Debate on Budget Policy Statement

I move, That the House take note of the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Budget Policy Statement 2021.

What a pleasure it is to rise after the last speaker—I must say he was outstanding. I’m not sure I could better him, but I’ll give it a go. I must retract somewhat from my previous pugnacious approach, because my role as chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee is a little less partisan. My role is to perhaps bring to the House the proceedings of the Finance and Expenditure Committee—a great committee, a committee which tries its hardest to work together across the board. I must say, the hearing into the Budget Policy Statement was one where, I think, both Grant Robertson, the Minister of Finance, and the Secretary to the Treasury were fulsome in their replies. I think members from the other side had a pretty good effort at probing and inquiring into the Government’s finances.

Of course, we then took submissions. We had 58 submissions in total and we heard from quite some number of people on the Budget Policy Statement. I must say that they came from across the board. CCS Disability Action, obviously, came with a particular perspective about the need to have a Budget policy that looks after their community. Caritas, the Catholic aid agency, talked about foreign aid. The Child Poverty Action Group, that great friend of the Labour Party—you know, they do a lot of good work, but they absolutely let their views be known that child poverty should be a focus, as it is. And, of course, others from, perhaps, different areas. The rural sector was well represented. Federated Farmers gave a submission, the National Council of Women, the Salvation Army—and that is just a short selection.

But I do want to say that they were pretty much all useful submissions. There were some that were perhaps a little challenging, suggesting that we should defund the police or perhaps, you know, do away with military spending. I just want to say that I certainly recognise that those parts of the Public Service are really important, and, across the House, I’m sure we all agree that we need to fund them adequately to do the very important role that they do. Whilst not particularly mentioned in the Budget Policy Statement, that was one theme in the submissions that I wanted to touch on.

But, importantly, the focus: the fantastic wellbeing approach—the world-leading wellbeing approach—that Grant Robertson launched in New Zealand. Quite rightly, the world is looking to New Zealand to see how we are implementing this and to see the improvements that can be made. Now, I know even the National Party accept that it is a really important question to say that when we invest taxpayer funds, Government funds, into any initiative, we want to make sure we’re getting the best return for them across the board, not just whether we have a particular output, whether we can tick a box, but how do we measure all of those other ripple effects that we might have? All of those things that make lives better—or, perhaps tragically, to make them not as worse as they otherwise would have been, you know? So when we are putting money into childcare or into Oranga Tamariki, things like that, how do we measure not only that we’ve spent some money on supporting a family but also those effects that that child might go to school, that child might in turn have a family which is stronger and more resilient than the one they came from, and have better life prospects? That is what wellness is: not just looking at how we spend our money in a kind of appropriation and audit sense but looking at it in a far more textured and contextual way. That is world-leading.

I’m not saying it is without its challenges. Quite rightly, in the Finance and Expenditure Committee, we are having an ongoing conversation across the board with a lot of agencies about how we measure those outcomes. I welcome that, and I know Treasury welcomes that as well. This Budget Policy Statement really reiterates that the wellbeing approach remains the right approach.

We absolutely want to ensure that the outcomes aimed at are being achieved. One of the really important things in doing that is a collaborative approach, a cross-agency approach, and a collective responsibility—the idea that even though the appropriation might go to justice or to police or to corrections, those agencies need to be cooperating with each other, need to be talking with each other, and need to be connecting with each other to make sure that it is not simply the case that, “Well, this is a question for the courts. This is an issue for sentencing. You deal with it over there. Don’t worry what corrections outcome it has. Don’t worry what housing outcome it has.” We absolutely need to have an approach which isn’t siloed. And that is a challenge, right? Because for anyone in any job, to broaden their horizons outside of their own department, their own immediate circle of influence, is a challenge. That’s the challenge that we’ve got to get out there: that we need to have agencies and agencies are only individuals, so that means people talking with each other, talking not simply to people in their own department but across agencies.

Of course, one of the real questions is measurement. Again, the Minister was very useful, very knowledgeable, and articulate when he talked through the Living Standards Framework, the fact that across all of those domains—whether it be the environment, whether it be human capital, whether it be infrastructure, or whether it simply be the economy—there are multiple measures that we can look at to determine. Again, the joy of being world-leading and the difficulty with being world-leading is that we are developing this as we go. But do you know what that means? It is getting better. It is getting better and better and better. So the Living Standards Framework is something that we are really going to be working on.

I do want to touch, though, on the COVID response. The Minister and the secretary were very clear that wellbeing took a step backwards. I just want to recognise that for a lot of people, COVID hit them hard. People have lost their jobs—not as many as Treasury had predicted. But in terms of maintaining and enhancing wellbeing, our COVID response is really important. Absolutely part of the Budget Policy Statement—its main thrust, really—is saying that we’ve got to maintain our COVID response; first of all, maintaining the protection of the health of our people, because that is part of our wellbeing, right? And a critical part. But the really interesting lesson from the past year or so has been that our health response, having a healthy population, a population that can go about its business, has benefited us economically beyond compare. We are the envy of the world, not only because we can sit close to each other, chat, socialise, and do all the things that we usually do but also because we have an economy which is still thriving. Now, it took a step back.

I think the other thing that came out clearly in the Budget Policy Statement, in the debates and so on, in the examinations, was that we have uncertain times ahead, that it is not absolutely clear that we are on a flat, upward trajectory. We’ve had some outrageous growth periods. The September quarter was, I think, 13.9 percent growth—unprecedented. And then the next quarter, we went back 1 percent. That kind of up and down may well last a while, so we need not be alarmed. We do have a predicted steady growth, and we need to be aware of that. But let’s be very clear: just because it appears the worst is over, this Minister of Finance won’t be embarking on any austerity measures. We are not going to start tightening the belt and paying back the loans simply because we look like we are through the worst of the woods. No, there is a clear plan in place. The projections are that we will be back to surplus in 2027. It would be utterly counter-productive and quite harmful not only to the economy but to ordinary people, to mum and dad New Zealanders, if we were to start slashing Government spending now. We didn’t spend all of the COVID response fund; there’s a good amount left. That is not there simply to be spent, but we absolutely need to be prepared for anything that is ahead. So that is sitting there in the kitty for the rainy day. And what that means is that we are in a lot better—wildly better—position than we thought we would have been.

💬 Helen White: Wildly.

Wildly better, Helen, wildly better. And that is a good thing, but let’s not get complacent. We absolutely need to remain vigilant and remain ready to respond.

