Budget Debate

It’s been a very bored looking crowd in the gallery today, I have to say. This year’s Budget was delivered by the Hon Grant Robertson during a time of unprecedented global financial and health crisis. I think it’s a Budget that he can be rightly proud of, delivered at a time of great challenge in the world, and to have the confidence to deliver such a forward-looking Budget says a lot of how he has assumed the role as an outstanding Minister of Finance.

That confidence to deliver such a profound, forward-looking Budget comes from the knowledge that this Government—made up of the Labour Party; our coalition party, New Zealand First; and our support party, the Greens—had, before the COVID crisis, reduced Government debt. As page 28 of the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update shows, we had reduced net Government debt to 19 percent of GDP. We had reduced unemployment. Unemployment had come down from 4.7 to 4 percent. We had real wage growth that was the best that New Zealanders had experienced for a decade, and we had growth rates in New Zealand higher than in Australia, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and higher than the average in Europe. So we went into this crisis in a strong position, and it is that strong position that has enabled this Government to bring forward such a forward-looking Budget.

Now, we know—I think, at least on this side of the House, we share a celebration with the effort and commitment that has been shown by 5 million New Zealanders to largely—not completely—overcome the first challenge presented by COVID-19. And you would expect that everyone in this House would be celebrating that, but I have to say that there’s one side that doesn’t seem to be smiling that much about it. Maybe it’s the time of year, but it seems that the only thing that they have in their garden to suck on during this lockdown was lemons—lemons.

💬 Hon Amy Adams: Come on, David, you’re better than this.

Gone is the party—I’m better than this, am I? Well, I will congratulate the former National Party. I can’t imagine that that would have been the response of John Key and Bill English. They were optimistic, they were ambitious for their country, and they used to celebrate success. But they’re long gone and the people that have succeeded them are of a completely different ilk.

We are coming out of this lockdown ahead of virtually anyone else in the world. There’s one or two other countries that have done as well as New Zealand, but not many—you can count them on less than one hand—and there’s lots of other countries who are suffering from a worse health outcome and are suffering for a longer period of economic damage. On this side of the House, we think that is something to celebrate, and we are pleased with the supports that we have managed to give to those businesses in the economy who have suffered as a consequence of the decline in economic activity caused by the virus. And let’s not forget that is caused by the virus. Government policy has helped the country get through this challenge faster than most other countries, but, none the less, we are suffering those consequences as well.

Now, the standout measure, I think, of support for businesses has been the many tens of thousands of businesses who have taken up the subsidy that has enabled them to keep trading and to keep more of their employees engaged—$12 billion has been spent on that scheme, and that vast majority of it is going to New Zealand - owned businesses. Of that $12 billion, $5 billion, at least, has gone to small businesses, including sole traders. And the Opposition only had to look at the website where every one of those businesses are listed transparently, and they would have seen that it is the small businesses that they say that they’re worried about that have been the recipients of that taxpayer funding that has helped them at both a business and individual level.

I’ve been surprised to hear the first question from the Leader of the Opposition assert that there has been no support for small business, because every one of those small businesses—and there are tens of thousands listed on the website—have been a direct recipient of those billions of dollars of support, and I cannot understand how the Leader of the Opposition made that mistake yesterday. Perhaps it was because it was at the end of a very long day, even though by that time it was only 2 o’clock in the afternoon. I have to say, as I watched Newshub last night, it was like watching a disaster series going back to the 1970s calamity movies that we used to see—The Poseidon Adventure is one that comes to mind, the roaring inferno. There were more twists and turns in that one story on Newshub than you often see in a multi-episode series on TV these days.

What happened? Well, maybe in the last we had a good start—maybe. Maybe a good start for him; not so sure it was a good start for the National Party.

💬 Kieran McAnulty: Bring back Simon.

Well, “Bring back Simon.” Bring back Bridges—bring back Bridges. I have heard that that is a theme that is coming to get a bit of currency on the other side. But anyway, he first said, straight after that, that Simon Bridges was considering his future, and Simon Bridges said, “No, I’m coming back.”

He then had his first serious interview, which was on Q+A with Jack Tame, and he wouldn’t commit to anything. He said, “Well, you’ve got the job; what’s your plan?” And he wouldn’t give one, because he hasn’t got one. So what did he say? By the end he was pinned as wanting to borrow less but spend more. It wasn’t a very good start from the Leader of the Opposition, and maybe that’s why, on his way into caucus—his first caucus as Leader of the Opposition—that he actually lost his way a bit. The mistakes that were made on the way into that caucus—look, I’ve never seen it. I’ve been here for a while. I was here when Don Brash took over the National Party. That was a time of real backbiting. There was real division within the National Party. We had our share of that when we were Opposition too—we’ve been through this. We came through it—we came through it very strongly, but you can see they’re just at the start of this in the National Party, can’t you?

What happened? Well, we had “Ngāti Epsom”, and then the deputy leader of the National Party, having dropped her leader in it, went away to check, came back and said, “Yes, he’s Ngāti Porou.”, and he then said, “No I’m not.” It was all on camera. Then we saw Judith Collins and Paula Bennett leave the caucus at the same time, and Paula Bennett bitterly—I think she is another person who’s got lemons in the back garden; very bitter—said, “Well, Judith Collins’ contribution is obviously more important than mine.”—clear reference to her demotion. And then we had: what was the highest-ranking Māori within the National Party?

💬 Hon Member: Goldsmith.

No, no, it was Shane Reti all of a sudden. After they got over the mistake of “Ngāti Epsom”, they actually said it was Shane Reti. Unfortunately, then they realised he was at number 17. Now, I’ve got a lot of time for Shane Reti. I think he’s a very competent member of Parliament and a genuinely nice person, but I did feel a bit sorry for his sort of very temporary elevation to the front bench.

So if I could return to some of the other positives that are in this Budget. In addition to the $12 billion that has been spent into the economy, which we really did get out the door quickly, and I really thank Government officials for their assistance in both the design and the delivery of that. I know that there were teams of people working throughout New Zealand throughout the COVID lockdown to actually get that money into the pockets of New Zealanders, and they did exceptionally well, but we’ve got a lot of other things to support the economy here. This is not a financial crisis in the sense of the global financial crisis; this is a collapse in consumption and demand. The collapse in demand also affects production, and so we’re facing, around the world, difficulties.

In the face of that, one of the roles of Government is to support consumption and demand so that you don’t get into a downward spiral, and that’s what this Budget most certainly does. It takes a leaf out of the lesson of the first Labour Government. We’re not going to get into this perilous downward spiral. We’re going to lift the fortune of New Zealanders, and we’re going to do as well economically as we have so far in overcoming the health challenges. Congratulations, Grant Robertson.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I am pleased that I have a chance and get to take a call in this appropriations Estimates debate. While this is, of course, the Budget debate, I don’t think anyone would disagree that it’s been delivered, it’s been put together, and it’s being debated in the context of the biggest economic crisis that any of us, certainly in this House, will have dealt with, and quite likely any of us in our lifetime. The scale, the intensity, and the size of this challenge really render, you know, all of the normal rhetoric and analysis and debate around Budgets somewhat obsolete. The focus of this Budget really is that it encapsulates the Government response to how this country is going to approach the COVID crisis.

In that regard, it was eagerly anticipated. Right across the country, irrespective of politics, everybody understood that we were in an unparalleled crisis and that the thinking and delivery that would be required to get us through it would be set out in this Budget. And I don’t mind admitting it myself: I may be an Opposition politician, but I’m a New Zealander too, and I was looking to this Budget to understand and have confidence that New Zealand had a clear path ahead and could have some confidence in its future.

The Government, of course, had three months from the time the severity of this crisis first became apparent—about the middle of February—to work with tens of thousands of public servants, very highly paid, very highly skilled, and millions and millions of dollars in consultants, to ensure that this document could set out the very best of thinking that they had around how they would respond to the crisis. It was a chance to show that they got it, that they understood what was going on and what we were going to face, and that they had a plan to get New Zealand through this, that they understood the scale, they understood the support that would be needed, and that they understood the adaptation that would be needed right across our country to a post-COVID world. But what did we see? We saw no plan whatsoever. After three months and hundreds of thousands of man hours from our civil service and consultants and all of the minds on the Treasury benches coming together, we saw no plan, no direction, nothing at all that was going to reassure communities that this was a Government that held their livelihoods in safe hands, that the country could look at this and say “OK, I can breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve got real confidence that my job is going to be safe, and, for those who do need new jobs, that those jobs will come to pass.”

What we saw instead was a Labour Party that has reverted completely to type and just assumed that if you talk about big numbers, that’s the same thing as having a plan, and that if you talk about spending a lot of money and really big numbers and lots of billions, people will think that they know what they are doing. That is just not enough. I was just reading, actually, an article in The Australian today where a former Labour treasurer described this Government’s response as having, “no idea whatsoever except to throw money around.” That is exactly right. If you don’t have a plan, in Grant Robertson’s world, just talk about billions and billions of dollars and let’s hope that’s enough.

What we got in this Budget was a $20 billion slush fund. And, you know, in this House, billions—and Michael Cullen famously said, “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon it’s real money.”—$20 billion; that’s a 20,000-million-dollar slush fund that the Government either can’t or won’t tell us what it’s going to be used for, and that’s just not OK. Either they’ve got no ideas, they’ve got no concept at all of what that money is going to be spent on—

💬 Hon Maggie Barry: That’s quite likely.

—or even worse, though, Maggie Barry—even worse than that bad scenario, they know exactly what it is and they’re callously sitting behind a frame of it being a COVID response to chuck a whole lot of money around to support their election chances. We will see, won’t we? But to tell New Zealanders who’ve, by the way, paid for that money that “We’re not going to tell you what it’s for. We don’t know what we’re going to use it for, but we’re going to take it off you.” is simply not good enough.

I think it’s very easy for Governments to forget that this is money—whether it’s borrowed or taken in taxes, it’s all money that comes out of the pockets of New Zealanders. Those New Zealanders deserve the respect of knowing what it will be used for, what impact it will have, and is it going to be spent carefully. You’ve got to know, surely as a Government—as a competent Government—not only how much you can spend, but what difference will it make. I’ve always said in this House, and I stand by it, that the test of a good Government is not how much you spend; it’s what you achieve with that money. We’ve seen time and time again in this House that this is a Government that wants to get rid of targets and accountability for outcomes and wants us to judge them on how much money they spend. Well, if that’s the contest—how much money they can throw around—they can take that one. I would far rather that our side of the House is judged on the difference we make for New Zealanders, and that’s certainly what we stand for. If a Government truly wants to be kind to New Zealanders, don’t take money out of their pockets unless you know exactly why it’s needed, how you will use it, and what difference it will make. That is a kindness.

It also shows—this Budget—to me that this is a Government, and, more worryingly still, a Prime Minister and a finance Minister, who I don’t think are actually appreciating the true scale and severity of this crisis. Let’s look at the Budget, and, of course, Budgets are put together—and I’ve certainly been in the room when Budgets have been put together, and I understand the process. Budgets are put together based on a set of Treasury forecasts which go through a range of scenarios—best-case, worst—well, you know, a sort of a high-risk case, a low-risk case, and a likely middle line. The Treasury forecasts in this Budget are unbelievably, in a time of such fast-moving crisis, a month old at Budget day—a month old. This is a crisis that is evolving by the day. We’re seeing a thousand people a day—isn’t it, Louise Upston—go into just the job seeker support, and Treasury stopped taking the mood of the economy a month out from the Budget. So we get a picture of things looking unbelievably rosier than they are or that they will be. I would say it’s Pollyanna-ish, but it’s far too serious. If you cannot appreciate the scale of the severity, you cannot respond appropriately.

And this is not just an Opposition view of the world. You’ve got the Reserve Bank today coming out and saying, actually, unemployment could be twice what Treasury said. You’ve got significant and well-respected commentators saying unemployment could be 24 percent, and yet we’ve got Grant Robertson, just a week ago, or less than a week ago, saying he thought unemployment had plateaued. That, to me, tells me that we have a Government that is either duplicitous or entirely out of touch with the severity of what’s going on in communities around New Zealand. The businesses I talk to are quite clear. We are nowhere near the worst of this economically yet. And yet we’ve got Treasury and the finance Minister singing from an “It’s All Fine” song sheet, and that’s simply not right.

I want to come back to that same article in The Australian today, where they referred to this Government, and I quote, “pushing our economy off a cliff. Public finances are in tatters, its biggest export sector obliterated.” That is the true reality of the economic management of this Government. That is the true state of affairs. And Mr Robertson’s comments that he thought unemployment was plateauing and businesses were confident now that we were back to level 2 shows an unbelievable naivety and failure to understand business. Just because a business can reopen—and I wouldn’t have thought I would have to spell this out in the House, but let me do so—just because you allow a business to reopen, it doesn’t mean it is suddenly profitable again, and if it’s not profitable it won’t keep its staff. Those unemployment numbers are going to continue to rise up. And that is people, it is livelihoods, it is security, it is everything they have worked for.

