Budget Debate

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s good to be back in the House and speaking on this year’s Budget, aka Rebuilding Together. Now, it’s not the Budget that Grant Robertson expected that he would be delivering in 2020, but it is absolutely the Budget that New Zealand needs now. At the time of a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, history will record that this Government took decisive action not only to fight the virus but to protect jobs, incomes, and businesses. Alongside that, we took the view that the best economic response to this crisis was always a strong public health response—and when you turn on the TV news and you see what’s happening in countries around the world, that is unquestionably true. We went hard and we went early, and, thanks to the team of five million, now is the time to start rebooting the economy and building the recovery. The challenge—[Interruption]

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! It’s very difficult for the Minister. Carry on, Minister; I was just getting a bit of quiet for you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The challenge now is, surely, that this country has to take the same level of focus and discipline that it applied to fighting the virus over the first two months since we went into lockdown and apply that same measure of resolve to the economic recovery.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, since our health system has been supporting us through this time of COVID-19, it’s appropriate that we support the health system. Budget 2020 delivers the biggest ever increase in funding to the health system; it’s also, importantly, had additional funding for around 153,000 more surgeries and procedures, radiology scans, and specialist appointments to help clear the COVID-19 backlog. Budget 2020 continues this Government’s record of tackling the legacy of neglect and underfunding that we inherited in the public health system.

Last week, the Government’s west Auckland MPs had the pleasure of hosting the Minister of Finance, the Hon Grant Robertson, in a public meeting—a Zoom and Facebook Live session—about the Budget. One of the queries that was raised by Margaret in that session was about services at Waitakere Hospital. She said that she wanted Waitakere Hospital to have all of the services and the status that North Shore Hospital does, which is also in the Waitematā DHB. Well, good news for Margaret: the Budget put around $300 million into the Waitematā DHB, and a good share of that will go to the Waitakere Hospital—something that myself and other Government MPs in west Auckland strongly support.

Some other feedback that we had during the Facebook Live session with the finance Minister came from Leigh, who said that she was so pleased to see the restoration of funding for adult education after it was decimated by the former National Government a decade ago. It is a very, very popular announcement: a $16 million boost to adult and community education in the Budget. The new funding will give 11,000 New Zealanders the opportunity to take up adult and community education, which will involve a modern approach to rebuilding and reinventing night classes—something that our communities treasured but was taken away from them. And, of course, it’s particularly important now given that so many people in the job market will be looking for an opportunity to get back into education and to retrain.

Tevita—you know who you are, Tevita—said it was fantastic to note that $36 million was being put up to support community groups in Budget 2020. A specific focus of this Budget allocation is to help Māori, Pacific, refugee, and migrant communities to access this fund to support grassroots work. That’s really important in west Auckland, because our community is so diverse—very big Māori communities, Pacific, other new migrant communities. They will treasure the extra resources being put into these community groups. And, of course, those organisations play a crucial role in supporting the most vulnerable people in responding and adjusting to the shock caused by COVID19.

West Auckland is, of course, the home of small business. A few days ago, I did a Facebook Live panel discussion with the Central Park Henderson Business Association, and the leaders of that association made it very clear in that discussion just how important the wage subsidy scheme has been to keep workers in work and businesses in business. The wage subsidy scheme has supported businesses, from large ones in my electorate like Tasti, the snack bar manufacturer and exporter in Te Atatū Peninsula who employ more than 200 local people in their factory there, to the family who run my local fish and chip shop.

We followed that up with a $1.4 billion injection into skills and apprenticeships. If there are two things that west Auckland needs at the moment, it’s support for jobs and for training, and skills and apprenticeships. This could not have been received more warmly in my community. That injection into skills and training will financially incentivise and support businesses to keep apprentices on during these difficult economic times—that’s absolutely essential. It will also ensure that some trade training and apprenticeships will be free in targeted and selected industries. One of those will be construction. I’m sure another will be retail. Those two industries are critically important for people in West Auckland—a lot of jobs in those two sectors.

We’ve also put support packages in place, in the response to COVID-19, to save jobs in tourism and in aviation—two of the sectors that were hardest hit and earliest hit. We’re also doubling our assistance to exporters. That’s a really important part of the COVID recovery plan. It has to be export-led. We need the jobs that our big exporters generate—particularly in the regions—and the foreign exchange. Those are the big industries that are going to get us through the next few years. We are doubling our assistance through NZ Trade and Enterprise—NZTE—a fantastic Government agency that works directly with thousands of New Zealand firms, helping them to lift their export performance.

At the smaller end of the scale, for small to medium sized enterprises, another part of the assistance package for small businesses has been $10 million to help them hone their e-commerce skills. We saw this during the level 4 and level 3 lockdown periods. So many businesses reached for e-commerce as a way that they could keep operating, keep looking after their customers, and keep their staff at work. Many have discovered that, actually, that can become a successful and productive part of their business model. They can reach more customers more efficiently, and so directly helping those small businesses with e-commerce is, I think, one of the best and most targeted things we could do.

As economic development Minister, I’m working with the film industry to get productions back under way in west Auckland. I’m pleased to say that a number of the big American studios are very keen to resume production, and there are a number knocking on our door to come here and start new productions. That’s also something to celebrate in west Auckland, because it means literally billions of dollars of investment over the coming years, and hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs directly and indirectly supporting these big international screen productions.

During our Facebook Live session with the Hon Grant Robertson, Heather said that it was great news about the school lunches programme. The expansion of the free and healthy school lunch programme was part of a whole package of initiatives designed to really support some of our poorest and neediest communities during the economic crisis. The expansion of the programme will see around 200,000 extra Kiwi kids get a free lunch every school day. It’s not just good for the kids; it’s estimated that this policy will create around 2,000 jobs in those communities. I know, in west Auckland, in some of our neediest schools, parents and staff in those schools come together to provide nutritious food for the students that need it to ensure that they can learn. This is a great policy—no wonder it’s so popular.

Lynette from Sport Waitākere welcomed the package for sports and recreation, in our Facebook Live discussion, and pointed out that, actually, since COVID-19, much of the funding for the sport and community sector has dried up, putting sports under real strain. The Government—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.

Look, New Zealand’s facing a great economic challenge right now. I have every confidence—and we on this side of the Parliament have every confidence—that New Zealanders can overcome the challenge and get back on track and restore ourselves to prosperity, and for New Zealanders to have the opportunity to live the lives that they want to lead, looking after themselves and their families, having opportunities for good, sustainable work, and getting on with it. So New Zealanders are resilient, and I have no doubt that we will get on top of the challenges that we face.

This Budget, however, will probably help in some degree, but not as much as it could have. When we look at the Budget figures announced on 14 May, what did we see? We saw the prospect of an extra $140 billion of debt. So, at the moment, New Zealanders have about $60 billion of net debt—$60 billion—and that $60 billion is going to go up to $200 billion—an extra $140 billion of debt. Then we’ll see unemployment rising an extra 150,000 people—150,000 people losing their jobs over the next few months. You can imagine the impact that that has on the lives of New Zealanders, their families, their communities up and down the country, including the East Coast and all about. The impact on those lives will be significant; so we want to reduce that impact as much as we can. So the only relevant questions are: are we making it worse than we need to, and how do we get out of it? Because everybody accepts that all around the world, the COVID crisis has led to an economic challenge. Many countries are grappling with it; in some, it’s still getting worse. New Zealand has got through the health crisis relatively well. Now we need to focus on the economic crisis.

There are three things that could be making it worse. One is being too slow to open up. We just heard yesterday that the Government’s going to take a month to figure out whether we can come out of level 2. Each passing week adds significantly to the costs that we sustain. So our strong view is that we should look to open up as quickly as we can. We should have an absolute focus on getting the international students back—a major industry, used to employ 55,000 New Zealanders, created huge jobs and opportunities. We should have an absolute focus on getting them back for the second semester, and not just letting it drag on. We should have an absolute focus on getting the trans-Tasman bubble up and going to save our tourism industry, get those people back. We should be taking the attitude that we shouldn’t be focused on what we can’t do but focused on what we can do, and allowing it to happen.

Second thing is that we can make it worse by not helping small business, particularly, stay afloat during an extraordinary crisis where they’ve had seven weeks with no income, no revenue, no opportunity to do their business and sell to people. The extraordinary thing is that, with all the billions of dollars announced in this Budget, and billions and billions of dollars spent, they have not chosen to get any direct cash into the hands of those small businesses. Sure, there’s been the wage subsidy, which has gone to workers and employees, and people have been grateful for that, and there’s been the prospect of all sorts of loans, but when you’re a small business struggling to stay alive, the prospect of taking more debt on is not all that appealing. That’s why National has argued for getting cash into the hands of those businesses, and we just haven’t had any response from the Government on that.

And then, finally, you can make it worse by continuing on with nice-to-have spending that might have made sense in the good times before this crisis. If you just carry on with that, you add to the overall debt mountain that future generations are going to have to pay for. And what we didn’t see in this Budget—nowhere did we see anywhere in this Budget any significant attempt to reprioritise spending away from things that might be nice to have in the good times.

So what we see is a fundamental contradiction opening up in this Government. So, for the first two years—for the first two years—they spent the entire time talking about nine years of neglect under the previous Government. Then, in the third year, they spend their entire time saying, as Grant Robertson, the finance Minister, said, “We’re in good shape. We’ve got the lowest debt in the world.” Now, those two things don’t actually go together very well, because we’re only in good shape right now, right here in New Zealand, from a debt point of view, because the previous National Government dug us out of the hole—a $50 billion hole—in the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes, where we had to borrow $50 billion. And, after that, the previous National Government, led by John Key and Bill English, worked hard, diligently, in a disciplined way, getting back on track, getting on top of that debt and reducing it so that this Government could inherit debt in good shape.

At not a single point did the Opposition—then, as it was, the Labour Party—support any of those moves. They complained and they grizzled and they opposed it all the way. So, for the first two years, they talk about nine years of neglect, and then, for the third year, they talk about the lowest debt in the world and how we’re in good shape. That underscores the complete absence of any coherence in what they’re saying. It also represents the fact that this Government and this Budget show no clear path to get back on track, to get on top of the debt. It just continues to balloon further and further into the future.

So how do we get out of the challenge? Well, first, we’ve got to open up the economy, focus on tourism, focus on international education, look for opportunities for people to work. Secondly, we’ve got to get cash into the hands of those business people that are struggling; as National has suggested, returning GST. There’s billions of dollars being spent on catching possums, lots of money spent on the railways, thanks to Winston Peters and his friend from the Far North, but not much in the way of helping businesses directly.

Third, we’ve got to fire up private sector investment, because it’s private sector investment that will drive growth and opportunities for New Zealanders. It’s small-business people and large-business people taking a punt, saying, “OK, I’m going to reinvest in my business. I’m going to hire that person. I’m going to take a risk and start a new venture.” It’s private sector investment that will drive the growth and restore the economy. So we need to have a focus on reducing the regulatory burden that they face. Unbelievably, in the middle of the COVID crisis, this Government pressed ahead and increased the minimum wage when businesses had no revenue. Now, any Government that does that has no idea. Of course, the primary purpose of economic policy is to increase wages, but it has to be based on the ability of a business to pay those wages.

The other thing is you need to have the investment flowing. Associated with this Budget have been very tight rules around foreign investment, where it makes it very difficult for even the smallest amount of inward investment to come in and save businesses. So, if you’ve got a shop, you’re in trouble, you’re struggling to survive, you’ve got a brother or sister overseas who wants to contribute, well, now, according to this Government, you’ve got to go through a notification process and you’ve got to wait 10 days; you’ve got to get lawyers involved, no doubt. It becomes difficult, and it makes it more difficult for businesses to survive and get the capital they need to grow.

Fourth point is we’ve got to continue to invest in quality infrastructure, and no doubt—we’ve just heard from Phil Twyford previously, Minister of Transport and infamous for the lack of delivery on KiwiBuild; now equally infamous for the lack of delivery on light rail down Dominion Road; thirdly, infamous for coming in as transport Minister, cancelling all the roads that National had on the plans, because Julie Anne Genter did not want to give in to the “car fascists”, and he felt we’d over-invested in roads. Two years later, he started to build those roads again, having wasted 2½ years. That same Phil Twyford will be standing there saying, “We’re going to invest in infrastructure. Trust us.”

Well, no New Zealanders have any confidence in the ability of this Government to deliver infrastructure. They are great at announcing it; they are world class at announcing it. The Prime Minister—you cannot fault her ability to announce infrastructure projects, and you can’t fault the ability of Shane Jones to announce all sorts of infrastructure projects. He’s announced his roundabout up at Waipapa in the first week—way back in the hot summer of February 2018. Still haven’t built it—still haven’t built it. There are a few cones that have been put up, but nothing else has happened. So they’ll announce infrastructure till the cows come home and there’ll be shovels ready—there’ll be shovels and all that sort of stuff—but no New Zealanders have any confidence in their ability to deliver it.

Finally, we need to invest in skills to help New Zealanders retrain and re-equip themselves for the modern world and for the changed world post - COVID-19. Yes, there’ll be a lot of New Zealanders saying, “Oh, well, good. They’re spending $1.6 billion on apprentices.” But that is this Government to a T. Big announcement, no detail, no plan, and, in the meantime, Chris Hipkins has gone and turned that whole sector upside down, in a state of chaos and dysfunction. How on earth they’re going to actually deliver all the apprentices that they’re talking about is beyond me, and it’s beyond anybody here. So lots of big talk.

So this Budget: big Budget—$62 billion of extra spending. As Professor Gemmell, one of New Zealand’s leading economics professors noted, the $20 billion - plus of unallocated recovery fund can be strategically dropped into the election battle as further subsidy extension and other vote-targeting sweeteners. I do hope that he’s mistaken there, and I do hope this Government will show some discipline over the next couple of months and ensure that future generations don’t carry any further burden than they have to, and that we can get back on track. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

That was Pāora, ko te Sky Tower taku whare, ko Ngāti Epsom taku marae, ko Māngere sewage pond taku moana, ko Pāora tōku ingoa.