But, as chair of the select committee, it was a great discussion—great submissions—from members from all sides of the House, and I am looking forward to the constructive contribution from the other side. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Hey, well, thank you, Mr Speaker, and I do acknowledge the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, Dr Duncan Webb. I just wish I was wildly excited about that speech. Gee, I’ve got to say, you are no Mr Hon Grant Robertson. Oh, speak of—I was going to say the devil, but I can’t say that about Mr Robertson. I’m so glad he’s turned up—the new Mr Muldoon of New Zealand politics, Mr Grant Robertson. As we’ve all been debating just before, that letter to the board of Air New Zealand, Mr Robertson, was a particularly bad piece of judgment.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Budget. I think it’s worthwhile just reminding ourselves where we sit at the moment. So this year, we’re going to report a budget deficit of $23 billion. Over the next few years to 2027, we’re going to report another budget deficit, continual budget deficit in every year amounting to another $83 billion. Our current debt—we’ve blown $40 billion in the last year. So we’ve gone from $60 billion to $103 billion I think, and we will see it go up to close to $200 billion. And I think what people forget is yesterday we borrowed about $110 million. Today we’re going to borrow $110 million, and tomorrow we’re going to borrow $110 million.

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: That’s a lot of Trelise Cooper!

That is right, Mr Bridges, but I don’t buy Trelise Cooper—you may have other reasons. But I’ve got to say, this Government and the financial profile of where we sit at the moment—[Interruption] Oh, there’s someone who buys Trelise Cooper on the other side, well done. I’ve got to say, when you look at that financial profile, it’s a pretty ugly case, unfortunately. And I’m not saying we should not have spent that money, and I do acknowledge a lot of the spending has been worthwhile, and I’ll talk more about that shortly.

But I’ll tell you what else has happened over the last three years. We’ve seen house prices rise by about—

💬 Hon Mark Mitchell: That’s right—47 percent.

Yeah, 47 percent, and house stock is worth just under $1.4 trillion—$1.4 trillion. It has exploded under this Government over the last three years. And you can’t keep saying nine years of neglect when you’ve been in power for nearly four years.

💬 Christopher Luxon: Four years of failure.

Four years of failure, particularly on the housing market.

Then the other thing—and this is what’s really going to hurt people soon, and they’re just starting to hear it; they’re just starting to get this—is the cost of living. It’s the issue around the increase in rents. We know rents have gone up $120 a week. And for people who rent, they do not have discretionary income. That is everything that they have to pay, and when it goes up by $120, they can’t just take it from somewhere else. They have to pay it—it comes out of their salaries—they have little alternative. It means that they’re going to not be able to save for the deposit on their house, because they’re paying more money in rent. It’s a vicious circle.

Then we’re going to see the increasing avalanche of electricity prices, and it’s only just starting. And we’ve got a Minister of energy who really does not understand the energy market. I can guarantee you, and I’ll say this publicly: prices of electricity and energy in general are going to skyrocket under this Government over the next 2½ years, and we will watch with interest because, unfortunately, the most vulnerable New Zealanders are the ones that are going to be missing out.

But what else do you see when you look around? Well, I see growing levels of poverty. And unfortunately, the Government has not been able to match its wonderful words on reducing poverty, and I think that’s incredibly bad. The other thing is huge problems in health, and particularly in mental health. And I’ve got to acknowledge my colleague Matt Doocey, who has been prosecuting the case where they’re grand on announcements and little on delivery and, in fact, even worse than that, haven’t actually put the funding into where they said they would go.

Poor educational outcomes—big issues. When you compare us against the OECD, we are going backwards at a rate of knots that is most worrying. And the worst thing is the Ministry of Education claim that we’re going the other way, but the Programme for International Student Assessment scores show a different result.

Then we’ve got the issue around immigration and the broken families—the people that are living in New Zealand, hard-working people who’ve immigrated to New Zealand who haven’t seen their families for over 400 days, who are locked in New Zealand, just waiting for the Government to fix up the managed isolation and quarantine facilities and show a little bit of compassion.

So what are we seeing from the Government? What’s been the response? Well, the first thing Mr Robertson’s done is he’s shoved up the tax rate—39 percent. And even according to the Treasury expectations—which I think are overstated—the first year they’re going to raise $80 million. Well, in the day that it took us to debate that in urgency under the watch of Mr Robertson, we borrowed another $110 million. We went backwards that day—we went backwards that day.

Then we have the issue around tax deductibility of interest. Well, gee—well, gee, how that’s going to impact on future developments. I was just talking to an ex-partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers who was telling me how it was having a chilling effect even on new developments.

I’ve got to say, the issue around where we are as an economy—we’ve gone backwards last year. I note that the chair of the select committee only mentioned the last sort of couple of quarters. Well, actually, last year we went backwards by nearly 3 percent in terms of GDP growth, which actually put us behind Australia, which was about minus 2.5. We’re nearly 3 percent, and Ireland, who is another island nation who can control its borders well, had positive 2.5 percent. We’re 13th in the OECD list in terms of growth rates. And I know we hear those wonderful soothing words from the Minister of Finance, but the reality speaks a different thing. We’re middling in the order of growth rates.

And then when you talk about—well, I’ve got to acknowledge that Mr Robertson did a lot of good stuff through COVID to support New Zealand businesses and people. But I’ve got to say this to you, Mr Robertson: what you did was really not much different from every other developed country in the world. And I’ll give you the stats—I know you like numbers, Mr Robertson—93 percent of all OECD countries implemented a wage subsidy. Big tick, we did that too. Eighty-seven percent directly lent to small to medium sized enterprises. You did that. Good one. Sixty-two percent implemented some sort of debt moratorium. Good one. Forty-nine percent did training. You did that. Actually, what this is just showing, Mr Robertson, is you did everything that everyone else did. But the one thing you didn’t do that two-thirds of countries in the OECD did was they dealt with the issue of rents, and you should have dealt with the issue of rents, particularly for small and medium enterprises, because they put in rent aid, and you should have done it. It would have cost you $300 million a month—I did the numbers.

So I hope this forthcoming Budget is how we reset the economy, and I’m just hoping that in the forthcoming, we see some issues and some initiatives that encourage businesses to actually go out and employ people and do the stuff. But, unfortunately, your record talks differently. What have you done? You banned oil and gas. That’s not a big industry; it’s a little industry. Don’t worry about that; it’s a minor one! We’ve increased sick pay, we’ve reduced labour flexibility, we introduced a new extra public holiday—we don’t even know what the dates are because we’ve got to be able to work it out—we’ve made some changes to the Overseas Investment Office, but the reality is we’re still having trouble getting investors to come to New Zealand. We made minimum wage increases at a time that most companies are struggling for cash. What a beautiful sense of timing! We don’t disagree with the principle of increasing the minimum wage, but how rapidly you did it and what it means to the many hundreds of thousands of businesses who are already short on cash because you didn’t do the rent subsidy—they’re already struggling, and you just came and gave them a double whammy. And then we’ve got the issue of fair pay agreements coming up—wow.

