Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill, Imprest Supply (First for 2020/21) Bill

I move, That the Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2020/21) Bill be now read a second time.

I thought it might be helpful at the outset to let members know exactly what these two bills are. The Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill makes new appropriations and changes to appropriations in the 2019/20 Estimates to reflect the decisions taken by the Government since the 2019/20 Estimates were finalised in April 2019, prior to Budget 2019. The Imprest Supply (First for 2020/21) Bill provides an interim bulk spending authority for the first three months of the 2020-21 financial year until the Appropriation (2020-21 Estimates) Bill is passed by the end of September.

The total imprest sought through the Imprest Supply (First for 2020/21) Bill is greater than that provided by the Imprest Supply (First for 2019/20) Act. This is a reflection of both the Government’s fiscal response to COVID-19 and the considerably heightened economic uncertainty resulting from the global pandemic. The Imprest Supply (First for 2020/21) Bill seeks to provide sufficient authority for the Government to incur a maximum of $40 billion in expenses and $10.5 billion in capital expenditure and $1.7 billion in capital injections until the Appropriation (2020-21 Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2020/21) Bill are passed. These figures account for the financial implications of the decisions made as part of Budget 2020 through the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund and other COVID-19 - related spending. Although the Government does not expect to incur expenditure of this magnitude before the passing of the Appropriation (2020-21 Estimates) Bill, it is standard practise for imprest bills to provide sufficient supply to cover fiscal risk as well as the uncertain timing and spread of expenditure.

I give notice that at the end of the second reading, there will be a committee of the whole House stage of the Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill to consider a Supplementary Order Paper to incorporate into this bill the changes to appropriations and new appropriations for 2019/20 contained in the addition to the 2019/20 Supplementary Estimates that I presented to the House last Tuesday. This is something that has happened before in this House in the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes, when decisions have needed to have been taken after the time that they normally would be.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. As the Minister quite rightly pointed out, these two bills actually are very interrelated. First, the need to reflect new or changed expenditure from the finalised 2019-20 Estimates, which were presented prior to the Budget earlier this year, and then, of course, needing to cover the additional spending for the first three months of this financial year, which is 2020-21.

As the Minister says, the amount that’s been set aside at $40 billion for additional spending, at $5 billion for capital spend, and also another $1.7 billion for capital injections is by any standards the most incredible level of financial expenditure, I think, probably in New Zealand’s history. Even on a comparative basis, I would imagine that these amounts are just so staggeringly large that every other time that we’ve had these types of initiatives, even during the global financial crisis, the amount of money that’s been allocated to deal with the COVID-19 process is absolutely outstandingly large.

I think that is a real question for all of New Zealanders to ponder, because I don’t think for a moment anyone thinks that we shouldn’t be spending large amounts of money to support vulnerable New Zealanders, and particularly vulnerable businesses in New Zealand, particularly at a time when we’ve had the process of trying to at least eliminate the COVID infections in New Zealand. It was right and proper that support measures were put in place. The primary one has been the wage subsidy, which has amounted to roughly about $11 billion so far. An interesting point, it’s 50 percent of the average wage in New Zealand, whereas most countries around the world did 80 percent. That is a large portion of the additional spending.

I think one of the areas we haven’t seen any support in—I think this is a very disappointing area and one that we might have contemplated if we had been in Government—is the lack of support for businesses, especially in the area of rental support. Using Reserve Bank valuations of commercial industrial buildings, if the Government had subsidised 50 percent of all rents that were paid to independent landlords for industrial and commercial properties in New Zealand, that would have cost $300 million a month or $1 billion for three months. I think, unfortunately, that is one of the big things that has happened.

Even though we allocated $40 billion here, the mix of spend that the Government has chosen to apply, in my personal view, has been that it’s not well balanced. It underspent in terms of support for employees—wage subsidies during the actual lockdown period should have been 80 percent—but didn’t deal with the issue of rental support for businesses. The result of that is that now many businesses, three months down the track, who’ve only just been able to do approximately 10 days of work last month and will have now invoiced for those 10 days of work and will now, hopefully, later this month receive the first lot of payment in three months—during that period, not only have they had to deal with half their labour costs, and labour normally reflects about 40 percent of any business’s total costs, they’ve had to top up half of that for the last three months.

The second thing is they’ve had to deal with and pay for rent, which accounts for roughly about 20 percent of everyone’s profit and loss. On top of that, and everyone seems to have forgotten that, all businesses face another 40 percent of general overheads, whether they’re power, lighting, whatever it might be, general overhead that they’ve had to incur. As a result, we’ve now got businesses perilously close where many of them do not have cash reserves at all and are waiting and hanging on for the wage support. I think that is the travesty of where we’ve ended up. Even though we’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve ended up with a travesty that many of our smaller businesses in New Zealand—we have 320,000 of them, mums and dads in many cases, less than five employees—those businesses are so financially constrained now, their owners—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I’m very sorry to interrupt the member. The time has come for the House to have a dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30. Andrew Bayly has four minutes, 54 seconds remaining should he wish to take it.

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

Just to remind people what we’re actually talking about right now, this is the Estimates and the imprest supply bills. So as the Minister said just before the break, what the Government wants to do is to put in place enough funding for the first three months of the 2020-21 financial year. So what this bill does is set aside $40 billion for working capital purposes—if I can use the business term—$5 billion for capital expenditure, and $1.7 billion for injection into Government-owned entities.

What I was saying before the break was that we do need to invest heavily, and I was talking about the level of support given in terms of wage subsidy at 50 percent rather than 80 percent and the lack of any financial support around rental arrangements for small businesses. Having costed that, that’s worth about $300 million per month if the Government had chosen to do that. What that would have done is protect, husband the cash that those small businesses have, which right now are in a critical, perilous state because they haven’t been able to invoice, basically, anything for three months and they’ve had to carry not only the top-up of the wages but also the rent that they’ve had to pay, plus the remaining overheads that all businesses incur.

So we accept the principle that the Government needs to spend. But this $40 billion is on a herculean scale. It is something that we’ve never seen before in New Zealand’s history. We didn’t even do that level of spending during the global financial crisis, and the total bill for the Christchurch earthquake was $20 billion for the Government and $40 billion for the wider industry. So that just puts this $40 billion for the first three months into a context of the scale of this.

What we’ve seen is that we’re going to see debt rise from roughly $60 billion over the next few months to close to $110 billion, and the financial cost of that, the interest cost of that, is going to be $3.5 billion a year. Again, to put that sum of $3.5 billion into context, that is the same cost as the New Zealand Government writing out a cheque to fund the New Zealand police force in New Zealand every year. The cost to the police force is the equivalent of the additional funding we’re going to have to find to service this increase in debt.

What is worse, this document, this Budget document and the Estimates that are all part of it going forward—over the next four years this Government is proposing to run deficits totalling in excess of $100 billion, which will result in this Government and this country and every New Zealander facing a $200 billion deficit or debt figure. That’ll be an annual interest cost of roughly $7.5 billion. It is staggering. The largest surplus that the Government’s ever recorded is about $7 billion. That is just servicing the debt; it is nothing about repaying the debt. That is the most dangerous thing about this.

Part of this $40 billion that’s in here, we know that the Government has been clear that they have set aside $20 billion. It is yet to be specified what it’s going to be applied to, but it’s going to be spent over the next couple of months prior to the election. That is the issue that we have. We do agree that good investment by this Government should be made to support vulnerable New Zealanders, to support vulnerable businesses who employ vulnerable New Zealanders, and we should be looking after our communities, but this is a Government that has little discipline.

It’s interesting, when you go through this document, some of the Estimates that are included and some of the costs—like if I just look here: the Prime Minister’s and Cabinet fund over the next four years is going to increase by $7 million.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: What page—what page?

Page 80. If I look at “Saving the Crown’s audio-visual collection”, another $10 million to be spent, plus $32 million of capital expenditure. If I look at some of the other aspects, there’s $6 million set aside immediately after the election for Ministers to be able to reassume their offices. That there is a staggering amount of money just for offices.

I want to pick up on something which the speaker immediately before me, Andrew Bayly, has said. He said that we have never before seen spending on this scale. He’s correct. We have never before seen Governments having to spend on this scale. I say “Governments” because it’s Governments around the world. Of course, Governments around the world, including our Government, are spending on this scale because we are facing a situation which we have never seen before. We are facing the extraordinary situation of a global pandemic, and not just a pandemic like the previous great one that we experienced, the 1918 influenza commonly known as the Spanish flu. This is an illness different in nature from that, but it is still just an illness. The difference is our interconnected world. The difference is the speed with which this virus has spread around the world, affecting virtually every nation. It is an extraordinary situation and it has called for an extraordinary response by our Government and by Governments everywhere. So our Government has, with courage, taken the steps to do the best we can for New Zealand in this time.

Just bear with me for a moment while I tell you a little story, because it’s going to bear directly on the Supplementary Estimates that we are speaking to. I was out doorknocking on Saturday afternoon, as one does when an election’s coming up—and very enjoyable it was, too; it’s always fun. I knocked on the door of one house, and there was a couple there, and they said, “Oh, we’re a bit busy; no, we’ll talk.”, and they said, “The thing is we’re going through CVs at the moment because we’re looking to hire someone.” I said, “Oh, that’s great news. You’re hiring someone.” And they said, yeah, yeah, they are, they’re working through the CVs. They’re a truck rental company and they were looking to take on another staff member. I thought, “Well, that’s marvellous. You’ve obviously come through quite well.” They said, “When you see Jacinda, could you say thank you—thank you because the wage subsidy saved our business.” Those were their words. I haven’t got their names right here because I was going off a call sheet, but I can dig them out if needed. But that was their response: “Thank you for the wage subsidy, it saved our business.”