[That was Pāora, the Sky Tower is my ancestral home, Ngāti Epsom is my village, Māngere sewage pond is my ancestral body of water, Pāora is my name.]

That was the list member based in Epsom who bears the now Māori-fied name “Pāora”, which reminds us of Paul from the Bible. Paul was struck blind for three days; this Paul has been blind for three years—intellectually inert, vocally mute, and, sadly, spiritually very negative—failing to recognise that this Budget lays down a handsome array of opportunities for community, for business, for international investment, and, indeed, for domestic employment.

Let’s take a small part of the Budget associated with infrastructure. Now, infrastructure has been blighted for far too long by red tape, excessive delay, and processes that may have made sense in a time of economic surplus but now must be trimmed. They must be shortened and they must be rationalised in order for the $3 billion set aside—that’s before we get to the $20 billion that the Minister of Finance has wisely sequestered for future developments. The $3 billion will be dealt to by the Cabinet and will identify those projects that will add momentum to people’s need to create jobs, to absorb the slack labour, and those firms that are ready to go in the small to medium sized enterprise sector—those projects that can move with pace, timeliness—because I accept, on the odd occasions where Mr Goldsmith has made a sliver of sense, that it has taken too long for a number of our roading projects, rail projects, to get up and get galloping.

And, indeed, the Opposition infrastructure spokesperson has made the point that the Resource Management Act (RMA) changes are overdue. But, deep down, we don’t have the luxury of waiting incessantly for these projects, which is why that part of the Budget has as a companion piece the work that Mr David Parker is pursuing in revamping the RMA. There is more work to be done in the application of the Public Works Act and, in addition to that, the Building Act. Both of those, I have no doubt, will enjoy the refining, soothing qualities of bureaucratic reform in the not too distant future, preferably before the election.

Let me come back to another key piece of the Budget. Now, often it’s unkindly said about the former Speaker Sir Lockwood Smith that he presided over the death of apprenticeships and vocational training in New Zealand. It’s wrong to blame that single individual, and he was the Minister of Education. He was implementing the policies of the time. If there is one awful error that was made back in the early 1990s, it was to downgrade the significance of that type of training and uplift the significance of university-orientated training. One of the great contributions of this Budget is that fees will be met, money will be available for people wanting to move into education, the tertiary sector or to retrain, because infrastructure and housing are going to be key ingredients as we search out ways to expand economic activity to make up for the loss of income associated with the diminution of international tourism and, indeed, international education.

I see two types of international education myself. I do believe international education has a tremendous amount to offer with those kids that are coming here and going to secondary school. It actually expands the knowledge, the experience, and the confidence of our Kiwi kids when they meet, look, learn, and consult with our international students. And, indeed, universities are able to expand their services for Kiwi kids by attracting highly paying international students. But where I draw the line is where we have dodgy language schools that really have paraded as educational institutions where, sadly, too often they’d be nothing more than visa factories. So, in that sense, no one in this House should look for an early return to that type of education, because many of the unfortunate souls attracted to New Zealand to study in that context have been abused and they’ve been used and they’ve actually been a source of cheap labour fodder by unscrupulous employers. Those days, as a consequence of COVID thinking, are over.

Now, let me return to the Budget. During the course of the Budget urgency period, we introduced an overdue small piece of legislation to deal with forestry registration of advisers and log traders, otherwise known as “log mongers”. I won’t say too much about that bill, because it’s still at the select committee, other than to share with the House that, if we are going to diversify the sources of revenue in our economy, we need to turbocharge those parts of the economy where we can rely upon our own natural resources and invest and expand in a better mix of goods and services. Now, admittedly, a lot of our raw material does go, at the moment, to China. That’s not surprising from the time that the Helen Clark Government negotiated and bedded down the free trade deal with China—a historic and extraordinary development. Sadly, it has left too many of our commodity traders, such as the woebegone crayfish traders, in a situation that, once that tap is turned off, they have nowhere else to go. So one of the great contributions that will come, post-COVID, from that small piece of forestry reform will be to broaden the markets, given that we’ll have a richer array of products coming out of our own country to lessen our reliance on commodity trading with China.

However, we should value the economic relationship with China. It is very important, but we must address our own economic sovereign interests, which is why later today we will be dealing with the overdue reform that Mr David Parker is shepherding through to ensure that, as a consequence of COVID, our country does not lose the ownership of strategically important industries, firms, and enterprises by tightening up the Overseas Investment Office criterion, not to prevent overseas investment but to ensure that it contributes to deepening our ability to survive in an increasingly turbulent world.

One of the features of the Budget has been the focus and attention shown to ensuring that Pasifika and Māori endeavour is not marginalised. But I have a message: we have zero tolerance, we have zero willingness in the party that I belong to, to acquiesce or to encourage any growth in the mistaken beliefs ideologically driven by the iwi leaders group that they have a role to play in either vetoing, consenting, allocating, or rationalising any funding out of our Government to achieve better outcomes for water quality, better outcomes for resource management, better outcomes for farming. I say to those iwi leaders: go back and ensure you look after your own rangatahi before you try and eclipse the status and the experience of those Māori that are already in Cabinet. Any iwi leader who wants to eclipse the role of parliamentarians: hang up your rūnanga spurs, join the fray, stand for election. Otherwise, get out of the way.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, that member who’s just resumed his seat, Shane Jones, has clearly missed his calling in the Southern Baptist church in Alabama! That was an interesting contribution, and I see that he’s pleased with my suggestion that he has missed his calling. But, actually, this is quite a serious business.

We’ve got a Budget to discuss: the Appropriation (2020/21 Estimates) Bill. It is one which creates a tremendous amount of debt for the country. I think everybody in Parliament, certainly to my knowledge, understands that there is a very serious economic situation that the Government is trying its very best—not very well actually, but trying—to address. We have in the Budget and the Estimates around an extra $20 billion of money that seems to be unallocated, floating around, available to be used at a moment’s notice. That is really unusual, and certainly, in my years in Parliament, this is not something that I’ve ever seen before. Some people have suggested that it goes back to the days well before the Fiscal Responsibility Act. People are wondering about quite where that money’s going to be spent and how, and certainly in which electorates and whether it be somewhere around election day. So there are certainly issues here.

We’ve heard today some questions from the Leader of the Opposition to the Prime Minister around small business, and I thought they were exceptionally good questions. They showed to me that the Prime Minister did not have the detail on small business. And why this is important to this particular bill is to understand that big business always has an open telephone line or email to Government—certainly to Government departments—but small business, which represents most business in this country, certainly the most employers in this country, do not generally get a look in. It’s only through their local members of Parliament that they can often even get noticed—whether it’s in terms of immigration to get staff in, or whether it’s to help bring back into the country staff who have been overseas at the time of the lockdown, or whether it’s to deal with the fact that there is no extra money for small business.

I’ve heard today about how there is a wage subsidy—well, wage subsidies are, by their very nature, for the benefit of the employees, as they should be. We heard some contribution from a member on the other side of the House—apparently a Minister, I can’t remember which one; quite truthfully can’t remember which one—calling out and saying that even sole traders got a wage subsidy. Well, yes, that’s because they’re in the business trying to work it as an employee as well. But what’s not there is anything to assist people with paying their rent, paying their rates, paying their insurances, paying all the other costs and licences that they often have to have—paying their general way through.

And why should that be available for small business? Well, I can tell you it’s because small business did not ask for the COVID-19 shutdown. It did not have any—any—input into what happened to their businesses. Unlike some members of the Labour Party—I’ll try not to embarrass her by mentioning her name—I don’t believe that’s small businesses’ fault. I believe that small business, like every other business, were sitting around thinking that they were going along OK, they were paying their bills, they’d got over the Christmas shutdown, which they have to pay for—pay wages for and pay the rent for and pay everything else for—and they were getting themselves back into being cash positive, and all of a sudden this struck.

They did not have a direct line through to the World Health Organization. They did not have access to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade officials who knew what was happening overseas. They did not have the ability to make any provision. So this bill—this Estimates bill—makes, basically, no provision for them. What I see it making provision for is a whole lot of Government spending. Now, this party on this side is not against Government spending; we just believe that that spending must be useful for the people of New Zealand, and it must be something that’s going to help grow the economy and also help people through their time of need.

Despite everything and all the rhetoric out today from the other side—and my dear colleague the Hon Shane Jones’, who has resumed his seat, very good talking about people being employed. Well, let’s just get serious about this. People are losing their jobs. There are a thousand extra people a day going on to the jobseeker benefit, which in the old parlance is “the dole”—a thousand people a day. That is not a thousand people a day losing their jobs—there’s a lot more than that, because if one is in a partnership, is living with somebody who is earning an income who is over a certain level, they can’t get the jobseeker benefit. And that’s one of the things that I think is really sad, is that people who have never been on the receiving end of a jobseeker benefit or any other benefit are suddenly finding themselves now in that situation of having to ask for help—having to ask for help when they are used to other people asking them for help. That is extraordinarily hard for people who have always been self-reliant, and it’s really hard on the mental health of people who have always seen themselves as being survivors and able to cope no matter what to suddenly find they can’t cope. I see nothing in this bill that really addresses that.

I don’t see anything in this bill that addresses the significant harm that is being done to our communities in this country. When I look at the fact that, even today, the chief economist for the ANZ bank has come out and said that by September—only a few months away—we will have at least 10 percent unemployment, I think that is an absolute tragedy. That is not taking into account the number of people who are not having to be on the jobseeker benefit because of sickness or other disability issues. These are people who are—this is a very serious issue for us as a country. I know that just about every country in the world is having to deal with very similar issues like this, but simply saying that we’re going to pay out a lot of money to a lot of big industry doesn’t necessarily address the fact that most of our communities that we represent are actually small businesses and small communities.

I was in Clevedon yesterday—part of the Papakura electorate coming up to this election—and on almost a whole side of the street all the shops were shut. This was, until two months ago, an extremely popular, busy area where lots of tourists came and lots of Aucklanders, actually, just went out to Clevedon for the weekend and to go and do something on the way, and there was also a lot of through traffic. Half the businesses there are shut. I just think—how do people come back from that without some help? The best way of helping them is, in the Budget, to look at how the Government could actually just directly help these businesses.

There’s no point, as the Prime Minister said today, in giving people advice about liquidations or how to go into bankruptcy—well, that’s pretty easy: just don’t pay your bills and anybody will be bankrupt; that’s the way it works. But the other issue, surely it must be, is that getting advice from some bureaucrats about what to do is hardly going to make anybody who’s spent the last 30 years building up a business, seeing it fail—or, actually, by the way, bought a business last year and actually has plenty of debt—that’s not going to help them one scrap. Until anyone’s been in small business, until anyone’s understood what it’s like to pay the wages and not pay yourself, until anyone’s been in the situation of having to pay the GST and not pay your own mortgage, they don’t know anything about small business.

It’s all very well to sit there and moralise about how these people should be better off, and at the same time putting up the minimum wage for those who are lucky enough to have a job. Well, how about thinking about the small-business owners who don’t even pay themselves the minimum wage, because they don’t have the money. It’s all very well saying, “Well, we’ve got the wage subsidy.” Well, that’s great. I think that’s a good thing, the wage subsidy. I think everyone on our side of the House agrees, but the fact is that’s not going to the employer; it’s not going to the small-business people. If anyone wants to ask, just ask how much the Wellington rates have gone up. Just ask how much Auckland rates are going up. Just ask who’s paying for that. I can tell this House it is not the Government; it is actually small, medium, and some large-style businesses, but most are small.

New Zealand needs better than this Budget; it needs a Government that understands small business, it needs a Government that cares, and it needs a Government who understands what to do and will do it.

Talofa lava. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thought I’d get up and have a go. I just want to take every opportunity—as we should in our roles as representatives—to ensure that we are speaking up for people removed and disconnected from resource and power, people who, sorely, don’t often have that representation in any places of power around the world, people without the means and the vested interests to lobby the way that other groups and communities are able to lobby.

So I’ll start off by pointing out very clearly that everyone should be worthy of receiving support, whether they are recently unemployed or longer-term unemployed; that employment status in and of itself is not the sole determination or indication of how people contribute to their communities; that for far too long we as countries and around the world have not valued the unpaid and volunteer work that is every bit as vital for sustaining our families, our households, our communities, and, yes, our businesses and our broader society and community the way that they have done for thousands of years. So, employment and relationship status should also not determine whether you are worthy of living with any sort of dignity. Aotearoa needs to live up to all of us being in this together and truly value everyone being able to live with dignity. So it has been a lack of political courage of who does and doesn’t have access to power and resource that has prevented this change over successive Governments.

Over successive Governments, we have continued to see people kept in poverty, kept living below the line, not able to make ends meet because of the decisions that powerful people, like those of us in this House, have far too often made that have kept people struggling for what should all be guaranteed, minimum, basic, fundamental human rights, what should be a guaranteed minimum level of humanity that we, as a country, agree to share collectively with all of the people of Aotearoa. The benefits in this country, in our social safety net, have been kept so low for so long that this has created intergenerational poverty and hardship and, as importantly, has severed relationships and trust with democratic processes, with engagements with agencies, with political elected representatives, because people lose their faith and trust in a system which is not seen to uphold their needs and their aspirations of basic care at all.

So the impact of this has been very, very clear to see over a long time. Just recently, the Auckland City Mission reminded us that, in 2002, they gave out 3,000 food parcels. In the 2018-19 financial year, they gave out 23,000 food parcels. In the last three months alone, demand for food parcels has doubled again—just in the last three months alone. I wanted to take a particular quote from yesterday on social media platforms, where a person is speaking out for the disabled community and says that the announcement that we are going to afford some people, recently unemployed through COVID, the ability to live with dignity is “a huge slap in the face for disabled people, many of whom are excluded from paid employment and make up a large proportion of people on long-term benefits.”