All these things, we reckon it’s going to cost nearly $3 billion that you have taken and imposed on New Zealand businesses. And I love how you want to do these programmes of increasing minimum wage but, of course, who pays for it? Not you, Mr Robertson, not out of your Budget but out of the budgets of mums and dads who own businesses all around the country, working hard every day, and you’re just socking it to them, and, unfortunately, that’s a bad thing to do.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker. The only person who enjoyed that speech more than me was Christopher Luxon, to be honest, because he was looking and thinking, “OK, as I’m putting the ticket together—me and Simon Bridges, my finance spokesperson and deputy—I can now do it without any concern or care in the world.” That speech was a little bit like those fridge magnets you get with a whole lot of different words and you just reorder them and then just read them out in any random order whatsoever.

I wasn’t here for all of the debate on Air New Zealand, but I would have enjoyed Mr Luxon’s contribution. He was crying out for the kind of letter that I wrote to Air New Zealand when he was chief executive so he would know for certain that he shouldn’t be shutting down all of those regional routes that he shut down when he was chief executive. He would have known for sure he shouldn’t shut down those regional routes. I look forward to hearing from Mr Luxon later in the debate.

The Budget Policy Statement this year was a unique document, not just because of its most excellent photography on the front cover, which cost the taxpayer zero dollars and was, I believe, an excellent way for the document to be put to the public, but it was also unique because this is the first time that the clause in the Public Finance Act was exercised that allowed the Government to de-link the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update from the Budget Policy Statement. The reason that we did that was because we are going through one of the most uncertain and volatile times that the New Zealand economy has ever—or has certainly seen in my lifetime, and has hardly ever seen before. We wanted to give ourselves the maximum amount of time to be able to put a Budget Policy Statement together that recognised the volatility that is in the global economy.

As we stand here today, it does bear pausing for a moment when we think about this Budget Policy Statement and the Budget that will come and flow from it—the position, the fortunate position, New Zealand finds itself in through the hard work of the team of 5 million. Just this morning, if you wanted to read the daily update of what’s happening with COVID around the world, you would see that in the Netherlands they’ve just reintroduced a night-time curfew, France has gone into another form of lockdown, Thailand’s increasing the restrictions that it has—all of these countries around the world who are struggling to get towards the form of normality that New Zealand has actually had for the vast bulk of the last year. So as we look at the world that we’re living in, the level of uncertainty and volatility that we have to put a Budget together in has never been higher.

So when I look at Budget 2021 and this Budget Policy Statement that leads into it, there are, essentially, three core elements to it, and they are the three themes that were given in the Speech from the Throne: to keep New Zealanders and continue to keep New Zealanders safe from COVID-19; to accelerate our economic recovery and rebuild; and to get on with addressing the major issues around child wellbeing, around housing, and around climate change. When we think about that issue of keeping New Zealanders safe from COVID-19, I was interested in Mr Bayly’s remark about how he compares where New Zealand is at in that regard. The IMF, Bloomberg, and the Lowy Institute have all ranked New Zealand’s response to COVID-19 among the best in the world, and that is because from day one, we took the approach that the best approach for the economy was also a strong public health approach. The two can’t be de-linked. Mr Bayly can talk about Ireland, but we know that Ireland has had deaths in huge amounts greater than New Zealand, and an economy that’s stopped and started and has locked itself down over time.

We have been able to have a consistent approach here in New Zealand, built on that strong public health approach, but also built on two core principles for business: that of cash flow and of confidence. Everything we have done in terms of the supports we have provided have been built around the idea of cash flow and confidence, and that will continue to be the way we approach achieving that theme of keeping New Zealanders safe from COVID-19. We did it when we saw the resurgence in Auckland, and we were able to deploy the new resurgence support payment that we had there, as well as the wage subsidy scheme. We did that because we had been careful with our COVID response and recovery fund. We hadn’t done as we had been urged by those on the opposite side of the House, to just spend it all, just spend it all right now, not worry about that, not have money in the kitty. So we were able to do that and we will continue to do that.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: What?

Well, Mr Woodhouse, I debated your former finance spokesperson. I was the person who looked through the numbers in the alternative budget from the National Party to see that that money was being spent on other matters. This Government has taken the responsible approach of having money held back for COVID and for resurgences, and that has stood us in great stead and allows us to continue to keep New Zealanders safe from COVID-19.

But what the Budget also does—the Budget Policy Statement and the Budget that flows from it will do—is accelerate our economic recovery and rebuild. We’ve done that by our massive investment in infrastructure—over $40 billion over five years going into making sure that we have the infrastructure that we need for a modern New Zealand. That does not only do the job we want it to do to reduce congestion, to be able to build more houses, but it keeps people in work. One of the main goals of this Government has been to keep unemployment down during this COVID period, and we have succeeded. We now see unemployment under 5 percent, compared to the rest of the world—the OECD average of around 6.4 percent, even 6.9 percent, I believe, over in Australia. So we have here in New Zealand a record of making sure that our recovery actually builds jobs and takes people with us.

But now we begin the process of reconnecting with the world. The trans-Tasman bubble gives us that opportunity to see tourists come in, to make sure they’re there. All the while, we’ve connected with the world through our exports, which have continued to go out, supported by the Government’s support scheme for aviation services. But now we have that process building up of making sure that we will see our tourism sector start to move forward. Minister Stuart Nash—as indicated in the Budget Policy Statement, we know that there are sectors that will continue to need support, and that includes the tourism sector, and Minister Nash has already given an outline of where that will go. We’ve also had the housing package announced, which is a critical part of making sure we build that stock of housing that contributes so much to our wellbeing but also to our infrastructure and to job creation. So accelerating the recovery and rebuild is critical.

Then thirdly are the big issues of our time: how we make sure that we improve child wellbeing, how we make sure that we get on top of the housing crisis, and how we make sure that we have a response to climate change that is progressive and modern and puts us at the forefront of countries who are not only addressing the challenge that faces future generations but finding the opportunities within that for job creation, for investment in our regions. That will be a major focus of the Budget.

Backing up that are three major reform programmes that this Government has under way: the reform of our planning rules, the reform of water, and the reform of our health system. These are three critical underpinning aspects of what will make all of those major goals for the Government work. If you put that agenda together—around climate change, around child wellbeing, around housing affordability, around health, around water, and around planning—you have a massive, ambitious programme of work to make sure that New Zealand can thrive both socially and economically into the future. The Budget is going to be focused around building off all of those things.