Now, the previous speaker said that there had been a lack of support for business. What an extraordinary thing to say. If I go to page 8 of the extra Supplementary Estimates, which we’ve had this year because of the COVID crisis, I see that there is an allocation there of—let me just find it exactly—$15.2 billion—$15.2 billion—it’s called the business support subsidy, and it is the wage subsidy—the wage subsidy that has saved businesses. That is direct support for businesses to help them keep their valued employees on. So when you say that there is no support for businesses, that is the support for businesses.

The previous speaker spoke of the worry about the cash expenses that businesses have to carry at the moment—the cash that they have to come up with in order to survive. He talked about the issues around rent and the like, and then he said, “Well, where is support for this?” Well, if we go to page 7 of the Supplementary Estimates document that we have here—the additional Supplementary Estimates—we see that there is funding right there for the Small Business Cashflow (Loan) Scheme. Sitting in there is $5.2 billion allocated in order to support small business. “Where is the Government and the business support?”, the Opposition have asked. It is right here in this document—right there, because this Government on this side understands the need to support business and it has acted to do it.

Now, sure, along the way there will be some mistakes, perhaps some people who could have got the wage subsidy when they shouldn’t have; perhaps some people who have taken out the loan when they shouldn’t have. But, by and large, it has gone to the people who need it, when they need it, fast and early, so that businesses survive. That’s what’s sitting in this addition to the Supplementary Estimates.

Then, in terms of actually spending seriously to make sure that things work, sitting here on page 5 of this addition to the Supplementary Estimates is an allocation of a further $495 million for the COVID-19 health response. That’s the money that’s setting up the campaigns around uniting against COVID-19. It’s purchasing extra equipment. It’s getting the contract tracing going. It’s getting going on supporting quarantine. Money that is supporting the COVID response and, through that, supporting all of us.

We are highly desirable now. People want to come here. We are seeing more and more people coming back to New Zealand because we are safe—because we are safe. Again, those borders are, by and large, holding up. Sure, there have been some hiccups along the way, and that’s understandable. No one has tried to put in a quarantine like this elsewhere in the world—it’s us and Australia. We are working it up as we go along. Why? Because it has been such a sudden event, such a quick response has been needed. Yes, there will be things that go wrong along the way, but by and large we are getting that right. Do you know how we can tell that? There is still no community transmission in New Zealand. We have got it right—we have got it right. That’s why New Zealanders are coming home, because they are coming home to safety. That’s the story that we can tell in the Supplementary Estimates.

I wish to pick up on one further point from the Supplementary Estimates. The previous speaker was concerned about the amount of debt that New Zealand is getting into. But sitting here in the report from the Finance and Expenditure Committee, on the Supplementary Estimates—and I take you to page 3 of that report—is some discussion of the debt that’s going on. It says, “With fiscal spending levels reaching historic highs, New Zealand’s debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to climb to 50 percent.” New Zealand’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 19 percent, but it’s going up. It does say that it represents a large increase in Government debt. But then it goes on to say—and this is a report that the previous speaker signed off on, as well, because it came from the committee that he sits on, as well—“However, we note that the increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio is comparable to the increase that occurred between 2008 and 2013, after the global financial crisis. We have also previously heard from the Treasury that the Government’s debt position will remain sustainable, even if the debt-to-GDP ratio were to reach 50 percent.”—in a report that the previous speaker signed off on, as well, sitting there; you can read it for yourselves.

So we’ve heard a lot of carping and criticism from the Opposition bench, but when you look at the numbers, we are getting it about right. We’re doing well. This Government has worked hard and fast to get it right, to support business, to support individuals who have lost their jobs, to support our economy, and to make our border safe. It’s working.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I’ll be speaking on this Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. It’s just a small bill; a short bill that packs a fair punch, with billions and billions—tens of billions of expenditure. So if you look at this bill, it’s innocuous in many respects. Then you run down the line on page 30—just quietly on page 30—$12 billion on one line item: business support subsidy, $12 billion, not too bad, and then various other bits and pieces here that have been listed.

The thing that, of course, New Zealanders are obviously asking as they see a lot of this expenditure going out—some of it, of course, is absolutely appropriate and right, particularly when we run through the health expenditure. You would expect that we would be putting more into health and disability support services in the Lakes DHB and the Hutt Valley DHB and the Nelson Marlborough DHB—everybody expects that. We’ve been dealing with a global health crisis.

But then there are other bits of money that they’ve seen rolling out the door: whether it’s all the money spent to kill the possums or various rail proposals from our friends over in New Zealand First. They’ve sort of racked their brains and they think, “Didn’t they just spend a whole lot of money opening up that line to Wairoa? Isn’t it true that most of the trees that they’re hoping to get on the line to Wairoa, actually, are closer to Napier Port than Wairoa?” So they have to sort of get in a truck and go back to Wairoa, and then get off the truck and get on the train, and then take the train to the port. As a result there have been a grand total of six trains so far in the six months. Then they see millions and billions of more money being spent on various lines up in Northland, and there isn’t much prospect of any more trains going on those.

So they ask the legitimate question: how are we going to pay for all this? The worry that many New Zealanders have is that this is a Government, with $20 billion in Grant Robertson’s kitty, that will spend whatever it takes to try and keep their polling up till 19 September, then on 20 September the smiles will drop from their faces and New Zealanders will be presented with the bill, and the bill is higher taxes next year if they were lucky enough to win the election. So New Zealanders have got a stark choice: do they want those higher taxes or not? And they’ll be asking themselves that over the next little while.

So while many of the things that are listed in the Supplementary Estimates make sense, the overall scope of spending is concerning. What is more concerning, of course, is the continual and constant gap between the announcements and the delivery. All New Zealanders this week have been reflecting on that—they’ve been reflecting on the Prime Minister’s front-and-centre descriptions of how the Government has delivered on and done this and done that on border security, and then they’ve seen the reality. Then they haven’t seen the Prime Minister; what they’ve seen is a reference to a systems failure, and various officials running around defending it, and Minsters not being seen anywhere. David Clark—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s very interesting but it’s not about the Estimates.

Well, it is about—Madam Speaker, with your indulgence, there is a very strong connection between these Estimates, which represent the money being spent and what we’re getting for it, and the confidence that New Zealanders have, or the lack thereof, in it.

Then we’re talking about how there’s supposed to be a focus on COVID, but, if you looked at page 31, for example, you would see many millions being spent on establishing a single, national vocational education institution. Well, that’s short for taking over the entire polytech and centralising it, turning the whole industry upside down, shaking it from its feet, and then expecting that you can go and spend $1.6 billion to get a whole lot of apprentices into the working environment, and those two things don’t fit very well together.

So my simple message is one of yes, in a time of crisis, yes we need to borrow, and yes Government can spend in order to help us through a crisis—nobody debates that. The question is how much and how effective is that spending? And that is a much more debatable motion. What we’ve seen in this Government has been a mixture of some effective spending but a whole lot that hasn’t been effective. When we see the Budget proposals, including these Supplementary Estimates, what we’ve seen is a fair amount of money devoted to dealing with COVID, but also a lot of money in areas that are not directly related to COVID but they are areas that the Government wants to do for their political reasons.

Now, that’s fine, but, at a time when we’re taking on an enormous amount of debt, and the projections from the Treasury are that we’ll be having a deficit of $28 billion this financial year and about the same next financial year, and then over the next four years we’ll be adding an extra $140 billion of debt—in that context, recognising that New Zealand is a small, isolated economy, prone to national disasters, and with also high private sector debt, there does come a point where it is risky for the country.

So our simple message is that, yes, we take on debt, but we’re careful about it, we don’t go crazy, and we don’t take more than we need. And in a time of crisis, you’ve got to be a little bit considerate about whether some things that might be nice to have in the boom times are still required in the difficult times. We haven’t seen any of those hard decisions made in these Supplementary Estimates, in my opinion. On that basis, we are yet to be convinced of the merits of this bill. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

This will be a focused, pithy, and concise speech. But I just want to contrast what our side of the House is doing through this modest—in size—piece of legislation with what the shadow spokesman for finance is saying. So the shadow spokesman for finance is saying that we were wrong to buttress the economy; we were wrong to look after the hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who, as a consequence of COVID, were dislocated from the workforce; we were wrong to underwrite our national airline. So I presume what he is saying is that this level of injection, this $40 billion, is actually not what the economy needs. That is not what Kiwis believe. The reason that this figure is so large, you need look no further than the 11—roughly speaking—billion dollars in protecting jobs.

Now, this side of the House knows, as we go forward, jobs will organically come from the economy as it regains strength, and the strength that it regains will be reflective of the navigational skills shown by Grant Robertson and his fellow Ministers. The other thing we need to bear in mind—and I’m not going to speak for very long, because Kiwis actually want to see the money flowing. Kiwis actually want to see an injection and interventions in the economy. But I’m going to round up my speech by talking about what is alluded to in this legislation, which is infrastructure spending.