Those are the impacts that our social safety net creates when it is not one that ensures that everyone is respected and can live in dignity. Only the Greens have consistently and long-term continued to call for the urgent increase of benefit rates according to the Welfare Expert Advisory Group and the report that they released over a year ago, which offers us a clear blueprint and solutions for how to overhaul our social safety net system to one that is indeed kind and compassionate and understands the value of helping people get the support they need, at the level they need, and when they need it. It takes—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I just remind the member, sorry, that this is a debate on the Budget, and we’ve now had over 5½ minutes—I don’t think that the member has mentioned the Budget once.

Fair call, Madam Speaker, thank you very much for pulling me back on track. We were pleased to see, in Budget 2020, for example, the massive upscale for public housing—8,000 more public and community houses that are going to be affordable, that are going to allow more people to live with some security. We were pleased and worked hard to see thousands more families going to be able to live in healthy, safe, warm, dry homes, with a massive upscale to the warmer Kiwi homes programme, allowing for more families to have bigger subsidies to get that insulation done.

We were pleased to see, through the COVID initial Budget response, the increase of $25 to base benefit rates. There are so many examples of the good things that we have to hold on to as the initial start of hope, including through this Budget. And, again, we pushed for and received the $1.1 billion package for green, nature-based jobs, thousands of jobs around the country that are going to provide for decent livelihoods, protect and nurture our environment for generations to come, and help to get our country on reducing our climate polluting and our carbon emissions. Those are long-term visions that we really can be proud about.

We also have to go further on what the Budget was able to announce. Again, we are also really proud of having been at the core push for indexing benefit increases to wage increases and for removing the harsh sanctions for those children whose fathers and other parents were not named on the birth certificate—one of the cruellest sanctions, I think, that this country should never have had in the first place.

So we are very clear that we have seen some good signs of good beginnings and a good ray of hope about what we can do collectively for this country. We have built incredible mandate and support through Budget 2020 and the fantastic initiatives that were in that Budget, particularly around keeping people safe and secure, and creating jobs coming through COVID. Those were essential. Those are necessary changes that we should all be leaning into as a sign of where we need to still continue to go. We have been able to bring people together rather than separating people out into who is deserving and who is not deserving of our help and support.

So, once again, to finalise, we want to keep pushing and working towards making sure those on the lowest incomes have enough to live. No one should have to line up for food grants in this country. We have enough for everyone to be able not just to live and provide for their families but also to ensure they are able to spend and revive their local communities, local businesses, and neighbourhood initiatives as well. There is every good tick to making sure that everyone has enough to live on, and I’m proud that the Greens will continue to call for those changes. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. These are indeed very extraordinary times, and it cannot have been easy for the Government and the Minister of Finance to pull together a Budget in the context of what was such a rapidly evolving situation that we faced with the COVID-19 pandemic. But, frankly, they should have tried a little bit harder to be more realistic about their financial projections and what they are going to spend this eye-watering sum of money on.

Before I go into some of those projections, I just want to reiterate the point that the Hon Paul Goldsmith made in his intervention around this clear contradiction between the tired old mantra of nine years of neglect and pivoting so quickly over the fact and what a relief it is that our financial situation is in such good shape, because I think it’s really important to point out that, before COVID, things were going backwards. It took this Government just two years to turn a solid surplus into a deficit, in the best economic times this country has seen in a generation. The only reason debt to GDP was dropping was because the economy was growing. They certainly weren’t repaying any of it. So it’s really important to point out, as I go into detail in the Health Vote—but the economic picture more generally—things were bad and getting worse before COVID.

While this is, as I say, a very difficult Budget to write in that context, let’s not candy coat where we were at. This Government took a good economy and made it worse. Indeed, the projections in here, as was pointed out to the Secretary to the Treasury and the Epidemic Response Committee meeting last week, are frankly heroic. I want to just touch on the issue of Crown revenue, because the actual Crown revenue last year was $93.5 billion. This Budget is forecasting our current year—because we won’t know that position until October—at $89.5 billion. Now, we were on track to meet whatever that budgeted revenue was, and that $4 billion backslide happened in the last six weeks. Yet this Budget projects Crown revenue next year to be only $2.5 billion less than that: $87 billion to the Crown.

So, for all the reduced spending, which creates a reduction in GST; for all the unemployment that is heading our way and has already started that means that people are not paying as much PAYE; for all the economic carnage that is going to be produced by companies going to the wall, and at very best making a loss but surviving—no Crown revenue from that—this document says, “By the way, all of those things are going to result in just a $2.5 billion drop in Crown revenue.” I’m sorry; I cannot see how on earth that can be right.

I think actually there was an admission that many of these projections were done in early March to inform this Budget. Well, we should throw this out and recognise that that revenue is simply not coming into the Crown coffers. What does that mean? It means that that $140 billion that we think we need to spend just to stay afloat is going to be even greater. We will have to go into more debt, saddling future generations with greater interest and greater repayments for generations. That goes, therefore, to the importance of making sure that spending is of appropriate quality and in the right things.

I agree with Ms Davidson that, through these times, we do need to protect and support our most vulnerable. My Government, the Key-English Government, in those years following the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquake, did just that—not that they got any credit for it from the other side, but indeed that is an appropriate thing. But, when it comes to infrastructure spending, health spending, other social development, conservation spending, it’s got to be of a high quality. I don’t think we can say—in fact, we don’t even have enough detail yet to be able to say—whether that is going to be the case. This is a war chest, but is it a recovery war chest or an election war chest?

Now, I want to touch on Vote Health. There is a significant sum of money going into DHBs: $980 million per year is going to DHBs, and that is as it should be. It did need a bolus of money in order to continue that sector. But let there be no illusions, lest people who are listening be under any impression that that is going to result in a single extra treatment. Here’s why. We don’t have the latest data, because the Minister of Health seems to be not only ambivalent but allergic to information. These are reports, remember, that last year sat on his desk for seven weeks before he even knew what the combined financial deficit of DHBs was.

As at January this year, they were already in $304 million of deficit combined and they were heading for $560 million of deficit. Annual inflation in DHBs is about $400 million, and when you add the extra $100 million a year that the DHBs will need to spend because of the Holidays Act remediation, their spending next year is going to be at least $1.1 billion to recover deficits and manage inflation. They got $980 million. They’re going to go backwards, even with this, unless something happens. But this is a Minister who in question time today admitted that it didn’t matter what came out the other end as long as you’re putting lots in the top—whether it was people or money or kindness, that’s OK. Well, actually, you know what? Kindness doesn’t replace the hip, cure the cancer, check the diabetes, screen for cervical cancer; organisation of resources does. So the bolus of money is good, but let’s not pretend this is going to make a blind bit of difference to the health of New Zealanders.

Now, I would say this: the positive aspect of the spending is in disability support, and I’m sure Mr Ngaro will talk a little bit more about that—$833 million, if memory serves. But I make two comments about this. There is no detail behind how that’s going to be spent, and when the Associate Minister of Health or the Minister for disability support—I can’t remember which one it was—was asked by a reporter last week about whether that would mean that people with profound hearing loss would finally have equity, this Government having cruelly taken away the extra funding the previous Government had put in for extra adult cochlear implants, they couldn’t even say yes or no to that. Now, either they’re not going to do that and they just didn’t want to say it or they’re not even organised enough to say yes. And why should we be surprised by that?

The mental health funding from Budget 2019 of $460 million - odd hasn’t even been spent; three point something million dollars of $460 million has been spent. And this goes to the point. Hope is not a plan. Allocation of money is not a plan. The fact that people would like something to happen doesn’t make it happen. There is no sense of purpose in this Government; there is just hope and cash, and that ain’t going to get people well.

And then, of course, there is that silent group of heroes in our health sector, the midwives, who took the previous Government to court in a very novel way to get equity under section 88 of the Human Rights Act; because they weren’t employees, therefore they didn’t have the protections under employment law. The previous Government set up a mediated, co-designed process to understand what the proper value of a midwife was, and the Minister of Health received that report nearly three years ago. He got his Ministry of Health to apologise, frankly, on his behalf for the fact that they didn’t put a Budget bid in in 2018. They didn’t put a Budget bid in 2019 and went to the College of Midwives to explain that that was all going to happen in 2020. Budget 2020 has come and gone and midwives are still waiting.

The college issued a press release last week to say they were perplexed. Well, they should have been apoplectic, frankly, at having been ignored once again by this heartless Government that does not care about midwives; it does not care about parents and their babies. And, as a consequence, the health of our most vulnerable New Zealanders, our newest New Zealanders, is now at significant risk because those independent midwives are leaving. They’ve had enough of this Government. They’ve had enough of the talk and no action. And, actually, that’s what this Budget says about health: throw some bucks at it to solve the huge fiscal hole that they themselves created and then walk away. That is not good enough.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Like the new Leader of the Opposition, Todd Muller, I’m something of a political nerd in that I got interested in politics at a very young age, and I’ve been listening to Budgets, literally, since I was a teenager. In the early days of listening to Budgets, they used to be read at 7.30 in the evening, as I recall, and they were full of detail about how much petrol would be from midnight and how much cigarettes would be from midnight and how much alcohol would be from midnight. Then, in the hours between the reading of the Budget and the midnight of that night, there would be a rush on petrol stations and dairies to buy tobacco and cigarettes and on bottle stores to buy beer, wine, and spirits, and I didn’t think ever that I would in my lifetime get to experience a Budget of the sort that we have had this year, in 2020.

Not only are Budgets read at a different time but they are fundamentally structured in a different way, and this year’s Budget was structured in a way that I acknowledge—as do my colleagues on the Opposition benches—was done under incredibly difficult circumstances for the Government. The Minister of Finance has had to change what was inevitably his master plan for Budget 2020, probably something that he was well advanced in his thinking about towards the end of last year. Then he’s had to pivot away to try and accommodate the challenges that we as a nation find ourselves confronting, and the world, indeed, confronts internationally.

But little did I expect that, in a Budget that has literally sprayed around billions upon billions upon billions of taxpayers’ borrowed money, there would be so little focus and so little actual inspiration out of the opportunity that investing that money could have for the long-term benefit of New Zealanders, of their way of life, and of their long-term health and wellbeing, and, ultimately, for the benefit of our natural environment. That’s disappointing to me as the National Party’s environment spokesperson and climate change spokesperson, and now looking at Resource Management Act reform, because here was an opportunity when so much more could have been done—when so much more could have been done—and what did we find? Well, actually, very little in the way of inspiration.

I listened a couple of speeches ago to Marama Davidson, the co-leader of the Green Party. She spent 10 minutes speaking about aspects of social policy and of social justice and spent about 30 seconds speaking on the Budget, when she was required to do so. But not once—not once—did the co-leader of the Green Party, for goodness’ sake, talk about the environment or talk about our natural resources. Not once did she talk about climate change. Not once did she involve herself in the name and understanding that New Zealanders would expect from a party that used to profess to be an environmental party. They’ve so long since forgotten their role as being an advocate for the environment that the co-leader now, in a Budget debate speech like this, simply doesn’t even mention the environment, and that saddens me.

Some of the most difficult conversations I’ve had to have over the last month or two have been with constituents in my Coromandel electorate, and they are people who have been impacted and affected dramatically by the events of the last couple of months. The economy in the Coromandel is, by and large, made up of small-business people: sole traders, family-run enterprises—people who have been hit very hard. Some of them are farmers, some of them used to run tourist operations, some of them used to run international tourist lodges, and some of them now no longer have businesses.

Some of them have had to make some of the most difficult, heart-wrenching decisions of their working lives, of their business lives, in terms of laying off staff. I particularly recall one tourist lodge operator in my electorate, and he and his wife had, over 20 or more years, built up a business largely focused on international tourism. He rang me and said, “Scott, every single one of my forward bookings for the next six months is cancelled.” This was early on in the piece, and I suspect that even more have cancelled since then. Effectively, his business got turned off like a light switch, and it’s not a big business. He said, “I employ four or five people, but that’s four or five people that won’t be working and won’t be employed in my Coromandel community, and their families won’t have a breadwinner.”—their families won’t have a breadwinner.

What he was most concerned about was, he said, “Well, look, the wage subsidy’s good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help my business. It doesn’t sustain my business. It doesn’t make my previously viable, profitable, growing business sustainable in the short-, medium-, or long-term future.” And I think that’s very sad. We heard today in question time the Prime Minister, who simply didn’t get it—who simply doesn’t understand how economies work and how businesses work and how enterprises work, and the stresses and strains that go on small-business owners and operators when they have to make hard decisions about putting off staff who, in many cases, have been long-serving, hard-working, dedicated members of the family, so to speak, in terms of that business. I think that’s very sad.

One of the other sad things that was in the Budget was the lack of focus that was applied to the spraying of $1.1 billion of Budget allocation into the environment area in terms of make-work for what the Government expects, or hopes on a wing and promise, may be 11,000 jobs for people who are going to be supposedly employed catching rats or hunting possums or pulling out wilding pines, or otherwise doing that kind of work on the conservation estate, and maybe doing a bit of riparian planting around the place as well. Now, a little bit of quick maths: $1.1 billion, 11,000 jobs; that’s $100,000 per job that they’ve allocated—$100,000 a job that they’ve allocated—for that funding. I’d like to have hoped that that would have been more focused.

In a previous life, I ran a company that sold and manufactured and distributed PPE, or personal protective equipment, and, to use another acronym, that was in the tail end of the days of the famous PEP schemes—the Project Employment Programme—which were a bit like this scheme that this Government is hoping to employ 11,000 people with, with $1.1 billion, at $100,000 a job, to do some make-work stuff in our environmental area. That’s good as far as it goes, but I can tell the Government one thing for nothing, and that is that, of the $100,000 that’s been allocated to each and every one of those jobs, the vast majority of that won’t be going to the people who are doing the rat catching, the possum hunting, the riparian planting, or the wilding pine pulling out. It’ll be going into servicing those jobs, and those companies that sell and manufacture and distribute PPE will be issuing a pair of boots, a Swanndri, a hard hat, a pair of gloves, a raincoat, and probably a pair of gumboots for every single one of those jobs, and what will happen is that those people who take those jobs up will find that working through a long, cold, hard winter in our natural environment, as beautiful as it is, is blimmin hard work. It’s very hard work. Many of them actually won’t last or stay more than a month or two or three, and when they go, all that PPE will go with them—it usually does—and then someone else will be employed, and a new set of PPE will be bought and issued to another worker who’ll do another couple of months.

