deliver major projects that are flagship, that are crucial to why people voted for them? The answer is no, to the extent—and we’ll see it in the next Budget—that they’re having to cancel programmes like KiwiBuild. Then the third question that we ultimately ask of them is: are they able to commit to their promises? This Budget, in the area of education alone, is a great example where they can’t. So they’ve put a little bit of money around careers plans, but, actually, the School Leavers’ Toolkit—they promised $197 million in this Budget; there’s a couple of million. Again, donations reform—it was going to be all deciles, but in this Budget it’s deciles 1 to 7. Again, when you look at the infrastructure spend—and we heard today, the Minister was out there talking about the last National Government. The reality is we left them $4.85 billion in school infrastructure, and in this Budget alone the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education are admitting they have 50 percent of the money that they need for growth.

I mean, ultimately, Budgets are a window to the soul of a Government, and in that window to the soul is etched what they see are their priorities, but it is also etched whether they deliver on their promises. We would argue, on this side of the House, that not only have they provided false hope but they’ve botched all of the major flagship policies that they promised. They’ve left a litany of broken promises, and I would argue that the emperor has no clothes.

I’m going to start my contribution to this debate by reading from an article that was published nearly a year ago—eleven months ago: “The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risk of drought, floods, extreme heat, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris Agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.”

Now, we are seeing a rise globally and here in New Zealand in demand for action from our young people, and that is right. Our Budget this year isn’t just about the immediate wellbeing of New Zealanders; it’s got to be about the future wellbeing of our children and their children, the long-term prospects of New Zealand to respond to climate change, to mitigate by reducing our dangerous carbon emissions, and to adapt to the changes that we already know we will face that will affect our farmers, our food production, our infrastructure.

This Budget has significant commitments that start us on the pathway to where we need to go. There are huge opportunities, and I particularly want to refer to transport, because transport infrastructure is one of those areas where we have everything to gain and nothing to lose by investing in those modes of transport that are going to enable more people and more goods to move around our country while reducing pollution. In transport, in this Budget, we had a significant commitment to rail that we haven’t seen in decades. I refer to the previous Minister for Infrastructure’s speech on the amount of money that has been invested in KiwiRail—just this morning, the Minister of Transport and the Auckland mayor announced a new interchange at Puhinui station, which is going to result in a high-speed bus link through Puhinui that will link up the airport and east and south Auckland to the southern rail line. It’s that type of infrastructure which was not funded under the last Government. That project would not have happened if we had not had a change in Government, but it will result in significant improvements into the ways that people visiting Auckland and people living in Auckland can move around their city.

There is a need for much more, and that is why our Government policy statement on transport, which lays out the priorities and the funding levels for each three-year transport budget period, the National Land Transport Programme, identifies these priorities—using the infrastructure we have, improving it, making it safer, ensuring that we’re making best use of our rail corridor so that more goods can move by rail, and getting those big heavy trucks off the road which damage the road and make it less safe. Of course, there’s still going to be a need for trucks, but the more we can move on rail, the better for our existing road network. The same goes for public transport in our cities; of course, our major cities are the ones that currently have the biggest improvements in public transport, but there’s no reason why medium-sized and smaller cities can’t have frequent, fast, reliable bus services, and that’s something that we will be working on in the coming years. Safe walking and cycling—our children have a birth right to walk and cycle safely. In order for that to happen, we need to ensure that we have the infrastructure there that means that there’s safe and appropriate speeds around their schools and around the places where they live, but, also, on those arterial roads with higher levels of traffic, that there’s that safe, separated infrastructure.

That’s not just a benefit for the climate. Yes, it’s a benefit for the climate if we can have more kids walking and cycling to school, if we can have more goods moving by rail, if we can have more people at peak hour moving by public transport. That’s good for the climate, but it’s also just good generally. It’s good for public health. It means our kids learn more; because they’re more active, they can be more independent. It’s good for our air quality and our water quality. It costs less money—and this should be obvious, although I have to explain it quite a lot to members of the Opposition. It is way cheaper for people to make short trips by bicycle or by foot or for more people to share a bus or a train than for every individual to have to go in their own car. The infrastructure required is less, the cost of running it is less, it saves individuals money, it saves businesses money, and it saves the country money.

Because there has been a lot of confusion coming from the Opposition, I feel the need to come with some graphs to show exactly what is happening and set the record straight on transport funding. The blue line here is the transport budget from 2011-2015, the darker blue one is 2015-2018, and the green one is from 2018-2021. Now, as you can see, this Government is spending slightly more on State highways over three years than the previous Government did in the previous two Budgets. Now, that makes sense, because there’s more money in the Budget and because there are more people travelling, but this doesn’t tell you about how we’re spending it, so I will get into that.

What you can also see is that we’re spending significantly more on local roads. Local roads carry half of our traffic. Half of our car and truck trips are on local roads. The previous Government were so focused on delivering just seven motorways over nine years. You know, in 2009, they announced seven motorways, two of which had been committed by the previous Government. The next five, two of them aren’t even complete yet. So they didn’t manage to deliver seven roads in nine years, but they did spend the vast majority of the transport budget on those extremely expensive roads which only carry 4 percent of all vehicle trips. It’s an extremist transport policy. It’s one that is pouring all of the money into just a few stretches of road, and letting the local roads—where the traffic actually is—just languish without the investment and without the maintenance and safety improvements that were needed. So we’ve significantly increased spending.

If the members are interested: we had a 51 percent increase in local road improvements; a 12 percent, at least, increase in local road maintenance; and in State highway maintenance, an almost 20 percent increase—that has meant that over 2,000 kilometres of State highway, additional, have been maintained just in the last year.

Of course, people out there in New Zealand are still going to see potholes on the roads. Why? It’s because under nine years of the last National Government, they sweated the assets and they didn’t invest in road safety and they didn’t invest in maintenance where it was needed. And that is why the road toll rose inexorably between 2013 and 2017—no one can deny that. The Opposition cannot deny that despite record amounts of spending on a few small State highways, the number of people dying and being seriously injured on our roads increased. That is because the money was not being spent all across the road network; it was only being spent, primarily, on seven extremely expensive highways.

We have increased the money for road policing and safety promotion, and we have massively increased the money that is going into public transport, rail, and rapid transit infrastructure. That makes sense, because that gives people choice. That’s where I have to say that this Government is absolutely committed to giving New Zealanders more choice when it comes to transport, because it’s the right thing to do: it’s the right thing for the environment and the climate, and it’s actually the right thing for Kiwis’ back pockets.

Now, it is very easy for the Opposition to confuse people on this issue and to mislead, and they have been doing so in regular social media attacks, but I think New Zealanders deserve to know the truth. The truth is that this Government has an extremely balanced transport plan, one that will invest for the future, for our children’s children. We’re already seeing, luckily, some curbing of the deaths and serious injuries, and we haven’t even begun to truly invest in the road safety improvements. We have the road safety strategy, Road to Zero, out there. It’s just come back in from consultation—very strong support from New Zealanders, Kiwis, right around. I am absolutely committed to ensuring that we have an evidence-based and balanced approach.

Although the Opposition has claimed that we’re looking at blanket speed-limit reductions, there is nothing true to that claim. Every time I sit down with ordinary New Zealanders from right around the country or people who work in the freight industry, and I explain to them what our transport policy is, do you know what they say? They say, “Well, that just makes sense.” And it does—it just makes sense. It’s exactly what New Zealanders would expect. It’s what a responsible Government does. We don’t go out and mislead, we don’t have extreme impositions, we don’t hate anyone, and we are investing not only for the Kiwis of today but for the future.

I’m very proud of this Budget and the steps we’ve begun to take in the right direction, but it will take a few more years to undo the damage that was done under the nine years of the last Government and their extremist transport policies and their negligence.

For those people stuck in traffic, listening to this debate, north and south of Auckland: that contribution that has just concluded was from the Hon Julie Anne Genter, the Associate Minister of Transport. So if you’re stuck in traffic, then consider carefully every word you’ve just heard from the Hon Julie Anne Genter.

In question time today, we actually had our finance person ask the Labour finance Minister, Grant Robertson, to name one roading project that has been commissioned, and is under way, by the Labour - New Zealand First - Green Government.

💬 Hon Member: What was the answer?

The answer was a babble of words that said absolutely nothing, but it equalled the fact that Grant Robertson couldn’t name one single roading project that is under way. So for the people listening, stuck in traffic: for the next 12 months, nothing will get any better until you get a chance to vote this dreadful Government out.

We’re here in the appropriation debate, and I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the contribution from the Hon Shane Jones, because he said, in his contribution, “No one remembers the delivery of the 2019 Budget.” So I’m going to take the opportunity to remind everybody about the delivery of the 2019 Budget, because it’s the only Budget that I’ve ever known where the Minister of Finance was too ashamed to deliver his own Budget, and he got the Leader of the Opposition, the week beforehand, to start dribbling out bits of information, and leaked the Budget via the announcement on the Treasury website. It was a dreadful Budget. It’s been called the Wellbeing Budget. It was completely botched by the Labour Government, and even Grant Robertson doesn’t want to spend much time debating it today.

We’ve had this debate; it’s a regular on the parliamentary calendar. Normally, the Prime Minister would make a contribution to the debate; she hasn’t so far. I suspect—if I follow the media and the media is accurate—she’s actually unlikely to make a contribution to this debate today, because, I’m told, the Prime Minister’s already on her way to Japan for the Rugby World Cup. Now, I equally know that the Rugby World Cup’s first game is Saturday, and today is Tuesday. I think when New Zealand—

💬 Hon Julie Anne Genter: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought we weren’t supposed to refer to the absence of members from this Chamber.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: That’s right. He hasn’t. He’s close—he’s close—but he hasn’t actually said that she’s not in the Chamber.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. The point I’m making is that you would expect the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern to want to make a contribution on her Budget. But, no, things haven’t been tidy for the Labour Government over the last week. So go and watch the rugby, go four days before the game actually plays, but I say to the Prime Minister: Prime Minister, you can run from the current scandal of the Labour Party but you cannot hide from it.