The very first thing this Government should do is acknowledge the true picture of what has happened to New Zealand and show them that they have the germ of a plan, any idea how they’re going to get through it, and if they don’t know how to get through it, then they need to step aside for those who will get New Zealanders through this. We need to support communities in this time of crisis. This is not about keeping money in the tin. We agree with that. It is about supporting New Zealanders in getting the help that they need and it is also about adapting New Zealand to a post-COVID world. That needs a clear plan. It needs a team capable of delivering it. If National has the privilege of being re-elected in September, I can promise everyone in New Zealand that that is exactly what you will get.

The next leader. Sorry, thank you, just to follow on from the Hon Amy Adams, who probably should have been the current leader, to be perfectly frank. It’s lovely to see her back, and it’s lovely to know that she will be here for some time. It was a great sadness when she decided that she would step down, but it’s lovely to see that she has rescinded that decision and this House is going to have the benefit of her intelligence for some years yet—on the Opposition benches, but for some years yet, so that’s always a good thing.

However, I do want to pick up on some of the comments of my colleague who just resumed her seat. I believe that the article she’s referring to was actually written by—or the quote that she was giving was from—Roger Douglas. I noticed that—I don’t know; I haven’t read the article. I’m sure perhaps I’ll go and search out, but if it is by Roger Douglas, I doubt I will read it. And, of course, it may very well have been by Ruth Richardson, somebody else that the National Party likes to, well, not really talk about any more, do they? Because that’s exactly the point. Naming those two names, the very reason why this Budget is the way that it looks is because New Zealand First, as part of this coalition Government, absolutely refused to allow this Government to shift into austerity measures, absolutely refused to allow what happened in the 1980s and the 1990s happen again to New Zealanders.

I find it fascinating that the Hon Amy Adams stands and talks about “a plan, a plan, a plan”—we’re rolling out the plan, and yet their current leader cannot articulate any plan at all. Apparently there are 55 of them working on it and, according to the current leader, they’re all talented, they all have depth—e.g., that doesn’t matter what number you are, then, and where you sit. But they keep talking about the fact that they want to see a plan. This Government has articulated it with the amount of money that we have already put forward in Budget 2020.

💬 Hon Louise Upston: That’s not a plan!

I find it also fascinating that the Hon Louise Upston, who is shouting out at the moment—that the Hon Amy Adams just said, “We do not argue against spending money on our people.”, but the Hon Louise Upston stood up and said, “Why are you giving New Zealanders a temporary income support? Why are you giving New Zealanders temporary income support?” She also argued something about the ethnic background of the New Zealanders that might be receiving the temporary income support, but it’s a complete flip from the ethnic background that she used to talk about before there was COVID—now there’s another ethnic background that she doesn’t believe that the Government should be supporting.

This Government will support New Zealanders. We did so with the wage subsidy to start with. We’ve just announced an extension to the wage subsidy. We have announced that we will do a temporary income support package. There are other packages that are coming forward. There is an enormous amount of work going on by Ministers in this Government. We are incredibly aware of the one-in-100-year shock that our people are going to experience. We know it every day by the people we talk to. We know it every day by the numbers that we see signing on to income support and signing on to the wage subsidy. We know exactly what we are staring down the face of.

The other thing that this Budget has done is it has built on some of the investment that we had in the previous Budget. The Hon Amy Adams talked about: absolutely there is a process for Budget. I led priority D of the Wellbeing Budget, and we were right at the end of that, and then COVID-19 struck, and instantly all of that process, all of that work, needed to change. It needed to swing into place to support our people. One of the things that we got in the 2019 Budget was $7.7 million for seniors, and part of that was working around the gold card. Online providers started working with the gold cards, the Office for Seniors, around how can we incentivise, how can we help our seniors to get online and make sure that they can continue to get some form of discount to stretch their dollar while we’ve asked them to stay at home. So those people just shifted their work from where they were enhancing the gold card in the physical environment, to now trying to enhance it in the digital environment.

We had 600 learning support coordinators announced and funded in the 2019 Budget. During the lockdown, those 600 learning support coordinators not only were continuing to professionally develop but they were contacting families; they were making sure that they talked with Special Education Needs Coordinators and Resource Teachers: Learning and Behaviour to build a picture, so that those children who had learning support needs, the moment that we were able to—either through online learning or back into their classrooms—were immediately supported.

Oranga Tamariki, for example, we had got a budget, a $1.1 billion budget over four years in 2019. Part of that was to digitise up our workforce. Oranga Tamariki was able to immediately start working from home, immediately continue to do their work to try and keep their eye on children by handing out devices to our families, our carers, and even handing out phones on some occasions to some of our parents so that they could stay in touch with their children. We worked with Whānau Ora to make sure that, when they were delivering, Oranga Tamariki put some of that money into Whānau Ora and the emergency and sanitation packages that were being delivered, and we asked them “While you’re there, please check on the children.” We know that we actually had others of our providers step up.

We have been working on transition support, on prevention and early intervention, and we continue to do that because we know that one of the side effects of COVID-19, if I speak as the Minister for Children, is that more of our families will be under stress. And when our families get under stress, bad things can happen to children. So we need to, as a Government, make sure that we move in with assistance much faster than we’ve ever done before, before families start to break down, start to have the raruraru within them escalate to a level where there is—whether it be verbal abuse or physical abuse, sexual abuse or whatever, we move in earlier.

And that is part of what this Government has put in, and some of its investment into continuing to build on what has been the amazing capacity of community to come together to look after each other. We’re going to build on that, New Zealand; we’re going to take the team of 5 million and we’re going to invest in the team of 5 million. We’re not going to move to austerity measures. We are going to now take that spirit of community that we have rediscovered—something we’ve never seen in our lifetime—and we’re going to build on it and invest in it, and we’re going to enhance it, and we are going to make New Zealand better out the other side of COVID-19, because this coalition Government, in which New Zealand First holds a key anchor, will not allow austerity measures to be part of what goes on, but we will not allow our people to get to a cliff face, either. Any solution that this Government puts in place—if it’s temporary, we will have an exit plan; if it is permanent, we will make sure that it can just transition through as our economy recovers. Because we won’t have a cliff-face again, like the subsidies that were lifted off our farming communities, that brought them to the brink of destruction in earlier times—we will not allow that to happen.

So we’re very proud of the Budget that we have put forward in 2020. It delivers what it needs to deliver. We have more to come, because we must. The Opposition talks about $20 billion as a slush fund. They can’t give you a plan, New Zealand, about what they would spend your money on, and, again, I find it fascinating that the Opposition talks about this as taxpayers’ money. These are the very taxpayers that, again, just today, they argued should not get the temporary income relief. Again, these are the taxpayers that they say “Why would you invest in those taxpayers’ children and their children’s education? Why would you invest in those taxpayers and actually helping them make sure that there are loans for the businesses that they either own or are employed by?” It is a strange and confused message coming from the Opposition. It hasn’t got any clearer with the change of leader, but I can tell you now that this side of the House is particularly focused. Our vision is incredibly clear: we’re going to get New Zealand up, we’re going to get it back out and working, and we’re going to make sure that we are stronger than when we went into COVID-19. This is the opportunity for the reset, New Zealand, and from here there’s only up.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I enjoyed that speech.

💬 Hon Member: I suppose when you’re on 3 percent, there is only one up.

Yes, yes, at 2.7 percent for New Zealand First, yes, I think that’s very important.

I did have a good look at this Budget, as all my colleagues did, and I’ve got to say, it’s grim reading—it is grim reading for all New Zealanders current and in the future. And that is obviously something that has happened as a result of COVID-19, but the financial impacts are just incredibly huge in the sense of what it’s going to do to our future generations.

So we had a debt of roughly 60 billion bucks, and everyone was praising us, only a few months ago, that New Zealand was well-placed with low Government debt. On the other side, we didn’t talk about the high level of private debt that individuals, households actually have. So when you put those together, actually, New Zealand was always reasonably indebted. But at a Government level, through successive Governments—both the current Government and, certainly, under our administration—we got that debt down. But we are going to see debt grow from $60 billion, which is a hard figure to envisage, to basically three times that amount: $200 billion. That is a staggeringly high amount of money, three times the level of debt that somewhere, sometime, someone is going to have to pay off. Part of the reason for this, this huge increase, is that the projections that the Government put out assume that we will continuously lose, every year, substantial amounts of money. So our revenue from our tax resources or income will be far below what we will be spending every year to the tune of just over $100 million over the next four years—$100 million.

We’ve just been celebrating the fact that we have achieved a surplus of about $7 billion, albeit that a couple of billion of that came from accounting treatment. That is one of the highest Government surpluses we’ve ever achieved. And yet, we have got a Budget that seems to say it is OK to run up $100 billion of operating surpluses before we even start to generate any returns so that we can even contemplate the ability to pay down some of that $200 billion worth of debt. Now, any business, any household, would not stand a chance if they went to their bank and put up a proposition like this. I think this is the disconnect and the difference that the National Party has with the Government. It is the simple fact that we believe that it is perfectly appropriate that the Government is spending a lot of money right now—in fact, it should be spending more, and I’m going to talk about that—but there is a time when that needs to stop, and we have got a flabby Government that doesn’t know anything about financial discipline. And that is the worrying thing, that anyone could be prepared to put out a Budget like this that says we will run up $100 billion worth of deficits and we’re perfectly OK.

Now, the bit about this, if you even look at the Budget, it is one hell of a spender. I’ll just give you examples, just random examples from the Budget. The first one I came across, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, for some reason, and, you know, this in the context of growing our debt by three times. So most of us will be going, “Yeah, we’re going to spend lots of money, but we’ll make sure we cut it back from somewhere else. Otherwise, the future generation, the young generation, is going to have to eventually pay it back for us.” That’s pretty unfair for people like us in this House. So presumably you’re going to take quite a disciplined approach. So the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, guess what! Another $7 million in the Budget. Alright, doesn’t sound a lot, I know. But, you know, if we’re going to lead the country, why don’t we just look at our own department?

If I go to—and these are random—the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Here we are, we’re going to spend some money on the delivery of an online rating tool for the self-classification of commercial video. Very good, thank you. We’re going to spend some more—oh, here’s another one: we’re going to spend some money, not much, on doing up the Premier House and the cottage because that’s very important.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: That’s more important than breast cancer screening.

Much more important than breast cancer! That’s right, Mr Michael Woodhouse, as we’ve heard earlier today.

Then we’ve got arts and culture—no, here’s another one. Here’s a good one—[Interruption] Excuse me. I’m trying to give a talk here, excuse me. Here’s a really good one: general election 2020, transitional support for the executive. This means this is funding for when we have the election and, post the election in October, whoever it is, and hopefully it’s us, apparently you’re going to give us $6.2 million so that we can ensure that the Ministers and their staff quickly become operational. Well, I can tell you what, if we happen to be on that side of the bench in October, we will be returning the $6.2 million, because we don’t need it.

But the other stuff in here, you know, the area where I really wanted to see something, because I did have the building construction portfolio, and I know that in Wellington everyone’s been saying to Mr Grant Robertson, “Why don’t you help us upgrade our seismic strengthening on our apartments, on our commercial buildings?” He’s had it in his ear from all the locals. Guess what—guess what! We had all that other stuff. We’ve got $3.1 million to help strengthening of buildings across all of New Zealand. Now, I tell you what, if I was running this Budget I would have taken all those other millions and I would’ve probably given $20 million to that. That’s where I would’ve funded that from. Easy peasy.

These are just small examples of the Budget. It just shows that we’ve had a hell of a spend-up, and we’re not worrying about our future generations, how we’re going to pay for it. Now, that is the issue, and National’s issue is that, as I said before, we should not be spending more than necessary.

All this should be put through a cost-benefit analysis. We heard today that a lot of these Budget items haven’t been put through it. They haven’t been put through the CBAx system, which was introduced by you guys, and you’re not using it.

💬 SPEAKER: Order!

Sorry, Mr Speaker. So this is where we sit with this Budget.

Then, we turn round the other side and say, look, what should we have seen in this Budget? We should be talking about the support for households and for businesses. We agree with what you’ve done with the wage subsidy, albeit you only did 50 percent of the wages in the sense that there was a 50 percent subsidy of the average wage. One might have argued it could have been 80 percent of the wage, which was what most countries overseas did, but, nonetheless, it’s a relatively generous package in the terms of the lifespan of that project. But the issue around funding our businesses is a crucial issue.

And we’ve heard about the business finance guarantee. It was a scheme that was taken from the UK and, basically, dropped in here at the very time that the UK were talking about it being ineffective and that the Government was going to change it. The Government chose to bring it in, and, as we heard today, $60 million—a mere $60 million—of funding has been provided to small business—drop in bucket. Then, we’ve heard about the tax loss scheme today. Again, $71 million. The reality: it does not work—it does not work for small businesses.