Now, that’s not a grand vision for our environment. Surely—surely—a Government of inspiration, of aspiration, particularly when it comes to the environment and natural resources, could have been more imaginative, more targeted, and more on message in terms of the investment that they were making with borrowed taxpayers’ money to the tune of $1.1 billion in terms of environmental spending. I think they could have done better, and it saddens me that they didn’t and that they didn’t have an opportunity. But not only that, there was no progress in this Budget towards any of the lofty goals of environmental aspiration that they so often used to talk about only a couple of years ago. Where’s the progress on the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary? Where’s the progress on improving water quality? Where’s the progress on what they said was going to be a tax on exported bottled water?

No, this is a Government that has an opportunity to invest wisely, given the authority that they have to borrow extensively on behalf of New Zealanders for our future—not only our future personal wellbeing but the future wellbeing of our environment and our natural resources—and this is an opportunity that they have squandered. They have squandered it poorly, and that disappoints me enormously, that they haven’t been better at it.

Malo le soifua. Talofa lava, and happy Samoan Language Week, Mr Speaker. The Wellbeing Budget 2020: Rebuilding Together is coming through during an unprecedented time of global and financial and health crises. In terms of our health response, I’d like to acknowledge and thank our Prime Minister, first and foremost, for her leadership. You can see, in comparing Aotearoa New Zealand with other countries, just where we are. I’d like to thank her, as well as the Director-General of Health and all of our Government departments, for how we’ve come together. And I cannot go ahead without thanking all New Zealanders: our team of five million New Zealanders. We are where we are, we’ve come together, and we are close to eliminating COVID-19 only because New Zealanders have come together, united to fight against COVID-19. But, our Budget, “Rebuilding Together”—I’d like at this time to refer to one of the former speakers, the Hon Paul Goldsmith, where, and I quote, when he gave his speech he said, “Investing in skills and retraining is beyond him.” This is exactly why we are the Government which will absolutely invest in the right way.

When we came into Government, we were confronted with a huge shortage of skills in building and construction. This Budget of 2020 is going to invest $1.6 billion to train and retrain people, but we wouldn’t have had to do that if the Government before us, over nine years, had actually trained the people that we need. When we came in, in building and construction, we needed 30,000 more skilled people in this area. This sector, construction, is the fourth-largest employer in New Zealand. They employ 10 percent of our workforce, contributing billions of dollars a year into our economy. Between 2017 and 2018, the construction workforce grew by 5 percent. However, in terms of that long-term investment in training our people, that is something that is quite different between this side of the House and those on the Opposition, because we always look long term and train the folks that we need. One of the things that we’re investing in as well is we’re going to build 8,000 public and transitional houses. The Government before us sold houses. They didn’t actually build the State houses that we need. We are focusing and ensuring that we build those houses.

💬 Hon Member: Brave work, Minister.

Absolutely. In terms of assisting our small businesses, the fact that we have invested and 1.6 million people have actually benefited from our wage subsidy scheme—that is something that we absolutely know, from people writing to us, telling us when we walk around small businesses—is something that they absolutely love: the fact that our Government has invested to ensure that they can keep their employees employed. In this Budget, we’ve extended that wage subsidy scheme. But, of course, we’re targeting that extension. We will ensure, in terms of training our apprentices, that in the future we won’t have such a huge shortage in skills.

Just over the weekend, I made an announcement as Minister for Building and Construction that we will ensure, in terms of exemptions—and I also would like to thank many of our colleagues from this side of the House—that we will allow our homeowners, our DIYers, and indeed, with the assistance of our builders, to be able to build carports, to be able to build verandas, to be able to build greenhouses without having to go through the council for consent. We know from feedback from the construction sector that this will actually assist them. Many of our builders and our tradies, instead of going through the process of consenting and then building, can get on and assist with that build right now.

The other thing that our apprenticeship scheme will do is it will actually incentivise our employers. As feedback from our construction sector, we know that this is really, really positive because, when we incentivise them to take on our apprentices and our tradies to ensure that they are well skilled, they will, we are told, take even more trainees in.

The other thing that the last Government did is they stopped what we call ACE—adult community education. In this Budget 2020, we’re reinvesting and ensuring that our adults who have to retrain can actually come back and retrain in the evenings, because we know that we’re going to go through a contraction in terms of jobs.

The other thing that we’re doing is we have the Construction Sector Accord. With that, one of the things that we and industry are focused on is how we can transform the construction sector. I’m glad to say that they are really giving us a whole lot of advice in terms of the areas to focus on.

I do want to also focus on the fact that, as a Government, we are investing the biggest amount ever in disability support services: $833 million in Budget 2020 for disability support services. There’s never been such an investment in disability support services. In our first year, when we came in, we invested $211 million. Last year, in our Wellbeing Budget, we invested $348 million for disability support services. But this year, this huge investment of $833 million is historic. We know that one of the things that the disability support services sector usually does is, after every year, it actually gets a top-up. So this huge investment of $833 million should ensure that we won’t actually need such a huge top-up in the future. This year, we are topping up by just over $100 million, but as I say, one of the reasons why we’re investing that much is to ensure that in the future we won’t have to come back and top it up.

The other investment that we’re doing is in terms of a Pacific package. This is also an historic amount—$195 million for investing in Pacific—but I do want to cover just one small part of that overall investment, which is in education: a package that’s called Talanoa Ako. Now, this is a programme where teachers, communities, and parents actually get together to ensure that the parents themselves know how best to support their students. Now, this programme is going to be expanded to 65 different schools right across New Zealand, right across the motu.

As soon as COVID-19 hit, what we needed to do in terms of the Ministry of Education and this investment was to reach our parents in a different way because of the fact that schools were closed but we still needed to actually get in contact with our parents. So we changed the focus of this particular programme, Talanoa Ako, and we went to deliver it via the radio—so, via Radio 531pi—and we did it in the various Pacific languages. So we engaged with Pacific parents via Tongan, Cook Island Māori, Fijian, Samoan, Niuean, Tokelauan, Tuvaluan, English, Kiribati, and Solomon. We’ve gotten so much good feedback from our parents because not only do they connect on a daily basis with our teachers but this programme, Talanoa Ako, also allows them to be able to ask our teachers questions and then, when they come through the next day in the next session of Talanoa Ako, whoever the teacher is is able to answer our parents’ questions in the language that they actually can understand.

Another innovative programme that we changed because of COVID-19 in education is an initiative called Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities (DMIC). Now, this particular programme, basically, teaches our young people, our Pacific young people in schools, to utilise things that they are really familiar with—whether it’s tapa, whether it’s mats—from their own culture. They can actually be really great mathematicians, but it is actually teaching them using things that they are really familiar with. So, when COVID-19 happened, what DMIC actually did is they changed their programme so that they could actually reach out and continue teaching our Pacific students DMIC, but in a distance way. So, you know, I’m very, very proud of Budget 2020, and I’d like to also thank and acknowledge the Minister of Finance, the Hon Grant Robertson, for doing such a wonderful job of this Budget. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand and take a call on this, the Budget debate. First of all, can I acknowledge the Government and their health response to what emerged to be a serious global threat, and that was COVID-19. The only issue, of course, that I did have with it is that I felt very strongly that the Government was too slow to respond in closing the border, and it pushed them into the inevitable position where they had to take the country into level 4. As we went into level 4, everyone could see very clearly there were going to be enormous economic consequences around that.

What I’ve been very concerned about in this debate and in comments that have come from members of the Government is a complete disconnect in terms of what it actually meant taking our country into a level 4 lockdown. I think the best way—the best way—that I could describe it for the members opposite is when you made that decision to take us into a level 4 lockdown as it relates to small to medium enterprises (SMEs) is that you, effectively, cut your own pay.

So Jamie Strange, who’s in the House—I’ll use him as an example. Jamie Strange’s revenue, his pay, his cash flow, is cut off from that date—he has no cash flow, but he’s got a guy that comes and mows his lawns every week. How is he going to pay him? I’ll tell you how we’ll pay him; we’ll pay him with the wage subsidy. So we’ll pass that through Jamie Strange, and Jamie Strange passes the wage subsidy on to the guy that’s mowing the lawns, but where does that leave Jamie Strange? He’s still got his children that he has to provide for. He’s still got his mortgage that he has to pay. His wife needs to be able to go and do the groceries each week. Tell me—maybe he can take a call—tell me, how are you going to cover those fixed costs when your cash flow has been cut off? [Interruption] And they’re joking about it, they’re laughing about it, because they don’t understand. The Leader of the Opposition, Todd Muller, had a very good line of questioning, a very pertinent line of questioning to the Prime Minister today, and she had no answer whatsoever. Her default setting was “We’ve put a wage subsidy in place.” She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t get it.

I remember 10 weeks ago, as we moved into level 4, every Wednesday on the Mike Hosking show with the Hon Stuart Nash, and I said to him, “Stuart, you’re going to have to make sure that you’ve got a cash-flow payment that’s going into our SMEs and businesses.” The wage subsidy, that’s great. In fact, use that mechanism. If you’re going to put that in place, use that mechanism to get cash flow into the business. There’s a saying in business: cash is king. You can’t do much when you’ve got utilities to pay, when you’ve got licensing fees to pay, when you’ve got rent, when you’ve got insurance, and you’ve got no income. I was accused of being alarmist. I was only saying that because I did a start-up with my own business, my own company. I had a thousand employees plus.

💬 Hon Member: Oh God, here we go again.

I actually understood the importance of cash flow. And there’s murmurings and little comments from the other side there. Take a call. Tell me how many employees you’ve had to care about or worry about or think about their families—looking after them, making sure that you have cash flow to meet those payroll commitments. Take a call and tell us, because I’ll tell you what I feel like: employees are critically important—employees are critically important to any SME or business, so look after them. We have to look after them.

But this crew over there—listen to them. This crew over here, they treat the employers like they’re second-class citizens. They treat the employers like they’ve got massive cash reserves that they can just dig into and they somehow have to look after themselves. They treat the very people that take the risks to actually establish businesses, that put their own cash into establish, so they’re not dependent on the State, so they can actually create employment for those employees, because no one on this side of the House is creating employment. No one on this side is creating the tax receipts that you are collecting; it’s the SMEs that are out there. There is one person on the Labour benches, and I acknowledge her that she does have a small business, and she’s nodding in agreement with me, because she knows completely and understands the issues that I’m highlighting and that I’m making in relation to this.

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Who’s that?

It’s Jo. Sorry, I’m terrible with names.

💬 Hon Members: Jo Luxton.

Ha, ha! Jo Luxton—it’s Jo Luxton, and I admire her, I admire the qualities that she has to get out there and have go, to start a business, and have employees. She’s agreeing with me. Everyone down here is trying to shout me down, trying to say that the employers are bad and somehow a second-class citizen—they don’t deserve the same respect as the employees themselves. Everyone except Jo Luxton; she understands what I’m saying, which is great.

So I do have some ideas. I would like to put some ideas forward to this Government, because they’re completely devoid of them. They have no plan. You do have a licence—you do actually have a licence from the public right now to borrow some money—you do have a licence to borrow some money and we support that. We understand that we’re going to have to help the country through this, without a doubt. This is the problem with a Labour-led Government, though. How many times have we seen someone that’s won the Lotto, they’ve won the jackpot, and they’ve come into a lot of money, but they don’t spend it wisely. All of a sudden, at the end of it, 12 months down the line, all the money’s gone and they’ve got nothing to show for it. This is the danger. This is the real danger that you guys are falling back into right now.

I’ll tell you why, because you’ve come out with big announcements, you’ve announced eye-watering sums of money—that’s debt for the future generations and it’s going to take a National Government to sort that out and get that worked out—but you’ve got no plans. You’ve got no details. You can’t stand and give us any details. I see Marja Lubeck in the House, that’s great.

💬 Hon Members: “Mai-ya”.

Sorry, “Mai-ya” Lubeck. I told you I wasn’t good with names.

So Penlink—the great saviour and advocate for Penlink. If you are talking about investing in infrastructure, let me give you this message: at the last election I stood up—finally, I actually managed to get support from the National-led Government to say that we’d build Penlink, and we campaigned on that, right? We campaigned on that. Penlink would have already been three years into construction. Do you know what Marja Lubeck said in that campaign? “Labour will not commit to Penlink. We will not build it.” Now, all of a sudden—which is great news because we need Penlink, it’s a safety issue, we have 30,000 people living on a peninsula with one way on and one way off. To me it’s always been a safety issue. If we have some type of civil defence event, we’ve only got one way in and one way out. In fact, we had a fatal motor accident up there two years ago that cut off the only way off the peninsula. Everyone was stuck there. They said, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll use the ferries. We’ll get the ferries operating out of Gulf Harbour.” There was one problem with that: the ferry captains were stuck in the traffic, they couldn’t get there. So it’s a major safety issue. We need that road built off Penlink.

Here’s the challenge to Marja Lubeck: that project’s ready to go. Why are we waiting two years? We’re going to build it—we’re going to build it, we’re going to start it, it’s ready to go, it’s shovel ready. So I hope that you are advocating and I hope that you are having the conversations now to get it going, because two years is not good enough—two years is not good enough. So we’ll get Penlink going—we’ll get Penlink going post-September.

Here are some ideas: e-commerce. What are you doing around e-commerce? Support companies to get online. Actually, one good thing that might have been driven out of the level 4 lockdown is giving people the ability to actually work from home and have more flexibility around their employment—I support that. I think if that can work then we should go for that.

Sports clubs: trust them, work with them. They’re going under. They’re under enormous pressure. In my own electorate, in the North Shore—

💬 Kiritapu Allan: That was in the Budget.

So where is the funding going? Stand and tell us the detail. Don’t stand there telling me it’s in the Budget; this is where you’re getting it wrong. You’re fantastic at saying, “It’s in the Budget. Look at the line item.” What’s the detail? Because they need help now, they need certainty now, and they need to know what the plan is. There is no plan.