This Budget is a Budget of high taxes, it’s a Budget of wasted spending, and it’s a Budget of promised spending but with no detail. I’ll give the House one example of the final of those three, the spending without detail: the huge announcement, the wonderfully acclaimed announcement of $1.9 billion on mental health. And I thought, “That’s a good initiative. It probably should have been done by earlier Governments.”, but then I was astounded to find out that there is absolutely no detail at all on how that huge amount of money is going to be spent. After the Budget, the Government then embarked on another roadshow going round New Zealand, talking to people in the mental health area, saying, “We’ve appropriated $1.9 billion but we don’t really know how to spend it. Would you give us some help?” So that’s an example of the amateurish way the Budget was put together.

I mentioned also it was a Budget of wasted spending, and I can look no further than the Hon Shane Jones with his $3,000 million slush fund, which is nothing more than an attempt by New Zealand First to spend taxpayers’ money to buy votes for the next election. And I can say to Shane Jones—the Hon Shane Jones—yes, the Minister knows how to spend the money, but I guarantee today that he doesn’t know how to get the votes. So $3 billion spent and sprayed around New Zealand and the photo opportunities for the man who claims he’s the champion of the provinces won’t assure the Hon Shane Jones of a pathway back into this House after the next election and nor should it.

And then the final point about the Budget was the fact that it’s a Budget again of high taxes. As the Hon Todd McClay reminded us, after the urgency motion followed the Budget what was the first legislation the Government slammed through this House in urgency but, again, two more fuel tax increases. So you’ve got the Prime Minister today suggesting that all of the promises around fuel taxes, the concern about the price of fuel for New Zealanders, are more associated with international events and recent events in Saudi Arabia. That’s not right: approximately half the price of fuel today—when those Auckland people finally get home with their tank nearly empty after they’ve been stranded on the motorways, when they fill up next time, approximately 50 percent of that money goes into the Government coffers in the form of taxes.

The point I want to make finally is the current attack by this Government on the part of the economy that’s performing. So we have an economy that’s now straggled with low confidence. We have an economy that’s growing at half the rate that it was when Labour became the major party in the Government. We have GDP figures out on Thursday, and whilst I say the growth rate is half, it may prove to be less than that. And the Prime Minister and Grant Robertson continue to blame international reasons entirely for the declining New Zealand economy. I accept part of that argument, but the greatest reason the New Zealand economy is slowing is because business has no confidence in this Government. You’ve got the Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr, now reducing the official cash rate to 1 percent—we haven’t seen that since the global financial crisis—and the likelihood he’ll have to reduce it further, and the Governor of the Reserve Bank out there actively encouraging businesses at this price “Go and borrow.”, and the businesses aren’t prepared to do so, because they are worried about this Government and this Government’s management of the economy.

Yet the sector that’s performing and performing well is our primary sector. Our terms of trade are good. So what do the Hon David Parker and the Hon Damien O’Connor then do? They then attack the primary sector. We’ve got their freshwater strategy, ill-thought-out, rushed and announced, and now there are meetings being held urgently all around rural New Zealand. There were 400 that attended a meeting in Ashburton last week. There wasn’t enough room to accommodate the 400 concerned farmers who travelled from all over Canterbury to try and find out the details from Ministry for the Environment officials. And as if they haven’t got enough to worry about now with the freshwater strategy, we’ve got the zero carbon bill before the select committee as well.

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: Great bill—great bill.

Well, the Hon Shane Jones, the champion of the provinces, says it’s a great bill. Let me tell the Hon Shane Jones he’s got no chance of seeing farmers reducing their methane emissions by 50 percent by 2050. It is not possible. Well, I’m now learning that it wasn’t the Hon Shane Jones that interjected; it was Dr Duncan Webb, that member from Christchurch—he wouldn’t know a farmer if he fell over one. He wouldn’t know a farmer if he fell over one. But let me tell him the way this Government is treating the primary sector will not be forgotten at the next election, and I don’t think the ramifications will only be in rural New Zealand, Dr Duncan Webb; it will be in Christchurch Central as well. So take that smug smile off your face, sir, because you may well be going back to practising law in about 12 months’ time after a very brief experience as a member of Parliament and, frankly, as a member of the Labour caucus, a member like that deserves absolutely nothing better.

What a shocking speech from David Carter, a former Speaker who was quite a reasonable Speaker, Madam Speaker—not as good as yourself, of course. But it was a sad speech from that former Speaker. I want to ask him, I want to ask the National Party: who said the other day that this Government did in two years what the last Government didn’t do in nine years? We’re talking about mental health here.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m sorry to interrupt the member, but I didn’t say this is a split call.

Oh, right. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I was on a roll there, but never mind; I’ll say it again—missed the effect. I ask the question again. We’re talking about mental health here and I know that the former Speaker doesn’t want to hear this. Who said that this Government did in two years what the last Government didn’t do in nine years? That’s the question. They’ve gone out into the communities. They’ve talked to actual people at the front line. The last Government paid nine years of lip service and did absolutely nothing. Who said that? Who said that? The New Zealander of the Year said that, Mike King—Mike King.

So that, basically, does away with all the nonsense kōrero about mental health that the previous speaker talked about—absolute nonsense in terms of this Government’s commitment to mental health. It’s a huge commitment—some agreement on the other side, I’m glad to hear that. When you have a man of that calibre saying how useless—in effect, what Mike really wanted to say was that the last Government were useless in terms of their support of mental health, they didn’t care about it at all, they didn’t support it, they got rid of the Mental Health Commission. And we as a Government are totally supporting that.

I’m so pleased today to be talking about the support that Māori got through the last Budget, and mental health is a huge part of that. So I was very proud of the announcement the other day that our Prime Minister made in terms of us going forward with regards to mental health. We’ve put in an interim commission and we have key Māori representatives and leaders on that interim health commission: none other than Hayden Wano from Tūī Ora up there in Taranaki, who my National Party friend over there from Taranaki—Jonathan, of course, who does a great job up there, might I add. He knows the work that is being done by Hayden Wano, a key part of the new interim commission, Julie Wharewera-Mika, Kendall Flutey—three Māori on there and two good Pākehā too of course: Kevin Hague and Kelly Pope.

This is a crucial commission in terms of overseeing and managing mental health. We need a commission that’ll be accountable to the Government—whoever the Government is. We’ve got so many problems at the coalface, so I’m just so pleased that we have started the campaign in terms of mental health. Māori mental health remains, though, a huge priority in this Budget. So $61 million was appropriated for Māori health for our Māori providers over four years in terms of health and addiction services, $10 million in terms of Māori health workforce, and 1,600 more staff who will be supported over the next five years by this Government. That is a Government that cares about what’s happening in terms of Māori health, and our people out there have been very supportive in terms of the strategy going forward.

Also, what appeals to me, in terms of Māori in this Budget, is Mana in Mahi. Mana in Mahi has been a revelation for this Government. Over 300 young people have commenced employment from Mana in Mahi placements right across the spectrum: in hospitality, in construction, in hairdressing—young people who’ve been written off by society. There has been $49.8 million appropriated over four years, and we’ll be funding up to 1,850 places.

We have a success rate in terms of Mana in Mahi of 80 percent. That’s a success rate to be proud of. Sadly, it’s been a percentage that has been roundly criticised by the National Party, but we are investing in young people who have been written off by society, written off in terms of communities. So I’m incredibly proud of Mana in Mahi and our people participating in it.

He Poutama Rangatahi, of course, is another venture that we are incredibly proud of: $26 million appropriated for that fund, right around the regions, supported by the man from the regions, Shane Jones, in terms of his Provincial Growth Fund. Again, supporting young people at the coalface who have been abandoned. They were abandoned by a National Government, and Māori were abandoned by a National Government.

We came into this job and we saw the minimal investment that the National Party had put into Māori, but we, in our Budget, have put up $571 million in terms of Māori in the next four years. That’s investment that Māori have never seen, and would never have seen under a National Government. We, as a Māori caucus, are very proud of that investment. We’re on the right track. Well done, Grant Robertson and the Māori caucus. Kia ora tātou.

Oh, thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise to take my call and follow on from that last speaker, to talk about the issue of mental health. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that this Government used to use words like “transformational” and “transforming mental health”, but, interestingly enough, with all the firestorm of last week and the sexual assault allegations, what got hidden amongst that? Well, the announcement of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. Why would you release it that week? I can tell you why: because it’s taken them two years to announce something for the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. The commission is something that is not only Labour’s but, of course, it was a key plank of New Zealand First for their election manifesto in 2017. Here we are, two years into Government, and they announce their Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission.

What’s the detail around this commission? It’s going to be set up in two years’ time: 2021. Yes, there’s an interim one in place, but I would argue that 2021 would be four years in. This is a Government that made mental health a key election issue. They were going to focus on it, make it transformational, and transform, and here they have a Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission that’s going to take them four years to set up.