The worst thing I find about the approach is that the Government think the best way to help a business is to gear them up, give them more debt. What is absolutely crying out from our small business owners right now—because, by the way, they employ hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders—is the absolute need to get cash in their pockets so that they continue to meet their overheads and their rental payments. Of course, we had this absurd proposition put forward by the Hon Andrew Little about rental arrangements. There is no financial support for small businesses in rental arrangements. It has just been assumed that every rental landlord in New Zealand—it’s OK that he or she should pick up the bill. But we heard today from the Reserve Bank, when I asked them, they are particularly worried about the commercial sector. It’s worth $180 billion, and it’s huge. And they are now worried, as we are climbing out of this period where we’ve had wage support, that this is one of the areas that New Zealand is really going to have a problem with. The Government should have dealt with it and they haven’t.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Ka tīmata ahau ki roto i Te Reo Māori, ka mutu, ka huri atu ahau ki roto i te reo Pākehā.

Tiwhatiwha i te pō, kakarauru i te pō. I a au i te pō kerekere, i a au i te pō, ka rapuhia, ka kimihia kei hea koe e ngaro nei e.

E te pāpā, e Wiremu Wiremu, kua ngaro atu rā koe i te tirohanga kanohi, haere atu rā koe ki runga i tō waka o Ngātokimatawhaorua ki te wāhi o Hawaiki i whakataukitia ai e ō tātou mātua, e ō tātou tūpuna. Koutou o te pō, kotahi tonu te kōrero ki a koutou, haere mai, haere.

Ka whakahokia mai ngā rārangi kōrero ki a tātou katoa, te hunga ora. Ka ao a Tamanuiterā ki runga i te mokopuna a Te Omeka, ki runga i te mokopuna o tōku hoa mahi. Kāti, ki te hunga ora, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[Greetings, Mr Speaker. I will begin in Māori and then change to English.

The dark night, the deep night. When I take steps into the long night, I will search for you, I will look for you in the great beyond.

To my ancestor, Wiremu Wiremu, who has left the world of the living, go on your ancestral canoe of Ngātokimatawhaorua to that place in Hawaiki that our ancestors memorialised in proverb. To those who have gone to the long night, return to us and go in peace.

I will guide my speech back to us, the world of the living. The sun shines on the descendant of Te Omeka, on to the grandchild of my work colleague. To those of us who walk in the world of the living, greetings one and all.]

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. Over $900 million: that is what this Budget delivers to Māori—Whānau Ora, Māori education, Māori housing, kōhanga reo, employment, and skills training. As the Minister for Whānau Ora, I am proud—proud that this Government backs the good work that Whānau Ora does. I’m proud of our response, the immediate action that Whānau Ora took in protecting our Māori communities from COVID-19. I’m proud that we have invested, in the recent Budget, a further $136 million into helping whānau through Whānau Ora in a Māori way and in a way that we know works.

I note that the Leader of the Opposition asserted this morning that National created the concept of Whānau Ora. This is a gross misrepresentation. The concept comes from Te Ao Māori and has been understood by our whānau and our people since time immemorial—well before its adoption in official policy.

The Leader of the Opposition also said that the investment in Whānau Ora was driven solely by whānau needs. I would like to note that Whānau Ora is an intentional step away from the deprivation assessments of the previous Government. Whānau Ora fosters whānau resilience, building on their strengths and aspirations, to empower them, and to restore rangatiratanga.

This investment does not happen by chance; it happens because a Government chooses to make it happen. It happens because our Prime Minister and our Minister of Finance see the challenges facing Māori. They understand the statistics and the failures of the past, and they vow to do things differently. It happens because our Māori Ministers sit at the decision-making table and, as a team, advocate for our people, to help our people, and, as a result, we get wins for our people. Our contribution is strong; our team is stronger.

No one should underestimate the importance of diversity, the important role diversity plays in ensuring Budgets serve all of our people in Aotearoa. In one of his first interviews, the Leader of the Opposition said that he didn’t see Māori, that he didn’t take into account who a person truly is when determining who would sit on his front bench. In that one reply, he told Māori that he does not see them, that National is blind to who we are and to what we stand for.

His colleague Judith Collins, in select committee today, announced that she was sick and tired of being demonised for her culture. When Ms Collins is more likely to live in poverty, to end up in prison, to be stopped to have her bags checked in a shop even though her Pākehā mates are not, then maybe she can claim to be demonised for her culture, but not now—but not now. She, like her leader, is blind to the real Aotearoa that the rest of us live in.

The Leader of the Opposition claims that my ministerial colleagues the Hon Willie Jackson and the Hon Kelvin Davis are weak—the same Ministers that delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to Māori education, to kōhanga reo, to employment, and to Māori trades training. As a child of kōhanga reo, those announcements warm my heart. They are the same Ministers that have made gains for our people in every single Budget of this Government and in every policy of this Government that we have put in place since 2017. Their contributions have made a difference to our Māori communities.

The Leader of the Opposition doesn’t understand our Māori world. In his own words, he doesn’t see our world. The real weakness in politics, in my humble view, is ignorance. The Opposition would have never and would never deliver a Budget for Māori like the one we have delivered in 2020. When leaders admit that they don’t see someone’s culture, when they don’t value the Māori contribution, they are admitting that they are blind to our achievements and deaf to our concerns. Their assessment of what effectiveness is, what strength is, is based on succeeding in a world that we as Māori do not live in.

The Leader of the Opposition may not see us; he may not value our contribution, but let this be said: we see him—Māori see him—and we see what true weakness really looks like on this occasion. Tēnā koe.

It’s my pleasure to rise and take a call in the Budget debate, and I’ll come to some of the points that Peeni Henare, the previous speaker, has just made, in a minute. But at the outset, I wish to say that it’s my proper first time at speaking in this place since COVID, and I wish to acknowledge the health response. It was good. I wish to acknowledge the Ministers and all MPs right across the Parliament who worked during that time, because it was a difficult time for New Zealand. MPs and Ministers worked incredibly hard during that time, and I want to give some acknowledgment of that, including to the executive.

But I also want to acknowledge people in my own area because, yesterday, we officially had no COVID-19 cases in Hawke’s Bay any more. They have all recovered. We had one cluster, caused by a cruise ship that came in, which was deeply worrying for everybody, and while there could be slightly related cases in the future to that, they think it unlikely. So in Hawke’s Bay, yesterday, we officially had no new cases.

We had no deaths, and I want to pay tribute to my DHB, who did a fantastic job. The doctors, nurses, essential service workers, and the people in rest homes—it’s been an amazing response.

I also want to thank the civil defence personnel. I was included, fortunately, with the leaders—with the mayors—with the chair of Ngāti Kahungunu, and with all the civil defence. It was a united approach and it worked well.

I also want to pay tribute to the Hawke’s Bay economy. Like with many other parts of New Zealand at the time of COVID, it is our peak production season, so 10,000 people in Hawke’s Bay worked through the lockdown in pack-houses and orchards, delivering fruit and all those types of things. Not one single person contracted COVID19 in that workforce, and I pay tribute to the people who own those businesses, the efforts they went to, and the money they spent to keep their workers safe.

But while I am complimentary of the health response, that’s where the similarities end, because when I read the Budget, it’s fair to say I was shocked at the scale of the borrowings and the projected deficits. I also believe that the funding that has been—and the assumptions made by Treasury are optimistic. So we started off with a debt of $60 billion and, in four years, it’s going to be $200 billion, and we’re going to run deficits of $100 billion over the next four years. I’m talking billions; I’m not talking millions—billions. Currently, the total debt of New Zealand is around $60 billion, so our deficits alone will be nearly twice that over the next four years.

Why I worry about that—and I’ll come to the borrowings in a minute—is that even though interest rates are historically low, all that money has to be paid back by us, by our children, and by their children.

💬 Kieran McAnulty: So the member wouldn’t borrow?

So I’m not against borrowing the money—I’ll come to that, Mr McAnulty, if you just wait for a minute—but let’s be clear: it does need to be paid back, and it will be a major handbrake on the New Zealand economy.

The wage subsidy has been a good thing. However, the pain has only just hit. On Monday, I spent the day in my electorate visiting businesses and talking to them. In my view, the workers have not yet understood the full ramifications of what’s going on, because they’ve been sheltered by the wage subsidy. Those business owners are petrified. The small shops in my electorate, the small and medium sized enterprises—all the stress currently, or most of it, should I say, is going on the owners. They asked me about the next wage subsidy, and they said this: “If we qualify for a 50 percent reduction in turnover so we can get another eight weeks, we might as well shut our doors, because it doesn’t work.” You cannot trade when your turnover is 50 percent of what it was before.

So as we go into June and as we go into July, let’s remember those small-business owners. We need to look after all New Zealanders, but at the moment, in my view, they’re taking the biggest brunt of the stress and financial concern that’s going.

Yes, there is a small-business loan scheme, and we heard today that $1 billion, I think, has been taken up. But there are massive inconsistencies between who can get the small-business loan and who can get the wage subsidy, and I saw a classic example yesterday where it’s completely misaligned. The equity support through the Government underwriting 80 percent of the new loans, up to $500,000—only $60 million has been taken up. Most people tell me that’s because if the bank has to be the facilitator of that, they might as well get it from the bank, rather than using some new scheme that the Government’s got.

Then, I come to the Hawke’s Bay aspect of the Budget and some of the inconsistencies in some of the things that we’ve been promised. A couple of days before the Budget, the Hon David Clark came out and said that it was the largest ever investment in the DHB sector. “Wonderful,” I thought, and then, when I looked at the figures in the Budget, it’s a complete con. In Hawke’s Bay, last year’s appropriation for the DHB was $538 million. This year’s appropriation is $584 million, or about a $50 million increase. One would think, “Fantastic!”, until one remembers that last year, the Hawke’s Bay DHB had a deficit of $21 million, and this year they’re projected to have a deficit of somewhere up to $30 million, so the $50 million that’s been added simply keeps up with the deficits they’ve been running. Not a single extra new operation, no funding for the COVID response so far, and all those people that have been waiting for elective surgery, they’ve been bumped—nothing for them. A whole lot of screening and other things have been cancelled—nothing for them also.

So it’s a con. It is a new investment—sure—but it doesn’t actually advance the health needs of my people in Hawke’s Bay.

Then, another Minister also announced—fantastic, it’s part of the scheme—8,000 new houses. State houses, they said—8,000. They conveniently forgot they’d promised 100,000 KiwiBuild houses and built about 500—so 8,000 new houses. I’ll tell you in my electorate the situation: for 2¾ years, there has been 2½ hectares of vacant Housing New Zealand land in the middle of Hastings and, in that same period, 10 houses have been built—10. At the same time, we now have 550 people living in motels in Hastings, and the Government can only build 10 houses. So it’s all very well to make big announcements, but there is absolutely no credibility associated with what this coalition Government can deliver.

I also watched my councils. They said, “Oh, this is fantastic. We need some shovel-ready projects. The Ministers have come round and talked to us about what they need.”, and $300 million—or $310 million, I think—was put up by the Hawke’s Bay councils for shovel-ready projects: roading, water, and those types of things. I found out today that the total applications for that fund were $136 billion—$136 billion was the applications for the fund, and the fund has got $3 billion in it. My councils seriously think they’re going to have a reasonable show at $300 million. When you look at the number, they’ll be lucky if they get $5 million.

So there have been lots of promises in this Government and there have been lots of discussions, and I’ve heard Ministers and the Prime Minister say, “We’re not into austerity.” Nor are we, on this National side of the House. Nor are we, under our new leader, Todd Muller, and what he wishes to do. We’re not into austerity, either. But what we are into is making sure that the massive amount of money that we’re borrowing on behalf of New Zealand, that we and my children and their children are going to pay, is spent properly. So far, in the 2¾ years that this Government has been in power, their ability to deliver anything close to their promise has been woeful, and I don’t expect that to change. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I understand this is a split call. I call Dr Liz Craig—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. In my split call, I would like to focus on the record investments in health, but before I do, I’d just like to provide a bit of context. During the lockdown, I was lucky enough to sit on the Epidemic Response Committee, and we heard from a whole range of health professionals, who were, themselves, working during the lockdown. We heard from GPs, and a number of GPs had moved incredibly quickly to providing remote consultations and focusing on providing the care that their patients needed while keeping both their patients and their staff safe. We heard from midwives who had been out in the community providing antenatal care—sometimes remotely, sometimes face to face—and also delivering babies in difficult circumstances. We also heard from pharmacists who had been going out and making sure that patients had the prescriptions they needed by delivering them to people’s homes.