💬 Business: an integrated proposal centre. Unfortunately, I’ve run out of time because the Hon Shane Jones was talking about value-add. We signed, under the World Trade Organization, the Government procurement agreement—that’s a trillion-dollar pipeline internationally that we’ve never been able, as a country, to play in. We’ve got a huge opportunity there to tap into that. We have to know what to do. And that’s—thank you, Mr Speaker.

It’s going to be a hard act to follow. But I want to congratulate the National Party and particularly a Māori member who’s been very critical of our Budget—over there, very critical of the Māori members too; said some terrible things about us, actually—Jo Hayes. She’s the Māori development spokesperson for the National Party and she’s said things about Whānau Ora in the last couple of weeks and she’s said things about Māori members that I just find very hard to take. However, she did say today, though—I need to say this, because we’re talking Budget—that she’ll be questioning the leader of the National Party, Todd Muller, about the seniority list in terms of the National Party. She said on that very famous radio station, Radio Waatea—she said, “This is not good.” This is from Jo Hayes. “We need to remedy this or you need to front up.” That’s what she’s saying about Todd Muller. “You need to give a better explanation of why you’ve left us out. We have a party full of challenging people”—la, la, la—“and you need to actually say what is it you wanted, and it’s up to him as to whether he’ll come up with a response and why Māori have been left out”—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): And if the Minister could relate his comments to the bill in front of the Parliament—

Well, no, absolutely.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Well, you haven’t yet, and you should do that.

Absolutely. Because I’m talking about Jo Hayes, because she’s been talking about the Budget and she’s been criticising us, and you know, when you criticise us about the Budget I think, “Well done, Jo Hayes.” You know, I’ve got to congratulate Jo Hayes. I’m just mentioning how she’s put a vote of no confidence in her leadership—a leadership that’s collapsing already, and it’s sad. Like, I was listening to Nikki Kaye, who doesn’t know how to identify a Māori from a Pākehā and clearly has problems in identifying—she’s part of the dream team that is actually turning into a nightmare team.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Yeah, Ngāti Kāpō—Ngāti Kāpō.

Yeah, tino kāpō. And so, you know, I have to respond because this is a crew saying we’ve got no plan. We’ve got plenty of plans, but we’re a little bit upset by the so-called “dream team” that’s really turning into a nightmare team and the Māoris are revolting—they’re revolting. You saw it. [Interruption] Yeah, revolting? Revolting against the Opposition. And we saw Shane Reti today. Only one of them in the House. Ka aroha, ka aroha, taumaha.

[Sympathies to them, sympathies to them, it is tough.]

You know, watching him today, and he’s lost—poor Shane. He’s lost. And Paula Bennett, totally upset, because the other problem is with their spokesman in terms of finance who made some criticisms of Grant Robertson today—Mr Speaker, coming back to the Budget—and you will have heard his criticism of the Budget and our finance expenditure, and as we’ve heard today, this is from a person who’s totally confused: another leading member of the dream team.

But the campaign manager, of course, of the dream team who’s come back, as we all know, doesn’t actually know how to board a plane. Who will ever forget the way he just walked through security and jumped on a plane? We also know his respect for ethnic minorities. Can we all remember the aroha he showed to the Finnish people when he called them murderers and he said that we’ve got nothing to learn from the Finnish? This is the person in charge of the National Party has-been nightmare team who they’re trying to sell to everyone at the moment. [Interruption] And I’m glad that the Opposition are finding it funny, because they’re very divided at the moment.

They’re divided because they’ve seen the amount of resourcing coming towards Māori: $900 million coming towards Māori through this Budget. As a Māori caucus, we’re very pleased that we’ve been able to address certain areas. Kōhanga reo—I want to mihi to my good friend the Hon Kelvin Davis for a wonderful job: $200 million appropriated for kōhanga reo. Let’s not forget the history here. The National Party, aligned with the Māori Party, wanted to get rid of kōhanga reo or relegate kōhanga reo. They refused to address the equity argument in terms of kōhanga reo. You’ll recall the arguments for a number of years. Kelvin Davis put that to the side and decided to work with our kōhanga reo whaea Iritana Tāwhiwhirangi, and the result is $200 million. That is a kaupapa, as I said, the National Party refused to support.

Whānau Ora—very controversial kaupapa. As I said, Jo Hayes has been particularly ruthless on us here. My mate JT has been horrible to my mate the Minister Peeni Henare, but the Minister’s put that to the side: $136 million for Whānau Ora. Why? Because they’re delivering out in the regions, they’re delivering everywhere, they’re reaching whānau—funding that the National Party could never dream of. They only gave them breadline funding, and I was very proud of the funding that he was able to acquire in that area.

Minister Nanaia Mahuta in the housing area has done a terrific job in terms of papakāinga housing. We’re talking $40 million going out there. Right across the spectrum we see the funding happening. In my own area, we heard this nonsense from Mark Mitchell in terms of what are we doing for businesses: 1.6 million workers. That’s what we’re doing for businesses. We’re looking after businesses, and the question today is: where does that money go in terms of wage subsidies? It goes to the businesses. That’s where it’s going, and they pass that sort of pūtea on to their workers. That’s something that I’m very proud of. We came to the aid of the people of this country at a very, very stressful time, and, as members on this side quite rightfully say, that wage subsidy is something that we treasure very much.

In other areas we’ve been able to extract $121 million for He Poutama Rangatahi, a kaupapa that myself and Minister Jones over here have supported very, very much in the regions. I’ve been very lucky in the past because I’ve been able to get pūtea out of the Provincial Growth Fund and that’s been a wonderful kaupapa. Anyone who says there hasn’t been a change in the regions because of it doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So Poutama Rangatahi has been great, courtesy of Minister Jones over here, for a while. Now, we’ve moved on. I don’t need his pūtea any more, but I thank him for his support of the kaupapa. And his original kōrero about getting the nephs off the couch is something that has always been an aim of this Government. So Poutama Rangatahi’s been exceptional.

Our Māori trades training is another kaupapa that our people have talked about for some years. A lot of us have fathers, uncles, and grandfathers who’ve been involved in Māori trades training and the hope is that we can partner with our iwi and with our Māori groups right around the country as we try and activate and motivate rangatahi into turning their lives around. So we’ve got our Māori trades training. We’ve got He Poutama Rangatahi. We’re also expanding in our Mana in Mahi area—an area that the Opposition seem to have a few problems with, but we have an 81 percent success rate in terms of Mana in Mahi, as I said today; young people not returning to benefits, so we’re on track on terms of success.

There’s been a lot of kōrero about what’s going to happen in terms of the unemployment rate. If we can cushion the blow as much as possible, incentivise different industries, incentivise iwi, look at apprenticeships, look at retraining, look at redeployment, I think we’re on track. We are doing that. Minister Robertson is doing the business as our finance Minister. Minister Jones is doing some terrific work out there. All of us as Ministers are committed to turning things around. So I think that we’re on track in terms of employment.

This Māori caucus is on track in terms of delivering for their people. Don’t believe the nonsense being trotted out by the National Party’s mates, the Māori Party. Don’t believe their nonsense for one moment. We know that we’re on track at the moment. But, again, I want to finish by saying we are worried very much for the Māori members in the National Party and we are here for Jo Hayes and Shane Reti if they want to come and have a kōrero with us. We will support them, because clearly there are divisions in the ranks of the National Party at the moment as they struggle to identify just actually who are the Māoris, but we’ll give Nikki Kaye and other members a hand, if they ask us. Kia ora tātou.

For those people who watched the Epidemic Response Committee when the member who resumed his seat, the Hon Willie Jackson, came before us, I said to him—I meant it then and I mean it now—his job is the most important job in the Government because, as we know—as the forecasts are showing—300,000 New Zealanders will lose their jobs.

So what the public of New Zealand want to see in the Budget 2020 is the plan and the detail for how this Government intends to get those 300,000 New Zealanders back into work. So where’s the detail? Where is the plan and where is the detail? Well, let’s just crunch a few numbers because there’s a bit of a track record, and I’m pleased that another member of Parliament is in the House, because I want to just start with some figures from the Provincial Growth Fund, because I’m sad to say that there are some communities around the country—and as our leader, Todd Muller, has said, the economy is actually our communities. It’s the shop that you go to for your bread; it is the shop you go to for your groceries, for your fruit and veggies; where you get your petrol, and the staff that work there. It is not some “thing” out there somewhere. The economy is about communities and it’s about people.

So when communities that I represent have big expectations around the Provincial Growth Fund or the Crown infrastructure projects, it’s a bit of a stark reality, when the reality is—of the multiple announcements in the Provincial Growth Fund, I think it was $2.6 billion as of October last year that had been announced—$330-something million delivered in terms of cash out the door.

So if you’re a business—and I started my first one at 19—if you have a business, you are sitting there today worried about how you’re going to pay your bills, and staff costs are not your only bills. So, yep, the wage subsidy’s fantastic. That is absolutely fantastic. But if a business wants to keep the doors open, and as I look around the room, hopefully, those members opposite have been visiting their local businesses, looking them in the eye and saying, “Yes, we’re giving the wage subsidy, but no other support to your business.”

So back to the Provincial Growth Fund: how many jobs had the Provincial Growth Fund created—because at the end of the day, that was all it was about, right? All about jobs in regional New Zealand, and I’m proud to be a representative of a rural electorate. How many jobs? Any guesses?

💬 Hon Member: A thousand?

Oh, a bit more: 1,900 jobs and 1,000 of those were part-time.

💬 Hon Member: How many in Wellington?

Quite a few. Quite a few bureaucrats. But of the $2.6 billion—1,900 jobs. Now, I’m not sure that that actually represents good value for money in terms of taxpayer spend. But, you know, roll forward.

Let’s have a look at some of the announcements that have been made in the Budget, because the Provincial Growth Fund jobs are actually 550 grand per job. If that was your business, you would not be spending $550,000 for a job. But let’s just look at the figures, because it’s a bit confusing. If we look at the redeployment plan: $100 million—sorry, I can’t call it a plan; I can call it an announcement—$100 million. One of the written questions that I did get from that Minister, which was helpful, was the number of jobs full-time and part-time. If you think $28 million of it actually went to one electorate rather than anywhere else around the country, so that was—

💬 Hon Member: Which electorate?

Tai Rāwhiti?

💬 Hon Members: No. We’re not going to help you with it.

No, no. Well, it was one. It was one electorate.

💬 Hon Member: One?

Yep. So $100 million, and for those jobs it was $3,100 per job. But bad news if you’re in the tourism industry, $400 million was the Budget announcement in this Budget 2020, for an industry where in my electorate alone, one-third of the workers are in tourism. So a $400 million Budget announcement by the Minister of Tourism who couldn’t even define, couldn’t explain on the Epidemic Response Committee what tourism even was. That’s 400,000 jobs they’re trying to save there. So that’s actually only a dollar a job. So I’m sorry, but if you’re in the tourism industry they don’t value your jobs very much. But, in the green jobs, the Budget announcement there was worth $100,000 per job. They actually did the detail of where those jobs were going to be, which was helpful—11,000 jobs.

But my point is, the reality is every job lost is a family who struggles, and a family who struggles to put food on the table and pay for the roof over their head. So I actually think they deserve a bit more detail from this Government in terms of what actually is going to happen on the ground. But what have we got: zero detail. Zero detail: $150 million that’s going to the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). But actually, what have they been spending the last lot of money on—that was meant to be for work-focused case managers? Oh, well actually the number of employment engagements—put it this way: if you were a newly employed person, you would hope that you could turn to MSD and get support. Yep, they’ll help you get a hardship grant, which you’ll need, that’s great. But actually what you need more is a job. You need a job to be able to provide an income for your family.

So, Willie Jackson, where is the detail? Where is the plan? Where are the jobs? How many jobs in my electorate are you saving? How many jobs in Rangitata are you saving? How many jobs in Waikato are you saving? No answer. So there’s this grand figure. We’re going to have—

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Infrastructure.

Oh, infrastructure—that’s the answer. How many jobs? How many jobs? How many jobs in infrastructure? Are you going to reinstate the road that you cancelled—the road of national significance—the Waikato Expressway extension that both Mr van de Molen and I are championing, which is the Cambridge extension through to Piarere. That would bring a few jobs to our electorate. It’d be great to see that commitment from the Government, because actually then you could see exactly how many jobs, what area, who was going to benefit. But no, I suspect this Government is going to string people along with big numbers and no detail.

Well, at the end of the day, when you talk about big numbers, most people still have a household budget. The Government’s Budget, admittedly, has a few more dollars on the end, but you still need to be accountable for how that money is spent because, after all, it is the income and the tax off that family that pays for everything in the Budget. So any time someone says, “Oh, the Government was so generous with this.”, well, no, actually taxpayers were, because taxpayers earned it, paid for it, and then if you’re in need of support, you will absolutely get it back.

So what do we see? You know, a $50 billion response to COVID. Well, you know, I’d actually want to know where every one of those billions is being spent. Oh, but no, we’re told $20 billion is just, you know, a figure out there with no detail. Well, if there’s no detail, surely it’s not being spent because there’s no plan for how to spend it. And the reality is, if you have a budget at home, you don’t just say, “Oh, well, I’ve got a bucket of money over there and I don’t have a plan for it.” That’s absolutely ridiculous. And I think the Government owes it to New Zealanders, some of whom are desperately afraid of losing their job. They want to know the Government has got this handled and they have a plan and they have detail for every single job. And if they think it comes at $550,000 per job, they’ll be pretty concerned. Oh, but as I said, if they’re in tourism, it’s only a dollar.

As I said before, there is still no support for the actual costs a business has to keep its doors open. When I visit the local businesses, that’s what they want. They want cash support. They want it now because, yes, the wage subsidy covers some of their employees’ costs—not all of them—and they want the confidence to know this Government has a plan. And no one’s answered it, no one’s provided it—not the Prime Minister, not the Minister of Finance—and, unfortunately, the person who I said I thought had the most important job in this recovery, the Minister of Employment, Willie Jackson, has absolutely no detail, has no information, no idea, and no plan.