For New Zealand, as we look to this Budget Policy Statement, we have to make sure that the balance—the careful balance—that we have struck around fiscal management continues throughout the next few years. I heard my colleague Duncan Webb, just as I was coming into the House, talk about the importance of not adopting austerity policies, because the thing that would take New Zealand backwards would be to believe that having saved for the rainy day and then used the money when the rainy day arrived—to suddenly think that we can click our fingers and go back to where we were and that that will not damage the social fabric of New Zealand is plain wrong, but it does seem to be what we’re hearing from the Opposition. So Andrew Bayly mimicking the bored cat—he wanted the borders open; he wanted the borders closed. He also wanted us to borrow more and borrow less at the same time. I invite National Party speakers, when they get up, to tell us: do they approve of the borrowing programme? And if they don’t, what goes? What’s not going to happen? What’s going to get cut in order to bring that debt level back down, right down to where it was before we went in?

Of course we will continue on a path of debt reduction. It is the right thing to do, and that path is laid out in the Budget Policy Statement. Of course we will make sure that we continue to work towards a sustainable surplus. We will do all of those things because that is the right thing to do, and that is the balance, but it has to be balanced against investment in our people, in public services, in education, in health and housing. So the National Party can’t have it both ways. Either we borrowed the money and it was the right thing to do, or they want to make sure we go back to austerity. They’re the two options in front of the National Party.

On this side of the House, we are absolutely convinced of the strategy that sits inside this Budget Policy Statement. It is a strategy of a balanced approach that invests in our infrastructure, that supports the core public services that we need, and that has a plan for making sure that we address climate change and gives our young people, our children, a future. I’m proud of the Budget Policy Statement, and I look forward to delivering the Budget in May.

My colleagues were speculating on who would be the next Labour Minister of Finance, and the name that came out was Dr Duncan Webb. Frankly, he couldn’t do much worse a job than the one we’ve got now. That’s not my pick, I have to say. I think the next Labour finance Minister is sitting two seats behind him and could be the first female Minister of Finance. That’s Barbara Edmonds. She’s the rising star in an otherwise—well, interesting intake.

I have to say about the Budget Policy Statement (BPS), though, from the Minister of Finance, the only thing fiscally prudent about this is the photo on the front, and clearly they’ve saved a few hundred dollars in getting it done professionally. The Minister couldn’t even be parochial. It’s not an Otago shot, it’s not a Dunedin, it’s not Otago Peninsula, but it is probably a little less than the cost of what’s inside this.

Now, I want to take up the point that was made on page 19 of the Budget Policy Statement, because it’s simply not right. It says, “Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Labour-led Government ran surpluses.” Well, actually, they didn’t. It should have a few more words at the end of that. They ran surpluses into the ground and in two years took fiscal projections of surpluses up to $8.5 billion by, I think, 2024 or 2025 and turned it into a deficit by 2019/20. Now, COVID needed spending, but the amount of financial licence that has been taken by this Government and the use of COVID as a cover for financial profligacy is, I think, something that we need to talk about, because if there’s one thing that Labour Governments do really well, it’s spending money, and the perfect storm is the conditions that enable them, that give them the licence to do that.

The Minister asked, challenged us, to say that we wouldn’t have to borrow it. I don’t agree. We would. We would’ve done many of the things that this Government has done, and we did do them in times of other crisis—the global financial crisis, where we made sure that not a single person had a benefit cut or was supported otherwise during those longer, much longer, straitened times. But the idea that if we were to spend less than this Government somehow things should have to be cut is a myth and it’s wrong and it needs to be put down and away. The reality is that growing the economy helps the Government, helps Crown revenue. Holding the economy stable and improving it is the best way to reduce borrowing. Returning back to surplus sooner than we otherwise might is the best way to reduce our debt.

Now, the Government’s done well in that regard. But you know what? Going into lockdown was the easiest part of COVID. Managing and controlling people’s lives and telling them what they can and cannot do and closing borders is actually quite easy. Moving from pandemic to endemic and safely opening borders and actually allowing international students in and allowing tourists in and the essential workers that we have so that fruit doesn’t rot on the ground in the Hawke’s Bay and Coromandel and Central Otago—that’s the tough stuff. And how much more are we going to have to borrow because of the loss of Crown revenue, because of the loss of profit, because of the decisions that have and have not been taken by this Government?

Treasury point out, and the BPS says, that there is significant uncertainty about the trajectory that we’re on, and one of the reasons for that uncertainty—and the biggest uncertainty, in my mind—is Crown revenue. Now, the numbers in this statement are frankly heroic, and they’re based on receipts that are cash, GST—so spending has been OK—provisional tax. But tax on profits eventually finally returned is going to be down—significantly down, I would suggest—on what this Budget Policy Statement is saying. It is a rose-tinted view of the revenue projections for the future.

And the degree of borrowing and the projections for future borrowing are going to be affected by interest rates. We know now from Air New Zealand that the Government lends at a pretty eye-wateringly high rate. The chances are it’s borrowing at something higher than some parts of the market would have, but there’s no doubt that when inflation hits, interest rates will go up. And inflation is coming. You can’t spend as much as we are spending and not have an inflationary environment. They’ve probably prevented deflation with the Reserve Bank policies that are being embarked upon. But we see from the housing market that if one pump primes $20 billion into a housing market that doesn’t have increased supply and prices will go up, the eventual effect of that on the rest of the economy is that inflation will occur across the economy, not just in the housing market.

But it’s the spending that’s the one thing the Government does control. And there’s no doubt that COVID has been used as a stalking horse for significant structural spending increases. If one looks at the trajectory, if it was COVID and COVID was finite, then the spending trajectory should then drop again, and it doesn’t. And it doesn’t because this Government has spent 3½ years doing things that don’t add to productivity: increasing wages in the Government sector well beyond that which has taken place in the private sector. I’m not saying that doctors, nurses, and schoolteachers don’t deserve it.

💬 Helen White: Yes you are.

No, I’m not.

💬 Christopher Luxon: At the right time.

Exactly. And there has to be a quid pro quo. There has to be an expectation that services will improve. The irony of this Government talking about wellbeing Budgets is that the very metrics that they would use to measure wellbeing, they’ve dispensed with. They’ve dispensed with better Public Service targets, they’ve dispensed with national health targets, and they don’t want to talk about things like NCEA pass rates or reoffending, because they’re all going the wrong way. And they’re going the wrong way because they’re not being measured. The public sector is not being held to account in the way that they are used to being held to account under a National-led Government, and that means fewer kids are getting immunised, fewer houses are getting insulated by the State, cancer treatment is going longer, kids are failing at school, reoffending is high.

💬 Christopher Luxon: Some people can’t get mental help.

Well, I’m going to come to mental health, Mr Luxon. It’s a very good segue, because the cornerstone of the 2019 Budget was $1.9 billion, according to the Government, of spending in mental health. Well, that was a myth, because $400 million of that was in pay equity settlements, another $400 million of that was in cost pressure increases that would’ve occurred regardless of who was in Government, and about $300 million of that was in housing support, not mental health. So the kindest thing you can say about that mental health announcement was that there was probably $800 million over four years, OK? Call it what it is. And that might’ve made an improvement if it was even spent. But my colleague Matt Doocey has been prosecuting the case that, actually, we’re still stuck at the start line. And the reason is this: announcements don’t improve mental health. Announcements don’t build houses.