We also heard from some of the cancer services, and particularly from specialist Chris Jackson. What he was talking about was how they had continued to deliver cancer care right through the lockdown—so chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and cancer surgery—and most of the patients that they were looking after had received the care that they needed right through that period. For him, one of the quotes he was saying, during that time, he said, “The lockdown has kept people with cancer and vulnerable immune systems safe. They have been spared the serious or fatal harms of infection. This … to date [has] been a success.” I think what he was saying, basically, was that this lockdown has made sure that those with cancer were completely protected from the effects of COVID in the community, along with many, many of us as well. So the success of that lockdown was noted by many. But what he was also talking about was the fact that the lockdown had resulted in delays in some cancer screening and delays in diagnostic tests, and what he was saying was that as a sector, we would need to be planning some catch up in the system for elective procedures and also for non-cancer elective procedures.

This is where Budget 2020 also comes in. But this Budget isn’t actually in isolation; this is the third of the Budgets from this Government, and the previous two basically were designed to rebuild our health system after nine long years of neglect. Many of the things that were invested in those two previous Budgets are going to be incredibly relevant to our recovery, including our record investments in mental health services and making sure that people on low incomes can continue to access low-cost GP visits. It’s also incredibly important that we’ve invested, over the last two Budgets, in our DHBs and also in our crumbling hospital infrastructure, our buildings that had been neglected over those nine years. So that’s put us in a good position moving forward.

But, basically, Budget 2020 isn’t the only other significant investment that we’ve put in during this year, because as the conditions started to deteriorate overseas, our Ministry of Health, our Government, was watching. Basically, because we had the capacity to put those border measures in place early, we had the time to look at the evidence and put extra measures in place, because in the absence of a vaccine, contact tracing and early diagnosis are going to be the cornerstones of protecting us. So even before we announced Budget 2020, the Government, on 17 March, had announced $500 million in extra funding. What that funding was used for was to double the resourcing going into public health units, who were at the coalface of that contact tracing, setting up a national close-contact service that then coordinated that contact tracing and also looked at investigating the clusters and all those complex investigations.

We also put extra money into primary care—not only just for primary care to look at telemedicine and remote consultations but also set up those community-based assessment centres, so people knew where they could go and get a diagnostic test. We put extra money into Healthline so people could ring up and there would be extra doctors and nurses there to provide consultations. So there was a lot that we did even before we went into Budget 2020, and what that’s done is, as we’ve moved through and had an incredibly successful public health response—and the number of cases are very, very small, and we’re getting many days now where we’ve got zero new cases—we’re putting ourselves in a position for recovery.

So where Budget 2020 comes in is now significant investment into our DHBs, and so what we’re basically doing is putting the largest investment into DHBs—$3.92 billion over the next four years, or $980 million per year, into DHBs—so they can do some of that catch up but also just to put them on a sustainable footing. We’re also putting an extra $282 million over three years into a catch-up campaign for electives. So this is a good Budget for the health system, and this is a good Budget for the people of New Zealand. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Fa‘afetai i lau afioga Fofoga Fetalai. It’s an absolute opportunity to contribute to this Budget debate this afternoon. My speech today is going to be about leadership, and it’s going to be about thanks, and it’s going to be about leadership for a once-in-100-year epidemic. So I want to take this opportunity to thank our Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. I firmly believe that we live in the best country in the world, not because I’m bragging but because of the leadership, the people at the helm, and I want to just say fa‘afetai tele to our Prime Minister.

We are now celebrating the lowest numbers in a response to this COVID-19. We are now at a stage where we can say, “Play it safe.” So when we look at playing it safe, what’s the “it”? The “it” is about the leadership of the people who are leading us as a country. The “it” is about the team of 5 million—a team of 5 million. Every day we are comforted in confidence that our leader, the right honourable Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is speaking to every individual in the team of 5 million.

I want to acknowledge—well, the Budget is about leadership. I want to acknowledge the leadership of the finance Minister, the Hon Grant Robertson, because when we took this journey, our books were in very good shape. What do I mean by very good shape? We had the lowest unemployment figures ever—lowest unemployment figures ever. We had a surplus. We were positioned—in the leadership since we took office in 2017—to lead in a once-in-100-year epidemic. I want to thank the honourable Minister of Finance, and I want to talk about the $12.1 billion quick response in the lockdown alert level 4 and alert level 3. Why do you want to talk about that? I want to talk about that because it addressed the immediate needs—the wage subsidy addressed the immediate needs. I want to echo the Prime Minister that no one in this country should go hungry—immediate needs in terms of the wage subsidy.

Of course, we talk time and time again about inequality in this country. We talk about our Māori and Pacific in the same sentence about inequality in this country. Evidence tells us about inequality in this country. But have we seen it done before? No. It is the first time in a hundred years that Pacific and Māori are part of the priority of the Government. Why do I say that? Well, there is evidence saying that we are listening. We’re listening with our heart, not just with the evidence that’s been before our face but we’re listening with our heart. The $900 million—the $900 million—to try and equal that, to Māori tangata whenua in this country. The $105 million to Pacific.

English is the language that we speak most often in this country, but in the time of crisis, people who couldn’t understand English needed to be told the crisis and response in the language that they can understand as a team of 5 million. The leadership that it took for the languages to be spoken in our mainstream media is about leadership and is about ensuring that our team of 5 million understood the Government’s response in terms of public health.

I want to acknowledge what happened in Papakura, in terms of the $12.1 billion first response of the Government. I’m the Labour list MP based in Papakura. The Papakura multidisciplinary cross-agency team, MDCAT, and the leadership of it—it was chaired by Mel Tipene. Every week on a Wednesday they got together: KuraConnect, YourPapakura, Te Puni Kōkiri, the Sikh temple. They got together and they spoke about how do we respond to our community—how do we respond to our community.

I want to be able to acknowledge the Minister, the Hon Peeni Henare, in terms of Whānau Ora. Under that leadership, people got the food at the door. It didn’t matter what status you had in this country—it didn’t matter what status. You were provided with a food parcel at your door by people who knew where the vulnerable people are. So I want to take this acknowledgement of Kathleen Tuai-Taufoou of Siaola Social Services, the arm of the Vahefonua Tonga ‘o Aotearoa Methodist Church, for their contribution in terms of Whānau Ora. And last but not least, I want to sing the praises of Daljit Singh, who leads the Gurdwara in Takanini, the Sikh temple, who fed thousands of people in Auckland because the need was there, and they could do that because they could rely on the Government—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Look, I can’t begin my speech without responding to the comments of the member who’s just returned to her seat, Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki, where she congratulated the Government for putting food into everybody’s mouth who were in need during the lockdown period. Yes, I congratulate the Government for stepping up in that regard, but they weren’t the only ones.

They weren’t the only people in New Zealand who were stepping up to help their fellow team of 5 million in New Zealand. Sure, the Government did a great job during the lockdown. We totally support the vast majority of measures that the Government brought in in dealing with the health response, and, to a certain extent, the social response, particularly during level 3 and level 4 when people were in their homes and suffering significant hardship.

But it wasn’t only the Government, and the degree of hubris that we are now beginning to see coming from this coalition Government is breathless. The member earlier in the afternoon in this debate, the Hon David Parker, was fulsome in his praise for the finance Minister, the Hon Grant Robertson, with his visionary Budget and got himself quite worked up in describing the wonderful—the sheer wonderfulness of Grant Robertson. I could just see into his mind—and I could just see into his mind that he was going, “This man is superb! King Dick Seddon—no, no, that’s a bit much. This man is superb!” And then he checked himself and went, “Oh, hang on a minute.” Then he just stuck to, “OK, he was visionary.” But I want to know from David Parker, and I want to know from other members of this Government and Cabinet, including Grant Robertson, what is so visionary about spraying money around in a Budget? We all know that stimulating the economy via putting money into the system is what absolutely is needed.

But I tell you what else is needed: a plan is needed. While this Government seems to have an unfailing focus on jobs—which is great—what about business? What about small business? What about those small businesses who are the very ones who employ the workers? Please explain to me at some point during this debate: what is the point of giving the wage subsidy to your employees? It’s a good thing; we support it, but if you don’t support the small businesses themselves, when that support runs out, so does the business.

So we are waiting. We are teetering on the edge of the cliff, in New Zealand today. We are in this false situation where we have workers in small businesses and large businesses. They are impacted in this crisis as well. We have all of those workers with the subsidy—a good thing—but as we know, when that subsidy goes, in the absence of any other meaningful support, not for the workers but for those employers and the businesses, then it will all collapse around the Government. They know it. They absolutely know that. And I’m yet to see any meaningful policy coming from this Government, any meaningful plan coming from this Government which is going to address that very moment when the wage subsidy runs out and suddenly employers go, “I can’t make this work anymore; I simply can’t make this work.”

All of the measures put in by this Government, and I do wish the Prime Minister had been able to explain today, in answer to questions from our leader, just how those measures to support small businesses were going to work because I didn’t see any coherent arguments or answers from the Prime Minister, because it’s blindingly obvious we are all connected to small businesses. It is blindingly obvious that if you don’t have—

💬 Hon Member: We are.

Yes, we are. If you don’t have customers coming through the door, if you don’t have orders coming through your website, well, what is the point of a wage subsidy? Because when that runs out, you do not have the means to pay them.

So I want to talk for a moment about conservation in New Zealand, because it was another example of spray the money around, make jobs for people, but where is the plan behind it? I’ve read the Budget documents. I’ve read the press releases. I certainly acknowledge that spending money on all of those things in the conservation portfolio that we all hold dear, addressing pest control, supporting Predator Free 2050, Jobs for Nature, jobs on private and conservation land: all good stuff. All good stuff.

But here are some questions I will be asking the Minister of Conservation in due course: where is the plan for all those jobs? There is a lot of money. Let’s just talk about the Jobs for Nature fund; $200 million to fund jobs and create jobs. So these are new jobs we’re talking about here: boosting predator control—wonderful; restoring wetlands—wonderful; regenerating, planting, and improving tracks—it’s what we all want; huts and other recreational visitor assets on public conservation land. How are they going to do that? How are they going to do that in Fiordland or Otago and on the West Coast—where formerly there was very low unemployment, but particularly in Otago, where there has been a mass loss of jobs but a lot of those people in those jobs are in hospitality or tourism—and working in areas that are totally unrelated. The skill set is totally unrelated to what is required to working in the outdoors and in nature. How are they going to make that transition? Is the Government going to provide pastoral care for those people?

Who are the agencies that are going to be delivering these projects? And what is the strategy between the Department of Conservation and those other agencies to make sure that not only do we get the outcomes that we need in the environment—and I’ve just listed them—but how do we ensure that that $200 million fund for new jobs, which I’ve just outlined, how do we know that is going to provide value for money for New Zealand? Because we’ve got to keep a hold of quality expenditure. It is simply not good enough to keep spraying the money around our economy on make-work jobs without ensuring that that money is well spent, is targeted, and gets the outcomes for which it made the press release, which sounded really good in the first place. It’s easy to do a press release. It’s fabulous, but delivering is quite another matter and one only has to talk to Phil Twyford to see that non-delivery is one of the hallmarks—and I’m talking KiwiBuild here—of this Government, and I could go on—light rail to Auckland Airport—but I digress.

There’s another thing I want to ask—and I will be asking—the Minister, and I expect some good answers. The question is: what happened to that $60 million shortfall in her funding through this Budget, which was caused by lost concessions due to the lockdown, of course—members will remember that—and which is exacerbated by no more coming, no more visitor levy coming across the border? So there’s a $60 million shortfall. Where does that appear in her Budget documents, because I can’t find it, and is some of that funding—that funding announced in the Budget—going to plug that gap, to plug that hole? It’s not immediately apparent, but it is incredibly important because the public needs to know that the money that the Government allocates through the Budget, it’s not the Government’s money—like they seem to think that they are the providers of all things good in New Zealand. It’s not their money; it is taxpayer money.

And here’s another thing I want to ask the Minister of Conservation and believe that New Zealand needs an explanation for: what happened to that promise that she made midway through the lockdown that she would be providing financial relief to people who had concessions to hunt or to commercially operate or to undertake pest control on conservation land, but couldn’t? What happened to that relief? Because the stories I’m hearing are that far from concession fees being waived during that time, they haven’t. There have been promises made, and I have heard one person with a concession flagging to me that they are not only not receiving any assistance, but expecting an increase in the concession fee. Where is the thinking there?

It’s all very well creating jobs. It’s all very well putting press releases around, flagging support for predator control. We all support those things. But where is the Minister supporting those small businesses who not only rely on concessions for their very livelihoods and the livelihoods of their families, but also make a contribution to biodiversity outcomes in New Zealand? What about them? Where is the mention of those people in New Zealand? Oh, I’ll tell the House the answer because I’ve been looking. There is no mention. This is a “scatter the money around” Budget. This is a “scatter the money around” in the conservation estate. It’s OK. There’s no plan though—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Mr Speaker, I wonder if you could indulge me for a few minutes. I want to spend a little time—this is the first chance I’ve had to speak in the House since we have returned post-lockdown, and I want to acknowledge the sacrifice that families have made over the lockdown periods, particularly families who have lost their loved ones; families who have been restricted in their ability to care for loved ones, especially those at end of life; families who have been unable to grieve. I want to say a huge and immense thanks to all of those families who, despite really wanting to be with their loved ones, actually paid a sacrifice for all of us. So I want to acknowledge them. I cannot speak more highly of what they have done for all of us.