It speaks volumes of the problem with the Labour Government, because what Labour Governments do is they come in and they throw money at things, but they have no detail on mental health and they have no plan. Yes, they announced a huge amount of money—$1.9 billion—but, funnily enough, when I asked the Minister how you would break that down, $200 million of it goes into Housing First—potentially, there might be some crossover with mental health there. Three hundred million is going into transitional housing—I think you can start to sense a theme that’s taking course here—$70 million into the establishment of the royal commission into historical abuse, and $100 million into resolving claims of historical abuse. Now, I’m not here to say that any of those announcements are not valid, but my point being, when you reiterate $1.9 billion, the public believes you are spending that in mental health services, and you’re not. Already, of those amounts I outlined, around $700 million of that $1.9 billion is not going towards front-line mental health services.

Now, we in the Opposition want to support the Government on mental health—we’ve joined the cross-party mental health group—but our bottom line is that anything we do in mental health needs to provide more front-line mental health services, to respond to the growing demand. What does this Government do a few weeks ago for their new front-line mental health service? The first announcement is $9 million. To new services? No; $9 million to cover the cost of existing mental health services and GPs. There’ll be no new services delivered with that $9 million. This is the problem: talking big on numbers but, in fact, no detail and no plan. Now, the health Minister is saying, “Oh, hold on, though. We’re thinking it might take four or five years to roll out.”

This is the problem: delay after delay. We had a $6.5 million inquiry that they kicked the can down the road. They delayed the report, and then here we get all this money. What was interesting is that out of all the Budget lines for this $1.9 billion—I went back and checked, because, of course, in 2017, the former National Government announced $100 million for 17 mental health initiatives. How many of them reappeared in Budget 2019? Thirteen out of 17. So they came in, they cancelled 17 initiatives, and relaunched them two years later. They’re initiatives and projects that could be making a real difference on the ground today, to vulnerable New Zealanders. That’s the problem with a Labour Government. They come in, they announce a lot of money, they throw a lot of money at issues, but let’s never forget the State of the Nation Report in the last Labour Government in their last year that said that for all their increased expenditure, they did not increase social progress by 1 percent. It’s clear this Government has no detail on mental health and has no plan.

Order. The member’s time has expired.

Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. It’s a real pleasure to stand and speak in this debate, and it’s with some pride that I stand here as part of this Government, led by Jacinda Ardern with a group of Ministers around her, who are doing such great work. I’ve been privileged to be made the chair of the Environment Committee, and I was really surprised to hear the Hon David Carter speak in a quite derogatory manner. I don’t mean when he said that he thought I was Shane Jones. What I really mean is when he was trying to drive a wedge between rural and urban. I am a central city MP, but, you know, that’s not to say that I don’t bring to the Environment Committee—and all the work that this Government is doing around that—a real sensitivity to what’s going on there, and a listening ear. It’s very clear in the work we’re doing—he mentioned the zero carbon bill—that absolutely the farmers are on board. They want to play a balanced part in bringing New Zealand to a world, which addresses climate change, because it affects us all. And we absolutely want to have a framework where the best farmland is protected, we adapt appropriately in terms of climate change, and we mitigate as well. So it’s quite inappropriate to try to pretend that New Zealand is not at one here, and we’re all working together there.

What’s more, in terms of what this Government, in this Budget, has done in terms of the environment, protecting our elite soils and sustainable land use, the fact is that we recognise on this side of the House how important the agricultural sector is. Only today we heard of the great results that have come from our primary sector and that, in fact, our trade is flourishing: our kiwi fruit, our honey. Incidentally, our honey exports have skyrocketed on the back of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. On the back of an open market into Japan, our farmers and our primary sector are doing better. I’m really glad that we’re part of that.

So we’ve got research grants so that people can transition into this new low-carbon economy. Of course, the Minister of Revenue very recently introduced research and development tax credits: a universal scheme where people who are innovating and moving our economy into a much more productive sector are going to be rewarded for that by what I must say are very, very generous tax credits. I know that the select committee there has been working on that, making them more easily accessible and more workable, and that’s going to be great as well.

But it’s not just that; of course, this was and is the Wellbeing Budget. It is called “wellbeing” for a reason: focusing not just on a single aspect to what goes on. Money doesn’t make us healthier, but health services, good exercise, a good diet, a strong community—all of those things—make us healthier and contribute to our wellbeing. So it’s time we started joining those things together. As part of that, I was disappointed to hear Mr Doocey be derogatory in respect of the mental health reforms. We are doing much more in this short two years than National did in the nine long years that they let the health service—mental health in particular—languish. It languished and deteriorated.

Of course, we can’t magic up mental health nurses; we’ve got to find them. We’ve got to find the young students who want to train as mental health nurses and rebuild a health sector that deteriorated over many long years. So that’s what we’re doing: we’re putting money into vocational training. We’re tidying up that sector—a sector which was neglected as well. So we’ve got to start on ground zero there as well.

And, of course, addressing properly, for the first time, suicide—the scourge of our society—the scourge that hits our young and Māori and Pasifika most heavily. Introducing a suicide prevention agency—something that that Government could have done but never did. Thank goodness we’ve got a Government on this side that looks to those things. We can’t do it all at once, but we’re doing it. We’re starting it right away. We’re not going to sit on our hands any longer.

Of course, mental health, again, isn’t just about those acute cases. We’re putting in a front-line service so that anyone who has mental health issues can go and get that help at the front line—at the primary level. So whilst we accept there’s huge need in our hospitals—like with Hillmorton Hospital, in Christchurch—equally, people need to be able to access mental health services at their GP as well. We’re doing that as well. In Christchurch—and I know, I hope, elsewhere in the country over time—Mana Ake is an absolutely fantastic initiative; an initiative which typifies the wellness approach in this Budget, bringing, through the education system, through the schools, social workers, educators, and mental health professionals together to bring a cohesive and coherent approach so that we can look at the children who are at risk, who may be suffering anxiety or other moderate mental health issues, and those professionals can intervene there in a way which is appropriate and is right sized so that we can avoid the huge costs—not only money costs but the catastrophe that hits those young people’s lives if those things are not addressed right away—and so that they can learn better, they can be participants in their social networks better and their family better, and, as they grow up, they can go on and lead meaningful lives.

You know, one of the great things about the wellness approach—and something I think that, I hope, we can build on over time—is it doesn’t necessarily say the only thing to do is to enter into the productive workforce; it recognises caring and volunteering as well—those people who are absolute cornerstones of our society but don’t necessarily appear on the GDP figures. They don’t necessarily appear on the employment figures, but they’re out there. They’re engaged in what I consider—and on this side of the House, we consider—to be meaningful work, and they’re absolutely supporting the network of our society.

Our Minister of Health has been working so hard, and he has had to work hard because of the huge deficit that he has been handed. The fact is that our hospital system has been run down, and I still remember as a very new member in this House learning of the huge problems he was having at Middlemore Hospital—a hospital that simply hadn’t been maintained. And, of course, Dunedin: this Government is rebuilding Dunedin Hospital. There is a real need down there for a world-class modern hospital, not a sprawling mess across all kinds of building, downtown there. So that’s a massive spend.

And, of course, we’ve taken action—this Government has taken action—on cancer care. We’ve listened and seen where the need is and taken action by having a cancer agency which can have a coordinated approach so people’s cancer care does not depend upon where they live, does not depend on some kind of lottery, but it will be appropriate, it will be measured, and it will be doctor and therapy led and not based on the basis of cheap party politicking.

But really, the big push here—and our Prime Minister’s push, Jacinda Ardern’s push—is to reduce child poverty, and that’s what we’re doing. We are absolutely reducing child poverty because we see that as one of the biggest barriers. A child living in poverty will struggle.

I mean, even a small thing. It’s from small beginnings, great things grow, and we’re starting with trialling school lunches. That’s fantastic, because we know that nutrition is at the heart of wellbeing. So this Government is going to make sure that those young minds are fed and fed properly, because that’s a critical part.

And also our Families Package: lifting 74,000 children—74,000 children—out of poverty. That is a huge lift. Now, on a family-by-family basis, the payments to you and I may look small, but the fact of the matter is that those payments—whether they be $25 or $75—they will make a huge difference to be able to buy better food, send the kids on school trips, and so on and so forth.

Speaking of that, of course, our move in respect of school donations is well overdue. This is a situation where the framework was broken. The idea that it was a donation on the one side but the schools depended on it on another was absolutely wrong. So we’ve come in and we’ve said, particularly for those schools in the lower deciles, we are going to give them an opportunity to do away with those donations altogether. We’re going to fund them more so that they don’t need to ask and they don’t have to put those families in the invidious position of choosing between school donations and giving their kids what they need—their soccer boots or whatever it might be. So yet another small—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to take a speaking spot in opposition to the third reading of the Appropriation (2019/20 Estimates) Bill. I know it’s disappointing I’m opposing it, but, none the less, I am. I thought the most interesting factor I’ve heard this afternoon was that you know you’ve got trouble with the Government, when Minister Jones makes one of the more plausible speeches of the day—particularly for the first five minutes, until he started veering off the point. But it is a privilege to speak in a debate like this.

I want to spend some time today speaking about the manner in which many of the so-called structural changes to our economy this Government is looking at introducing are in fact impacting on the very people they’re setting out to assist. I think that’s one of the shames—it is a shame—of the activities of the last Budget and also of some of the legislation that’s been introduced to the House in the meantime.

Some of the things I’m talking about with respect to that are things like the ring-fencing of losses on rental properties, which, effectively, have penalised the very people that drive the New Zealand economy—the tradies: those people who work hard and save a little bit of money and invest in a rental property for their retirement, or for whatever reason they invest in it, only to find they’re now unable to write off their tax against those properties, consequently either having to force the rentals up—and we’ve seen rentals rise by $50-odd a week in the time of this Government. That’s a pretty significant lift in rentals. So that’s the first thing that’s happened as a result of this. The other thing we’re going to see is those people who have historically invested in this put their investment elsewhere—not necessarily in the productive sector, and that’s where the investment needs to go, whatever the productive sector might look like at the time.