💬 David Seymour: Surely not!

Well, apparently. We’ve come to know that now, Mr Seymour. Just talking about it doesn’t get it done. So I would support this spending and the envelope—I think it’s $10.2 billion in operating expenses and $8 billion in capital expenditure—if I could see any evidence that the roads that they announced, the shovel-ready projects, the New Zealand Upgrade Programme, Dunedin Hospital—Dunedin Hospital was announced by the previous Government four years ago this week. The indicative business case was approved, and, four years later, we’ve got a flat car park where we knocked over a building, and the detailed business case still hasn’t gone to Cabinet. Four years. If that’s an example of the performance and the output of this Government, we’re in big trouble.

The finance committee heard this morning from Treasury, and we’ve previously heard from the Auditor-General, who has reviewed the 2019/20 account, and they expressed significant concern about this very point that there is insignificant robust reporting on Government performance. “There should be reporting”—I’m quoting from Treasury. “There should be reporting on what services have been delivered and what has been achieved.” Under this Government, Treasury say too much reporting is widget focused. They’re not focusing on the right things. They talk about lovely wellbeing outcomes. That’s fine. They know how to announce things, but they don’t know how to get things done.

So we need a Budget that delivers quality spending, quality infrastructure, and we need a Government that actually follows up on what it says and makes sure that the people of New Zealand benefit from that, because the last three years are certainly evidence that they don’t have that capacity.

The next call is a split call. I call Tāmati Coffey.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Very pleased as a non-member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee to stand and take a call on this, because it’s incredibly important that those people that are listening to the debate right now understand that this Budget Policy Statement sets a framework for how we’re going to be able to deliver for our Māori and our Pacific communities. I felt it was important to bring that voice into this debate today as we’re talking about the Budget Policy Statement, because it needs to be said. It needs to be said that actually explicitly having an objective in the Wellbeing Budget for 2021 centred around the benefits of Māori and Pacific is huge—having it actually singled out there, making sure that we’re lifting Māori and Pacific incomes, making sure that we’re providing those skills and opportunities, and making sure that we’re looking after those communities as we work through the impacts of COVID-19.

These will be pleasing for our Māori and Pasifika communities to hear this, because one of the last things they might have heard was just how severe the unemployment rate for our communities was going to be. At one point, Treasury had it at about 26 percent—they were predicting. That had huge implications as a forecast. It definitely put the shock into our communities, thinking that the sky was going to fall in, that we would be doing it tough for a very long time. Where I come from in the Bay of Plenty, we only have to look at how the forestry sector was affected in the 1980s when the whole game changed. There was economic scarring left from that lack of investment into those small communities that is still felt these days. But we are in a different time. It’s a new Parliament. It’s a new day. And this Budget Policy Statement, I can assure you, is going to deliver for our Māori and our Pacific communities.

Now, some of the fears caught up in—especially last year after we had such a huge year, COVID definitely put everybody into a tailspin. Again, this was one of the pillars. Māori and Pacific was a pillar that we had last year as well, and look at the investment that we saw. We actually saw significant investment into things like jobs, making sure that we didn’t have a 26 percent Māori unemployment rate; making sure that we had things like the wage subsidy scheme, things like the income relief payment for Māori, but also workers, businesses to be able to stay the course and hold on to their jobs. That was an amazing initiative put forward by this Government to get everybody through what was an incredibly tough time.

In terms of the health of our people, the doubling of the winter energy payment in 2020 was significant. We were telling people to stay home. “Stay home.”—we said—“It’s winter, but stay home.” Well, that’s going to have a knock-on effect for people that can’t actually afford to stay home, that have been made to stay home. So we doubled the winter energy payment to make sure that whilst they were staying home, they were also staying warm, because, actually, we’ve had enough of hearing about how our damp, cold houses in New Zealand are affecting our people. We’re already moving to make some changes to turn that around. But one thing that we could do, which was immediate, was actually the doubling of the winter energy payment, and I look forward to more—well, actually, I look forward to that kicking off again this year. Many New Zealanders will be pleased to hear that the winter energy payment is kicking in again really soon, as the seasons change.

Finally, in my short contribution, I want to talk about the investment that we put into education—specifically, again, to lift our Māori and Pasifika communities up by implementing and expanding the free and healthy school lunch programme. We were able to expand that out to another 200,000 more students. Now, there’s an equity formula that underpins that that absolutely benefits Māori and Pasifika communities. Why? Because they need a bit of extra help. Actually, communities like that see this scheme—the school lunches scheme; the free school lunches scheme—as a game-changer, a game-changer for your own household budget. Suddenly there’s an expense that you don’t need to worry about. And also, from the teacher’s point of view, it is a game-changer in the classroom as well, where young learners are showing up to school, they’re being taken care of, but they’re also being fed at the same time. This improves their concentration level, it improves the amount of waste that schools produce, and it leads to happier learners.

So, if they were the pillars of our Budget in our policy statement last year, then this year I think that actually we’re going to do quite well out of it. We’re going to be making sure that our jobs are still secure for our communities, going to make sure that we’re providing in terms of health and in education as well. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a privilege to be able to take a call in support of the Budget Policy Statement (BPS). I’m going to focus my call on the wellbeing objective of lifting Māori and Pacific income, skills, and opportunities and combating the inequalities of COVID-19 with specific reference to Pacific peoples.

The Budget Policy Statement references the Speech from the Throne, and I quote: “We have more freedoms, are a more open economy, and have saved more lives than nearly every other country we normally compare ourselves to. We can rightfully be proud of our success to date as a nation, as team, but we cannot afford to be complacent nor stand still. We must keep going.” And for the sake of our Pacific population here in Aotearoa, we cannot stand still. The Lancet, a medical journal, noted that Māori, Pacific, and Asian peoples were at higher risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 than any other population. However, we as Pacific peoples didn’t need a medical journal to tell us that. Our elders recall that with the influenza pandemic in 1918, where 22 percent of Samoa’s population was wiped out, and then more recently with the measles epidemic in 2019. Our wellbeing objective to lift Māori and Pacific incomes, skill, and opportunities is critical to New Zealand’s long-term success, and I repeat: it is critical. That’s why submissions on the BPS were overwhelmingly in support of this objective. So I acknowledge the Minister of Finance for recognising this and for making it clear in the Budget Policy Statement that we cannot stand still when it comes to improving outcomes for Māori and Pacific peoples.