But I want to pay special tribute to my friend and colleague Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki for the loss of her mum. I want to pay special tribute to Jerome and Jules Mika and their family at the loss of Josiah, and to my special friend Stephen Hughes and his family at the loss of their dad, Richard Hughes. But most importantly, the 11 residents at Rosewood Rest Home: more than half of the deaths attributed to COVID-19, from my electorate, the loss of our kaumātua from Christchurch East. I want to pay a special tribute and acknowledgment to David Meates, the chief executive of the Canterbury District Health Board; his staff and team; the team at Burwood Hospital; and the staff of all the facilities who took the residents from Rosewood and cared for them and loved them during this difficult time. My thoughts, my prayers, my aroha to them all. Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me that.

I have the most incredible, fantastic opportunity to work with and be the associate for some lead Ministers that I’m very grateful for: Megan Woods as the Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Iain Lees-Galloway as Minister of Immigration, and Carmel Sepuloni as the Minister for Social Development. I’m incredibly proud of what the Ministry of Social Development has contributed to the joint venture looking at family and sexual violence and the Budget that we have produced this year: $183 million; $142 million for family violence services, $16 million for perpetrator services, and $25 million for elder abuse.

Overseas experience taught us in the lead-up to our own experiences of dealing with COVID-19 that we would experience a spike in family violence. During the course of particularly lockdown at level 4 the numbers were relatively stable, but we knew from the intel that we were getting from our family violence services that, underneath all of that, families were under some pressure, they were under stress, and there were some difficult times that they were experiencing.

Now, our key methods of detecting levels of violence within our community were no longer operating. We get a lot of information from our schools, for example, as key reporters of difficult times with families. And, of course, we weren’t getting that information, but anecdotally, our refuges were telling us that violence was on the rise, and we had to be able to be prepared to support victims and families better. So I’m enormously proud of the $142 million for family violence services, proud of the work that the Ministry of Social Development does as part of the joint venture to put, in this particular case, a staffer from the ministry into the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges to assess how they work and actually to look at what they need, and start to deliver, based on the need and the ability to deliver effective programmes, to victims and their families.

Now, this has come on top of significant increases that we have already made. So since coming to office, since taking over as Government, we’ve made extraordinary increases to funding for family violence, because it’s been needed; that’s what we’ve needed to do. So in Budget 2018: $76 million to stabilise and strengthen family violence services for victims, perpetrators, and families. Budget 2019: $90 million for specialised sexual violence services; $30 million for family violence prevention, including the programmes E Tū Whānau, Pasefika Proud, and the Campaign for Action on Family Violence.

In this Budget, there are a couple of things that have been very exciting for me. One of them is the $16 million for perpetrator services. Why I find that extraordinary and exciting is there is a huge opportunity for us to look at those people who use violence, and try and develop the circuit-breakers, the mechanisms that will support them to deal with the issues that cause them to use violence before they do that—whether it’s by de-escalation through some of the programmes that are delivered, through Hey Bro or My Fathers Barbers. Simple things like having access to someone to talk to when you are elevating, when you are starting to become at risk of using harm, someone to talk to to actually help you to deal with your issues of anger and stress. Simple things, but preventative, that stop you from doing harm in the first place. This is a step in the right direction to us actually eliminating violence in our communities, and I think it’s a great step in the right direction.

Also $25 million to address elder abuse. I can recall talking to the Hon Tracey Martin about this and saying to her that, actually, really, in the scheme of things, we don’t really recognise elder abuse as family violence, but it is—it is. Our older people, our older citizens, deserve to actually be as safe as anyone in this country. And we have all got examples—constituents or others who have told us of how older family members may be placed under some duress to hand over assets or money or the like. So family violence does exist amongst our older citizens.

Just in the last few minutes before my contribution ends, I do actually also want to acknowledge the $63 million for water safety—the $63 million in this Budget for water safety. I’m particularly happy about this, living as I do on the east coast of Christchurch, and my constituency having a long length of coastline as part of it. Actually, when I’m exercising in the morning, I go past three Surf Life Saving clubs—four if I’m extending myself, but three, and they are particularly happy with this announcement. Surf Life Saving New Zealand, the Water Safety Council, and Coastguard all contribute to the programmes that they deliver to keep New Zealanders safe in and on the water.

I come from a family of fisher folk, and I know that for us—Pacific Island men, in particular, need to be encouraged to wear safety devices when they’re out fishing. This is part of the wider programme to keep us safe, not only in but on the water as well. These services are run mostly by volunteers, and if it hadn’t been for our community organisations and our volunteers, we would not have responded to COVID as well as we have. So I just want to send out a tautoko and a mihi to all of our community and voluntary services. Thank you so much for everything you have done during this really difficult time in our country, because without you we would not have come through this as well as we have. So congratulations to the Hon Grant Robertson, who has been extraordinarily nimble in being able to take what was a Budget that took a year to craft and turn it on its head so that we could respond appropriately and significantly to this difficult time that we all face. Fa‘afetai tele lava.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak today on the Budget. As part of that, I’ll traverse several portfolios. I want to talk to the health portfolio first of all. I’ll cover a number of points in the Budget. I’ll then also move to the tertiary portfolio and cover a number of things there as well. I think, talking to health, I want to say there are some things in health that I’m pleased with, some that I have a neutral view on, and some I’m looking at saying, “Gosh, I don’t know if that’s in the right place or not. I would do something different.”, and I’ll traverse some of that. But I think generally every health system in the world needs more funding, as does ours. It’s a vacuum, and every health system struggles, and so it’s good to be getting more money in health. It’s a point of contention, of course, as to whether it’s enough and where it’s going to, but it is a good thing to have more in health.

Why I think particularly it’s a good thing is around a point that I brought out last week, because more money is going to be needed at the health interface with the Customs Service. I’ll tell you why that is: because when we open up our borders—and I may speak to it when we talk to international students, and I make the point that I think, safely, we should consider opening the borders to international students in a safe way. When we do that, the first point of screening—because we’re going to need to screen for coronavirus for a long, long time—is the arrivals card that they receive when they come into New Zealand.

About six weeks ago now, on 16 March, a new arrivals card was proudly waved here in the House by the Minister of Customs. The concern I’ve had with this is that one of the key questions on the arrivals card asks, “What symptoms do you have?” And the symptoms that it asks are “Do you have a cough, fever, or difficulty in breathing?” Now, again, remember, this is the first contact people have, the first screening for coronavirus when they come into New Zealand. The problem I’ve got with that and why I’m proposing that a part of this Budget is going to need to completely redo the arrivals card is because the three main symptoms for coronavirus in New Zealand are actually—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Sorry to interrupt the member. There’s about half a dozen conversations going on just in this area, and it’s really difficult for me to hear what Dr Reti is saying. I’d really like a few conversations to tone it down.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. So the concern I have is that some of this Budget will need to be expended to completely renew the arrivals card. Why? Because it’s asking the wrong questions. Our prime screening tool at the border is simply asking the wrong questions, and, indeed, it has been since 3 a.m. on 20 March. That is what the Minister tells me is when this new arrival card—and I recall her in the House, waving it around and saying, “This is what we’re doing here now.”

The principle is good. It’s a health declaration card, which actually sits outside the flu pandemic response. It sits in another document, from 2016, around protecting international ports and borders. It’s a good document. It’s a good tool, but we’ve got to ask the right questions. The wrong questions, to reiterate, are “cough, fever, and difficulty in breathing”. It’s the difficulty in breathing part that’s the wrong question, and we know that because when I queried the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) and said “What are the main set of symptoms that New Zealanders had?”, they said “Cough, fever, and a sore throat.” Were there only a few people with a sore throat? No. In fact, nearly 50 percent of people with coronavirus have had a sore throat, and when I talk with people who have gone to the testing stations and asked them “Well, what symptoms did you have?”, the vast majority have actually complained about a sore throat. So it’s a really key symptom, and our arrivals card—our prime screening tool—doesn’t cover it.

When this was raised with Professor Des Gorman, he pointed out that it was a grave omission and a grave mistake, and so I would strongly commend the Minister that, with this Budget, she look at very quickly redoing that arrival card. Go on an evidence base. Base it on science. Who knows or who cares where “difficulty in breathing” came from—that’s a late symptom, long after the sore throat. Use the evidence that other ministries and our own ESR is bringing forward. Use that to redo the arrivals cards. So that’s one of the things I’d like to see in this Budget—that in the health interface with Customs, some of the money is used there.

I then want to talk to funding for the Ministry of Health for their administrative arm, and I’m a big fan of more people at the bedside rather than managing the bedside. But, clearly, administration and management at the Ministry of Health is going to need funding, and I see they have received that. Why I think that’s important is because it can fill in some of the holes, and I want to highlight one of those holes. It’s one of the holes that came up through the Epidemic Response Committee, where the chairperson, the Hon Simon Bridges, took the Director-General of Health to task for being late with information back to the committee. In fact, he was questioning whether he was controlling the information to the committee. Then, on the 7th—

💬 Hon Member: Completely incorrect.

It’s not correct, and I’ll tell you why it’s not correct. I’ll prove why it’s not correct.

On 7 May, the director-general then put up on the website his response, saying that it’s not correct. I’ll tell you why that’s correct: because at the meeting on 22 April, questions were put to the Minister and the ministry. They were sent by the clerk on 23 April. Nearly 10 days later—that is at least a week, if not two weeks, late—they arrived back at the committee. Those questions to that select committee were late. The Hon Simon Bridges was absolutely correct. What’s even worse was that on 1 May and 4 May, the clerk actually followed up with the director-general’s office. “Where are the questions?” “Oh, they’ll be here tomorrow.” “Where are the questions?” “They’ll be here.” No, they weren’t. What’s even worse than that is on 29 and 30 April, the clerk followed up with the Minister’s office—in fact, his personal SPPS.

So the response, the answers to questions from the select committee, definitely were late just from that one committee. In fact, 50 percent of the committee questions in May were late. I know that because 94 percent of them were mine, so I was watching them and tracking and waiting for them to come back so that we could do a better job. So just this one committee, questions were returned two weeks late, and four times the clerk went to the Minister’s office. The clerk went to the director-general’s office and got no response, so much so that, unanimously, the whole Epidemic Response Committee passed a motion to send a letter of complaint to the director-general. Those are the facts. That’s what’s on the record. Furthermore, if we really want to get into further details, at least 50 percent of all of the questions that were asked by the select committee in the month of April were late being returned. Simon Bridges was absolutely correct. Ask the clerk; it’s a matter of record.

So where I get to with this is saying, clearly, the Ministry of Health is going to need some of the administrative funds that are positioned there in the Budget, because we can see here, just from this very recent episode, there are holes there that need fixing. But I wanted to set that record straight, because the chairperson was absolutely correct. Ask the clerk; he’s got all the details—really simple. Ask about all the other ones, by the way. The late questions from 14 April, due on the 17th, didn’t arrive until the 21st. On 29 April, due on 4 May, received on the 6th—a whole litany of late replies to that committee. Absolutely evidence-based—need to correct that record.

I then want to talk to the funding that’s put aside for vaccinations and just make the comment that last year was the year of vaccine hell for New Zealanders. If we started the year and talk about the meningitis vaccine, we’ve prosecuted that already in Northland. There is still more to come from them. I’m still unhappy that children weren’t able to be vaccinated.

We then move to the running out of flu vaccines in May-June last year, if we recall. But remember: that’s only a distribution issue! I don’t think so. And when I said to the Minister here in the House and asked her questions—Minister Genter this was—around responsibility for the flu vaccine last year, she said “No, no. I didn’t have a responsibility for that.” Yes, you did. The delegation from David Clark was on 22 or 23 July. Every vaccine from then onwards you are responsible for. You are responsible for that. In fact, David Clark passed you that delegation—it was a suicide pass you didn’t see coming—because it was very soon, almost 24 hours, after the select committee had prosecuted him for his management of the meningitis outbreak. He saw the trouble coming, passed it to Julie Anne Genter, and she took it up.

So vaccines and then, of course, we had the measles issue last year. We had the measles outbreak. My question has to be: what did we learn over the year about logistics and supply that are focused on this Budget, that improve it, that make it better? It’s not clear to me that there was any organisational knowledge retained or any things that could be done better by the time we came around again this time and are running out of flu vaccines a year later. It’s not clear to me we learnt anything. As the coronavirus infection hit us, did we learn that the backpacker in Mount Maunganui who developed measles and hopped on an Air New Zealand and then Cathay Pacific flight to get home to Germany and infected people on the way—did we learn that you need to ask the airlines? Because in that instance, they didn’t even ask the airlines. Cathay Pacific or Air New Zealand let that infected backpacker make their way back through New Zealand and home. Why didn’t we learn about contact tracing way back last year with the measles response?