The other thing I want to talk about is the proposed introduction of taxes and tax relief on vehicles—again, an area that hugely affects the poorer and less well-off part of our community. Those people that live in rural and provincial New Zealand who have to drive to work every day, they don’t have the kind of income or the opportunity to invest in an electric vehicle. They probably never will have. This, in my view, is tax relief, effectively, for the rich; not tax relief or assistance for those people who struggle in life. Again, this action has impacted significantly on the tradies, the service sector of our economy, and the people that do the work out the back that make the money that drives New Zealand and the Government’s opportunity to do what they want with the tax they take.

Petrol tax, as well, impacts explicitly on those people who have to drive cars, whether they like it or not. We heard the Minister Julie Anne Genter, just a short time ago, going on and on about public transport. Well, most parts of rural provincial New Zealand have no access to public transport and probably never will have. That is the challenge we face in New Zealand, because not only do they have no access to public transport but that’s the very part of New Zealand that produces the income that drives the Government’s opportunity to do stuff—and I’ll get on to that a little bit later as well. But these people have to drive their kids to school, they have to drive daily to work, and they will never be able to afford, most of them, to drive an electric vehicle. Those are the challenges that we face as the result of the activities of this Government.

New Zealand’s job creation has slowed significantly in the last two years, and I think that one could ironically consider that to be fortunate, when you think that we no longer have people to work in many parts of our productive sector, and that’s created by a shortage of people to do that work. So our immigration settings have been not necessarily right; they haven’t necessarily helped us to drive this part of our economy. But none the less, it’s hugely important for both agriculture and many other sectors in our economy, particularly the construction industry and the tourism industry, that we have enough people to do the work in those areas.

I want to speak a little bit about that—again, related to rural New Zealand and provincial New Zealand—and that’s the standard of our education and our provincial or rural secondary schools. That’s not caused by the lack of very good people trying to do that, trying to provide that education; it’s caused by the fact that those schools are challenged by numbers. Unless we find a way of enabling those kids to participate in sport—because they struggle to participate in sport because, frankly, they can’t afford to get there, and when you live in a place like Taumarunui, it’s quite likely you’ve got to travel to Hamilton for sport. Very few people are going to be able to do that. They don’t even have enough kids in these schools to provide a full rugby team or a sporting team in many of these areas. That’s a huge challenge for them. They also struggle, because of the size of them, to provide the opportunity for those kids that every larger secondary school in New Zealand can provide. We need to find ways around that, and that’s one of the reasons that some of our young people face real challenges getting into work and, I think, progressing in life.

When you think of the fact that we’ve put $2.6 billion in the last 18 months into the fees-free scheme, which provides primarily for those people who either could have afforded to put themselves through those courses already or who have had access to an appropriate education that’s given them the opportunity to get on and make their way in life, that’s $2.6 billion which could have been spent in an area of our society, I guess, that would have enabled a whole lot more people to acquire the skills that would enable them to commence that type of education, let alone get into it. So that’s a challenge, I think, that we’ve got in rural and provincial New Zealand, which is not being addressed by this Government and has not been addressed by the spend and the Wellbeing—I suppose—Budget that’s been put in place to get us to this point.

I heard the finance Minister say today that they’ve stepped up. Well, unfortunately, in a lot of areas there’s been no planning behind the step, and I think that’s a shame, because some of the initiatives that we are looking at as a country right now—and I speak about the climate change amendment bill, I speak about the water planning papers that have been put out—they’re all very well, but the work hasn’t been done behind them, and when the work’s not done behind them that creates fear, which creates anxiety, which creates opposition. It’s no doubt that that opposition is going to grow when people, effectively, fear for their future. We’re seeing this not only in the primary sector; we’re seeing it—well, the fishing industry is part of the primary sector. We’re certainly seeing it in the fishing industry, where fishing families who’ve been involved in the business for almost hundreds of years are seeing a very bleak future in front of them. So some of the things we’re doing are being done for the right reasons but in absolutely the wrong way, and we’re seeing initiatives rushed at us at a rate that we can no longer keep up with.

I guess, getting back to the climate change bill, I think the climate change amendment bill, and the commission it sets up, is an absolutely appropriate way of going about things. The problem is the Government’s then rushed a whole lot of targets into there which are subjective—they’ve got no reason for putting them in there—and that, again, has created a whole lot of opposition to a piece of legislation that would have been very good without those targets in it, but certainly has made or created a rash of uncertainty, particularly in our primary productive sector.

Yesterday, we saw Forest & Bird, Fish & Game, and Greenpeace release a report which is clearly misleading. It talks about the 3 percent of GDP that the dairy sector puts into New Zealand. It talks about the 3 percent of people that work in agriculture in New Zealand. It does not make any mention of the thousands and thousands of people who work in the service sector behind it, who live, work, and are educated in rural New Zealand. It doesn’t talk about the 50-odd percent of our cash receipts that come into New Zealand from those sectors. It’s a grossly misleading report, and that is one of the challenges, I think, we are putting on to our productive sector in New Zealand which is creating uncertainty, which creates opposition, and that’s unfortunate, because some of the things that I said that are being done are actually being done for the right reasons.

The last issue I want to talk briefly about is the tree issue, and I accept that a lot of the things we’ve done around trees and the policies that are in place around trees are probably useful for New Zealand, but surely the ability to be able to write off your pollution by planting a tree is completely ridiculous. I think that this is a challenge that we haven’t addressed in New Zealand in a manner we should have done, and we need to do a lot of work on it. We need to do it quickly, because the tree-planting programme is setting a future for us that in 20 years we may well regret significantly. I think we need to give this a lot more consideration, and it needs urgent consideration, because the activities that are going on at present are running the risk of—and I’m not saying they are, because I think that there’s such a lot of work that hasn’t been done in this area, as with many other things this Government have not done. They haven’t done the work on the potential ramifications of the actions that are taking place as a result of the policy that’s been introduced. So there’s a lot more work that needs to be done on that, and I think we have, in the National Party, a policy of the right tree in the right place, basically, and I think a little bit of work on the legislation and the policy around the tree-planting thing will create an opportunity for that to happen, rather than trees just being planted randomly across the country. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

In amongst the ranting, the shouting, the—well, raving would be a rude word, so I won’t say that, but of Mr McKelvie—the rambling of the speeches that are coming from the Opposition, there is an occasional pearl of wisdom, and I wish to refer to one of those pearls of wisdom that one of the Opposition speakers came out with today, to talk about something very important that relates to this entire debate. It was something that was said by the Hon Nikki Kaye—a beautiful aphorism. She said that Budgets are a window to the soul of a Government. Budgets are a window to the soul of the Government. How true that is, and if we look at the soul that is being displayed by the Opposition today, it’s all about the money, it’s all about the technicalities, it’s all about the machinery, and it is not about the people. That is the difference between the soul of the Opposition and the soul on this side of the House. On this side of the House, we are concerned with wellbeing for all New Zealanders, and it shows very much in our Budget, it shows in the rhetoric from the Opposition, the difference between them and us. On that side of the House, the people serve the economy. On this side of the House, the economy serves the people, and that is a window into our soul and what we are about. Thank you, Nikki Kaye, for that wonderful aphorism.

So if we’re going to look at the economy—something that the Opposition has been criticising us about—let’s look at some of the economic indicators. Our growth rate is slightly down, but it’s holding up well in comparison to our trading partners and it’s holding up well in comparison to the global headwinds. It’s a tough world out there at the moment, and we’re doing well enough in it. The farm-gate milk price is holding up reasonably well: between $6.25 and $7.25 a kilo, depending, but it’s doing quite well. Net Government debt is falling. We are in a better financial position. Unemployment is at an 11-year low. We are getting people into jobs, and, really importantly, Māori and Pasifika unemployment is down too. We are achieving something in that space. The median household income is up. It’s now over $100,000, so we’re doing well in that space.

And if we look at what’s going on with all this, we are actually seeing growing confidence in the business sector. Our services sector is continuing to expand at a greater rate than its long-term average, and there is more spending in the economy. Consumers are confident. The business sector is hiring staff. That’s what’s going on with that falling unemployment rate.

And just in the last few days, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research has released its consensus forecast for the next three years. Now, it’s polling all the bank economists; not talking to the person on the street necessarily, but trying to get that educated view on what is happening with the economy. In actual fact, it shows that bank economists expect that the economy will go from around about 2.3 percent GDP growth in 2019-20 to 2.7 percent in 2020-21. Now, maybe it would be better if it was higher, maybe not, but the fact is it’s doing well and it’s growing. Retail spending is increasing. Seasonally adjusted retail card spending rose 1.1 percent in August. All this shows an economy that is doing well. Perhaps it could do better, perhaps not, but it is by no means a disaster. In fact, it is a solid performance by this Government in terms of the economy, as Labour Governments always do. So this economy, despite what the Opposition is doing, is doing well.

Moving to the Budget, the Budget that is a window to our soul; it is an ambitious Budget. Why? It’s because it focuses on wellbeing. If we are what we measure, then we need to work out what to measure so that the Budget serves the people of this country. We have chosen this time to present a Wellbeing Budget where we focus on increasing not just GDP, not just the economic indicators but we look at what those economic indicators need to serve, and that is the wellbeing of New Zealanders. When we are asked what is transformational about our Budget, that is what is transformational about this Budget. Not just the dry numbers but what purpose those numbers serve. So that is one reason for why we are very, very proud of this particular Budget.