Infrastructure spending is going to be incredibly important. It is covered off in some of these capital allocations because, as we’ve seen the drying up of virtually $17 billion of foreign exchange earnings through tourism, our Government is going to endeavour to plug that gap by futureproofing our provincial and our metropolitan economies with pots of infrastructure expenditure. That is what Kiwis expect us to do. They don’t expect us to be miserly, they don’t expect us to lose our boldness or our courage, and for those reasons our party thoroughly endorses both the strategy and the allocations that Grant Robertson, our Minister of Finance, has already announced and which this House, as it wends its way through the legislative process, will enjoy the support of New Zealand First. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Looking through the Estimates it’s really clear that the term COVID-19 comes through loud and clear. That’s because this country is facing an economic catastrophe. So we see large amounts of money going into trying to deal with the COVID-19 situation; the risks around, obviously, health; the risks around the border—the lack of quarantining that we’ve seen; and we also see a large amount of money going into trying to deal with the economic costs.

The Estimates themselves seem to have massive amounts of money here for the business support subsidy, leave support scheme, essential workers—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: What page is that?

Page 31—to the Minister who clearly hasn’t found it before himself. But thankfully, I have read it. And what we’re seeing here is a tremendous amount of money going into it. Of course it has to go into it, because we have—in our little country of a mere 5 million people—a situation where a lot of people right now are losing their jobs, and they’re losing their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own. Small businesses are closing their doors. Many of us around our electorates will have seen huge numbers of businesses having closed their doors. Just go around the electorates, it’s really clear. In some streets, half the businesses have already shut, and others are looking in the future to have to shut.

There has been a wage subsidy scheme, and that is a good thing, but it is wrong to say that that has gone to help businesses. That has actually gone to help staff, the workers, to be able to still have an income coming in. We, on this side of the House, support the fact that staff have been able to have their wages contributed to, that something has been able to get paid—about 80 percent of those wages—we think that’s a good thing. But we also know that the businesses that we are going to want as a country to be there to keep people employed, that they have essentially had next to nothing. They have not had help with their rent. In fact, landlords have been told that they have to help out their tenants with their rent. The landlords have not had the help. We have businesses where, if they have franchises, they often have franchise costs that they have to be able to pay. Some of them have had to shut. We’ve seen some of our well-known franchises have to shut.

We’ve seen the hospitality industry utterly devastated—and I will not use the term decimated, because that means that they would’ve lost a tenth of them—they’ve been devastated. We’ve seen the tourist industry devastated. What we would like to see, on this side of the House, is an economic plan to help businesses come back from the dead. That’s what we need to do, and the best way of doing that is to implement it before they’re fully dead, and actually do it while there’s still some life in those businesses.

I fear there’s not enough in these Estimates to genuinely and sincerely help businesses to stay afloat. What we’re seeing around the country is councils—local councils are saying they want to get involved, really spend big on infrastructure to help their economies. But, of course, they’re also putting up rates as well; rates for businesses who cannot afford it; rates for landlords who cannot afford it; rates for householders who cannot afford it. We’re seeing the Government not fast track the projects that they said they were going to fast track, in fact, not even announce all the projects that they wanted to fast track. We’ve been told since April that everything was ready to go—“We just need to be able to get the construction industry back again, able to work”—and it was all going to happen really quickly, lots of infrastructure being built around the country. What we’ve seen is not nearly as much infrastructure as we would have expected. What there is being built is often through the councils, rather than through the Government and the Government funding.

We’ve also seen tremendous loss in the education sector, particularly around international students, and in the tertiary sector generally. This is not something that’s going to be easily overcome. Yes, once borders are able to be opened, and, yes, once we can have any confidence in our quarantine system—which I say has been dealt some pretty mortal blows. Yes, we might be able to get things going there again but by that stage we will be back competing with Australia and other providers of educational services to international students and we may well find that we have lost opportunities that the educational institutions have spent years trying to get in place—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just remind the member to deal with the bill in front of her.

—and years trying to build that.

So when we look at the Auckland City Rail Link, for instance, in here, we see there’s—what?—it’s $193 million coming back into it. That’s because—why is that? Is that because it’s coming back in because things aren’t being spent? What’s happened to all of the cost that you might expect in here for some of the other rail work that we were told was happening?

Let’s have a look at the tertiary tuition and training on page 33 of this bill. Let’s have a look at that. We’ve gone from $16.8 billion coming in to—my word, a tremendous amount going out: well, actually, almost nine times that going out.

We have massive losses coming as a country. Just after the Budget was being read, Grant Robertson stood up in the House and told us that we would have to have some tweaking because of the COVID-19—tweaking of the Budget and tweaking of the Government’s finances. This is not tweaking; this is quite serious. I am concerned that some of the costs in here and this money being spent are not necessarily all going to be going into building our economy, building our preparedness for round two of COVID-19 or possibly even round three of COVID-19. I’m not sure that it’s going to be appropriately spent.

We know that this Government has shown a lack of willingness to judge itself by its results but a tremendous wish to be able to judge itself by how much taxpayer money it spends. Taxpayers would expect that when we look at some of these costs in here, whether it’s the Primary Growth Partnership, the New Zealand agricultural greenhouse gas research, that that will be money well spent. We certainly hope so.

We look at the earthquake-prone heritage buildings. It’s a reduction of the authority provided by clause 7 of the appropriation. I’m not sure why that’s reduced. Certainly, all around New Zealand and provincial New Zealand there are buildings that are vacant and they’re vacant because they are considered to be earthquake-prone. The problem with that is that they’ve been standing for well over 100 years. They’re not being slept in. They could actually be opened, I would have thought, during the daytime for people to run business from or even the odd time that they could be used for some event. What worries me tremendously in provincial New Zealand is that we have these heritage buildings being left to rot because nobody can afford to put them into the earthquake safeness that we now require for buildings, for heritage buildings. And here we have money that seems to be being lost to that account. So I’m not quite sure why that is and I’m sure that the Government would like to explain that to the people of Whanganui, of Napier, of Hastings, of all around New Zealand, where right now they need money into their economies and this Government seems more intent on taking it off them rather than giving it to them and building their economy. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It gives me great pleasure to rise on the debate on the Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the associated imprest supply bill, and I have to say there is a saying about when you’re damned with faint praise. It was interesting to me that the worst criticism that the Hon Judith Collins could find on the associated Supplementary Estimates was to do with heritage buildings—the single greatest economic crisis that this country’s faced since the Great Depression, and the worst criticism that the Hon Judith Collins could find to direct at the Government related to our spending on heritage buildings. What that tells me is we’ve probably got it about right.

The thing that she was criticising us for was not spending enough money. I know that COVID-19 has sort of upended the world, but it does say something about where this debate has gotten to. In the spirit of this being a proper debate, I just want to pick up on some of the points that previous speakers—including Andrew Bayly, who kicked off for the blue team on this, followed by the Hon Paul Goldsmith—made. They talked about a number of things, which were that we weren’t spending enough money and we were spending too much money and we were spending it too slowly but also we were spending it too quickly. So I couldn’t quite get a read on exactly what it is that the National Party thinks, because it clearly thinks quite a lot of different things about this particular situation that we’re in.

Andrew Bayly talked about how the amounts that are being appropriated are staggeringly large, and he is absolutely correct. He was voicing some concern that, obviously, all this is going to have to get paid back some day, and he’s absolutely correct—it is. At the same time—and this point was actually reiterated by the Hon Paul Goldsmith in question time the other day, where his lead line of questioning the Minister of Finance at that time gave the presumption that National could spend money faster than the Labour Party; the whole point of that line of questioning was that National can be more profligate and push money out the door even faster than the Labour Party—that’s a real challenge. It’s a real challenge, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because this Government has put over $11 billion in the wage subsidy in less than three months. We got money out the door to where it was needed in a staggeringly short period of time to businesses that needed it.

This is one of the other areas where the National Party were being completely inconsistent about this. They were saying, “Oh, you’re borrowing too much money and you’re spending too much money and it’s all going to have to get paid back.”, and, at the same time, saying, “We would have spent all of that money on the wage supply and then we would have doubled down by paying everybody’s rent for them at the same time.” Well, where was that going to come from? Plus, they were intending to have a GST refund.

So they’re going to give away GST, they’re going to pay for everybody’s rent, and they’re going to pay for everybody’s salaries, and they’re going to do that faster than they think that this Government has been able to get money to where it’s needed—that they can do that faster—and, at the same time—

💬 Hon David Parker: Borrow less.

—they say that they’re going to borrow less money and pay it back faster. It is an extraordinary series of claims.

Now, I remember. Having been on the Opposition benches, I know what it’s like when you’re in Opposition. You know, there is this temptation to say what you need to say in order to kind of please the folks out there. But for a party that has been a party of Government for as long as it has been, you would think that the moment those members were in Opposition, they would be able to maintain some coherent thinking about something as basic as the maths of finance.

So I have been listening to this debate and—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: And I’ve been listening to the member and I’d like him to address the bill.

Well, I mean, it is a debate on the bill, but I do—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: It is a debate on a bill that’s on the Table.

—take your point, Madam Speaker. So the amounts that are contained in this bill, as Andrew Bayly said, are very large. But there is a reason for that, and that is because at a time like this it is imperative that the Government injects enormous amounts of capital into the economy as fast as possible to keep it afloat.