So these are some of the things that I’m looking for in this Budget to make sure that we do a better job. It’s a hard job—I get that—but it seems to me we haven’t learnt anything from last year. This Budget needs to help fix that. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I seek leave of the House to table a document produced by the clerk of the committee and received by me on 12 May which shows that information requested by the Epidemic Response Committee of the Director-General of Health was received by the dates for which it was requested.

Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. It will be tabled.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

A point of order, the honourable—oh, sorry—Dr Shane Reti.

I seek the leave of the House to—

💬 Hon Member: Should be.

—you’re very kind—table a table sent to me from the clerk of the committee, showing the late responses to the Epidemic Response Committee.

OK, we think it might be the same document. However, leave has been sought for that purpose. Is there any objection to that? There is none. It may be tabled.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Talofa lava. Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. It’s really lovely to get the opportunity to stand and follow on, I think, from my Labour colleague, the Hon Poto Williams, in talking about the Budget and the impact and role it’s going to play in our effort to create a world where healthy, respectful relationships are the norm and where everyone in this country can feel safe. That is a piece of work that this Government is very engaged in, and I’ve got to say I’m really incredibly proud to be part of a Government where we’re all working so hard together to be able to move towards that reality.

So, ahead of speaking to some of the details in the Budget on that, I do just want to specifically acknowledge the Ministers in this Government, particularly the family and sexual violence Ministers, the Hon Andrew Little, Carmel Sepuloni, Poto Williams, Nanaia Mahuta, and Tracey Martin, as well as Ministers Nash and Salesa, who were involved in putting successful Budget bids through to help us move forward, and in looking over all of them—and, too, to recognise that while this group has the responsibility for the oversight, actually it is everyone across Government who is engaged in this, and to do a particular call out to Minister Lees-Galloway and the leadership he’s shown in ACC in getting them, just over this time, around the response to COVID, adapting really quickly to ensure that the funding was going through to our prevention agencies, who play such a vital role in our community, and to help reshape the prevention work to meet the needs of this context.

It’s been really encouraging, as well, to see the work flowing through from Minister Hipkins in Education, where they responded to needs identified by the community of the concern about the impact on children needing to leave their homes at that time and not having the ability to maintain their attachment to school. So Education worked with the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), other Government agencies, and our community organisations to be able to get educational resources to kids in that situation, including them being able to access laptops so that they were able to keep up with their school work just like other kids. I think that’s showing the benefit of us all working together—that, actually, it’s putting our families front and centre and making sure that we’re not just kind of carrying on blithely doing what we think is needed and not checking whether it’s meeting the needs of our community.

This Budget has specifically—the key feature is about the resource to our front-line services that enables us to have the partnership between Government and community, and recognising that that is essential for us to be successful in this work. And it builds on the work from the last Budget, which happened to be the largest investment in family and sexual violence in this country’s history in one Budget, and this investment now is the second-largest. But the biggest commitment in the last Budget was towards sexual violence services, because we knew that they weren’t adequately resourced for the work that they were doing. This Budget really builds on that for the family violence sector as well.

I just want to reference the fact that we’ve been hearing from the experts, as well as from those services and our families, about the importance and the need for this for a really long time. The Family Violence Death Review Committee’s reports have repeatedly pointed out the need to adequately resource our specialist front-line services, and for acknowledging that they were not adequately resourced and that their work is difficult and complex. We do a disservice to the families that they’re supporting when we underfund them, because that results in higher caseloads and increased stress for workers, and that doesn’t produce great results.

So it was a very moving moment for me to be part of the announcement around this package and to hear Women’s Refuge acknowledge the importance of this moment in time, and actually visibly seeing transformation and the potential for fundamental change. One of Women’s Refuge’s critical roles has always been to challenge and critique, and that kind of comment would never be made lightly. I really think it is a demonstration of the work of this Government, of all parties coming together to commit to creating a future for us all that is free of these forms of violence.

Just acknowledging that, too, that it is where Government agencies and Ministers have their lines of accountability—so, for Police, and Health, and Education—and all of those agencies’ and those Minister’s outcomes are reliant on those front-line services. They’re the people that they call when things get hard and they don’t know what to do. So it has made no sense to me that that sector has been so under-resourced for so long, and really it is a really significant moment in this Budget to see that change.

And, just to speak and pick up on a point that there is funding in this Budget towards victims and their whānau, as well as to help people who have been using violence change—the latest Family Violence Death Review report spoke to the absolute critical importance of that. That $16 million builds on other funding already in MSD as well as through Justice, and it is really important, because we can’t—one of the main shifts that we need to make in this work is from focusing on victims and holding them responsible for their own safety, to actually shifting our focus to ensuring that the people who have used violence are prevented from using violence again. So this money is critically important, as is the funding towards children’s services, because we know that the impact of violence where children are physically abused, but even if they’re in a household where there is violence—physical violence and other forms of violence—between parents or other people, that causes as much, if not more, harm to those children than if they’d been hit themselves. That is what the evidence tells us, and yet we have not resourced the services for those children to deal or heal from that trauma.

So this, again, is a really important moment in our shift towards ending this violence, because unless we intervene at that point, so many of those kids—we condemn them to having a future with that violence in their lives, and we get the chance to stop that. And that is something that I think we should all embrace and feel incredibly proud to be supporting, because it is that future for all of us, free of violence.

Also to note that there is money in here, as well, for elder abuse and addressing elder abuse, at the other end of the spectrum. It’s similar dynamics, often, to violence against people with disabilities, where there may be denial of medication, there may be denial of mobility aids, or financial abuse—that it traps people. Often, seniors, as well as people with disabilities, don’t have pathways to be able to tell people in the same way that an adult with full mobility or communication skills might, and that this requires a specific response—again, a tailored response. It’s really fantastic to see us putting more money towards that so that we can ensure their safety.

All of this, of course, is supported by all of the other measures in the Budget around housing, and income, and strengthening the justice system, and community aid, legal aid—there is so much to this, about us transforming our society for all of us, to restore wellbeing even in this crisis. We are seizing that opportunity.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Budget is a crucial part of any Government’s political year, but especially this year when we face the crisis that we do in our country. The COVID crisis has really made this country reflect—[Bell rung]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Oh, sorry. My apologies.

I think that’s another 10 minutes—it’s another 10 minutes.

💬 Michael Wood: We’ve had enough too, Madam Speaker.

Yes—ha, ha!

💬 Michael Wood: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I think members of the House possibly unanimously support the Speaker’s decision.

Ha, ha! For another 10 minutes, yes, thank you.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): The Hon David Bennett—nine minutes, 44 seconds to go. My apologies.

Thank you. It’s normally the other Speaker that interrupts me. But, no, the Budget’s a crucial part of any political agenda for any year, and especially this year when we’re looking at the crisis that New Zealanders encountered in the health sense and now in an economic sense. And it’s been fascinating to see the reflection that we’ve seen through the Government and possibly through the community as well on the role that agriculture’s going to play in the future of New Zealand. You know, the agricultural and horticultural communities represent the heart and soul of this country. They represent people that get out there and do the hard work, in whatever weather and under whatever financial conditions there are, to make the most for their future and their families’ future and for New Zealand’s future by delivering the hard export earnings that we need to enable our country to function and effectively pay its debts going forward now.

They need to be valued and respected, and I think that in the last few years, they haven’t felt that, and it’s time they are given the message that farmers are valued, they are respected, and this country needs them more than ever now. That is the message that I want to portray today in this Budget speech, because we’re hearing the right things, you can say, from the Government about the need for agriculture to deliver the economic prosperity for the country. But at the same time, we see that there are imminent dangers in the sense of the legislation that the Government wants to put in front of farmers to make sure that they aren’t as productive and they are challenged when they shouldn’t be challenged to that extent as they go about their business. So I want to do a big thank you to New Zealand’s farmers and growers that are the future direction of the New Zealand economy. They always have been the base of the New Zealand economy, and the days that we forget that are the days that we take for granted the people that made this country so strong and now will make the country stronger as we go forward.

I just want to acknowledge Todd Muller as well, who’s done a brilliant job in leading the National Party in the agricultural sector in the last year or so. He’s got around the country and really delivered to farmers the message that there is somebody that cares, there is somebody that understands, and there is somebody that’s going to work in their best interests and not just come to this House and take advantage of their role. So thank you, Todd, for the leadership you’ve portrayed in agriculture.

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Oh, it’s too late—too late.

And it would be good if members like that member over there actually did something for his portfolio other than stand there and just yell at other people in this House—actually do something.

I think that we need to thank farmers for what they actually do. You know, how many people actually go out there and put their whole family investment on the line every day? They borrow, they work hard, and they are challenged by the weather, by the finances that they have to keep, and by Government rules and regulations, and yet they still do that. Generation after generation of people come through wanting to be farmers and wanting to succeed.

Agriculture has got a huge part to play in our future, especially for Māori. It’s one of the strongest parts of the Māori economy and will get even stronger in the future, and it’s an important part if we want to build a stronger country.

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: You don’t support the Māoris.

We support agriculture, and Māori in agriculture are one of the strongest ones there, Willie Jackson, so we do support them. So that is an important part of the future of New Zealand as well. So it’s about employing people and taking that chance on their business, which actually means that they employ a lot of downstream people as well. Now, it’s those people in manufacturing and those people in the service industries that are all directly as a result of the farmers’ efforts.

At this time, when we have got major drought going on in parts of the country, never has it been more difficult for some farmers, and the stress that they are under is truly immense. The drought hit the Waikato. It hit Northland earlier this year. Now it’s still in the Hawke’s Bay and other parts of New Zealand. We need to go out there and think about those farmers, because we’re asking them to pay the bill for this country, and we’re asking them to do that in the toughest of conditions, and we’re not thanking them. We’re not acknowledging them, and we’re not giving them the respect that they deserve. That is what this House should be doing, because we’re all in this together. The farmers know that, and they want to work and help and build the success of this rebuild of the New Zealand economy.

When you look at the Budget—you know this—there’s some expenses in there, in the agricultural sector, that—I’m going to give credit to the Minister. I think he did a good job around the bovis system. You know, that eradication programme is a costly affair. It’s not only costly for the Government, but it’s extremely costly for the industry as well. It was a partnership between industry and Government to do that eradication programme. OK, it’s had its ups and downs, and there’ll always be some people that feel that the programme hasn’t worked as well as it should have for them, but, in essence, we are moving in the right direction in that way. If New Zealand can continue to do that, I think that’s a good sign for our farmers that there is support in this room. That is one thing that is in the Budget. It’s been in the Budget last year and again this year, and I do congratulate the Government for their support in that, because that is vital for the primary industries going forward.

But they need more than that. They need the infrastructure investment that’s vital to grow their products and their distribution chains. They need to see that there is that regional infrastructure investment, not some Minister coming into their areas once in a while and giving them small amounts of money for nothing that’s really going to make any difference. They need the hard-core, solid infrastructure that’s needed in their communities. Water storage, for example, was something that was canned by this Government, and it plays an important role in the future of agriculture and horticulture going forward. We’ve had a few little plays in that area by the Minister in recent months, but they took away that future of water storage from the rural community. They’ve taken away a lot of the big commercial investments in infrastructure and roading in many of our rural communities. They’ve said that they’re hidden behind the roads that they don’t need, and they’re only going to present most of that money in Auckland. No, most of the money was going to go in transport to Auckland projects. It wasn’t going to the regions, and they get little handouts and told be satisfied when the Minister comes and gives you a little handout. Well, we need more than that.

If we really value the people that are going to turn this country around, then we need to invest in them. We need to make sure that investment’s strategic and that investment is long term and it’s what they need for their businesses, not what people in this room determine is the best investment for them. We see that in forestry, where the hand of the Government is in that industry all the time, making it an inefficient industry. We need the efficiency of farmers to make the right decisions, and Government’s role is not to tell them what to do. Government’s role is there to be able to support them. If we really value them and we really want them to pay the bills, then let’s go out there in this Budget and give them some support.

Is there anything like that in this Budget to look after the farms that are going to pay the bills? No, there’s not. There’s nothing. Not one iota. If anybody was running a business and they knew that this was the most profitable part of their business going forward that had to hold the other parts of the business that weren’t going to do well, you would invest in that profitable part. The Government should have invested in farming and the infrastructure of it if it really was genuine in wanting to support them. Rather, the only signal that farmers can take out of this Budget is one that they will become the cash cow for this Government, that this is a Government just sitting there waiting, hoping that it can then inflict on the community the cost structures that will take away their efficiency, that will mean that they—

The member’s time has expired.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak on this Budget 2020—and just opportune, timely, coming on behind the new agricultural spokesman for the National Party. I congratulate him on his new role. I agree with his sentiments, actually. We do need to show our farmers the respect that they deserve. We will be relying on them incredibly heavily—as we have for the last 150 years, actually—to see this economy on the way through.