The BPS also references that education, health, and housing outcomes in New Zealand vary significantly by socioeconomic background and ethnicity. We know the stats around Pacific people. The average material standard of living for Pacific people is around half lower, for Māori a third lower, than for the general population. Pacific people are typically more severely affected by wage scarring by recessions and are more likely to have poorer health outcomes. The ability for many Pacific and Māori people to achieve their aspirations is impeded when the health, education, housing, and social welfare systems do not address the multi-faceted intergenerational disadvantages. But you know what? Despite these inequalities in housing, income, and health, Treasury in their Pacific Economy report in 2018 found that Pacific peoples contribute $8 billion towards New Zealand’s GDP and over 27,000 hours of volunteering. The Minister of Finance at the launch of that report stated that there is massive opportunity to invest in the Pacific community, looking at the overall approach to wellbeing. These are Pacific values of family, culture, language, and heritage, and it’s clear in this BPS that the Minister is taking up this opportunity. That is why this Government for the last three years has made it a priority to improve the lives of Pacific peoples here in Aotearoa.

The BPS makes reference to previous investment. For Pacific people, this included Budget 2018, which laid the foundations for the future with $1.6 billion over four years for schools, early childhood education, 1,500 new teachers, and the Families Package, which many Pacific families were benefactors of. The 2019 Wellbeing Budget secured an unprecedented amount of new funding of over $113 million over four years to boost support for Pacific communities across Aotearoa to achieve their vision of confident, thriving, resilient, and prosperous Pacific Aotearoa people, and Pacific-led solutions in education, health, languages, and culture and community wellbeing. Budget 2020 secured $195 million for the Pacific package to support the recovery and rebuild of the Pacific community. We launched the Action Plan for Pacific Education. We extended the Tupu Aotearoa programme, and Mana in Mahi. These are the action plans and investments that underpin previous Budget Policy Statements. So I look forward to what investment comes from this Budget Policy Statement.

I finish my contribution today by acknowledging the thousands of students who are participating in the largest cultural music and dance festival in the world. Today is the opening day of Polyfest, which was cancelled last year due to COVID-19. We are able to hold this festival and festivals like Pasifika, events like the Relay for Life, the Pinkalicious Breakfast this weekend at Te Rauparaha Arena in Porirua because the Government put our people first. We knew that a health response was the best economic response. So I quote again from the BPS and the Speech from the Throne: “We can rightfully be proud of our success to date as a nation, as a team, but we cannot afford to be complacent, nor stand still. We must keep going.” There is more work to do, but this Government is not standing still. Fa’afetai tele lava.

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak on the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Budget Policy Statement (BPS) in looking at what we should expect, and then I’m going to focus specifically on climate change and climate action, how this relates to what the Minister of Finance has laid a path down for, and what the Greens’ aspirations are in the economic transformation that is essential—that is essential—to an economy that can reduce our emissions in a way that makes sure that everyone has what they need to live good lives. That is the key to climate change: that it is actually system transformation, economic transformation, and that it is interconnected to all of the issues that I know we all care about.

So it is refreshing to see a Minister of Finance who is prepared to even use the words “climate change” in the Budget Policy Statement. We know that previous National finance Ministers seemed happy for Governments to sign up to international climate change targets, but didn’t put any backing behind reaching those targets, didn’t have a plan or resourcing to actually meet those targets. So this report from the select committee on the BPS is a refreshing change. It is also important to see that a just transition—and I think these are the very words—to a climate resilient, sustainable, and low-emissions economy is a specific objective in the Budget Policy Statement. Likewise, it is important to see that we have a whole section of the select committee report on the Budget Policy Statement on climate change.

It is about time. It is long past time, in fact, because scientists tell us that, actually, 2030 will be a tipping point, and 2030 is not that far away. If we don’t get our emissions under control, and if we don’t have an economic transformation that can reduce our emissions well before then, then we are actually going to lock in a high-emission climate future, where we have more violent storms, more extreme weather patterns, more devastating droughts, rising seas swamping our coastal communities in Aotearoa and in the Pacific.

💬 David Seymour: It’s like the Bible!

It’s not like the Bible; it’s happening right now. It is already happening. For those of us who understand the planning that is going to be required to actually protect our planet and her people, then we need the planning right now. So 2030, we have only eight harvest cycles left to change the way we farm, to change the way we use land, to change the way we grow and produce food. We only have eight winters to make sure that the way electricity and the way that we heat our homes is clean and from wind, solar, and hydro, not coal and gas. We have eight years, eight school years, to allow parents and whānau safe, clean, affordable alternatives to driving their children to school. This means that we must get serious about actual economic transformation, and the Minister for Climate Change is working across the Government to get these very things happening.

The urgency of the climate crisis means every part of Government—and I had some colleagues over here yelling out, “What about housing?” This is our point and this has always been our point. Every part of Government—the parts that are responsible for housing, the parts that are responsible for making sure everyone has enough to live, the parts that are responsible for our health system, the parts that are responsible for our water—needs to work together to ensure that we are addressing the climate crisis. The BPS report shows—and this is the important part—actually that the Crown’s books are in better shape than was expected, that the deficit and core Crown debt are less than what was expected, and that revenue is more than what was expected.

So we do continue to weather the COVID-19 storm, and the report on BPS shows that, right now, money is cheap. The Government’s borrowing costs are low right now and likely to stay low, so now is the time—now is the time—to invest in a just transition. A just transition is the transition that will ensure that we are not leaving people behind who are already struggling, living in poverty; that we are not leaving behind people who are struggling, living without a dignified, long-term, healthy, quality home. So that has always been the understanding and the position of the Green Party. Now is the time to invest in how we actually plan ahead. What if we connected homes and communities together with electric buses that come every 10 minutes and are free for kids to catch to school, lowering our emissions? What if we built thousands of State homes that have solar panels to be able to also lower the costs of people being able to heat their homes? What if we empowered community groups to grow gardens, feeding their communities locally and all around in the year? What if we invested in our people by raising incomes so that everyone has enough to live with dignity?

I think the Minister of Finance is already on this journey to the economic transformation that is needed for climate change. The question is, though, how big a step will Budget 2021 actually take on that journey? Now, I’d like to remind the House that it was, in fact, Jeanette Fitzsimons who said in this very House, many years ago, that our nation’s wellbeing is not a number on a GDP chart. She said GDP mainly measures the rate at which resources are turned into trash. The long-before visioning of the late Jeanette Fitzsimons is the vision that we still hold to today in the Green Party. We welcome the spirit of the Government’s wellbeing approach to Budgets, which is finally moving beyond the narrow restriction of what the GDP actually measures and starts to answer: what do we really value, is this enduring, and are we putting our investment where we have a long-term, enduring, sustainable plan to look after our planet and her people in a way that benefits everyone and not just a few, in a way that stops exploiting and pulling dirty fuels and dirty energy from our earth that contribute to the higher emissions of our current economic framework? This is what we are wanting to see in the upcoming Budget 2021 this year. So having a formal, organised way to look at the spending decisions that Government makes in terms of the impact on people, nature, and communities is a good thing. It is an essential thing.