The last time that we had a significant economic downturn, which was during the global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquake, the Government actually borrowed comparable sums of money within the context of the time in order to get us through that period of time, but then put a lid on spending, and it’s been demonstrated afterwards that the lid that we had on spending under the National Government of the time actually prolonged the economic downturn. So it is actually entirely appropriate that the amounts that are being appropriated at the moment and being pushed into the economy at the moment are actually exactly what the Opposition is calling for: the right level of stimulus to keep the economy afloat and to keep as many people in their jobs as possible; where someone isn’t able to stay in their job, to give them retraining and get them back into work in a new job as fast as possible; if they are stuck in a situation where they’re unemployed for a period of time, to make sure that they have enough money coming in to put a roof over their head; and so on.

Honestly, you know, I’ve been listening to the debate on this bill and I cannot for the life of me work out where the criticism actually is, because there is really only one course of action available to us at this particular time, and we do have the lessons of history to guide us. So I find absolutely nothing to fault in this bill and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ve already attended one financially distressing meeting tonight and I’m attending another one now, and it’s somewhat ironic, I think.

This is the second time or maybe the third time that I’ve followed James Shaw, and I always quite enjoy him. He comes up with something else and in this speech it was the maths of finance, which I find intriguing, and his maths of finance particularly intriguing. He went on to say, though—and I think that this is absolutely relevant to the Supplementary Estimates bill—that the National Party are calling for more expenditure, and he called it profligate expenditure. I’ve got to say, we’re not calling for more expenditure. I’ve not heard us in any stage call for more expenditure. We’re calling for better direction of expenditure. That’s absolutely the key to where this whole discussion needs to go. I think the appropriateness of the expenditure that is contained in the Supplementary Estimates is absolutely the key to the issue we should be talking about.

I just want to go on to an issue that the Hon Shane Jones raised as well. He said Kiwis want to see the money flowing; they want to see Governments bolstering the economy with cash. That’s fine, but the cash has got to be directed in the right direction. I just want to touch on one issue, particularly, and I know that’s it been touched on tonight already, and that’s some of the expenditure around railway. The interesting thing, when you put money into a railway line like the Wairoa to Napier railway line and then you encourage people to plant trees that will never be harvested, it’s very difficult to see what the use of the railway line is actually going to be, because a lot of those trees that have been planted in that area may well never be harvested. So in fact, they’ll never need the railway line to go to the port. So things like that are other sorts of things that I think the National Party in Opposition are particularly critical of.

I also have an interesting electorate, and some of the challenges that we face when we look at biosecurity, at border security, and what they might mean for further expenditure that this Government will need to get to—when you see things like—and I pick on two particular areas, the ski fields, which had we been able to secure our borders, had we been able to maintain our reputation around those borders, those ski fields may well have been able to host overseas visitors during the ski season that’s about to follow. My point is, of course, that if they don’t, in fact, have that opportunity, they are going to be much worse off and, consequently, the Government’s highly likely to have to produce a supplementary Supplementary Order Paper to this bill and put more money into the business than they otherwise might have.

I want to pick on one other issue as well that I think is particularly relevant, and it’s very relevant today because we’ve just put the racing bill through its second reading. I think the issue there is that, of course, we’ve got the national yearling sales coming up for both harness and thoroughbreds in January. And if, in fact, these border lapses don’t enable foreign buyers to come to New Zealand to look at those horses, those yearling sales will collapse. That’s another massive blow to an industry that’s already struggling significantly. So my point is that if we don’t keep our borders secure, if we don’t get keep our biosecurity up to speed, which is another very important issue and obviously an issue that’s included in this Supplementary Order Paper tonight, then we’re going to suffer further challenges and the Government is going to suffer further challenges in where it allocates its money.

The other issue I wanted to talk about with respect to this was, in fact, the debt levels. When you look through these Supplementary Estimates—and I’m not used to looking at the second round of noughts, if you know what I mean. So you’ve got a $12 billion figure in there, which you think’s $12 million till you read it again. And you think it’s $120 million. And you read it again and think, “Oh, it’s $12 billion.” That’s one of the things that we’re just not used to in this country—the magnitude of the money that’s included in these Estimates.

The problem will be for those future generations that’ve got to repay them. It’s all very well to say, “Well, you’re going to have to repay the debt.” Well, my generation won’t have to repay this debt. It’s my generation that’s been saved by some of the activities that have caused this debt, but my generation won’t be repaying it. I think that’s one of the saddest things about where we’ve got to with this Budget and with these Estimates—that a lot of the money contained in here will be repaid by future generations, not by the generations that we’ve spent the money to protect. I realise that’s a difficult conundrum for a Government to deal with, but, none the less, it’s very real and I think it’s absolutely critical to this discussion because somewhere along the line, we are going to have to generate the activity that will repay that debt.

I want to turn for a minute to the—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Infrastructure—infrastructure.

Well, I’ve just turned to the primary sector for a minute, Minister Jones, because, for a change, in New Zealand—not a change, because it happened in 2008-09 as well, but, for a change, in New Zealand the primary sector is going to drive the recovery of New Zealand again, and I think it’s our vibrant rural economy that’s coming to the rescue. If we, in fact, do away by inadvertent or poor investment in the regional economies that drive our primary sector, then we’re going to run the risk of in the future not having such a strong primary sector. If we don’t have a strong primary sector, we will never pay these debts off in the future. Whether we like it or not—and I’ve heard Governments in the past talking about a sunset industry. Well, the sunset industry is now our sunrise, and it, in fact, is driving where we want to get to with respect to repaying some of the debts that are included in this massive amount of expenditure. Sure, I accept that in some ways that expenditure was required.

I want to very briefly talk about the winter energy payment, which was doubled this year, and certainly in some parts of New Zealand—

💬 Brett Hudson: Did you get it?

I missed out, Hud, I missed out. In some parts of—

💬 Hon Member: You gave it back, didn’t you.

—New Zealand—ha, ha! I made a bad blue, actually.

💬 Hon Member: Too hot where he lives—doesn’t need it.

Don’t need that in the Rangitīkei, but in some parts of New Zealand, it’s extremely necessary.

One of the challenges that we face, of course, with all these sorts of things is who does and should get it and who should and shouldn’t get it. One of the strong arguments about the winter energy payment was that people should have had to apply for it, not to default from it. I think that’s still a very relevant argument to some of these things that we do to assist people. Obviously, the wage subsidy was one of those places where you could apply for or default from, but you had to apply to get it. I think it’s logical that when Governments are handing out money of the magnitude that we’re handing it out right now, you should actually have to apply to get money and not just automatically get it and then have to default from it.

One of the positives about the activities of this Government has been the speed with which they’ve acted. Now, history will tell us whether that was a sensible decision or not, and some of the figures in this, our Supplementary Estimates bill tonight, will in due course maybe come back to haunt us, because of the way we’ve managed that. But that’s an issue that the Government will have to face at the time.

I think this discussion is all about who’s got the best priority, and I think James Shaw missed the beat completely when he accused the National Party of splashing cash all over the place. We haven’t said we’ll splash cash anywhere other than in the places that it’s logical to splash it, and I think that our policy would be much more relevant and much more stable than the current Government’s policy is, which, really, some of the subsidy and some of the expenditure in this bill has not been well thought through.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Provincial Growth Fund—Provincial Growth Fund.

So that’s probably—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Politics of envy.

—enough for me, otherwise, I shall have to answer the member on the other side of the House, which I don’t want to have to do, because I could have spent a lot of time accusing him of ruining the country with trees, and you can’t eat them, of course. That’s the other thing. He hasn’t realised you can’t eat trees.

💬 Hon Member: Except for fruit trees.

Oh, the old—ha, ha—

💬 Hon Member: You can’t eat trees.

You cannot eat trees, and that’s a challenge we’re going to face in the future. That’s one of the challenges that we face as we recover from these issues that I’ve mentioned, in this bill. We have got to generate income to pay the bill. Whether it’s expenditure on infrastructure, whether it’s expenditure on whatever, we have to generate income to pay the bill. So that would be me for the night. I’ve done enough, thank you.

This is a split call. I call Willow-Jean Prime.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The previous speaker just said that tonight’s debate has been characterised by who has the best ideas and priorities, and I believe we do. So with that, I commend the bill to the House.

That was a fine contribution, short but sweet.

💬 Hon Member: That won’t win a seat in Northland.

No, no, you need a bit better in Northland for that.

I want to carry on on what my learned colleague and friend Mr Ian McKelvie has told me, because, while he’s had a lot of seriously bad financial news this evening as I understand it, this bill really is seriously bad in terms of financial news for New Zealand. It’s not, as the Government would say, that we’re all negative. It’s just that we are borrowing so much money—$140 billion—we’re running deficits for the next four years, and because we are spending money as quickly as we can, it generally lacks the scrutiny and probity that one would normally have around such large-scale expenditure.

I’ll give you an example, Madam Speaker, I’ll give the House an example. I read an article earlier in the week that said the Government has spent $22 million on housing homeless people during level 4 lockdown—that is 1,200 homeless people according to the article. That works out at $600, or nearly $650, a night in motels for homeless people. There may be a very good reason for that—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Bad maths.

—but I know—no, the maths is fine, Mr Jones. The maths is fine; I’ve checked it several times. My point is, when you look at the number that’s been spent and the number of nights and the number of people, it is over $600 a night. Now, my point in illustrating that is to not have a go at homeless people, but to say this is exactly what happens when you spend money of scale and as quickly as you do. We’ll get to the bottom of why it cost that much per person, but when you are spending $140 billion at pace, then the quality of that spend often gets compromised.

I’ll remind members of this House that it’s not the Government’s money; it’s our money. Every time this House or this Government borrows money, they’re borrowing it against us—against my household, against my children, and against my grandchildren. When you do that at pace, and you are somewhat reckless in areas, then, ultimately, you are wasteful.