Like many of us, I want to focus in particular on what we are doing in mental health, because that is especially about the people, and this Budget had a huge emphasis on mental health. We all know that there cannot be a family in this country who is not affected by mental illness; some of us, quite severely so. When we were campaigning in 2017, there was a display that was going around the country: a pair of shoes for everyone who had committed suicide. It was devastating. It just showed how prevalent suicide is in this country. When we spoke to people, they told us that the thing they wanted us most to have a look at was mental health, because it was making a real difference to New Zealanders. And in this Budget, we have responded to that call from the electorate to work on the mental health of New Zealanders, and we have put in place a whole variety of actions to ensure that we do work to improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders through improving their mental health.

Let’s start with the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, which we talked about just last week. It was announced last week. Did you know that we used to have a Mental Health Commission? We used to have one.

💬 Hon Member: What happened there?

It was shut down in 2012. It was shut down. The previous Government shut down the Mental Health Commission.

💬 Tamati Coffey: That’s outrageous.

It is outrageous. This Government that cares about the people has set it back up again. We’ve got that Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission back in place. Why? It’s because of the need to focus on New Zealanders’ wellbeing.

In response to suicide, we have set up the suicide prevention office. Why? It’s because one suicide is one too many. And that suicide prevention office was explicitly endorsed by Mike King, the New Zealander of the Year. He praised us for that action, and said we really needed to get it going. It’s a really great action under that mental health care. We’re putting in place much greater support for young people to ensure that they thrive and that they are not debilitated by mental illness. The nurses in schools programme is designed, in part, to support the mental health of young people. The Piki pilot is helping 10,000 young people. The Mana Ake programme is in 219 primary and intermediate schools, working on helping young people with their mental health.

We’re helping about 170,000 New Zealanders through the roll-out of mental health providers in GP practices, so that when you or I, our brother, our mother, our employee, or our friend is in need, we go to our GP and that support for mental health is right there. It’s an incredibly important series of measures that shows that this Government is taking the wellbeing of New Zealanders seriously through mental health, and it will be measured. It will be measured through Treasury’s Living Standards Framework Dashboard, looking at the key indicators that show that New Zealanders are thriving. If we are what we measure, then we’re going to try to measure subjective wellbeing, we’re going to measure social connections, we’re going to measure civic engagement—all things that show that people are thriving and their mental health is thriving.

So what this Budget does is it tackles some of our long-term problems. It doesn’t brush them under the carpet or hope they’ll go away, or just, kind of, manage along, day to day, because managing is fine. It takes positive action to address our long-term problems, to put in place solutions that are going to last for 30 years, not just the next three.

After those nine long years of neglect under the National Government, we needed to take some serious action, and here it is in this Wellbeing Budget, which is not just about the dry measures of the economy, which is not just about how many dollars are spent here, there, or everywhere. This Budget is a transformational Budget that is focused on wellbeing and focused on wellbeing for all New Zealanders, because the economy serves the people. That is the soul on this side of the House. We are here for all New Zealanders. This window into our soul is one that I am so proud of.

Well, what a boring speech. I think that it looked like it had come from some PR from the ninth floor, actually.

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: No passion.

Yeah, no passion delivered. It was rather robotic. And if you’re going to be talking about something you really believe in, get into it. Show some passion.

So the question for me is: what do I talk about? You know, there are quite a few different issues. It could be the economy, and I’ve heard the Hon Paul Goldsmith’s talk about that. That’s not going well, you know. Every 1 percent drop in GDP is $3 billion of lost activity in the economy. That means fewer lattes, fewer people being employed, fewer people growing their businesses, taking on staff. Well, I can talk about that.

Nikki Kaye did a pretty good speech around education or certainly highlighted some of the issues there today. And then—oh, actually, I think I’ve got to talk about that wrecking ball, that wrecking ball called KiwiBuild, that slayer of reputations, that thing that has just highlighted one of the biggest issues about this Government, this combined Labour - New Zealand First and the Greens Government, which is that inability to actually do what you’re going to say you’re going to do, that ability to implement, that ability to deliver. That is the issue with this Government. I do not think there is a better example of that than what we’ve seen in KiwiBuild, and it’s wrong, because, actually, in New Zealand we wanted the Government to build some houses. We do need houses—we all recognise that—not only the houses for first-home buyers but the social houses, all that range of things. All New Zealanders wanted it and we wanted them to build houses because there is an issue. We recognise that.

But what have we ended up with? It’s hard to get a handle on it, but I think it’s 258 houses that have been built by this Government in 20 months—in 20 months.

Tim van de Molen: What was their target?

The original target—that’s right, Mr van de Molen. The original target—I think it was a thousand, wasn’t it, in the first year, and then 2,000 and then 5,000 and then 10,000. But it’s that slogan. I just heard another slogan before. It’s that slogan: 100,000 homes in 10 years.

This is the issue—this is the issue. They are not even going to get close to it. And, unfortunately, we’ve seen one Minister get shunted off this project because he was very good at claiming and making all these aspersions when he was in Opposition, but actually, in Government, it’s a lot different. And, actually, we’ve now ended up with a mess because, unfortunately, the worst thing that’s happened under this Government is that, by adopting this brand of KiwiBuild and putting so much store in it and then not delivering on it, unfortunately that brand has probably been destroyed. It’ll be a question for us in 2020—what we might do with that brand; whether in fact we want to take it forward and continue with it or whether in fact we need to rebrand it, because we do need to build houses, and we will be building houses.

The interesting thing is that I went to the Registered Master Builders’ Constructive forum last Thursday—

💬 Fletcher Tabuteau: Constructive forum? Are you sure that’s what it was called?

Yes, it was. It was, Mr Tabuteau. There were about 600 attendees. These were all people who are developers, large-scale builders, and contractors, and also smaller builders that, obviously, build a lot of houses. It was insightful because these people, after the last election, were hopeful. In fact, many of them said that they were hopeful, but a lot of the undercurrent—and some people were very explicit about it in their speeches, saying how disappointed they were with all the fine rhetoric that had been said up to and after the 2017 election. Where we are now, in 2019, and the absolute lack of clarity, the lack of delivery—and it was slightly sad, but the worst thing: I was there for the session when Ministers Twyford and Salesa were giving a speech about the Government’s objectives going forward. Mr Twyford talked very highfalutin about what they’re going to do around developing economic policy, and then Minister Salesa talked about what she was doing in the building construction industry. I’ve got to say—and I don’t wish it ill—it was actually embarrassing, and I know a number of people said that, and the media reports have said it subsequently.

There were two key issues. One was around procurement practices in general and how they’re carried out both by Government and also by territorial local authorities—and central government procures about $43 billion a year, just to put it in context. So that was the first question: how do we improve procurement practices? But the underlying and the overarching theme was this issue around how risk is allocated appropriately between parties—whether they be central government and the building firm and the developer, or architect and the designer. And this is something that all these people in the industry—and it’s a massive industry; 250,000 people employed in it. This was the central issue for the day. The Ministers were tested repeatedly, and, unfortunately, in many occasions, it showed up that our Ministers, and particularly the Hon Jenny Salesa, did not understand what special conditions were as part of a contracting arrangement. That is where risk allocation is made and assigned in a contract, and I could tell that the 600 people, unfortunately, found out that we do not have people that actually know what they’re talking about in detail about this industry—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: Just not competent.

That’s right; not competent. I think it’s unfortunate because we shouldn’t be having Ministers in that situation, because it is a huge, huge industry, and for that reason I was slightly—I was glad I was down the back; let’s put it that way.

What I would have expected to hear in this industry were things around what we are doing around the shortfall—bringing in and dealing with a shortfall of people in the industry. We need about another 50,000 to 80,000 people, and in figures supplied by the Hon Chris Hipkins, even he acknowledged there’s been only a very small portion. We train about 46,000 apprentices in New Zealand, but the change—the ripping out and the closing down of BCITOs, the building and construction industry training organisations—is something that we are fundamentally opposed to because this is an entity that trains half of our apprentices and does exceptionally well in terms of building the level of apprentices. This proposal to rip that apart and centralise it and have some bureaucrat running it is implacably opposed by us, and I know that many in the industry are very, very concerned about it.

The other issue I heard nothing about in the speeches is consenting issues, and we do have some fundamental issues with consenting. We have delays in terms of people getting building consents, we have delays in terms of getting resource consents, and we have delays in getting issuance of certificates of code of compliance. All of that is holding up the industry, holding up new developments, and if you wanted new houses to come on board, as a Minister that’d be one of the first things you’d focus on, because that’s where the biggest element of delay occurs in terms of starting and commencing projects.

I also didn’t hear anything from the Ministers about encouraging new products and technologies, and we’ve got a CodeMark system in New Zealand that the Australians—we used to do it jointly with the Australians.

💬 Fletcher Tabuteau: It’s still there. It’s OK.

They have now walked away from it. The Australians have walked away from it, Mr Tabuteau, and we do not have a CodeMark system that works well, and there are no initiatives around how we might improve it. I heard nothing about warranty statements from suppliers of products that are less risky, which is a key factor the industry is asking for—absolutely zilch from the Ministers because they haven’t done their homework.

Then I heard nothing about off-site manufacturing although there has been lots of rhetoric from this Government about off-site manufacturing. The only first attempt has, unfortunately, been the Stanley Group involvement with the 68 apartments in Māngere. We as a Government, as this Government should have done, should actually support that and underpin that industry quite significantly in terms of making sure that the scale of that industry could get up and running very quickly—but, again, silence.