We also welcome the development of He Ara Waiora as a way to supply and ensure that there is a Te Ao Māori lens to the wellbeing approach and the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework. And just before I start to wind down at the end of my time, I wanted to acknowledge the thousands of young people across the country who rallied for climate action to address the climate crisis. One of the signs—one of my favourite signs that was held that day, which is relevant to the economic transformation that we are seeing some hope for in the BPS—said, “Indigenous people must thrive for Papatūānuku to survive.” It is those very values that will return us to an economic framework that properly does want to look after the planet and our people for many generations to come, not just a short-term fiscal outlook that is going to continue to shovel the benefits mainly into the hands of the few on the back of exploiting the many. That is the vision and kaupapa of what the Green Party are proud to support, and that we are here in this Parliament to continue to pressure for that very economic transformation that must take place for the long-term enduring good of everyone, our planet, and nature. Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. This Budget Policy Statement sets out again that the Government will have a wellbeing focus. It says that there’s going to be a just transition to new fuels. How’s that working out? Well, it turns out that we’re having a dress rehearsal of what this Government’s just transition looks like. By banning exploration for the most efficient, cleanest-burning fuel that could be used for a just transition, we find ourselves burning coal. That’s what the future is going to be like. There will be more coal in our future because this Government’s just transition is so myopic they have banned the one fuel that could be used for a transition.

And then they say that we’re going to have better child wellbeing. Well, there are some kids who go to King’s College—

💬 Hon Willie Jackson: Very negative—very negative!

—and they get very good grades, and Willie Jackson can tell the House all about it in a moment. But then there are other kids at decile 1 schools. Do you know what the pass rate is for kids at decile 1 schools at university entrance? Oh, about 20 percent—you know, less than half of what it is for kids at decile 10 schools. Child wellbeing—has anybody heard about the performance of Oranga Tamariki? A scandal from start to finish.

And then we talk about physical and mental wellbeing. This from the Government where a Minister of the Crown calls other politicians a nutter in front of 400,000 people on Mike Hosking. That’s the Government. And is it any wonder, if that’s the attitude of senior Ministers of Cabinet in this Government, that we have school principals in the Epsom electorate, including where Chris Luxon’s daughters went to school, who are telling me just this week that they have serious difficulties with students getting into mental health services because COVID has pushed kids over the edge and the services for them are not scaling up to meet that demand?

This is the reality of this Government. They said it’s a wellbeing Government, a just transition, the future of work, Māori and Pasifika, child wellbeing, physical and mental wellbeing. Well, it’s not just the ACT Party which says that this is a triumph of spin over substance. We said that two years ago when they first started talking about a Wellbeing Budget. I was astonished, and I think it’s unusual for a social democrat Government to be lambasted in The Guardian.

Now, this is the newspaper that took over from the Red Star, and they are lambasting this Labour Party because, it says, this wellbeing Government, this Wellbeing Budget was supposedly world leading. “But”, it says, “the country still struggles with deep-seated social problems that seem incongruous … growing inequality; high rates of child poverty, the worst youth suicide rate in the developed world; [stifled] … progress on climate change. Its housing affordability crisis has become one of the worst in the world and has countless flow-on effects. The waiting list for public housing has hit an all-time high, with 20,000 families waiting for a home—four times what it was when Labour was elected in 2017.” That’s what the left-wing Guardian is saying about this Government’s Wellbeing Budget. That’s how the initiative is going three years in. It is a disaster by its own standards. The idea of a Wellbeing Budget cannot be taken seriously. There is no substance. It’s all spin. By the very measures that this Government set for itself, it is failing in education, in health, in mental health, and housing, and The Guardian, to its credit, is calling this Labour Government out for its failings.

But then there’s what we normally worry about in a Budget, and that is: how much money is the Government spending? I hate to seem old-fashioned, but Budgets are supposed to be about how much money is the Government spending and what results is it getting for that spending. Well, one of the things that potentially people should be concerned about when it comes to Government spending is actually the amount of debt that this Government is taking on.

We now have a projection that there’s going to be 48 percent of GDP debt at its peak, and, incredibly, the Minister of Finance is trying to say that this is a good thing because previously the estimate was 53 percent of GDP debt at the peak. Well, the truth is that the biggest problem that this country faces in the short to medium term is that the Government has borrowed so much money when interest rates are low, knowing that interest rates may not stay low. It’s easy to borrow a hundred billion bucks when the Reserve Bank is just printing it hand over fist. You know, some people say the Labour Party won the 2020 general election. I’d say Social Credit won it, because they’re the ones that are having their policies implemented, funding the Government by printing “funny money”. The only difficulty with that is that eventually you get inflation, as someone could have read in the Herald this morning from Richard Prebble, a fantastic former member of this House. If you increase the supply of money and the supply of goods and services stay the same, inflation is what happens and it’s happening in the housing market. That’s why the housing market’s gone up 22 percent in the last year.

It’s difficult to overstate how badly this Government has failed. They have managed to be elected to fix housing. In fact, Stuart Nash—he had a few clangers this morning on Hosking—said the Government has “fixed housing.”! I would hate to see this Labour Government screw something up if a 22 percent increase in house prices, and therefore a reduction in affordability, is this Government “fixing” something. Well, that’s a direct result of the monetary policy that has been used to subsidise the Government’s spending. Here’s the problem. Eventually it doesn’t work because people lose faith in the currency and interest rates have to rise back to the prices that people will actually loan the Government money. And when that happens, having borrowed on low interest rates, facing high interest rates, we are in a mess of trouble.

Then the Government’s Budget policy response says: “But we’ve done such a good job on the Government’s response to COVID-19.” Well, let’s just think about that for a moment. This Government had a less challenging job responding to an epidemic than any other country on Earth. And we know this is true, because I asked the Minister responsible: could he name a country that went into COVID-19 with greater isolation, with a more sophisticated civil society, with greater wealth, and that was in a better position to fight a pandemic? He could not name one because there isn’t one. And having had the easiest, least challenging job in the world, they have duffed it time after time after time.

Just this morning on the Health Committee, the officials admitted that case B at the Grand Millennium hadn’t been tested for the last four months. Now, this is not a new thing. This was litigated through the press in this Parliament all through the end of last year. The Government was asked: “Is the Government testing people who work at MIQ?” “Oh yes, we’re testing them now. We didn’t before, but we’re testing them now.” They’re still not testing them.

And then there’s vaccination. I remember a great word in New Zealand politics, and it’s time to bring it back: “omnishambles”. We are facing an omnishambles in vaccination, because, fundamentally, this Government cannot put in place the information systems to understand who’s vaccinating who with which vaccine and when. It’s going to be the gift that’s going to keep on giving for an Opposition, but a disaster for the rest of New Zealand.