Because the Hon Shane Jones is in the House, and he commented on infrastructure. Money is being borrowed for infrastructure, but, yet, as I can see it, Mr Jones, very little has been announced or is shovel-ready or is about to happen. While we jest about the Napier to Wairoa line—which I was on the train when it was opened with you. Six million dollars, six trains—I only thought it was two trains, but apparently it’s six trains. If you do things of scale, at pace, and without the proper business analysis—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: COVID-related slow-down.

COVID-related slow-down. Mr Jones, you know that they haven’t even got a marshalling yard in Wairoa to put the logs on. That is nothing to do with COVID, that is because the Government, as it’s typical of doing, announces something and said, “This is wonderful.”, but cannot deliver.

If you come down to this bill, this bill is very important because what it talks about is, particularly, the COVID-related changes that are being brought about in this Supplementary Estimates. I come back to the bill, because, one, it’s important that I do so as part of this, but also because we are spending a fortune. This side of the House is not against spending money, as laid out in the Supplementary Order Paper: business support, COVID subsidy. I’ve been around business in my electorate. They’re grateful for the wage subsidy, they’re grateful for the extension, some employees are grateful for the $490 a week if they lose their jobs. That’s not the question.

The question for me is in the bigger spend, which relates to infrastructure and urgent projects, and the scrutiny of that. I used the example of the homeless people as a mere example of the type of spend. If we’re not careful, this Government will be wasteful with that money, and it has to be paid back. Myself, my children, and my grandchildren will pay for it, and we believe it’s inefficient. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

That’s quite all right. Thank you, Madam Speaker. Very simply, that member who has just resumed his seat, Lawrence Yule, I refute that this Government is wasteful. I refute that this Government is reckless. We are in unprecedented times—post - COVID-19 recovery. We’re rebuilding, and I therefore commend this bill to the House.

As we discuss this Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill, what really surprises me is the contributions that we’ve had, particularly from Government members who almost seem to trivialise this legislation and the amount of money. There was a contribution from Dr Deborah Russell, which I thought was worthwhile, where she said, “We’ve never seen spending like that”. I accept that and I go back to the Budget presented by the Hon Grant Robertson back in May. He talked about the fact that they were suddenly appropriating $50 billion, of which at least $20 billion would have no detail at all, and here we are now tidying up that Budget and the Supplementary Estimates with a bill that’s particularly light on detail.

As I look for some of the information, I’ve found the best and the most appropriate place to go is the Budget document, to which not one speaker has referred tonight. I can go through and list page after page of huge expenditure—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Relevance—relevance.

The Hon Shane Jones says to talk relevance. I ask him then, when we get into the committee stage, to take the chair and explain to us COVID-19 assistance for primary industries—$10.245 billion. Mr Jones has no idea what it’s for.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Extension services—extension services.

It’s got nothing to do with extension services, because, if he bothered to look at the paperwork, it’s actually $10 million that has been spent supporting the pork industry. The detail is here in the information of the Supplementary Estimates, and that’s what disappoints me with the discussion tonight. We normally have a Budget process where a Budget’s presented and, at the end of that Budget process, there’s inevitably a supplementary bill that tidies up the variations that occur, and that’s appropriate for all Governments. But what we’ve got here, and what we’re discussing tonight, is supplementaries to the supplementaries. The Government has had to cope with an extraordinary situation with COVID, and I fully accept that, but the amounts of money we’re talking about here are mind-boggling, and you’ve just had the interjection from the Hon Shane Jones, where he has no idea whatsoever why we’re appropriating $10.245 billion to the Ministry for Primary Industries. Nothing to do with extension services; it’s to do with supporting the pork industry.

That’s only one of the appropriations I can find. Go to Corrections—prisoner-based custodial services, an extra $31.046 million appropriated for custodial services. Let a Government Minister stand and tell us what that money’s been appropriated for. Go through to appropriations for education, and again there’s millions of dollars being appropriated here; some of it no doubt for the modems that were delivered to private schools right around the country after we’d moved to lockdown level 1 that were not needed by the schools at all, and many of the schools appropriately sent it back to the Government. That’s the sort of mismanagement I’m talking about with this particular legislation.

Go through to Vote Health—millions of dollars being appropriated to all of the district health boards to cope with COVID-19; reasonably explicable, I would think. But go through and explain to me—and I’m going to take this up with the Minister in the chair—the variations, where Canterbury District Health Board gets $3.793 million additional money and Auckland, for example, doesn’t seem to get anything. There is just a lack of exposure to the sort of expenditure we’re discussing tonight.

Māori development—$20 million for Whānau Ora to purchase achievement outcomes from non-Government commissioning agencies. What does that mean, Michael Wood? He’s been prepared to interject right throughout my speech, but when I ask him a question, he can’t answer, because he’s never bothered to pick up this piece of information before the House today and discuss it. Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet—$11.619 million for the management of emergencies. Well, we’ve got an emergency—it’s called the border. It’s failing us every day, whereby people are coming finally into managed quarantine, not voluntary quarantine, coming into managed quarantine, meant to be tested day 3, day 12. We’ve got no idea how many have been tested. We know a lot are out there without tests at all.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: What about Mr Bishop monstering the bureaucracy?

What about Mr—we’ve had the best interjection earlier when he claimed that the reason the Wairoa rail line’s had only six trains is because it’s got COVID. Trains have got COVID! That’ll make news to the World Health Organization! The Hon Shane Jones, it’s a serious problem if that’s happening.

I could go on pulling this particular document to bits, and I certainly intend to do so when we move to the committee stage of this legislation. But, in listening to the debates tonight, the Opposition members have seriously asked questions and questioned the relevance and the wisdom of the expenditure. We accept there has to be significant increase in expenditure. We accept that not all the details will be known—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: How much?

Well, Shane Jones interjects again; he’s got no idea how much. It’s $50 billion, of which $20 billion, when the Budget was read, was announced as no detail yet—“We’ll let you know as we get close to 19 September.” And that’s what a lot of this money is for. It’s about attempting to spend and show a Government of competency, and what we’ve seen over the last week is they’ve got a hell of a job ahead of them if they’re now going to show any competency at all, whereby we declared internationally, and received praise internationally, that we were free of COVID-19, only a couple of days later to have a few cases, and now I think it’s up to nine or 11 at the day—

💬 Brett Hudson: We’re the laughing stock now.

We’re the laughing stock; Brett Hudson’s absolutely right. We’re the laughing stock of the world, and this particular legislation, and the way it’s been treated by this House tonight, is another reason why that Government continues to be a laughing stock, not only internationally but certainly by the voters here in New Zealand, and they’ll bring that to the Government’s attention come 19 September.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d first like to thank members opposite enormously, not for the bill—the bill is in need of much attention—but for their absolute kindness—[Interruption]—because they’ve given me an opportunity to speak. And thank you, Mr whip, I’ll stop there and I’ll get to the bill instead.

I’d like to start—it’s been a point made by a number of members on this side. The part of the problem, as we go through this and the supplementaries of the Supplementary Estimates, is that so much of the spending is either poorly defined or, as we have seen, poorly delivered. The most obvious one to deal with is non-departmental other expenses “Business Support Subsidy Covid-19”: $15.2 billion—what New Zealanders would have said pre-COVID was an eye-wateringly large number, but, when the Government is talking about borrowing an extra $140 billion, that puts that into some level of stark relief at least. But it draws our attention to what was it to be spent on, what was it spent on, and is there any left for it to be spent in perhaps some areas that have been overlooked.

The most obvious one, of course, which we supported and don’t resile from is the wage subsidy, but let’s not mischaracterise what the wage subsidy actually is. It is not, strictly speaking, a business support. It is, first and foremost, an indirect means to channel wage payments to workers affected by the lockdown that the Government imposed. So while they like to herald it as supporting businesses, that’s not what that share of the $15 billion does. It merely gives them an indirect way to pay some wages for staff members who have been impacted, because they either couldn’t work or have reduced hours, and were suffering under those lockdown conditions. Now, we supported that; we still do. It was absolutely important, and remains important, that businesses that were suffering significant revenue loss under the COVID conditions were assisted to keep their employees, because the alternative was equally stark, and that was, simply, that those employees would have had to have been let go. The State and taxpayer would still have had to pick up a chunk of money, because, of course, they would have gone straight on to the jobseeker benefit.

So the idea that we could move relatively quickly from the health crisis into an economic crisis, but to seek a pathway to recovery that this side has got far better credentials to deal with than that side, meant that it was a very good idea indeed to help to ensure that those employees would be able to be retained, such that a business would be able to switch from pure survival to at least the beginning of a recovery quite quickly. So we supported the Government when they announced that. It has turned into a large amount of money—most of, but not all of, that $15 billion.

But something that is very relevant and is certainly not covered in the detail—there is no detail—here in this bill is what appears to be an ideological blind spot for the Government in deciding what to do with the $15 billion. That is, while they like to talk about the wage subsidy as a business support—and I’ve already said it’s not actually that—they have been unable to find themselves capable of actually providing direct financial support to those businesses. They’ve got the money, but they find themselves unable to provide that direct financial support.