The last issue, which, again, is most pertinent, is the one around contracting arrangements and looking after subcontractors. Again, just the issue has not been dealt with—not even discussed—and I don’t think that’s appropriate, because subcontractors need to be looked after. At least Nick Smith put in the retentions Act, which has gone some way to protecting them, but nothing from this Government, because it doesn’t know how to implement and deliver an outcome.

This is a split call. I call Fletcher Tabuteau—five minutes.

Unfortunately, it is a split call, but, look, I just want to say it’s great to see the heavy hitters sitting in the Opposition this afternoon giving their contributions to this meaty debate. It’s been fantastic. Mr Bayly, can I say that you have been the standout contribution of this afternoon. Actually, I do have to say that often you come down to the debating chamber and you feel like you have to raise your voice, and I say that because there the members opposite sit and they refuse to listen. Not only do they have their fingers in their ears, they refuse to listen to facts. So I wanted to very quickly go over a few facts in the House this afternoon and put it to them just how important these bills are.

Now, what I want to do is put that into context very quickly. I admit I missed the first half of this appropriations debate because I was in my office talking to some very concerned, good people who were talking to me about gangs in their region, in their home town, close to their homes. They are worried about gangs. I get angry when I have those conversations, because for nine years the Opposition, when they were in Government, told us they were being prudent and saving a dollar today. And, technically, that is exactly what they were doing. They were putting a dollar aside in their Budget and, technically, saving money. But what does that cost us today? I put it to this House that that dollar saved is costing New Zealanders exponentially in the money that must be invested now to combat these issues. This is exactly what this appropriations bill is having to deal with. It is having to deal with and combat the kind of 80s-style, bean-counting theory from the Opposition, who said that they are not a tax-and-spend Government. Well, they taxed, but they refused to spend it, and they made a commitment that they were going to give a tax cut to their mates. And all of this—all of these problems—we know would have continued.

So I am here to say today that this is an appropriations bill that focuses on and is about the wellbeing of New Zealanders. It is, essentially, what we have always said it would be: a Wellbeing Budget. We say that because we are tackling long-term issues facing New Zealanders, like mental health, child poverty, family violence, homelessness, and, I say, gangs and drugs in our street; a symptom of neglect from the Opposition. We’re doing all of that with a particular focus on our regions, which I am particularly proud of. Here’s the good news for the members opposite—these are the facts for the members opposite: we are balancing record levels of investment from this Government, and, actually, from business. I’m not sure if the Opposition remembers, but it was only a few months ago that the House noted investment from private business was at some of its all-time highest levels. We are maintaining fiscal responsibility, meaning we’re spending within that Budget that we set ourselves.

We are delivering a strong surplus at the same time. We are growing at a rate greater than the average of the OECD, and I put it for the members opposite, who don’t seem to understand long-run average forecasts: actually, this Government will see growth greater—I say it again—average growth greater than that Opposition party saw in their time in Government over the next few years. This is a Government that is delivering, and we’re doing that at the same time that we made a commitment to increase wages in the community, at the same time we’re experiencing record low unemployment.

The doom and gloom merchants opposite forecast that all hell and doom was about to break out because we were going to pay New Zealanders a fair, liveable wage, and we’re working on that trajectory. They said it would all fall apart. Businesses wouldn’t employ people. Yet here we are, the lowest unemployment levels in 11 years, and it’s forecast to continue for the foreseeable future. It is this Appropriation (2019/20 Estimates) Bill and Imprest Supply Bill which are helping this Government to achieve it. It is our policies, it is the hard work of our Ministers and Cabinet, and those outside, it is the hard work of everyone on this side of the House, and I tell you what: I’m incredibly proud to be part of it. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call in the appropriation Estimates debate, and, of course, this is about how the Government of the day chooses to spend taxpayers’ money, and they talk a big game. They’ve always talked about being a more kind and caring Government. But the reality is, this Government—Labour, the Greens, and New Zealand First—are failing to deliver for hard-working New Zealanders. I think it’s actually quite appalling, because what they’ve done in a whole range of areas—whether it’s in housing, whether it’s in child poverty, whether it’s in the wellbeing of Kiwi families—is they have, actually, you know, built up these incredibly false hopes, and, unfortunately, many Kiwi families now are starting to see the emptiness of those words. And, whether it’s KiwiBuild—and my colleagues, I know, have traversed this in detail, so I don’t intend to cover it much. But 100,000 houses—that was a big promise, and a promise that was made back in 2012.

We’ve seen also, in terms of families, an increase—15,500 more people on jobseeker benefit, half a million hardship grants, of which nearly 50 percent of those are for food. We’ve seen an increase—8,000 more children, living in benefit-dependent homes, which we know means that they are having a much harder life than we on this side would like them to. The other side said, “No one should need to be accommodated in a motel”. At the time that National introduced them, Labour said they were appalling and they were disgusting. So what do we have? Three thousand people now living in motels. We’ve also had the Minister Phil Twyford say that no one needs to live in a car this winter. Well, guess what! They’re all living in motels, and, actually, there are still people living on the streets and there are still people living in their cars.

So Labour have absolutely failed to deliver on their promises. So actually, you know, the majority of people want to be able to look after themselves and their families. They want to be in work. They want to have a roof over their head and they want to be able to afford to put petrol in their car, and food on the table. Unfortunately, two years into this Government, they’ve realised they can’t be trusted. They’ve realised they cannot be believed, because they are not delivering. So what is some of what’s going on? Some of it, of course, is what we’ve seen in terms of the increase in the cost of living, the fundamental basics around the increases in rent. It’s pretty hard to escape an increasing rent. I heard, unfortunately, a story, just recently, where both a landlord and their tenant were begging not to have to get the extra insulation standards, because they knew it was going to be an impact directly on rent. That was a landlord who didn’t want to have to put the rent up, and the tenant who didn’t want to have their rent increased.

So we’ve seen some very perverse results for families. Petrol; increase again in petrol tax. The Prime Minister says, oh, well, she’s appalled about the price of petrol right now. Well, actually, the Prime Minister tomorrow could reduce excise tax and relieve that burden for Kiwi households.

In terms of the number of jobs, we’ve also seen a significant reduction in the number of new jobs being created, and that has a massive impact on people who want to be in work, who can work, who are able to work and can’t. That’s incredibly frustrating for them and frustrating for their children. Again, if you think about the expectations and hopes that have been created, there’s 27,000 New Zealanders between the age of 18 to 24, that are currently on the jobseeker benefit—18- to 24-year-olds. The Government have dreamed up this initiative called Mana in Mahi. That was originally for 4,000 places. They kicked off with 124, and, unfortunately, a third of them dropped out in that first period of time. Now the Government’s reduced that number to 2,000, and that’s over four years.

So it’s about building up all these great expectations, only to have the Government of the day absolutely prick that bubble; it bursts, and what are people left with? They’re left with less hope, and more frustration at a Government who said, and promised, they would look after them. Actually, the most vulnerable New Zealanders are doing it pretty tough right now—and this is a Government that’s supposedly kind and caring.

So what are some of the things that were promised? Well, there’s a whole raft of them. The doctors visits were going to be $10 cheaper per doctor’s visit. For those families where they have rare disorders, there was going to be greater access to medicines for those rare disorders. Annual health checks for seniors; not delivered. There was going to be funding for early childhood education to have 100 percent qualified teachers; that’s not there. All students were going to have access to digital devices; again, not delivered. Increasing breast screening—that would be free up to the age of 74. There’s a whole list of things that were not delivered that were promised, and that’s a hell of a lot of people that are now feeling ripped off by this Government, because they have failed to deliver in so many different ways.

I do want to acknowledge the Government, though, for a couple of things, because they’ve seen sense in a number of National initiatives that they have continued to fund, whether it’s the transition support service for young people in care, He Poutama Rangatahi—which is for young people who are not in education, employment, or training—the Integrated Safety Response work for family violence, Housing First for those who are homeless. So I am pleased that all of those National initiatives, the Government has continued to fund. But there’s no secure funding for KidsCan, and KidsCan, as we know, have provided critical food for thousands of children across New Zealand. But no; that funding wasn’t delivered for a four-year period.

A lot of people say, “Well, you know, if this was National’s Budget, what would have been in it?” Well, I can tell you what would have been in it; National would have continued to make sure, through its Better Public Services targets, that the focus on Government agencies and taxpayer spending is on the things that matter—whether it’s reducing welfare dependency, because we know the number of children who live in benefit-dependent homes have the poorest outcomes over their lifetime; child hospitalisations; child harm and abuse would be minimized; crime victimisations were counted; the waiting times for social housing had targets; reoffending rates. These are the things that New Zealanders say matter to them, and yet not one of those things the Government is now measuring. If you look at health, for example, not only do they not measure it but they don’t report on it. As we’ve seen with the measles outbreak, the very people—the very children—that the Government of the day should be protecting the most are being let down, and that’s appalling. This Government is failing to deliver for the most vulnerable New Zealanders.

Now, National recognises through its social investment work that, actually, you’ve got to change lives, often, individual by individual, whānau by whānau, and you’ve got to deal with the cause, not the symptom. This side of the House is not interested in servicing misery. Our side of the House believes absolutely in the ability of New Zealanders to deal with the challenges that they are thrown in life. We do firmly believe that when people experience times of difficulty, they do expect others and the State to help to give them a hand up. But the important thing is we also recognise the need and responsibility of those people to work with the Government to help themselves to get back up on their own two feet, as well, and that those who can work should, and that is because, fundamentally, we have a belief in New Zealanders’ ability to rise up.