But the National Party have had a habit over these last three years that I’ve been in here in talking down the efforts of this Government in terms of supporting our farmers. I will be putting that right in a second. But I think we do need to acknowledge that we will be relying very heavily on our agricultural sector.

But I think before we do that, we also just have to take stock and acknowledge that this Budget has been delivered against the backdrop of a once-in-100-year global pandemic. The response of the team of 5 million that has been referred to often has been nothing short of magnificent. We are now in an enviable position, compared to almost all our international comparators, of being able to focus almost totally on our economic recovery. This Budget—I would describe it as a kitchen sink affair. We have thrown the absolute kitchen sink at this situation that we find ourselves in, and I will give credit to Cabinet.

The Budget process is six to eight months of grinding meetings and detail, and that would have been torn up on about 1 March, and we would have had to go through a whole new process—well, they did have to go through a whole new process—against a fast-evolving backdrop. I think under those circumstances, we’ve seen a Budget that delivers much of what we need, which is to keep the wheels on the economy as much as we can in the short term but also deliver some long-term investment into our economy that’ll pay back over the long term. So we do have a plan.

I’d note the Opposition have mentioned ad nauseam that we don’t have a plan. But when they’ve been challenged on their plan, they’re yet to show that they’ve had any plan—apart from pulling the knife out of Simon Bridges’ back. They don’t seem to have been able to articulate anything else apart from a change of face. Well, Todd Muller is respected on this side of the House and is liked, and I will acknowledge the previous speaker has done a good job of lifting the profile of agriculture in the debates around this House. He certainly is an example, potentially, of be careful what you wish for. It does look to be a bit harder than it seems from the backbench, being the leader.

So we came into this with strong books, which is absolutely key to this. We have managed this economy well. We have run surpluses. We did have a debt to GDP of 19 percent, and, yes, that will blow out to somewhere around about 54 percent under Treasury forecasts. But let’s put that into some context. The G20, which is the 20 richest nations on earth—they went into this at an 80 percent debt to GDP. So we’re starting this on the front foot, and the Government has stepped up.

I will acknowledge the commentary around small business and particularly in the tourism. I was out last week. I managed to get on the road out through Central Otago, Queenstown, drove up to Franz Josef, and it is a very grim picture in a spectacular part of the country. They are doing it incredibly tough. Just to flesh that out a little bit, I stayed in Franz Josef—the Scenic Hotel there—one night. It’s probably about a 200-bed hotel; I was the only occupant. So we’ve got a lot of work to do there. But we do need to get that trans-Tasman bubble. While we can support these small businesses with wage subsidies and the like, essentially what they need is tourists, and that trans-Tasman bubble will be key. It will be key, actually, that we all get out there and explore our own country.

So this Budget does, I think, as I said, strike a balance between keeping the wheels on in the short term and those long-term investments in infrastructure. Included in the total package: somewhere around about $15 billion in infrastructure, which is off the scale compared to what we’d been investing in recent times; and, of course, the $1.2 billion in rail, which we’re very proud of here in New Zealand First—to have been a champion of that, in the long-term future of our multimodal transport system where rail will play a key role.

But I do want to get to the agricultural sector. Despite the grim protestations from across the floor, the sector has been doing incredibly well: record exports over the last couple of years and actually holding up pretty good through this COVID situation as well. I note the red meat sector, for the first time ever last month, topping a billion dollars of exports, and that’s incredible under the circumstances. I will acknowledge, too, the meat works, the fruit packers, the shearers during that initial period of lockdown—those essential services. I would like to acknowledge them because in the dozens and dozens and dozens of calls I was making into those industries, I never once heard anyone from any industry push back on the need to react—the imperativeness of looking after their workforce and wanting to comply with whatever rules the Government was asking for from them. In some respects, they were pretty tough—particularly in the meat industry, where you’ve got a lot of workers side by side—but they all did their utmost to comply and on most occasions, they actually commended the Ministry for Primary Industries on the way that they worked to make and enable that to happen.

But in terms of the Budget, the previous speaker, David Bennett, minimised the work that has been going on within this Budget to support agriculture. We’ve got $193 million in there to continue the Mycoplasma bovis response, which is a world-leading initiative. No other country has attempted to eradicate this disease. We’re on track—Minister O’Connor announcing those updated figures the other day of just 17 live cases at the moment, and another $193 million committed to that total package that is approaching $1 billion. So we are out there supporting our farmers.

The $1.1 billion environmental package had significant money that will help farmers. The wilding pines, which are sweeping over large parts of our country and our back country—they are getting a significant $100 million investment, and the cost of doing it actually goes up 30 percent each year, so we need to get in front of this. We’re well behind the eight ball, and this will help incredibly. Wallabies, possums—that sort of pest control—once again, we’re behind. So this is an absolute opportunity to put some money into some, hopefully, short-term jobs that will allow people to be in a transitionary phase between careers but still have a job to go to that’s absolutely meaningful and will have long-term payback. The money invested into fencing of wetlands and waterways—significant money being invested there, and another $100 million into that initiative announced yesterday by Minister Jones out of the Provincial Growth Fund (PGF). So these are all expenditure lines that will benefit farming and agriculture greatly.

Of course, it’s not about just keeping the wheels on; it is actually about growing the pie. The one thing that hasn’t got a lot of traction or visibility in terms of the wider debate is the $216 million that was invested in New Zealand Trade and Enterprise in terms of an increase. We have to grow the pie. We have to be able to export and grow a value-added component, and we are now giving our exporters even more support out in the world markets to be able to do just that, so we can return those valuable export dollars, and the primary sector will probably benefit most of anyone out of that spend.

I do agree with the previous speaker that we do need to do more in water storage. The PGF has made a number of announcements. I was in the Hawke’s Bay on Monday. I’ve seen the drought up there firsthand. It is absolutely stark when you see it going into winter. With the paddocks brown and with water storage options on the table there, we do have to look much more seriously. Aquaculture is an area that we need to do more in. We need to be growing the pie, and we have made some starts, but we need to do more.

So I am proud to stand behind this Budget. I think we have got those dual imperatives there. We have looked to hold up what we can of the current economy, but we have also looked to invest in New Zealand’s long-term future, and I and New Zealand First are very proud to stand behind this Budget. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and join our caucus colleagues in actually critiquing this Budget. But before I get into some of the critiquing that I have to do for this Budget—because I have specifics that I wanted to mention—I want to acknowledge all of the members of Parliament who over the course of the lockdown and through level 4, level 3, and level 2—it’s been amazing, the work that they’ve done in their communities. It’s really lovely to see all of the members in 3D rather than 2D on a computer screen using a Zoom committee, and it’s really lovely to see everyone.

I’ve lived in New Zealand since 1988, and over the years, as a member of the community, as a member of the public, and as a member of Parliament, I have seen different Governments actually produce Budgets. Budget times can be very exciting. It has ranged from austerity measures to lolly scrambles, and there have been numerous names. I think, this Budget, the Government has called it “Rebuilding Together”, and I’m not so sure if that’s an indication that it’s going to fail, because in terms of building, this Government hasn’t been known for building a heck of a lot. I mean, KiwiBuild was one of those things, and also the light rail that they intended to build along Dominion Road has actually been cancelled. So if they call this the rebuilding Budget, I’m not so sure if that is an indication that they didn’t really have much of a plan. But having said that, it is an incredible amount of money.

I understand that it is actually not a time to talk about austerity, because the Government needs to spend the money to help New Zealand rebuild. I totally understand that. Having said that, it is an incredible amount of money that we are putting every single person in New Zealand into debt for. So the total budget that the Government has talked about is $140 billion, but if you look at a document called Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2020—I think it is on page 28—the total borrowing goes up to $317.3 billion. That amount of borrowing, if one divides the total number of New Zealand’s population, which is 5 million, becomes something like $63,460 of debt for every woman, man, and child in this country—that is $63,460 debt for every child, woman, and man in this country. That is the total borrowing that this Government is putting New Zealand into.

I guess when I look at some of the ways that this Government has actually worked and my idea that perhaps the rebuild idea is not something that they’re going to do very well, it’s because during the lockdown, one of the things that I have experienced is that the Government didn’t seem ready, Government wasn’t aware, and Government did not prepare well enough—for example, one of the things that I experienced as an ethnic person is that the information that went out to the ethnic communities in regards to COVID-19 information was very lacking. Often, people did not have information as to what they could do during lockdown, what they could do during level 3 or 2, and the translation services were not available, or the information, the posters, that should have been in different languages was not available.

I’d like to take this opportunity, if I may, to thank, from my community, the COVID19 Han In Yeon Dae—that translates to the “COVID-19 New Zealand-Korean alliance”—and the Korean Students’ Association and the medical doctors and nurses who spent hundreds of hours translating Government PR and information about COVID-19, because that was essential for the ethnic, particularly for the communities who weren’t getting the information fast enough.

During the lockdown, MPs actually have contact with the elected officials’ email, and one of the things that I was constantly asking was: when is the Korean translation and when is the Chinese translation going to be online? Because these are the things that people were contacting me to find out if that information was available—it wasn’t.

I heard earlier during question time the Hon Willie Jackson talked about the fact that he cared about the Māori, Pacific, and ethnic communities, and he actually represented them. I hope that he takes this lesson: there were a lot of things that were done that could have been done better. This is not necessarily a criticism saying that you didn’t do it; it’s saying that it was very late. This information is really, really important—for example, when the Government made a decision to not publish weekly publications and said that they weren’t part of the essential service. Guess what! The ethnic newspapers fell into that so-called non-essential service. That means that ethnic communities could not publish in their ethnic language. I had to write to the Prime Minister and appeal to her sensibilities and say, “Actually the information that the ethnic communities require is in those newspapers and they need to be allowed to publish.” Eventually, that happened.

The other thing is: what ever happened to the halal butchers? Initially, it was going to happen immediately, and then it took a week. I don’t know how long it was before they actually decided that it wasn’t going to happen. So this kind of information delay is what costs people money, what costs people jobs, and what costs people their business.

One of the things that I was actually hoping for in this Budget was a tremendous contribution from the Minister of communications. One of the main things that happened was that, because most people were working from home, because students were studying from home, people were trying to run their businesses from home, connectivity became a major issue for a lot of New Zealanders. For people who were living in urban areas, who had signed up to fibre connections, it was perfect: their entertainment was available on fibre or internet—any kind of connections—commercial videos on demand that they signed up to. But many in the rural sector, many in the regions, have terrible connectivity. That was one of the many, many complaints that I received, where their upload speeds were terrible. They could not run invoicing, they could not do banking, and they could not have their children educated—when they have more than one child, how many children are connected to their work, while the parents are also trying to work?

I’d like to acknowledge the telcos—some of them—who have tried to help and assist by maximising the data, actually removing the data cap. But the data-cap removal happened only between midnight and 9 a.m., which was absolutely useless for people who were studying. I was hoping that, perhaps, the Government would contribute more in the Budget to expand the connectivity issue, to resolve some of the issue. I know there were earlier Budget announcements in terms of extending antennas and whatever, but the thing is that I thought maybe we would have seen a little bit more.

There are many people in the ethnic communities who run businesses. I have had numerous emails and phone calls where people are having to mortgage their homes, having to remortgage their homes, having to cut staff numbers because they just cannot make ends meet. During the lockdown, the very fact that some of them are actually running groceries, they’re running butchers, they’re running bakeries—they could not open, even though dairies could open using that one in, one out rule. They could have safely done that, as well, but it was deemed that they can’t and that they weren’t essential services.

There are many people in this country who come from different ethnic backgrounds and who run tourism businesses. I know it’s very tough because we cannot just open the border and allow people to come in, because a lot of the infections actually happened from people who came from overseas. There are many people who run export education where students from overseas, who come to learn the English language, as well as different kinds of tertiary education courses, cannot run their businesses, because currently they cannot open their business. For those people, the wage subsidy does not help. It is a help in the sense that it pays for their staffers so that they are not at risk of getting, I guess, the redundancy, but it is coming very, very close where they’re hanging on a by a sheer thread to hang on to their business, that they don’t have to actually cut the numbers of employees. But they are saying it is tough. This Government has done nothing, and this Budget has provided nothing for them. Loading them with more debt is not helping New Zealand.

The next call’s a split call.

We’ve heard so much over recent weeks and, certainly here in the House, over the past couple of days about the challenge that we have all faced over the past few weeks. The first part of 2020 has been very difficult for many sectors and many New Zealanders.

Part of one of the sectors that it has been very difficult for has, of course, been the education sector, something that, as you know, Madam Speaker, I am incredibly passionate about. But I have to say, over the past few weeks, I have never been as proud of the education sector as I have become over that time. The responsiveness, the nimbleness of the sector, the passion of the educators to make a difference for their children has never been more evident than what we have seen since the beginning of the lockdown period. Educators across the country are putting their hand up to say, “We want to be an integral part of the recovery. We know our job. We are willing to do it. We are going to stand up and be strong.” And that’s why I’m so pleased in the unprecedented investments that this Budget has made into the education sector.