In the very first instances, businesses were calling for assistance in meeting those bills. I’m talking about expenditure of the money that we’re agreeing, post fact, that the Government could spend. A criticism has been that they actually didn’t know what to spend it on, and what they have spent it on hasn’t been as well targeted as it could have been. One of the areas they could have and should have been targeting were those other costs that businesses sustain outside of their wage bill. Early parts of the calls were for assistance with their leases—the fact that they were still having to pay a portion of rent, and, in too many cases, 100 percent of the rent.

I even heard one, actually—we had one specific example—where a constituent in Ōhāriu came to me. He owns a building in Hawke’s Bay. It sits on land that is, effectively, owned by the Government and administered by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). LINZ were silent on whether they would give him any rent relief on that land. The Government was calling for landlords to do the right thing and to treat businesses fairly, and he couldn’t get an answer out of LINZ that they were prepared—the Government was actually prepared—to step up and play a similar line with him. That was a real world example.

So there was a lot of call for businesses to get support in a very direct financial way for those expenses that they still faced outside of the wage bill. In effect, it fell on deaf ears, because, although the Government had the $15 billion—and more in other areas of this bill—they simply couldn’t bring themselves to give direct cash support to businesses. That speaks a lot for the ideology of the other side, which, quite frankly, just thinks that anyone making a profit is taking a profit at the expense of someone else—either their workers, through wages, or from their customers. We on the other side, this side, know very differently.

But that blind spot has actually threatened a lot of the jobs that the Government has spent over $10 billion seeking, they say, to save—it’s actually threatened so many of them. The wage subsidy is going to expire, and, without that direct assistance that they had the money to give to businesses, far too many jobs will still disappear because they weren’t prepared to use some of this money to ensure the business survived and not just that the wages—or at least a subsidised amount of the wage bill—was paid for. That is a huge opportunity lost, and tens of thousands of workers are going to discover that in coming weeks. I’m not sure they’ll be too grateful once they get to that point.

What did they do? Well, we saw the Government promising to underwrite loans and being prepared to do that through the allocation of finance or money. But what happened? Well, they were going to take 80 percent of the risk and banks would take 20 percent of the risk, and the banks responded and said it’s not good enough; it still doesn’t meet the criteria for us to make loans under these uncertain economic conditions. So what happens? About $80 million—about $80 million—is all they got—$80 million. Actually, banks lent a lot more, we found out. The Bankers’ Association gave us a bit of a presentation last week. The banks actually lent billions during the period, but only $80 million through that business finance guarantee scheme. It was a flawed scheme, cobbled together because we have a Government that just was unwilling to take much of the money that it had allocated itself—and which Parliament appropriated, which Parliament agreed to, but which it was just absolutely resistant to using to provide some direct financial assistance to businesses.

What did they do? Oh, we’ll give you some consulting services, because the thing that every businesses needed in this COVID state was for some bureaucrat or consultant in Wellington to come and tell them how to run their business better—just what they needed; just what they needed. In the middle of this great uncertainty—and it’s still uncertain times—in the middle of that hellish uncertainty, heading into level 4, the last thing they needed was some clipboard warrior who charges $2,500 a day coming in to tell them how they could do better. But that’s what the Government thinks businesses in New Zealand needed and that’s what would help small businesses, so they were prepared to spend a little bit of this money on that.

But, actually, they weren’t prepared to put their money where their mouth is and actually provide the direct assistance that businesses needed, and still need in many cases, and which would have given a greater level of certainty—admittedly in uncertain times; but a greater level of confidence—that the jobs that were being protected through the wage subsidy would still exist because the business would still exist when that wage subsidy expires. Instead, we have a situation where in the tens of billions—or over $10 billion—has been paid on a wage subsidy, much needed at the time, but which, at the end of, may well see tens of thousands of jobs, which could have been saved through direct assistance to the businesses, go away because too many businesses that could have survived with assistance will instead go under. This has been poorly targeted spending—some of it good, but much of it bad.

I call—oh, I call Stuart Smith.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I know it’s a tough call when you’ve got two Smiths up, but you did choose the right one on this occasion—so thank you, Madam Speaker.

You went for the older.

Ha, ha! That’s right, went for the older. It’s a pleasure to get the call on the Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. We’re talking about enormous numbers here. They do say that it gets very difficult for people to understand what millions mean once it gets above a lottery jackpot. I think that’s absolutely right, so I did a little bit of maths. This is $40 billion worth. So if we were to pay $40 billion off at $1 a second, does anyone have any idea how long that would take, without reaching for their calculator? Well, I’ll help you.

💬 Andrew Bayly: Mr Wood does. Over there, he’s got an idea.

Has he? Right.

💬 Michael Wood: I just said that it will feel shorter than this speech.

Oh, that’s very complimentary. Let’s hope so. I hope it seems very long to you. It is my great desire to ensure that I actually give that member some great pleasure in my speech. So it is 1,268 years for $40 billion at $1 a second. It’s an enormous amount of money. If we talk about $140 billion, which debt is going to increase by, that’s 4,439 years at $1 a second. That is a massive amount of money and it shows the actual challenge that we are putting our children and our grandchildren through by borrowing this amount of money. Now, yes, we had to do something, and we all agree that that’s the case; it’s the how and the what that is important.

We’ve been here before, Mr Speaker—nice smooth change there, by the way, very well done. The nearest thing that we have to compare to what we are about to go into—and we are only just going into it—is the 1930s. During that time, we spent money on infrastructure. We finally did in the Rangitata Diversion Race—employed a lot of people, taking water from the Rangitata River across the Canterbury Plains, using it through irrigation on the way, and then the remainder going down into the Rākaia and through the Highbank Power Station, generating electricity—a great infrastructure spend. Now, what we’re seeing here with what’s being planned in a lot of the infrastructure going forward isn’t as transformational as that expenditure. I think that my colleagues have put this very well before—and, certainly Andrew Bayly did—that when we’re investing in infrastructure at a time like this, it has to be transformational. It has to enable businesses to hire people to give good jobs that are enduring and increases not only our GDP but also increases our exports that we can sell to the rest of the world to pay our way in the world. And we’ll need to do that and get very good at it very quickly because $140 billion of increased debt, $40 billion in this bill, as I said, is a lot of money to pay off. It’s an unimaginable amount of money until you start putting it in something like $1 a second.

Now, the wage subsidy, yes, it was a, sort of, quick and dirty, but very effective, way of getting money out the door, as James Shaw mentioned in his speech earlier. He kind of didn’t really understand the points that had been put forward by my colleagues on this bill, because, yes, no one disputes that that has done a good job of keeping some people in work, but it was quite surprising, really, that the Prime Minister was so shocked that The Warehouse announced that they were going to lay off 1,080 people. The way it sounded, she was personally insulted by it, that that company would make a decision to actually lay people off, because they had a wage subsidy. Well, actually, I don’t think there would be anyone more altruistic than Sir Stephen Tindall. I think he runs his company with his employees in mind, as I’m sure the rest of the board members do. But, actually, when you are a director of a company, you have your first loyalty to the company—that is what’s enshrined in company law. They would not have laid those people off had they not needed to do so. Yes, the wage subsidy has got us through to now, but, actually, it’s putting off the day. What we need to do is to get businesses back functioning as quickly as possible. That was what was so concerning, was to get our businesses back in operation.

Now, we know that during the lockdown, the Government got themselves in a bit of a state of a tizz because they realised that they were having very great difficulty in getting fruit and vegetables to people in Auckland because 40 percent of fruit and vegetables in Auckland are sold through greengrocers, so they were talking about redesigning the distribution of fruit and vegetables into Auckland. Do you know what the simple answer was? Open the greengrocers—open the greengrocers where people can buy it, keep more people in work, and get people the fruit and vegetables that they so desperately need. It was simple decisions like that that actually finished some businesses. Butchers and greengrocers are really put under pressure because of those decisions we make.

These decisions are crucial, that’s why we take this so seriously. The things we are doing today, when we have a normal three-year cycle in our elections and we have a change of Government, as we will in a couple of months, they’re normally easily unwound, any changes that are made, and, generally, either side of the House makes minimal changes, and whatever has been done, there’s not that much damage done. But now we’re talking billions. We are talking about, sadly, our grandchildren with debt and impacting on their lifestyles. Now, yes, we’ve had a terrible experience with a pandemic, and it’s not over yet—we know that—and life has changed for everyone, but we have to make—

💬 Hon Damien O’Connor: You borrowed $80 billion.

—the right decision—Mr Speaker, I believe that they’re drawing you into the debate; I don’t believe you borrowed any money, but, however, it sounds like the member for West Coast-Tasman, who’s about to retire, I understand, as he loses his seat—

💬 Matt Doocey: Trying to get his name recognition up.

—is trying to—yeah—trying to get his name recognition up; well, we’ll see how that goes for him next month.

Forty billion dollars—it’s unbelievable. They’ve turned a $50 billion problem into a $100 billion problem, and that is going to cost us dearly. We worry, on this side of the House, about our grandchildren and how they’re going to pay that off.

This plan isn’t a plan. The Napier to Wairoa line which has been talked about, that’s 19th century technology and it isn’t even able to be utilised yet. What, six times—six trains in six months? A waste of money.

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: Yeah, they got COVID.

Some of these—COVID apparently; yeah, someone’s got COVID, that’s for sure. This expenditure is not targeted in the way that it should be. We’ve got a bill that we’ll be debating probably next week and they’ve got 11 projects; well, there should be 111 projects on there. But all the shovel-ready projects that come up, mostly, I’ve seen, would be business as usual; instead of the ratepayers paying for them, they’re being put on to the taxpayer. We need transformational projects such as the Rangitata Diversion Race was back in the 1930s.