The problem is what New Zealand needs right now is a Government who understands business, who understands the economy is about local businesses and local jobs so that individuals have a job and can keep a roof over their own head and food on the table—because that’s what they’re worried about right now.

The next call’s a split call. I call Jamie Strange.

Madam Speaker, thanks for the opportunity to take a call. I’d like to begin where the previous member, Louise Upston, left off, because the previous member is the member for Taupō, and she was talking about the Provincial Growth Fund and how terrible the Provincial Growth Fund is. However, the Taupo Airport, in February, received $5.87 million for an upgrade—$5.87 million to create 60 jobs; to create economic benefit in the region, for tourism, and particularly domestic tourism at this point. The Mayor of Taupō said this is “a landmark day”—a landmark day for Taupō in terms of economic development in the Taupō region. So, obviously, the member who just resumed her seat has a fairly short memory.

What we’ve been facing across the country is a pandemic that we haven’t seen for a hundred years. The last time we saw an influenza pandemic was 1918—in terms of this scale—and it swept the globe and it killed 60 million people around the world. Now, history tells us that those countries that responded early in terms of strong and strict measures, their economies recovered quicker at the other end. So that’s what we’ve done as a country as we’ve been led by our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. We have gone hard and we’ve gone early in terms of that health response.

In terms of the economic response, this Budget is a huge shot in the arm for our economy. We understand that there are a number of challenges out there, in a number of different areas, and this Budget begins the recovery in terms of addressing those. I’d just like to pick up on a couple, in particular—there’s one that I haven’t heard during this debate yet, and I’d just like to touch on it, and that’s a $63 million investment in Surf Life Saving.

Now, we are a water nation. We are a nation surrounded by beaches. Every summer, people flock to the beaches. Unfortunately, 82 preventable drownings took place last year—82. I’d just like to give a really big shout-out to all of our surf lifeguards out there, most of them volunteers. I spoke to a board member today before this speech, and I asked him “What will this mean for Surf Live Saving clubs and those who are carrying out the role of surf lifesavers in New Zealand?” The board member said that this operational grant is a game-changer for the sector and that it provides stability in terms of the delivery of services.

The way things currently work is that regional councils pay the wages for lifeguards over the six-week summer period; the rest of the time, which is the other 46 weeks of the year, the lifeguards are funded through donations. Those donations are certainly really appreciated, but this Government investment gives them certainty for those other 46 weeks, mostly between October through to March; however, areas in the Waikato region, like Hot Water Beach, have people go there all year round and, unfortunately, they have had a number of drownings there in recent times.

So this Government contribution pays for operational costs—for example, signage; medical; fuel; life jackets; radios; all those things that the lifeguards need to perform their duties. There is also a capital-works component which will enable a number of clubs to do much-needed capital work. This is just an example of the Government hearing from people out there in the community—because the lifeguards have been saying this for a number of years—and we’ve got a Government who’s been listening to those in the community and putting that investment in. So that’s something that I am particularly proud of. In the Waikato region, there are a number of surf lifesaving clubs and I know that they’re certainly excited about this.

In my last few seconds, I’d just like to touch on another one, which is the night classes—and the Hon Jenny Salesa mentioned this. Look, lifelong education is incredibly important for our society. As we’ve seen through COVID-19, unfortunately people have lost their jobs and they need to retransition into other jobs. Having the ability to learn and to retrain is incredibly important for people to have the skills that they need. These night classes—the $16 million—the previous Government cancelled the night classes and we’re bringing them back. That will enable more lifelong education right across New Zealand.

I commend this Budget to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise with great pride to take part in this debate around the Budget. I would like to acknowledge the Hon Grant Robertson and the team around him who worked so very hard to get this Budget—outstanding Budget, I will say—in place in a short amount of time with not a lot of preparation going into it.

Before I begin my contribution properly, I just want to comment on a couple of things that the Hon Mark Mitchell brought up; the first one being that this Budget should consider supporting small businesses to grow digitally via e-commerce. Perhaps he should read the Budget, because it’s actually in there. Then he also talked about—he used Jamie Strange and his life at home as an example of how one might be affected by this, and he just assumed that it was Jamie’s wife that might go grocery shopping. Well, I don’t know why that would be, but one should not just assume that it’s just the woman that goes grocery shopping, in my view.

Anyway, I want to talk about the small business and early childhood education in this Budget. The other day, we had an online Zoom meeting, if you like, with the Hon Grant Robertson and the South Canterbury Chamber of Commerce. They wanted to talk, obviously, about the Budget and all the things that were in it for business, etc. We hear quite frequently from the members opposite that the wage subsidy doesn’t support the business, it supports the employees. Well, firstly, I would say that any business who has employees—if you can’t support your employees through something like this with the use of the wage subsidy, you have no business. Your employees are your business, and they are like family and they are valuable to the ongoing success of your business. So I say that the wage subsidy does benefit the business by looking after the employees and keeping them employed.

Wendy Smith, the CEO of the South Canterbury Chamber of Commerce, in her opening remarks said something along the lines that, “We would like to acknowledge the wage subsidy scheme. We recognise and show our appreciation for the subsidy. It is bringing $133 million to $139 million into South Canterbury. And it has provided a lifeline for many small to medium sized businesses across South Canterbury.” And I am hearing that with many, many businesses that I speak to.

I want to come back to early childhood education (ECE) because I’ve only got a couple of minutes to go. So ECE, the $278 million for the reinstatement of the 100 percent funding band. Now, I can remember working in the sector when that was cut—around 2013, under the previous Government. The sector felt a sense that that Government didn’t value early childhood education by the way they were consistently stripping money from it. They got rid of the 100 percent funding band, but said, “Oh, you know, well, we’ll get rid of that, but we will allow you to have primary school teachers in your centres.” There’s nothing wrong with primary school teachers, but they do learn a little differently for school as opposed to working in an early childhood setting.

So I want to acknowledge the Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins, for being a Minister who listens to the sector, he hears what they say, and he acts on it. He shows that this Government supports the early childhood sector, acknowledges just how important it is to have quality early childhood educators in front of our children, because we know that a good quality early childhood education sets our young children up for life, in fact, and particularly those from lower socio-economic groups.

I also want to just briefly talk, in the time that I’ve got left, around the increased funding for increasing the minimum salary that early childhood teachers will be receiving, because we know that it’s been an area of contention for many teachers. Wages were increased for the kindergarten sector many years ago, but not the early childhood education sector. So we will see the minimum salary go up from around $45,000 to $46,000 right up to $49,000 from 1 July 2020. So again, I want to congratulate the Hon Grant Robertson and the Hon Chris Hipkins.

Madam Speaker, thank you very much. Normally, on this side of the House, all MPs start a speech in a debate like this saying, “We welcome the opportunity to speak on the issue.” But in the case of this Budget, it’s very hard to welcome it, and the reason for that is it has a very, very large amount of money the Government is committing to spend, backed up by one of the largest amounts of debt this country has ever seen, but what it will deliver on is a bit like KiwiBuild; it’s very, very hard to see.

I’m going to come to some of these issues in a moment, but to the last speaker, Jo Luxton, who spends a bit of time every second or third week down in the South Island, the thing that happens here is that actually, when it comes to active campaigning—when it comes to active campaigning—it is important to get out and listen to the public, just to talk to them. Andrew Falloon is a great, hard-working MP who has spent the last three years in his electorate, up and down that electorate, talking to farmers, listening to them, finding the things they need to do, talking about the things that they need in that electorate that this Government has failed to deliver on. The top of the list was actually KiwiBuild houses, because they were promised 100,000 houses by Labour before the last election, and they don’t talk about KiwiBuild any more, although I do notice in the Budget there are 8,000 houses. Well, actually, you would imagine if you were going to do 100,000 houses in the KiwiBuild over 10 years, that would equate to be something like 10,000 houses a year. We are now almost to the end of the third year and they haven’t even done the 8,000 that they promised to in this Budget, and so therein lies the problem.

The biggest issue that we have with the Budget is that whilst there has been support for the public and some in business, it hasn’t gone far enough, and it actually is not delivering the help that they need to make sure that particularly small businesses and tourism in New Zealand, those businesses can survive. One of the last speakers said, “Well, you know, actually, when we talk about the wage subsidy and businesses, you have to look after the workers.” Well, the thing about small businesses in New Zealand—and 97 percent of every business in New Zealand is a small business, and the vast majority have fewer than 20 employees—is they are run by hard-working mum and dad New Zealanders, the people that live in our streets and our suburbs, who actually put their life’s effort and their savings, their security and their houses into these businesses. They work hard to use that to employ people, but also to feed their kids and to pay for their education and many other things. They are the everyday Kiwis that actually need, more than anything else, help from this Government in this Budget. I fear far, far too many of them are being let down.

We have had the wage subsidy, and, without doubt, during lockdown the Opposition—National—supported that. It was very important that New Zealanders had some certainty when they were locked away in their houses after the Government closed the economy down for eight weeks. But that didn’t help the business; what it did was kept people at least on the payroll. For every single small business in New Zealand bar a few, their costs continued and their debt went up. There are examples of cafes in parts of New Zealand that do very well and might employ 20, 25, 30 people, that over the lockdown ran up $120,000 to $150,000 worth of debt. They were helped with the cost of their employees and they were grateful for that. It was necessary, but what was needed was much more help so these businesses didn’t come out the other end and now have a weight of debt upon them. Not their fault; nothing they could do about it; they weren’t allowed to open. Now that they are opening, they’re finding the turnover is much, much less than it was.

These costs are the rent. We heard from Grant Robertson probably 10 weeks ago now that he was going to come forward with a package of support for small business, particularly, and landlords, to help them through the crisis—and this was an economic crisis I’m talking about now—and actually we are still waiting, because whilst there have been some things the Government has delivered around small business and landlords particularly, it hasn’t gone to the heart of the problem of the great debts that have been created. Guess what! Many landlords in New Zealand are small-business people as well, people who’ve worked hard and have invested in a commercial property, and they, too, are suffering.

The one thing that small businesses in New Zealand don’t need more of is debt, no matter how cheap it is. So when the Government says, “We’ll help you rearrange your debt and move it sideways, and we’ll lend you some money for a first year interest-free and then a lower interest rate thereafter.”, that wasn’t what they needed. What they actually needed was direct financial assistance—cash-flow assistance—to help them get through. I fear we are going to see far too many of these small businesses closed in the coming weeks and months—far more than is necessary to have closed, with just that little bit of extra help and understanding from the Government.

Every time we question the Minister or we raise it as an issue or say they should be doing more, they go straight back to the wage subsidy. Well, the wage subsidy helped, but during lockdown it was unproductive help because they were giving support to a business to pay workers who weren’t able to work. So it wasn’t helping that business. We do now see that some of them are back at work and therefore the subsidy is there. It’s about to run out, and the Government has announced an extension of that, but here is the challenge: these businesses need to show that they have had a fall of 50 percent in revenue over the last two months. There’ll be many that have great debts that are growing, and it may not be 50 percent any more, yet their costs are high, their debt’s high, the cost of serving the debt is very, very high, and at the same time, they have had no direct financial assistance from the Government.

In the area of tourism, this is going to be a catastrophe unless the Minister, Kelvin Davis, steps up with an actual plan. I questioned him in the House today on this. I asked him, as Minister, what his personal plan was. It is good to see that he’s able to read what his officials have given him; I give him credit for that. He’s much better at reading today than he was two years ago when he became the Minister. But for the entire sector, that used to be a $40 billion industry—I apologise, Madam Speaker, I almost made you laugh there. For—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): No you didn’t, actually. I found it really unnecessary, to be honest.

Did you? Well—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): It wasn’t laughing.

Were you not? Well, it looked like a smile. I apologise; I haven’t seen them very often.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): It was like a grimace.

The point here is—was it a grimace?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Correct.

Was it really? Well, they normally go downwards, not upwards. But I’ll continue with my speech. The point here, though, is that there are 400,000 people that are employed more widely in the tourism sector in New Zealand. It was a $40 billion industry, primarily made up of smaller businesses up and down the country. We see today that one of the larger hotel chains has just announced 900 employees have lost their jobs. What they need from that Minister is not that he is reading out the things that his officials are giving him. What they actually need is a real plan, not something that he says is coming, and we’re consulting, and we’re talking, but a real plan today. He said that there was $400 million in the Budget, and that’s been welcomed. It’s a very, very good start, but it’s not a big start, because with 400,000 employees, that’s about a thousand dollars per job. For many of these businesses, they will continue to struggle unless they see there is a plan and there is an opportunity for them to have more visitors through their door.

We take KiwiRail as an example. KiwiRail got $1.2 billion in the Budget. That’s $300,000 per job. Nowhere near as many people employed, of course. But I think the Government should have put that the other way round; $1.2 billion would have shown a real commitment from this Minister to the tourism industry and some of those 900 people that have lost their jobs in that hotel chain over the last few days may well still have been employed.

When I say an actual plan, it doesn’t mean that the Minister has to have every answer today. That would be asking too much. But what he could do, for instance, is send a very clear signal to the sector that he hopes—the Government hopes—in three months or in six months to have the trans-Tasman border opened, under the condition that it could open. The reason for that is if it is in three months, the entire ski season would gear up and would start talking to Australia, marketing themselves there, and there could be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Australians that come to New Zealand safely every weekend to spend money in these tourism ventures.

I was asked a while ago, “Will they come?” Well, they won’t be going to Bali and they won’t be having their holidays in South-east Asia. New Zealand is seen to be safe. Actually, the rate of the epidemic in Australia and New Zealand tracked almost identically. They were able to keep their economy open a lot more. As soon as that trans-Tasman border is open, the tourism sector will breathe a sigh of relief. What they need to hear from the Minister and the Government today is what the plan is, when they hope to have it open, because if it is six months away, then the tourism sector can plan to that. If it is longer, they can plan to that. But actually, I don’t think it has to be longer. If it can be three months, then many of them will talk to their bank managers, they will talk to their staff, they will look to how they market themselves and they can make a plan. The worst thing in business, actually, is uncertainty, and sometimes a no is as good as a yes, if it comes quickly. In this case, the Government is not saying no and they’re not saying yes; they’re leaving them hanging. For those 900 people in that hotel chain that lost their jobs this week, I feel for them. They need a full-time plan, not a part-time Minister.