Unfortunately, the other side of the House has talked a big game in terms of people’s wellbeing and talked about being kind and caring, and over the last weeks and months we’ve seen absolutely the opposite: big talk, small results, very little action, lots of working groups, and, at the end of the day, some of their policies hurting the most vulnerable New Zealanders the most. Child poverty numbers are going up, suicide rates have gone up, homelessness has gone up, the number of people on benefit and jobless has gone up—these are statistics and results that I don’t think the Government should be proud of, and it’s fascinating that they are silent on these matters because, unfortunately, they know. They know that they have failed to deliver to the most vulnerable in our communities, and it’s a shame.

National believes in the opportunity for people to get ahead. Our social investment approach to change lives and actually improve outcomes for every New Zealander—

Order! This is a split call. I call David Seymour—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill and in opposition to this Budget.

For as long as New Zealand has been a country, the economy has been cyclical. It goes up and it tops out, and it goes down and it bottoms out. The previous Government took power at the bottom of an economic cycle and—surprise, surprise—for their term in Government, things mostly got better. This Government has inherited power at the top of an economic cycle, and, unfortunately for them, almost whatever they do, things will get worse. But that doesn’t mean that Government policy is irrelevant, or that there are not good economic policy choices and bad economic policy choices that make a difference to the wellbeing, the welfare, the income, and the future of New Zealanders, and I oppose this Budget on behalf of the ACT Party because it is a series of poor-quality choices. In fact, this Government’s two years in office has been characterised by poor public policy decisions.

What would this Government do to prepare for an economic downturn that would safeguard the welfare of New Zealanders? Well, it would do three things: first, it would stop beating the proverbial out of business and New Zealanders who want to get ahead and make a buck.

It’s not difficult to see examples of where this Government has not only failed to help grow productivity but has actively attacked it: the unconsulted, surprise ban on oil and gas exploration; the threatened fair-pay agreements, which would take labour relations back to the 1970s; the ban on foreign buyers of residential property, when this country for all of its history has struggled to attract capital and foreign investment; and, while not directly under control of this Government, the Reserve Bank’s threatened capital ratio adjustments, which could put down returns on savings and put up interest on borrowings and which risks putting this country over the edge. The market studies into sectors of the economy that have done nothing wrong, where the Commerce Commission tries to decide how much a particular business should pay to get petrol to one of the most remote areas on Earth—these are examples of things that this Government threatens or actually does all the time that beat the proverbial out of business, and the best thing that this Government could do is simply stop stopping New Zealanders from being productive and getting ahead.

But we could not only stop doing bad things to business; we could actually start doing good things. This Parliament could choose to have the fairest, most competitive, most aspirational tax system in the world. We could have a 17.5 percent single rate of company and income tax. That would be simpler to administer, it would be fairer because everybody would pay the same rate, and it would be competitive because it would attract investment and innovation activity to New Zealand.

What would be the impact of that on the Government’s coffers? Nine billion dollars—an amount of money that could be saved by stopping the Shane Jones corporate welfare machine, the middle-class vote-buying machine, and the current surpluses. The Government waste that saps the productivity of New Zealand could be reduced to achieve a single tax rate of 17.5 percent. That is an example of the kind of policy that this Government could have introduced in this Budget. It could have stopped constantly characterising New Zealanders as vulnerable and in need of help and somehow a client of the Government that must come along and solve all of their problems.

It could have said, “We are going to stop attacking business, and we are going to put in place tax policy that doesn’t triple the tax rate of people who go along and work, save, invest, and upskill themselves, but charges the same rate of income tax and a low 17.5 percent of company tax too for every $1 of personal and company income in New Zealand.” That would be a way to prepare for the coming economic downturn. But, sadly, the Government has done nothing remotely like it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Government has done lots, in contrast to that previous member, David Seymour, who seems to see the doom and gloom, and, obviously, things were rosy when he was part of the last Government. Unfortunately, he’s not, and under this Government, we’ve got a wellbeing Budget that is absolutely targeted at looking after the people of New Zealand.

As we say in Māori, “He aha te mea nui i tēnei ao? Māku e kī atu, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.” [“What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.”] It is people. It is people that we need to be focused on, and for that reason, under the leadership of Jacinda Ardern, this Government has actually pulled its socks up and started to deliver for the people of New Zealand so that they’ve got hope and aspiration.

We saw under the previous Government child poverty at its worst. We heard the terrible stories about the degradation of our hospitals and the degradation of our schools, and it’s in this Government that we’ve actually decided to do something about it. We’ve invested in our hospitals in an unprecedented way. We have invested in our schools to make sure that if we’re looking after our teachers and our students, and we support teachers as well in schools—if they’re doing the best they can to look after our children, then we’re better off as a community, as a society, and as New Zealand of the future. We’ve taken mental health seriously. We’ve improved child wellbeing, and we will continue to do that.

But also, as a Māori member of Parliament from a Māori electorate, anything that supports the aspirations of our Māori people is a great thing for New Zealand. We know, obviously, that so many of our Māori are incarcerated in our jails, and we thank our Minister of Corrections, Kelvin Davis, for actually putting a strategy together—Hōkai Rangi, it’s called—to ensure that we’re transitioning our Māori people out of that place. It is absolutely foreign, the idea of jail, to traditional Māori society, and that’s why we’ve decided to turn that around. An active group of experts in the field have got together, worked out how we’re going to get our Māori people out of prisons so that they don’t just walk out the front door and come back in around the back door again, but that we’re actually making long-term change—long-term change. That’s something that you’ll keep hearing from this side of the House because it’s something that we’re focused on as a Government: long-term change. It’s for that reason that we’ve had record levels of investment into family violence and record levels of investment into sexual violence. These are things that—the call has come from our communities out around New Zealand. Where I come in Rotorua, I won’t disclose the number, but we have a significant amount of domestic violence calls calling out every single week; it is an absolute concern. There is nothing but praise coming from the people in our community that see that our Government is focused on making sure that we’re absolutely tackling the long-term challenges that this country faces.

When it comes to looking after our families: Whānau Ora, yes it was brought to our Government, actually, by Dame Tariana Turia many years ago and it’s still got legs—it’s absolutely still got legs. We were criticised for being the Government that was going to do away with it, but no, we saw the good in it, to the point where we’ve actually funded it in a way that it’s never been funded before: $80 million over four years. That’s going to make an incredible difference because those navigators, those people that go out into the households, the hard-to-reach communities, the gang houses, the places where nobody else wants to go, they’re going to be able to get in there and try and make a real difference. They couldn’t do it before because they didn’t have the resources for it, but, under our Government, we’ve undertaken the Whānau Ora review. We’ve reformed things and we’ve actually put our money where our mouth is on that as well.

When it comes to supporting our families—he tangata, our whānau—what we’re doing is we’re making sure that we relieve some of the pressures off the wallets so, when it comes to sending kids to school, they no longer have to stump up with the “voluntary” school donation, which we all know was never really voluntary anyway. Parents had to pay out for the school donation, and there were some horrific cases that were coming forward about kind of being shamed into paying your school donation. So, thankfully, this Government’s taken the cost of that.

Ending NCEA fees: knowing that that was a barrier to our young people being able to succeed in education. It’s our Government that has ensured that, actually, we’re taking care of the NCEA fees because, why? Absolutely, we have an aspiration for free education. Education is the thing that’s going to turn a child who is growing up in impoverished circumstances into a young achiever, into somebody that can actually be a circuit-breaker for their whānau. So I have got no problems with the direction that we’re travelling in as a Government to ensure that education does remain free, and for that reason fees-free tertiary education is absolutely something that I will continue to crow about as I go out there and I talk to our people. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you very much. Well, I’m looking forward to Mr Coffey continuing to crow about fees-free tertiary education—possibly the stupidest public policy decision in a very long list of this Government. The fees-free tertiary education has actually seen fewer students go into tertiary education. It has seen by far the most overwhelming benefits of that education go to wealthy, white, middle-class kids. It’s not poor Māori and poor Pasifika that are benefiting from fees-free tertiary education. The Government’s own figures released just last week, I think it was, show that actually the benefits are not going to them. They’re being captured by middle-class kids from Remuera and Epsom and central Wellington, which is exactly what National had said would always be the case: that there is a case for helping people to get to university and survive through university and to succeed at university, but the case for that is not a massive handout from the taxpayer to increase the subsidies on an already extremely generous student support system. The way to do that is targeted scholarships; it’s things like the First Foundation that I’ve had a little bit to do with which is a fantastic organisation helping students who would struggle to go to university achieve and get there in the first place. It’s not an argument for an untargeted free-for-all, which is exactly what fees-free is.

So Tamati Coffey, well, frankly, I’m looking forward to hearing him campaign up and down the campaign trail next year, because New Zealanders, I think, know that fees-free is a failure, just like everything else in the so-called year of delivery from the Government. I mean, it was just comical that the Prime Minister, frankly, started her year—I mean it probably sounded good in the focus groups, sitting around there with her advisers and said, “Oh, we’ll make it the year of delivery. Last year was the year of the working group; this year we’ll make it the year of delivery.” And she probably meant well by it; she always does mean well. But, of course, what she wasn’t counting on was the incompetence of her own self and the incompetence of her colleagues, and their total inability to deliver.

Tamati Coffey talked a lot about child poverty. And I want to talk about child poverty, because this is the raison d’être, apparently, allegedly, of this Government. Apparently, why Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern got into politics in the first place was to eradicate child poverty. Well, the facts are these: that child poverty fell drastically under National’s watch, and that’s in complete rebuttal and contrary distinction to what Tamati Coffey said. The facts are these: in 2008, there were 170,000 children living in material hardship in New Zealand. Those numbers increased during the global financial crisis (GFC) to 220,000 in 2011. Then something quite remarkable happened. Over the next five years, the number of children living in material hardship all but halved down to 135,000 in 2016. What caused that, members? Well, what caused that was strong economic growth, rebounding out of the GFC at low rates. And then, of course, we had the Christchurch earthquake to deal with as well, but by 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, the New Zealand economy was growing 3, 3.5, and 4 percent per year. And, of course, wages were growing at double the rate of inflation—wages were growing at double the rate of inflation. What that means is over time, families get ahead. And, of course, we cut taxes in 2010 as well. We incentivised earning and—

💬 Marja Lubeck: That’s why they ended up living on the streets?