💬 Andrew Bayly: You’ve got to have imagination.

We do have to have imagination. We’ve got the brains in this country, but we have to be able to utilise on that. In this stage, with what we’re seeing in front of us, it’s just not there. I worry about that. Yes, we’ve got a lot of companies in trouble at the moment. They need a future. We need certainty for the businesses and we need certainty for the employees, and we’re not getting that at the moment.

This wage subsidy has been—the current one that’s coming up now, with a 50 percent drop in revenue, I mean, that’s great but it won’t keep everyone going. Some businesses are going to fail, and, along with that, there are going to be more people on the dole queue. That’s unfortunate. We don’t want to see that happening. But the $490 a week tax-free payment for those losing their jobs, we’re already seeing examples of people on that subsidy that will not take jobs up. You’ve got to be very careful that you don’t end up—well, not you, Mr Speaker, but we don’t end up with a situation where we are disincentivising work. Because there are jobs out there, but there’s not as many as there were before. They may not get the job that they particularly want, but there are jobs there, and we just can’t get people to fill them. Some of them are quite happy to sit at home for $490 a week, and that’s really unfortunate. I’ve got employers tearing their hair out trying to get those jobs filled, and it’s not happening. So we oppose this bill.

I want to talk in this appropriation bill about the shambles in the Government’s response to the enormous challenge for New Zealand from COVID-19. I want to talk about jobs, and particularly jobs for my home community of Nelson, and I also want to raise real concerns about the levels of debt that this Government is proposing for New Zealand with poor quality spending.

Now, first to the shambles: what is the gaping hole in this bill and the Government’s response? It has been so plain to see in the last week over the mess at the border. You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to work out that the biggest risk to New Zealand, after all of the pain that we went through, supported by National, for the lockdown, was to ensure that our border was secure. Every New Zealander is just aghast at the incompetence of allowing thousands of people from countries where COVID-19 is rampant across our borders without testing for COVID. It’s not a complicated thing. It’s a very basic thing—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Relevance—relevance.

I say to Shane Jones: why has he and his incompetent ministerial colleagues not got the basics right of testing people when they come across the border?

Here’s the part that’s even more extraordinary: seven days ago, after we learnt of the famous British couple who came in to New Zealand and tested positive for COVID-19, every New Zealander was asking the question: how many people have come into New Zealand without being tested?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): As interesting as that is, Dr Smith, you need—

A simple question—and it is relevant—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): No. Order!

It is absolutely relevant to these Estimates.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Thank you. As interesting as that is, you have to link your statements to the contents of the bill, and so far I have not heard that. So—

These appropriations—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): No, I’m still on my feet—sit down. OK, so I’m telling you: get to the bill and reference it to your statements, because I have not heard that yet.

Right at the beginning—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Page—give us the page.

—I referenced to the appropriations bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Order! Hon Shane Jones, if you relocate yourself—you know the rules—you do not interject.

This bill extensively refers to the additional appropriations that are required for COVID-19, that include the response of our border agencies. Mr Speaker, I checked with the Clerk of the House, who told me it was a very broad debate, for me to be able to refer to such matters. The question I ask any Government speaker: why, after a week of knowing that our border was like a colander that was leaking COVID-19 through, why do we not know even today how many people have come across our border without being tested?

The issue with these appropriations is if we were truly interested in the economic wellbeing of New Zealand, the very first item in this bill would be testing for every person that came across our border to ensure that COVID-19 does not get a second wave. It’s not there. Ministers have been so incompetent that we’ve had the Minister of Health sidelined and now we’ve got the Minister of KiwiBuild—now, that’s been a ripper success—now in charge of the borders, and a few days into the job, it is turning out as successful.

But it’s not just the shambles at the border; the shambles has been as much in the economic response. In April, we had the Government announce its big IRD plan for providing business support, but something I have not seen in 30 years—not seen in 30 years—is the Minister of Revenue bring a bill into this House, rush it through all three stages, and for it to be the wrong bill. I have not seen that ever in my time, that level of incompetence, where new records are being set by Ministers opposite.

But it’s more serious than that—more serious. I have a business in my community: Armadillo’s is a restaurant in Richmond. It received a grant under that very scheme. “Here’s your $240,000 to help support those eight jobs.” Do you know what happened? The next day, IRD wrote and said, “We want the money back. We want the money back immediately.” Now, they—

💬 Michael Wood: IRD doesn’t administer that scheme.

Well, IRD—and I’ll be happy if the member across the House, who I am sure is as incompetent as his ministerial colleagues, would like me to table the letter from IRD demanding the return of that money. I’d be more than happy to do so, and I seek his help in trying to save those jobs in Richmond, on which I have corresponded with the Minister and for which the Government handed out the money one moment, pulled it back the next—how that’s friendly for small business, I do not know.

Then we had in the same parameter the Government saying the scheme’s going to provide $6 billion of support—$6 billion. Two months later, less than $60 million has been paid out. Now, I accept we’ve got a delivery rate on KiwiBuild of 0.4 percent; on the IRD business support scheme, we have a delivery of 1.4 percent, was what the Minister told us this afternoon. Well, let it make plain: members on this side of the House rate 1.4 percent, or one out of 100, as an abysmal fail in their response.

I want to come to the issue that should be the focus of this appropriation bill, and that is the issue of jobs. I think I’m the only member of Parliament—when this country had 10 percent unemployment, and I have to tell you, meeting hundreds, thousands, of good, hard-working, committed people desperate for a job would be one of the most challenging and depressing times I as a member of Parliament have had. I say to this Parliament: we need to pull out every possible action we can to ensure that the numbers predicted by Treasury of our unemployment surging to 10 percent, or 260,000 New Zealanders, does not occur. I just simply ask people to look at the track record, because every year through the 1990s—and this appropriation bill should learn the lessons of the 1990s of working with the private sector to create and grow jobs, because we inherited 10 percent unemployment from Labour in 1990, and when we left Government in 1999, we had more than halved it. Surprise, surprise, when we came back into Government in 2008, unemployment again had soared—it had got to over 8 percent. Again, a National Government did the hard yards of getting people back into work every single year.

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: No, no, no, just taking them off the list—just taking them off the list. Not necessarily a job—just cut them off the list. Cut them off, cut them off, cut them off.

From 2010, 2011, 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17, the number of people on the dole declined, and I’m proud of that National record. Here’s the interesting part for the Minister that’s interjecting: in the first two years of your Government, even before COVID came, the numbers on the dole increased—13,000 in 2019; 10,000 in 2018. The record is plain. Dole numbers go up under Labour administrations and down under ours, and that is why members on this side of the House say that jobs are at the core of the issues in this appropriation bill and at the core of the issues that will face the country on 19 September. Those New Zealanders who are concerned about jobs will be looking to National in the same way as in previous economic downturns. The hard yards have been left to National to create the jobs and keep Kiwis in work.

The last point I want to make, which is so much covered in this bill, is the lack of shovel-ready projects. You know, in my electorate of Nelson last week, they announced one of their big infrastructure projects: they are going to put some kerb and channel on Beach Road. It’s a $320,000 project—be smaller than the Table Office in the House. That’s the infrastructure vision that we have from this Government? It is truly pathetic. What we need is the sort of infrastructure projects that this Government—just look at Auckland light rail to see where this Government is incapable of delivering the infrastructure that New Zealand needs.

The last thing I note in this appropriation is the extra money for parliamentary services which so well illustrates the waste: the $570,000 for the slide on the front lawn of Parliament that—

The member’s time has expired.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call in this debate, and it will be a smaller call, because I realise there are some of my colleagues that are waiting to take a call before this debate finishes in about 15 minutes’ time.

I want to start by saying I’m a bit disappointed the financial oracle Dr Duncan Webb was not taking a call in this debate, because—unfortunately, I think, for this Government—Dr Duncan Webb decided that he would make a submission to the Christchurch City Council for their rate increases, where he slammed them for not increasing rates high enough. He actually said it would cost jobs and incomes for hard-working families. What’s causing the lack of jobs and incomes in Christchurch is the delay for this Government on the Metro Sports Facility, the delay for the convention centre, the delay for the multi-use sports facility, the delay for the Northern Corridor. Why that’s important for this debate is because, for all the money that they’ve so-called appropriated in Christchurch for their start-up investor fund—whatever that was called—not one dollar has been spent.

So Dr Duncan Webb—what was really priceless was that in his submission, he tried to say, “I’m not a Government member, I’m here as a Christchurch-centric MP.”, were his words. Well, didn’t he learn? Well, he will, once one Hon Grant Robertson sits down beside him over the next few days in the Chamber and reminds him that when he speaks, he is always speaking on behalf of the Government. What a shambles.

You can have a person turn up and say that increasing rates on hard-working families will cost jobs and incomes, because what a Labour Government fails to see—it’s not about just spending money, because let’s remind ourselves, in the last year of the former Labour Government, the Salvation Army report said, out of all their increased expenditure under the Helen Clark Government, they did not increase social progress by 1 percent. All their increased expenditure and they did not increase social progress by 1 percent. What’s the point of a Labour Government if you’re not increasing social progress? They spent all their money and they got nothing in return. And here we are again: Groundhog Day; appropriations. If it wasn’t for a sector, this would be comical, but in fact, it’s desperate. What we’re talking about here is appropriations for health and mental health.