Dr Deborah Russell—this is a split call.

The Opposition talking about the Budget reminds me of nothing so much as the Life of Brian. You know, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”, “Nothing!”, “Well, actually, there’s the aqueduct.”, “Oh, well, aside from the aqueduct—”, “And the sanitation!”, “Well, aside from the aqueduct and the sanitation—well, I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation—”, “And the roads!”, “All right, the aqueduct, the sanitation, and the roads”. And so it goes until we go, “Well, apart from the sanitation, the beds and the education, the wine, the public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health—what have the Romans ever done for us?” And that’s how they talk about the Budget. They say, “What has the Budget ever done for business?”

Well, what has the Budget done for business? Let me talk about that. Coming up for business there was the wage subsidy—that little wage subsidy that helped businesses to keep their staff on through the weeks of the lockdown; the wage subsidy that helped businesses to keep their valued staff with them, that enabled them to keep on going. “Well, it was just a wage subsidy. Well, all right then, aside from the wage subsidy?” Well, there was the wage subsidy extension. Another eight weeks of wage subsidy was there to help businesses keep their staff in touch with their jobs, to help them get through these weeks of the downturn with support for their wages, because employees are important. “Well, all right then, we’ll give you the wage subsidy and the wage subsidy extension, but whatever else did the Budget do for small businesses?”

Well, there’s the loan scheme, the low-interest loan scheme, because we know that for small business one of the critical things is cash flow, and that low-interest—and indeed in some cases no-interest—loan scheme will help business cash-flow and help them to get through. “Well, all right then, aside from the wage subsidy, and the wage subsidy extension, and the loan scheme, what has the Budget ever done for business?” Well, then there is the e-commerce package—there is the e-commerce package—because what we found was that many of the businesses who managed to get along reasonably well during the lockdown were those who already had e-commerce in place. But it’s hard for a small business to get that going, so in the Budget we put in place support so that all small businesses can get going with e-commerce. “All right then, so we’ve got the wage subsidy, the wage subsidy extension, the loan scheme, and e-commerce, but aside from that,” the Opposition say, “what has the Budget ever done for business?”

Well, then, leading on from that, there’s the $400 million that is available to help tourism, because the sad fact is—the sad fact is—that the international visitors are not coming back any time soon, and so tourism does need a really well-developed plan that is developed in consultation with the sector, that is done in such a way that enables the sector to change what it’s doing to swing to a new market, to rethink what they’re doing. In fact, in that, in terms of helping with tourism, the wage subsidy has helped with that, the wage subsidy extension has helped with that, this $400 million package will help with that—that is what we have done for tourism. “Well, all right then, aside from the wage subsidy, the wage subsidy extension, the loan scheme, the e-commerce scheme, and the $400 million for tourism, what did the Budget ever do for small business?”

Well, what did the Budget do for small business? There’s the apprenticeship scheme, and this is a really wonderful idea. Businesses take on apprentices and, during hard times, apprentices are often the first to go. But, in this Budget, we have a scheme to enable businesses to retain their apprentices, to help support them so they can keep that apprentice on their books, and that is so important because, when business picks up again, those apprentices will be up and trained and ready to work. So we’ve done that. “Well, OK then. All right, so we’ve got the wage subsidy, the wage subsidy extension, the loan scheme, the e-commerce, the $400 million for tourism, and the apprenticeship scheme, but aside from that,” they say, “what did the Budget ever do for business?” Well, there is the transport package, the package that’s designed to help keep the supply chains open, to keep transport links open so that businesses can continue to trade here and overseas. And so it goes.

So there we have it. We have the wage subsidy, the wage subsidy extension, the loan scheme, the e-commerce, the $400 million for tourism, the apprenticeship scheme, the transport package—that’s what we’re doing for business. There is a lot we are doing for business. The words from the Opposition are hollow. They are hollow. They are just slogans. The local businesses that I have spoken to are grateful for the wage subsidy, and I suggest that the previous speaker goes to speak to Bianca at the Arts Village Cafe in Rotorua, who is very grateful for the wage subsidy. They are pleased to hear about the loan scheme that will help with their cash flow. They appreciate the other measures being put in place, because this Government has put in place a package that helps business, businesses of all sizes, and small business. That is what this Budget has done, and it’s a lot. And I figured it’s time the Opposition stopped bleating and acknowledged the work that this Government is doing.

E Te Māngai, he mihi mahana ki a koutou i tēnei rā, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[Madam Speaker, warm greetings to you all on this day, greetings one and all.]

I’d like to spend five minutes today talking about housing—housing. This Budget is delivering 8,000 more public and transitional homes, and I’d like to look at what’s been happening in the Hutt in particular. So far this term, we’ve built 115 houses in the Hutt—in this term. In that, there are more than 260 new Kāinga Ora homes under way right now. What’s also been going on in the Hutt Valley, which has been really good to see, is there’s been this pilot programme in which all of those existing State houses that weren’t ripped down are being retrofitted. What that means is they get warm, dry insulation put inside them. They get new heat pumps. They get carpet. Some of them get kitchens. They get completely done up so that those families, in the cold months, get to turn on the heater, with their winter energy payment, and keep their home warm and dry for a whole lot less, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing to be building on land that has lain vacant for eight years, and it’s a good thing that those families and their children go to sleep every night in those warm, dry homes, but it’s even better—for the Hutt as well—that as well as that great win, we also get builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and landscapers. They are the people that will be doing the work in the Hutt. Those are the businesses that will be turning up day in, day out to make those homes warm and dry and to build on that vacant land. What’s even better than that is that all of those builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and landscapers have got apprentices—apprentices—that will be training and learning and being able to be the next generation of tradespeople, who have their own skills, their independence, their tino rangatiratanga, and their ability to earn their own crust in the world and to go forth and be able to provide for their own families.

In this Budget, we saw some great stuff for apprenticeships. We saw $1.6 billion invested in terms of making people—over 50,000 or 60,000 young people, and those ones who need to retrain—have access to free training. Those businesses can train apprentices for free. They can retain apprentices when they’ve got them, and people who are in areas can retrain. Some of them I’ve seen in the Hutt are 40-plus, who are learning to be home decorators and having a change of course, and that’s a good thing, to have a flexible workforce. There is a specific fund for Māori apprenticeships as well. I was going to say something there, but I won’t. There will be specific apprenticeships for Māori apprentices. Well, I’m sure there will be lots of people applying in that space.

When I was at home just not long after lockdown and we got into level 2, we had an electrician come to my home in the Hutt, in Belmont, and he had with him an apprentice that had been on the job for just two days before the big lockdown kicked in. The business owner said to me that this young guy—he looked about 17 or so—wouldn’t have had his job, because he got paid the wage subsidy for the entire time that he was on the job. Furthermore, he wouldn’t be keeping him. He said he’d be gone. He actually sent him out to the van to get something, and he said “He’d be gone. I wouldn’t be able to keep him if it wasn’t for the fact that I knew, on 1 July, that there will be funding for me to retain my apprentices.”

I’m going to go back to what the Minister for Finance said in his Budget speech, because what the Minister of Finance said in his Budget speech really resonated with me, because I grew up in about a similar era. I grew up in the time of the 1980s and the 1990s, when austerity reigned supreme, when we knew families who were on welfare and had their entire budgets cut. Mums with three kids couldn’t feed them. It was awful. I had friends and family who had horrible times, and we went to university not because we were particularly that keen on going there; it’s because there weren’t any jobs to go to. We learnt the hard way that austerity and hard times burns the next generation, and we don’t want to do that. We want a country that grows the next generation, who have hope, who have jobs, who have money in their pockets, and who are able to learn and to be confident that they can provide for their own. That’s what this Budget does. It looks after the next generation. Yes, we know damn right that there are tough times ahead, but this is a team that is united to respond, to rebuild, and to recover, and we will do that together.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s good to hear the member who’s just resumed her seat, Ginny Andersen, endorsing the National Government’s retrofit programme for State housing—fantastic. We’re still waiting for the 400 KiwiBuild homes in the Hutt, but no doubt they’ll be along before the election.

I want to cover the five elements in Budget 2020 as they relate to transport. I want to talk about shovel-ready projects. I want to talk about Auckland light rail, talk about the New Zealand Upgrade Programme. I want to talk about KiwiRail. And I want to talk, finally in my remarks, about the fuel tax, because the increase in fuel tax is due in this coming financial year, starting on 1 July.

Let’s first talk about shovel-ready projects. Now, Budget 2020 contains the “COVID response and recovery fund”. It’s got a funkier name than that, but that’s, basically, what it is. It’s a $50 billion fund to make sure that we recover and respond to COVID19. Included within that are going to be shovel-ready projects, and my question to the Parliament is: where are they? When is the Government going to tell us exactly what they’re funding? Critically—this is my second question—will they be sensible projects? Because there’s about 1,300 all around the country that the councils have bid in—local smaller councils, larger councils; in fact, there’s a range of private sector projects that have been bid in as well, and we’ve got Mark Binns and the infrastructure reference group going through them. We’ve got to make sure that the spending is value for money.

Now, here in the National Party—and as National’s new infrastructure spokesperson and spokesperson for transport—we’re all in favour of sensible infrastructure projects that move the dial, that make it easier to get around our cities, make it easier to transport freight to and from our export ports. We’re all in favour of those projects. But my fear is that what we’re going to see from the Government will be low-value projects that don’t actually move the dial and don’t represent good value for money.

And then, of course, you say, “Well, OK, it’s fine to have the shovel-ready projects.” That’s all good. There’s about $3 billion flagged in the Budget. Some of them are coming at some point. We were told a few weeks ago they’d be ready by now; presumably, we’ll get them at some point in the future. But, of course, we worry on this side of the House about the history of lack of delivery from this Government. Because when it comes to critical infrastructure projects, and when it comes to transport projects more generally, this Government—as it does in so many areas, whether it’s child poverty, or housing, as I mentioned at the start of my contribution—they talk a big game, but they don’t actually deliver. My point is, talk is cheap; actually, it’s the delivery that matters, and that’s what New Zealanders want to focus on.

So that brings me to the second point I want to cover, which is the debacle and the train wreck that is Auckland light rail. Now, members will remember this was a key election promise in 2017 of the incoming Ardern administration. It was promised that it would be under way to Mount Roskill by 2021, which is only a year away, and we found out today, after a bit of back and forth with Mr Twyford, that the last time he took a paper to Cabinet on it was June. I asked him, “Well, June of what year?” And it turns out it was June last year. Cabinet hasn’t considered the matter for about a year, so as of now, in late May 2020, we have no consents, no business case, no funding, no delivery partner, no route. We don’t even know if it will be heavy rail or a monorail-type structure along Dominion Road on the way out to the airport. In fact, we don’t even know if it’ll be to the airport. There is actually a real lack of clarity around that. It’s called City Centre to Māngere, and Mr Twyford likes to talk about going to the airport, but, actually, there’s a bit of confusion around that.

So OK, good luck, Mr Twyford. If you can build, you know, 20 kilometres’ worth of a tram network in a year’s time, I will give you that and say congratulations. But I’m putting it to the House: that is not going to happen. In fact, we found out today from Winston Peters, the Deputy Prime Minister, there’s no plans to build it in the immediate term. This project is dead. It’s absolutely dead—first election promise from the Labour leader, now Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. This project is going nowhere. We add it to the long litany of failures that Phil Twyford and Julie Anne Genter have overseen in the transport area: no projects started, cancelled roads, funding gutted out of the transport budget, and light rail—the flagship promise—nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be seen, just an absolute train wreck, a real disaster.

Let me talk about the New Zealand Upgrade Programme, because, basically, what happened between the last two years and then over the summer break is the National Party won the argument about roads. We said, for two years, you cannot cut $5 billion out of the State highway budget and expect there to be no consequence of that whatsoever. They cut $5 billion over 10 years out of the State highway budget, and what was the response? Well, immediately, projects that were on the books got cancelled—the term was “re-evaluated”, and they’re still, you know, sitting in the ether somewhere on the New Zealand Transport Agency website. But let’s be frank about it, let’s be upfront: they were cancelled or delayed. I’m thinking of projects like the Melling interchange—

💬 Hon Member: Waikato Expressway.

—in the Hutt, or Pētone to Grenada, or the Cambridge to Piarere section of the Waikato Expressway—and my good friend Tim van de Molen’s—four lanes from Christchurch to Ashburton, as Andrew Falloon likes to talk about. I know Matt King is very keen on four lanes up north as well. In fact, the East-West Link, that’s another one that associate transport Minister Julie Anne Genter liked to criticise all the time. All these projects are simply re-evaluated and delayed, and that’s simply because of the $5 billion funding cut to the State highway budget.

And so the National Party, we did our petitions, we did our criticism, we ran those campaigns. Phil Twyford spent most of the last two years talking about how we’d over-invested roads. He was not going to give way. He was not going to give way. They were gold-plated roads! They were unnecessary! We’d spent too much on highways, we’d spent too much on motorways! They were uneconomic! The National Party was obsessed with roads! Blah, blah, blah. We heard it all before—he spent most of six years saying it. And then what did we get in February? A big spend-up on roads: $6.8 billion announced for new, National Party roads. Melling interchange back on the table, Cambridge to Piarere—well, that’s actually not on the table, but we’ve got at least one section of it, we got some parts of it—and a whole bunch of spending around the country. I know this drives the Green Party absolutely demented. They cannot cope with the fact that the Government lost the political argument on roads and they’re finally funding these.