That’s why what? Sorry, I honestly couldn’t hear you. I mean, when wages increase at double the rate of inflation, families get ahead and, of course, they’re able to provide more their children.

💬 Marja Lubeck: And that’s why they lived on the streets and on the bridges and in cars?

I’ve just talked about children living in material hardship halving between 2011 and 2016, Marja Lubeck. If you actually supported proper urban planning reform and got on board with that then we’d be able to do something about homelessness and be able to do something about our housing market as well. But I look forward to you supporting urban planning reforms and getting rid of the Auckland urban boundary one day in the future!

Of course, the previous National Government has left this legacy for the current Government, and what do we see? Well, what we see in the Budget we’re talking about and we see in the appropriations bill is an economic outlook stretching off into the distance that is a gloomy one. Yep, of course some of it is to do with the international challenges that we’re facing: the global headwinds, to use a sort of clichéd phrase, that are confronting New Zealand as a small economy—again, to use a cliché, a cork bobbling around on the ocean at the bottom of world and all that stuff.

But actually, most of it is self-inflicted. Most of it is economic incompetence demonstrated by this Government; uncertainty created by 300 or more working groups. The uncertainty created by what’s going to happen with the reregulation of the labour market. You won’t hear much about that any more from the Government. They got rid of the 90-day trials and that was all very easy, but all these grand plans of the national awards and the reregulation of the labour market by old mate Jim Bolger and the back-to-the-1970s approach to industrial relations, which, by the way, was a time of economic disaster for New Zealand, when productivity massively slumped and the economy went to the toilet. So why we would want to return to those days led by Labour, no one knows.

So business confidence is down and consumer confidence is down, and there is no plan. The economy is slowing. And the Government will say, “Oh, well, we’ve got these industry transformation plans.” I mean, I kid you not; it’s like something out of some sort of Stalinist-style 1970s five-year plan. We’ve got the industry transformation plans. Don’t worry—David Parker says, “Trust us, I know what I’m doing.” Has there ever been a more depressing and worrying phrase ever uttered by a New Zealand Government Minister? “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”, says David Parker. Well, New Zealanders will judge whether or not—I mean, to be fair to him, he was actually saying it about—well, not to be fair, but just to point out he was saying it about water quality and agriculture. He’s so proud of himself, he would say it about the economy as well, and he’d say it about his industry transformation plans. I can’t even believe I’m saying it; they’re so comical as to be unbelievable.

So this is the year of delivery so far for the Government—thankfully for us, disastrously for them. It has been a year of disaster. If you look through the manifesto and you look through the portfolios and you look through the Estimates of what the Government is doing, it’s very hard to find something that is actually going well. KiwiBuild—well, I mean even the Government doesn’t talk about KiwiBuild anymore. Their heads are down, they know what I’m saying is correct; even they don’t talk about KiwiBuild anymore. We had the reset, that’s gone off into the long grass, the tumbleweeds are coming. We don’t talk about that anymore because that was an utter disaster.

I’ll tell you what’s going to be next: the next thing to be reset is transport. We saw the first sign of it today in question time when Phil Twyford—the man who says we’ve over-invested in roads for decades—was forced to his feet to admit that the Government is reconsidering its allocation of money into rapid transit. Now, there’s a story there about why they are having to do that, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: it’s a story of incompetence, because that’s the running theme with these guys. But they are reallocating money or they’re going to reallocate money, let’s face it, from rapid transit back into State highways. Now, we welcome that because projects like the Tauranga Northern Link, and Penlink up in Marja Lubeck’s electorate—well, not her electorate but the area she claims, she’s a list MP—

💬 Hon Member: Where she lives.

Where she lives—all of these roads that are shovel-ready. That’s not my language; that’s the language of Treasury—shovel-ready, market-ready roads, all of them that are ready to go. The Tauranga Northern Link, for example, was funded, consented, and out for procurement in one of the fastest growing areas in the country, one of the most dangerous sections of State highway in the country, and it was cancelled by Labour. So we welcome the money going back into State highways. Our point is: what was Phil Twyford doing for two years fluffing around by putting money into rapid transit?

Now we come to the incompetence, and I’ll end my speech on it because that’s the theme of this Government. Rapid transit—they’ve put all this money into it. Fuel taxes are going up, petrol taxes are rising, and we’ve got the Auckland fuel tax—all this money going into rapid transit. The light rail, a slow tram down Dominion Road—when’s it going to be built? Jacinda Ardern and Phil Twyford say, “We know it’ll be built by 2020.”. What do we find out last week or the week before? We find out no spades in the ground till 2021. This is an incompetent, useless Government and I can’t wait for them to be thrown out of office in a year or so’s time.

Well, it’s always a delight to be able speak on behalf of our Government’s Budget priorities, because one thing that this—why the heads are up on this side of the House and why they’re all looking a little bit doomy and a little bit gloomy on the other side the House is because they still haven’t worked out that they are in Opposition. I heard this afternoon from the shadow Attorney-General, Tim Macindoe—he still refused to believe that they lost the election last year. So I know it’s hard for that side of the House to grapple with the fact that they can’t give a thousand buck - tax cut to their mates; they didn’t get that one over the line, the electorate didn’t like it. They’re still whinging two years on that they are not on this side of the House.

💬 Erica Stanford: I can’t hear you, what?

You can’t hear me? Do you need me to speak up? Let me speak up, because I’ll tell you something: something about the other side of the House, too, that kind of got me and I had to have a wee giggle was the member Andrew Bayly. He started out with a huff and a roar and he said, “Woah! They’ve got no enthusiasm on that side of the House!”, and then towards the end he just whispered. He was whispering as he closed his speech because he had nothing to say, he ran out of puff at about four minutes. We had to lean in to hear what he was saying, because they didn’t have anything to say but that they were gutted that they didn’t get tax cuts for their rich mates over the line when they were last in Government.

But the reality is—and the last member, he wanted to talk about some facts. He wanted to talk about facts when it came to child poverty, because I’ll tell you: on this side of the House, we’re absolutely proud of the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern’s drive to bring down child poverty here in Aotearoa New Zealand. But let’s turn to some facts, because he wanted to talk about child poverty rates in totality. Well, I’ll give you some facts about when that member and his government—when they were last in Government, we had 135,000 children living in material hardship in 2017, 80,000 New Zealand children were living in severe poverty, and we had 290,000 children living in homes that were low-income. What the Office of the Children’s Commissioner went on to say in their report in 2017 was that, comparatively, children in 2017—27 percent of them were living in families experiencing income poverty, in contrast to the 1980s which was only around about 14 percent.

The reality is that that side of the House, when they had their chance in Government to radically make some transformational shifts they blew it, and now they’re sitting on that side of the House throwing stones. Well, throwing stones gets you nowhere. I’ll tell you something else: under this Government, just this week, we saw that the communities that they attest to stand on the side of, the communities that they are going around whipping up a frenzy in, communities like ours down there in Lawrence, over there in the Wairarapa, at my home in the East Coast, rural communities, provincial communities; the reality is that our communities who thrive on primary industries—primary export revenue is at a record high, $9 billion under this Government in export revenue. Under this Government—36 percent increase in dairy exports, 34 percent increase in forestry exports, 22 percent increase in horticulture exports, 11 percent increase in seafood exports, and 10 percent increase in meat and wool revenue. All the while, that side of the House is running around, up and down the country attesting to how doomy and gloomy it is because of this Government. But I’ll tell you what: under the leadership of the Hon Damien O’Connor, the Hon David Parker, the Hon Grant Robertson, and a raft of our members on the executive, on this side of the House, we stand right beside those rural communities.

Now, if I may turn to the Wellbeing Budget at hand. This is a third reading that marks the end, if you will, to enable this appropriation for this Budget to go through. We commenced with the Hon Grant Robertson, in May, delivering what became known as a world-first Wellbeing Budget. Now, this here, this Wellbeing Budget, what it does is it marks a transformational shift in the way that we prioritise New Zealanders, in the way that we measure and benchmark the indices of what makes life worth living. It was Robert Kennedy in 1968 that talked about GDP—that it failed to measure what makes life worth living. Well, this Budget goes on to ensure that we are investing in areas that New Zealanders have been crying out for attention for for nine long years under the previous Government. Now, what the finance Minister, the Hon Grant Robertson, decided to do, he was going to make investments not just for the short term, three years, but he was making investment in New Zealanders for the long term. Now, what that meant—in mental health, $1.9 billion investment. Why mental health? Well, because it didn’t matter where you lived, it didn’t matter what way you voted in the last election, and it didn’t matter whether you were old or whether you were young, mental health illness does not discriminate amongst anyone. What the constituents across New Zealand were calling out for at the last election—but for many years prior to then, it fell on deaf ears under the last Government, because in 2012 they shut down the Mental Health Commission because there was no mental health crisis. But the reality is there was, and the reality is there is. The reality is that on this side of the House we know that as an indices of wellbeing, we must see the investment into mental health. We had to increase the investment into mental health in order to redistribute and bring about a restoration—

I’m sorry to interrupt the member, but it has come time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

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

Debate interrupted.