Dr Nick Smith talked about metrics. Well, the front-line new mental health service: $455 are allocated; they’ve spent $30 million of that. Not only that but in 18 months’ time, do you know what their target is? They would have rolled it out to less than three percent of GP practices—less than three percent of GP practices. So here they are: like the Salvation Army said, they talk a big game, they throw a lot of money around, but they didn’t increase social progress by 1 percent. Under written questions, Dr David Clark told me, for their service they announced last year: $8 million that was going to provide support for people with mental distress pitching up to emergency departments. How much of that $8 million has been spent to date? Zero. In their first year, they haven’t even got one dollar out of the gate.

So here we are. Yeah, you can write all the big figures you want to in appropriations, but an area, a much-needed area like mental health where the current Government talked up a big game in Opposition—we had the Mental Health Commissioner come out in his report this week, and do you know what he said? From 2008 to 2018, mostly years under the former National Government, access increased by 55 percent.

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: Rubbish—absolute rubbish.

Well, it’s in the report. You go and read the Mental Health Commissioner report that was released this week: access was increased by 55 percent for $300 million. This Government has said they’re going to spend $1.9 billion on mental health and asked the health Minister how much he’s increased access by. Their own mental health inquiry said they needed to increase access from 7 percent of the population to 20 percent.

💬 Hamish Walker: How much did they spend?

Well, they don’t know. They can’t tell us. In answer to their question they say they don’t know. They’ve thrown, well, allegedly, $1.9 billion and they’ve got no target, they’ve got no metric. No wonder the Salvation Army said, in the last time they were in Government: for all the increased expenditure, they didn’t increase social progress by 1 percent.

Here we are again: big appropriations, talking big figures, no targeted spending, no targets—because, of course, they scrapped all the targets in the health sector—no targets to be measured by. Then, when you drill down individually, as a spokesperson, for some of the projects that vulnerable New Zealanders need the most today, in the first year, they haven’t spent any of the allocation.

What is wrong with this Government? What is the point of a Labour Government if they’re not driving social progress? Here we are again. Sounded pretty good at the time, didn’t it? “One point nine billion for mental health.” And now they’re getting caught out; they’re not delivering. You know what? It was the DHB representatives and the annual reviews that were like the canaries in the cages, because they were telling the Health Committee they didn’t know if that money had flowed out yet. They couldn’t point to where that money had gone. So you can talk up a big game, you can write documents, you can talk about billions of dollars. But in the end, you will be judged on delivery, and we all know—and the public is learning—that this Government does not deliver.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the chance to speak on this, the appropriation bill. A few people on my side of the House have said that the Government has been spending like drunken sailors on shore leave. I am here to defend them—I mean, of course, the reputation of drunken sailors on shore leave. Speaking of drunken sailors, I’d just like to point out to the House that I have no vested interest in this—I am no longer one of those things.

To spend money like a drunken sailors on shore leave would imply a lot less than $100 billion. That would be one hell of a run ashore, as they say. The price of a rum and Coke in Sydney in the early 2000s was pretty steep, but it wasn’t that steep, and the cocktails in Singapore were eye-watering in cost as well as just eye-watering, but $100 billion, such as we’re seeing now being appropriated—the top-up that this bill represents—is pretty considerable indeed. But the problem, of course, isn’t about the fact of spending; it’s the quality of the spending. It’s not the spending like drunken sailors that is the issue in relation to investments being made. Indeed, if the dollars that were being spent by the Government on behalf of all taxpayers, current and future, were being spent in the wisest possible way, then we would have no objection. But it’s the bad decision-making that’s inherent in here. It’s the detail that’s in this bill, but it’s also the things that are not represented here in terms of a plan to get ourselves out of the hole that the country now finds itself in that the Opposition is honour-bound to bring to the attention of the country in this debate.

I want to talk about shovel-ready projects. That’s not a particular phrase that appears in the bill, of course, but more of a colloquial way of describing infrastructure that’s at least supposedly ready to be rolled out. But that’s really the point—that’s the problem. So much that should be ready to go simply is not. So the appropriateness of the phrase “shovel-ready projects”, I’m afraid, is that we’ve ended up in a big hole of debt and we’re trying to dig our way out of it, which anyone will be able to tell you is not the way to get out of a hole—we’re going the wrong way.

The “ready” bit of “shovel-ready” is also a problem. We’ve heard now about lots of different things that the Government’s planned and lots of things that they’ve announced, but not so much that they’ve delivered. If I look at my own area that I represent in north-west Auckland, there’s been talk of a light rail project there for at least three years now, but only talk, and we’ve gone backwards in the sense that not only is that project not going ahead now but the hard-working local MP, who’s been advocating for better public transport for the area, has been told every time within the last three years that he goes to the authorities to seek a bit of investment in public transport infrastructure—which, to be fair, is a long-running, longstanding problem—“Don’t worry, because light rail is on the way, and any other project will not stack up in comparison with that. Hang on, help is on its way any decade now.” So the question, as I say, is not about spending per se; it’s the quality of spending.

Then my final theme, on a related note, would be about the question of the dollars and cents in this bill—I say “cents”, but, of course, it’s all rounded, not only to the nearest $1,000, and fair enough too. But there are some pretty big numbers—$10 billion here and $10 billion there soon adds up when you’re talking about real money, as the saying goes.

So it’s about the quality. It’s about getting ourselves into a virtuous cycle whereby we’ll be able to be placed more strongly in the years ahead and not in a weaker position for our children, our grandchildren, and future generations, because that, I fear, is the overall impact of the bill, whereby we’re going to end up in a hole of debt without an obvious way of getting out, certainly on the evidence of the bill that we see before us today.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very pleased to take a call in this debate. It’s an important bill, and it’s an important bill from both a parliamentary and constitutional point of view, because one of the precepts of the way that we work in a parliamentary democracy is that money that’s appropriated from citizens through taxes has to be authorised through this Parliament, which represents the people from which we appropriate the money. And the reason that this bill is important—and I want to really emphasise this point, because it hasn’t been reflected at all in any of the reflections from members opposite—is that this bill serves the purpose of appropriating money that will be used in the 2019-20 fiscal year that was not appropriated in the Budget that was set for the 2019-20 fiscal year. So the debate over this bill actually has quite an important constitutional and parliamentary function.

It is not actually usually a time for polemics and histrionics in this House. I’ve been in this House for about four of these Budget cycles on both sides of the House, and generally speaking, the Opposition engages in this debate in a reasonably sensible way, actually examines the Supplementary Estimates, looks at what has been appropriated that was not appropriated at the time of the original Estimates in the prior calendar year, and examines those. It’s also the case that usually the Opposition, prior to that, has done their work in the select committee, because what happens in this process is that the Finance and Expenditure Committee has Treasury in front of them, they examine the Supplementary Estimates, and they get to ask Treasury to give good information about why the Supplementary Estimates are different. We haven’t heard a dicky-bird about that from the Opposition. They haven’t actually done their fundamental job in the examination of the Supplementary Estimates.

In the time that I have, I want to touch on some of the things that are included in these Supplementary Estimates that I think are actually incredibly important. The reason I’m a little bit disappointed in the performance of the Opposition, as well, is that there’s probably been no more important set of Supplementary Estimates presented to this House in generations, because we know that these Supplementary Estimates—which came in two parts, first on 14 May, the second on 16 June—were delivered in extraordinary times, that these Supplementary Estimates appropriate a significant sum in order to deal with the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19 and its impact on the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders and on our economy.

I’m actually really proud of some of the additional appropriations that are made through the Supplementary Estimates. I’m actually really pleased that the Hon Dr Nick Smith raised before the experience of New Zealand in the early 1990s recession when, yes, as he said, we had 10 percent unemployment. If the House wants to know one of the reasons why we had 10, in fact 11 percent unemployment in that time, it’s because the party that sits on the other side of the House delivered Budgets at a time of economic crisis and recession. Instead of investing in New Zealanders and communities, they chose to retrench. They chose to cut people’s benefits. They chose to cut investment in communities and infrastructure. That exacerbated the situation, put more New Zealanders out of work and created more social misery. So I’m incredibly proud that through these Supplementary Estimates, our Government hasn’t retrenched. It hasn’t withdrawn investment.

In fact, it has put in greater investment into New Zealanders and their communities. We’ve done it through things like doubling the winter energy payment so that our senior citizens this winter, our beneficiaries this winter, don’t have to sit in the cold through winter, don’t have to put up with the risk of getting sick because of that. They’ve actually got some extra money in their back pockets to ensure that they can get through this challenging period. We’ve done it through the additional $25 per week for people on main benefits because we believe that if New Zealand’s going to get through this economic and social crisis of COVID-19, we need to bring everyone with it, including those people who find it the toughest. So I’m really proud of that additional investment. We did it, of course, through the wage subsidy, a decision that was taken quickly, a policy that was developed for which there was no playbook at all. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Finance here, Grant Robertson, the Minister of Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni, who were absolutely essential to the development of that programme. We hear every single day about the difference it has made, about the jobs it has saved, about the businesses that it has given time to help get through the impact of COVID-19. It’s about the tax loss carry-back scheme, which has helped to pump cash flow into businesses to help them get through, the interest-free small business loan scheme administered by IRD, which has given over $1 billion to help small businesses get through. These are the investments that our Government has made.

We haven’t retrenched. We haven’t de-invested, we haven’t given up on people as we’ve been told to at times in this debate by members opposite. I’m proud of this Supplementary Estimates bill because it speaks to the values of this Government—

Order! The time for this debate has ended.