Our argument, the simple argument of the National Party, is: you should not have wasted two years. These projects could have been gotten on with right away. I’m not saying they’d all have been built straight away. Obviously, you can’t build everything overnight. But what a waste of two years and what a destruction of the construction sector pipeline. The pipeline of projects—and I know for a fact, from my talking to the industry, there are people out there working on roads right now who expected there to be a pipeline, and that pipeline was destroyed, pretty much overnight, by the Labour Government’s government policy statement on transport. That has caused enormous harm to the pipeline of projects. And now they’re back on the table, and we welcome that. We welcome them being back on the table. Doing the Melling interchange, 2022—that’s fantastic. We welcome that. That’s good news. But the delay and the chaos in transport policy is really regrettable.

Fourthly, just briefly, on KiwiRail: $1.2 billion in this Budget. And we ask: is that really the best value for money, from a use of $1.2 billion? We’ve seen the opening of the Napier to Wairoa line—$23.3 million to reopen the Napier to Wairoa line, I think it is. Guess how many trains have gone down it?

💬 Hon Member: Surely, every day.

No, three. Not three a day. Three. Not three a week. Not three a month. Three. Three trains have been down that line. It’s $3 million a train. And these guys like to say to us that we are, you know—$3 million a train, it’s a waste of money. And, of course, Gisborne to Napier: the Government has finally, after campaigning to open it and being told by Julie Anne Genter for nine years that this was an enormous destruction of taxpayer wealth and it was an amazing train line—even KiwiRail and the Government have admitted that that is an uneconomic line. But, of course, giving $1.2 billion to KiwiRail, some of that investment will make a difference. Some of it will be sensible. But just a big lump sum, $3.6 billion over the last three years, we really query.

In my final minute, I want to talk about the fuel tax, because this Government came into power and they immediately lifted the fuel—well, firstly, they put in place the Auckland regional fuel tax, 10c plus GST, and then they put in place the three fuel tax rises. We had one last July, we had one in July the year before that, and now we’ve got another one coming on 1 July. And my simple point is, the reason we had the fuel tax increases put in place was in part to pay for the enormous multibillion-dollar cost to pay for light rail, to pay for the Crown taking over that project—well, it’s dead. It’s not happening. And, of course, coupled with that, we’re in a time of enormous economic crisis. Households are going to be under pressure. Yes, we accept the wage subsidy scheme’s done a great job, but households are going to be under enormous pressure in the coming weeks and months, and we think it’s time the Government bit the bullet and deferred that fuel tax increase scheduled for 1 July. You can expect to hear more from us on that in due course. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. We are all in this together—COVID-19 has made that crystal clear. We have shown in the last two months that, as a country, we were able to all pull together to work together for our common good. And we’ve been cooperating, not only in Aotearoa New Zealand, but even internationally—the human race is all in this together. We’ve had to work together to combat COVID-19. In our country, we can be so enormously proud of what New Zealanders have done, working together to stop the spread of the virus—stop it right in its tracks. I’m incredibly proud of the work that’s been done by our Prime Minister and our Public Service to pull together an incredibly rapid response, and, of course, all the work that’s had to go into this Budget to rethinking it completely, because everything has changed and yet nothing has changed—we’re still all in this together.

Together, we have to grapple with many losing their incomes and jobs due to our reduced ability to travel and interact closely while COVID-19 remains a threat. Our solutions to this economic shock have to take that into account, and I think that this Budget has made an excellent start. I have to speak, firstly, about how proud I am of what the Green Party secured in this Budget: $1.1 billion for good green jobs, practical jobs that will get New Zealanders out there to work, looking after our waterways, our conservation estate, our natural environment. That is incredibly important mahi, and I’m so proud that the Green Party has been able to deliver that.

I’m proud of what this Government has already delivered, with a record increase in State housing and the commitment to deliver 8,000 new public and transitional housing units. I have to correct the Opposition who’ve been claiming that somehow housing hasn’t been delivered. In fact, Kāinga Ora has delivered and is delivering record amounts of new public housing, and we’ll continue to do that.

School lunches: 200,000 children in New Zealand will have access to school lunches. I think that is a fantastic initiative. It’s so important to make sure that every child in New Zealand has enough to eat. By feeding people at school, it means that we really are all in this together; that everyone has that opportunity. We know too many Kiwi children are currently left behind, unable to learn because they were going hungry, because we had an inequitable system. Admittedly, that was more than just one Government that created that, and it’s going to take more than one term of Government to correct it, but at least this Government has the aspiration to do something, unlike that last National Government who never set any targets about reducing child poverty, never even tried to increase the supply of public housing until right at the end—right at the end of their nine-year term started to grapple with the fact that they’d overseen a horrific housing crisis and done nothing.

The last Government wasn’t brave enough to set targets; they erased targets, they stopped setting targets, except for the ones that were easy to meet, and they left a horribly underfunded health system which this Government has started to fix. I’m proud of the steps that we’re taking and continue to take to rebuild our public health system, which is needed now more than ever.

The apprenticeships: again, a fantastic initiative. As Minister for Women, I am incredibly keen to ensure that we do everything we can to make sure that these are benefiting women as much as men, that a diverse group of people are able to benefit from that, and to upskill, to retrain, and to get into jobs that they are passionate about that will help make this country an even better place.

Just talking about that economic shock, the Budget, we know—not everything has been announced yet, and there’s still more announcements to come, and I’m really excited about the announcements that I have to make. I think we are making good progress on those areas that were under-invested in under the last Government, including women’s health, maternity services—I hope to make an announcement about that soon.

Of course, we will be making further announcements about infrastructure. The Green Party is incredibly keen to see that sustainability and equity is at the heart of our recovery. There is no economy if we don’t have healthy people who can do and make things for each other. There is no economy without a healthy planet for people to live on. We all need a stable climate. We are part of nature and we must look after it. We can provide for our needs now, while tending to the earth in a way that will sustain us and future generations. Ultimately, our lives and our livelihoods are all interdependent. The balance of one’s bank account or the wealth one has means nothing if there aren’t other people producing food and goods, providing services, healthcare, and education. That is the backbone of our economy, really, are those public services that make sure that we have healthy, happy, nourished, fed people, that we have clean, drinkable water, that we have clean air, and that we have a stable climate for future generations, and the Green Party in Government is delivering on that. This Budget begins to deliver on that.

But we don’t for one second pretend that there isn’t a lot more work to do, and that we need to go further and faster to ensure that we do have an equitable New Zealand, that we are looking after our planet for the long term, and that, ultimately, by doing those things, that is what will enrich us and our lives most of all; far more than short term—the Opposition can’t stop talking about these really short-term, silly ideas like oil and gas exploration, as if that was going to create much jobs. No, it is threatening life on the planet, so it seems like a bad investment, but, sure, if that’s your big idea for how we’re going to respond to COVID-19 and build a flourishing, stable economy in the 21st century, good luck to you in September! Good luck to you in September is all I can say to the Opposition.

And as long as I’m speaking right after the member Chris Bishop, I will correct him a little bit. I think his memory and his history is just a little bit off. So let’s just go back to 2009 when Steven Joyce announced the roads of national significance. I just want to bring this up because this was the big flagship economic development idea from the National Party which has been spoken to in this debate. You know how much it was? It was seven highways—just seven highways they promised. Of course, they promised a whole bunch of them without doing a business case first, so it turned out that many of them had incredibly low benefit-cost ratio (BCRs). That means the cost of project is many times more than the actual economic benefits. I’m happy to provide the evidence of that for any of those members over there who I’m sure have never bothered to look at a business case for a highway project in their life.

So Steven Joyce’s big idea: seven highways, two of them had already been committed to by the previous Labour Government. So two out of seven had already been promised by the Helen Clark-led fifth Labour Government, that was the Waterview Connection which got delayed by Minister Joyce, and, of course, only got delivered very recently, and the Victoria Park Tunnel, already started by the Labour Government. So that was a good project that had a relatively high BCR. Do you know that project was only $200 million—maybe $200 million, $300 million. It seems incredibly efficient compared to the cost of the highways that were then proposed by the last National Government. So they then promised the Waikato Expressway, Wellington Northern Corridor, Pūhoi to Wellsford, Christchurch, and Tauranga.

So they were spending the vast majority of the transport budget just around our largest cities on highways that don’t even reduce congestion really. We all know highways induce more traffic. So within five years you have to expand them again. So you’re spending billions of dollars for no gain. And it’s funny the National Party are laughing at this as if they don’t know. All around the world people know this now. So in 2009, they promised seven roads by the end of nine years: the five roads that were their idea, all of which had incredibly low BCRs, not yet completed; the Waikato Expressway, not yet completed; the Wellington Northern Corridor not only not completed but their big idea for Wellington was a flyover, which got rejected by the board of inquiry that they had put up; Pūhoi to Wellsford, not done—they haven’t even completed Pūhoi to Warkworth because Pūhoi to Wellsford was more than a billion dollars more than what they had estimated. That isn’t done yet. That was signed up to as a public-private partnership (PPP), which is a total mess now. Transmission Gully, a PPP: a total mess now. We’ve actually had to go back and resurface a bunch of these roads that the National Party “delivered”. So that was what they delivered.

I’m sorry to interrupt the member, but the time has come for the House to adjourn for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m. and the member will have 21 seconds, should she wish to take it.

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

This Budget has been delivered in the context of a global health crisis unlike any I, certainly, have seen in my lifetime. I think we all wish to congratulate New Zealanders for their sacrifices and to feel some gratitude that we are coming through the first stages of this health crisis better than many other countries around the world. However, what this Budget lays bare in the forecasts that are set out in its pages is just how severe the economic impact on New Zealanders is and what it will be.

What these documents show us is that the economy is forecast to have contracted 4.7 percent this year. So that’s not just an economy that’s stopped growing; that is an economy that has shrunk and got smaller. It’s very easy to get lost in the numbers of the Budget and to think “Well, that’s interesting” and economists can analyse them, but a shrinking economy means dreams that are thwarted. It means businesses that are closed down. It means people who have lost their part-time job, who have had their hours reduced, and who have had their pay reduced. We are seeing that impact in our communities, and it hurts. The question that this Budget raises is how long that pain will continue; this Budget certainly does not answer the question of how that pain will be treated.

The Budget also forecasts a peak of 9.8 percent in unemployment, and that, of course, is one in 10 New Zealanders who wish to work, who are ready to work, and who are able to work and have had the training, are unable to find a job. Many of those people, of course, will be young people. They will be people straight out of university or straight out of school, eager to get a start in life, and they will find it very, very difficult to get a job. So the human toll in this Budget is severe.

And, of course, the numbers set out here by Treasury—it is important to note—have been described by some external economists as “wildly optimistic”. There are still scenarios in which that unemployment rate gets worse and stays worse for a lot longer. If we are to believe that we’re going to bounce out of this as fast as Treasury are currently predicting, we have to be prepared to believe that 189,000 jobs will be created in the next two years. I simply do not see the plan inside these Budget documents that would deliver job growth on a scale of that sort. Why is that? Because, yes, the Government can create some jobs, it can employ people, it can do conservation schemes, it can do things with the Government departments that it owns—and those are all, potentially, worthy initiatives—but, ultimately, the key place of employment growth in our economy has been, and should continue to be into the future, New Zealand businesses.

In this country, the vast majority of those businesses are small and medium sized business. Typically, they’re family-owned. I want to tell you about what is happening for those businesses in our community, because I don’t see their pain being adequately addressed in this Budget. It’s actually the swimming teacher or the dance teacher or the karate teacher who owns their own business, who has children who come to have their lessons each week, and you can’t charge for fees anymore, because the lessons aren’t happening—members on the other side of the House are laughing; I hope not at people who have lost their income and are unable to sustain their families anymore, because I don’t find it very funny—but, actually, that person has found that their livelihood, the business that they have created, they may no longer be able to sustain because they can no longer pay the lease on the building where they do those lessons, they can no longer do the advertising for that business.

Or it’s the restaurant that struggled through bad weeks and bad months but hasn’t been able to stay open through successive months. It’s the tour guide whose job was something they created for themselves with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit, they were the person who met the tourists off the cruise boat and toured them around the great sights of the city here in Wellington, and now don’t have that job to do. And it is the young couple who took their savings and bought a motel because they thought “This will be the way that we create some more earning for ourselves and our future and create security.”, and now there is no one coming through those motel doors. Yes, the wage subsidy will help for the next few weeks, but what certainty do that couple have in the future? What does this Budget say to them about what the opportunity will be in the future? It doesn’t lay out a plan; it is simply not here. They have no idea what the future holds. That lack of certainty and that anxiety is leading to people making decisions to let people go and to reduce their businesses, up and down the country.

I want to take a moment to also talk about housing, because the previous speaker in this debate, Julie Anne Genter, talked about how this Budget delivered 8,000 houses. I think it’s about time that members on the other side of the House learnt the meaning of the word “delivery”, because “delivery” doesn’t mean that there’s a line in a press release that says “We will do something”. Delivery doesn’t mean “We’ve put a big number next to something and we’ve said we’re prepared to spend a whole lot of money on it.”, because if that were true, then everyone in New Zealand would believe that KiwiBuild’s being delivered, but, you know, KiwiBuild hasn’t been delivered, because, meanwhile, while these people on the other side of the House spent hours in the last campaign going up and down the country, telling us they’d build 100,000 houses, they haven’t. So we on this side of the House question the commitment to 8,000 houses, not because it’s not a good idea—building more houses is a great idea; certainly, our country needs more houses—but we question this Government’s ability to deliver it, because, yet again, we don’t see the kind of detailed plans that are necessary to make something like this happen. We see it throughout this Budget: the unallocated billions that are there, that we’re meant to believe will stimulate the economy effectively, but with no plan spelt out for how that will be.

The apprenticeship fund—again, who would argue with the idea of investing money in apprentices and skills training at a time of unemployment and economic crisis? No one would argue with that, but what we will question is where the plan is to actually deliver that and actually make it happen.

So this is a Budget that leaves New Zealand uncertain. Yes, it addresses some of the immediate crisis, and, yes, it does some good things, but at the centre of it is a gaping hole, where what New Zealanders needed was a plan set out that gave them the aspiration and the hope they need at a time of terrible global uncertainty. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.