I want to briefly talk about the investment into the early childhood sector, something that I was absolutely just so, so pleased with. This is a sector that has been placed under significant strain. In fact, I’m not going to just say “strain”; this is a sector that has been haemorrhaging—haemorrhaging greatly—because of over a decade of underfunding from the previous Government. It has been a tough, tough, tough time for this sector, and so to see the priority given in this Budget to the early childhood sector was just fabulous, particularly into the actual workforce within that sector. The workforce, as I say, have struggled, and many with the same qualifications that I hold who haven’t been paid much more than minimum wage for quite some time because of the lack of funding that has sat traditionally within there.

So we had the announcements of the pay jolt for the lowest paid of those teachers—a great first step towards pay parity, an announcement of 9.6 percent to the lowest-paid qualified teachers in the early childhood sector. But the one that I got the most feedback, the really exciting, exciting announcement, was that Budget 2020 provided $278.2 million to restore the 100 percent funding band for teacher-led early childhood education (ECE) services. We did used to have that, but, unfortunately, the previous Government saw that as something that they could get rid of in 2010. At the time, early childhood teachers felt that they were being undervalued by that Government. This announcement in this Budget is paving the way for a fully qualified early learning workforce. And why shouldn’t our children be having fully qualified teachers in front of them? Our children and our future in this country are the winners out of this announcement.

I really just want to take this time to read out one piece of feedback that—I got many pieces of feedback, I should say, but there was just this one piece from a teacher who I felt quite worried about over the years because of how she didn’t want to stay within the profession because she felt like she wasn’t being valued. This is what she said: “Just wanted to say a huge thankyou to you and the Government to really see the value of ECE. I actually broke down in tears in this announcement. I’ve had some horrible stories from myself and other teachers who have been treated poorly for quite some time, but with this announcement, it just made me drop to my knees and say, ‘Thank you.’ Finally, my skills, my knowledge, and my qualifications are being valued. I can’t thank you enough.” I was delighted to hear those comments from her and really, really proud that we are doing something about a sector that is so critical for all our children.

I will say that in a meeting that I had last week with Post Primary Teachers’ Association, the union that represents our secondary teaching workforce, they also said that this was an absolutely fabulous, fabulous announcement because not only are the teachers in their sector important; the teachers in the primary sector are important, but the foundational skills that those young people get in the early childhood sector actually set those children up for life. So it was a fabulous, fabulous announcement to be made.

We also had a fantastic announcement in the early childhood sector about Māori education around kōhanga reo—again, unprecedented investment into that particular sector. We’ve also had wonderful announcements around school lunches and really expanding that pilot from 21,000 children to 200,000. That is a magnificent investment and that programme, one that I personally know the benefit of, will make a big, big difference to our young people and to our communities. And then, of course, the restoration of night classes. This Government is absolutely committed to the place and role of education in supporting our recovery and our rebuild.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. One of the first things that I did in level 2 in my community was head to King Edward Street in South Dunedin to my local cafe—Aroma Cafe, which is just down the road from my electorate office—and get morning tea for my Dunedin staff, as it was the first day that they were physically open. I asked the Aroma Cafe staff how they’d fared under lockdown. Bill, who’s the manager and the owner of that small business, said that they just would not have survived without the wage subsidy. The same was true with my hairdresser, with the vet, with the car yard in Andersons Bay Road, who actually told me not only would they not have survived without the wage subsidy but also that what was heartening for them was that business was booming once people came out of lockdown, which was good news for them.

I want to give a real shout out to the civil defence coordination in Dunedin during the lockdown, and Dunedin City Council and the Otago Regional Council, who corralled and worked with all of the community groups, the social agencies, to deliver that welfare support and response; the Otago Chamber of Commerce and the employers’ association that worked so hard with the local businesses right across the region; and the GPs, the care workers, the midwives, and all the essential workers. I have never spoken to as many supermarket workers as I did during the lockdown, particularly during that first week when there was so much nervousness and, literally, fear from those minimum wage workers who were on the front line, and without a lot of the supports that they needed, especially for those first few days.

I also want to give a big thankyou to the staff in my Dunedin office—and, in fact, my whole staff—who went like the clappers to form an online digital office so that we could respond to all of the hundreds and hundreds of calls and messages and help and support that was needed over that lockdown period. I know I’m not alone, obviously. Every MP in this House will have had behind them incredible staff who worked their butts off to provide the supports that were needed. I really want to thank Warren and Nadine and Larissa and Josh for the work that they did during that time.

Last Tuesday, I took a day to go down to Balclutha and Milton with Ingrid Leary, who’s the new candidate for Taieri, who’s replacing me when I stand down. We talked to dozens of people in the coffee shops and the shops along the main street, the community groups, the council—all who said, “Thank you. Thank you so much to the Government. Thank you, Jacinda, for moving so quickly, for putting in place the wage subsidy, for keeping us safe.”

Now, of course we know that not every job or every business can be saved, but what this Government has done is not only put in place that $12.1 billion recovery package right at the beginning, but then was agile enough to move incredibly quickly to put in place the Budget, showing the agility of a Government and a finance Minister faced with one of the biggest challenges this country’s ever seen, to be able to recast and refocus the Budget to deliver what is needed in our country right now.

Two things, in the short time left, that stand out for me is the free apprenticeships that are being made available and the reinstatement of adult education, which is part of the glue that holds our community together. We are a team of 5 million. When we work together, we’re at our best.

Vaiaso o le Gagana Samoa. It’s Samoan Language Week. I want to honour and acknowledge our Samoan community, its history, its heritage, and how language plays such an important part. So I acknowledge the week and the theme for this week as well, and to all of our Samoan communities as well.

The Budget debate is a debate in which many in the House and over previous years have always stood up. Often, and as has been heard this afternoon, people will make a pitch about what was and what wasn’t done in previous Governments and what is being done in the current term of a Government as well. Let’s just say, I’d like to put on the record that if we all own up, the fact is that there were things that we did in our terms of Government from the past to the present that we got right and things that we got wrong. I want to just put that and lay that out there.

But it is time for the Budget speech. It means that whoever is in the hot seat, they now get to be held accountable, and that’s what the speech is all about. That’s what this debate is all about. So today is a debate in which we can talk about the Budget for the Government of the day, to hold them to account to the things that they’ve said, to things that they promised and what significant difference that they have made. If I stand in this House, I can pick out a number of things and then begin to talk about them from my own perspective. I think that being the House of Representatives, and as a member of Parliament, I’d like to echo the voices of our community. What do they say when they reflect about this Budget, and what does it mean to them? So in some of my portfolios, I’d like to then speak from that perspective.

First of all, I want to talk about children and in regards to child poverty. When we look at the Budget, it is the first of a Budget in which there have now been recordings of the fact of the Budget implications in regards to child poverty. That’s been clearly stated in page 17 of the Budget report that was released. So we know what the indicators are; there are measures. There are three key primary measures and six supplementary measures in that regards.

But I want to bring the words from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAC). Now, we aren’t always supporters, and I don’t always support everything they say and do, but I do support the fact that there are significant areas that they have highlighted. One of the areas that they’ve talked about in their comment to the Budget is this: COVID-19 has shone a light on the glaring inadequacies in our welfare system we already knew have long existed since 1991. So that’s long term.

So what we would say is that in my speech I want to talk about the systemic changes. When we look at the changes, we have parts of our Budget which deal with a number of key areas. But what key people in regards to what we’re providing to our community are looking for is: are there any significant systemic changes in the system that will make a long-term difference? As I look through this and as I read through the reports, I want to come to the conclusions that have been made by the Child Poverty Action Group, and they start with the comment, in their conclusions, with this: “The risks which COVID-19 recession pose for children’s welfare is of concern for CPAC, as it is, no doubt, for many other New Zealanders.” Regrettably, there is little in the 2020 Budget which addresses these risks. And then there are many examples that they give from that.

So when we’re talking about systemic change, when CPAC themselves have looked through that, yes, there are things that we’ve done to mediate and to deal with the current issues before us. COVID-19 has presented a number of them. But are there systemic changes? Can we track and trace the ability to say that this will significantly change the outcome in the long term for our children, for our whānau, for our families, and for our communities? So CPAC are telling us there aren’t. So, again, I bring these words from the community itself.

If we go further, then, to look at some of the other responses and, particularly, to children. You would have known that there have been four different inquiries in regards to the uplift of children, especially in regards to Oranga Tamariki. That comes under my purview as the shadow spokesperson. When I look at the Budget and I look at what the Budget indicates, I want to point, first of all, to the work and the inquiry around Whānau Ora entitled “Ko te Wā Whakawhiti”, which is “It’s time for change”. Inside of that, the community came together, the Māori community, and they indicated four key areas. These are four key years of systemic change. Here’s what they asked for: they asked for the key principles of a whānau-centred approach; they looked for a systems-focused, kaupapa Māori - aligned, mātauranga Māori - informed—these were the words, again, that came out of Māori looking for a systemic change. Did we see that in the Budget?

If I look at the Budget in regards to Māori development, on page 22, and in the era of identifying and developing whānau-centred approaches to healthcare to improve the wellbeing of Māori and Pacific whānau: no budget. No budget at all. So that indicates to us, again, our community have spoken. There is no systemic change that’s happening. Yes, we can stand up in the House; we can declare $900 million towards dealing with the issues of Māori—Māori children, Māori whānau. But when they say this, you can do that for a time, but will it make a difference? Again, I speak from the words of our community. Here’s what they say when they’re talking about this. Some of their words are: just spending and borrowing won’t fix our economy or our communities. I want to quote because it has been written; it’s actually in press here from Te Rūnanga-Ā-Iwi O Ngāpuhi CEO Te Rōpu Poa. Here’s what he says: the Budget increase “looks okay on paper.” But he was unsure if it would help families in the long term—in the long term.

Again, people are looking for systemic change. They’re not unhappy; they’re not ungrateful. Please don’t get me wrong when I put these comments out. They’re not ungrateful for the support that they’re giving. But again, I ask the question: in the long term, what is there being done to increase changes? Here’s what else they say: how do you assess a whānau that lives in the country as opposed to a whānau that lives in a household or in a town? Again, there is no systemic change here. There is no systemic change. These are the words from our own community that they’re speaking out there. I then bring other words. Te Pūtahitanga o Te Waipounamu—here are the comments that are coming from them: “We [are] looking for a budget that would enable opportunities to address hardship, to nurture aspiration and to foster innovation—it is unclear at this time whether this budget will deliver on our expectations.”—on our expectations.

The Government is in the hot seat of responsibility. What the community are looking for is systemic change. I would have to say the comments that are coming up—and these are not my comments; these are comments from the community. So the Government can turn around and they can argue. They’ll only be arguing against the very people who they’re wanting to serve. There is no systemic change, and that’s what’s becoming clear to us here in this House as well.

I want to acknowledge the Hon Aupito William Sio and the work that he’s done, and his announcement that he made: $195 million. That’s significant. That’s gone out into our Pasifika community. When I look at the list of those things that have been announced down here, I first of all go back to the work that was done—and I was there at Eden Park, in which we had the announcements of significant work around looking at some key planks around systemic change. One of them was around economic development for Pasifika—economic development for Pasifika—and the areas that we think that could make a difference. The community were engaged, they were consulted; they were asked for what would make a difference. But when I look down at this list of what the $195 million will do, I’m not seeing a systemic change. If anything, there’s the support of some of the work that had already been started under a previous Government. First time I’ve mentioned it; don’t want to go too far there.

But I just want to say that my whole speech in this debate is the question that the community is asking, that you can meet the immediate needs—thankful and grateful—but in the long term, are you really making a difference for the life of our whānau, of our children, of our communities? And they’re asking this. Yes, in the Pasifika Culture and Heritage Fund we’ve got empowering Pasifika participation, expansion of Tupu Aotearoa programme across New Zealand, Pacific Aotearoa Community COVID-19 Recovery Fund, Pacific skills. We see all these things; they’re immediate. But there is nothing in here that tells us that there is systemic change.

So in my final minute, here’s how I propose that this Budget would be. It is all purpose but no plan. There was all purpose—

💬 Michael Wood: Good speech. You should be on the front bench.

—in meeting the current need of COVID-19. It’s all purpose. That’s right, Michael Wood. All the sense of what it has. But what the voices on the community say is this: where is the plan? Where is the plan? We’ve got a plan. Give me another 10 minutes and I’ll tell you what that plan is. These are the words, by the way, from our community, not my words. These are the words. Yep. You can hassle and haggle because why? Because it hurts; because what I’m saying rings true to you. That’s why in your community, when they turn around and they say this, that it’s purpose but no plan—all purpose but no plan. So you’re in the hot seat now. You get to make the decisions—

💬 SPEAKER: Order!

Not you, Mr Speaker, but to the Government of the day, it is your turn at the hot seat of responsibility—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.