So what should we want instead from our Government? It’s actually not particularly complex. What we should want from a Government in this Budget is an opportunity to grow out of our country’s challenges. It starts with honest conversations about the challenges this country is facing, about the debt, about the gaps in educational attainment, about the inability to produce urban land—land that is consented and connected to opportunity by infrastructure so the next generation can build homes like the boomers. If we have those honest conversations about the real challenges facing this country, perhaps we could also grow our productivity and be in a position to pay down the debt. But at this point, we have a Government that pursues a whole lot of objectives—airy fairy. It’s failed. Even The Guardian says so. It’s time for New Zealand to unite behind good ideas, and stop wasting money on the divisive spin over substance that is fast becoming the trademark of this Labour Government. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

It’s a privilege to rise and speak about the Budget Policy Statement, and I thought I might actually do it—we might actually talk about that right now. So the first thing that I want to talk about is the fact that I want to acknowledge that it’s been a really, really hard year for New Zealanders. It’s been very hard in Auckland Central, and it’s been very hard in my area of work prior to politics, which is that I represented both employers and employees. It’s been a tough year, and we are still weathering a crisis. It is not over.

I was very proud of the statement that we had, because this is a statement that has a vision attached to it, something that I have not seen in almost anything from the Opposition today. We have a Budget Policy Statement that contains a vision that is the vision that I want for my children. Just transition is about economic transformation. So is the future of work, which is another commitment that has been made. This is a Budget that will look at things like innovation and decent work. It will raise wages. It is a Budget that looks at wellbeing. It looks at children’s wellbeing and the physical and mental wellbeing of our citizens. It looks at Māori and Pasifika and children who have been left behind. It is a vision for a decent future, and I’m proud of it.

The Living Standards Framework is not fluffy in the slightest. It is the kind of framework I want. It’s one that’s richer and deeper than a simple cost-benefit analysis, but it doesn’t shy away from that either. It looks at the four kinds of capital: human capital—skills and knowledge; natural capital—the environment; social capital, being communities and wellbeing; and the physical landscape we live in, which is also our capital. It builds these things back better.

The crisis we have faced has been one that the Labour Party has faced with its values, and that has led to success. We have unemployment that is at 4.9 percent, and the peak of it was 5.3 percent. That is way lower than was projected by Treasury, which optimistically predicted an 8.5 percent unemployment rate, and the OECD world, which peaked at 8.8. What went right was our values and our leadership. We have had the best health response, and that has been the best economic response. I hate to think what would have happened if, in fact, there had been a different Government leading this country during this time.

We have had a situation where we have built our Public Service. We have built our tracking and tracing. We have done that. I was reading recently a book by Mariana Mazzucato, where she talks about the mission economy and she talks about how that opportunity has been lost in her own country of the UK, whereas here we have built those things, and we have a richer, stronger bureaucracy and support structure in our Public Service as a consequence.

We have been putting working people first, and I was very, very proud to see that happen with regard to the wage subsidy. It was my experience in that time that I was advising employers and employees, and actually that subsidy and the way it rolled out so quickly and so responsively reassured so many people, and I am absolutely confident it is the reason why our unemployment rates were so low. Work is so important to people. It is so important to their wealth. It is so important to their mental health, wellbeing. It is an incredibly important thing, and I’m very proud of our Minister of Finance for having achieved that. We have had resurgence payments which have now targeted those who still need support, and I’m just proud of that as well.

It’s a very interesting contrast when you look at what happened in Australia over payments like the wage subsidy, which were held back. We had a much better response because we got them out the door. Do you know why that happened? It’s not an accident that that came from the Labour Party. It’s because the Labour Party knows about working people, it knows what working people need, and it is grounded, and so it actually produces those things that people need in a timely fashion.

There was a bounce. We had a credit rating adjustment recently that was an AA+ rating. It’s an incredibly good sign when we get that kind of bounce. It is a bounce that is about results that we have had in our economy. We have had an operating balance before gains and losses—the deficit has been $5 billion less than was forecast. We have a $3 billion higher than forecast core Crown revenue, and we have net core Crown debt of 27 percent instead of what was predicted in the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update of 30 percent. That’s really just as important as paying back money fast, because we just don’t have to pay it back at all. It’s a good start, but it’s going to be a rocky road, and nobody is being complacent here. The secretary of Treasury said that they only predicted moderate growth and we’ll return to surplus in 2027.

I want to talk a little bit about the future of work, because that’s something that I have a really keen and practical interest in. There were a thousand places given in trade academies. There’s support for taking on apprentices—20 percent more in October 2020 from the year before. That’s actually a huge thing, because apprenticeships were just lost for so long—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! If members want to have conversations, can they please step out. Thank you.

In that time, we lost so much opportunity to train our own people and give them good jobs. Actually, what I’ve heard from the Opposition today is that what they would like to do is return to the old style, where we actually just bring people into the country, where we bring in low-paid workers, where we return to low-paid industries. This is not the future of New Zealand. The future of New Zealand is high-wage work, it’s training our own people, and it’s making a difference which is sustainable.

I want to make a comment about Michael Woodhouse’s comment recently. He was just talking about how the money that had been set aside in mental health basically got frittered away in pay equity claims. The suggestion was that that was not a good use of money. I want to talk about that for just a minute and think about it, because there’s been that criticism, and the criticism of sick pay, and the criticism of the minimum wage. All these things are about paying people what they’re worth. This is about putting money absolutely into the right place, into our poorest people, into people who will then spend it in the economy. They will not invest it in other things or go overseas; they will put it right back here. These are the people that I want to work hard to make sure they have better lives. So this is absolutely what we should be doing. These are our most exploited workers and these are the people that we need to focus on in the Labour Party.

I want to talk about housing. Housing has been a hugely difficult issue—nobody is suggesting otherwise—but it is being attended to. Rather than being naysaying, it would be good to see the National Party see the situation with some degree of lack of interest in investors, because what actually has happened here is that investors have been tipped into the new build market, and that’s a very good thing, because that means that we’re going to increase stock. Otherwise, the behaviour that was going on, where they were simply buying houses, is actually simply rent-seeking. It produces nothing, and we need that money that is available from investors to go into something real, to something productive, that gives New Zealanders something back. So I am very, very proud of those recent announcements, and I look forward to some much more significant ones.

💬 Nicola Willis: 4,000 kids in motels.

The children in motels and the children that are actually housed, I am proud of, because it is a whole lot better than it was, Nicola Willis, when they lived in cars. I have been in Auckland Central and I have seen children living in cars, and I am much prouder that, actually, homeless people during the crisis and people who have been in those situations are actually now looked after. I am particularly proud of the humane response there has been, to get people into housing, and we will work at it. We will continue to work at it.

I’d just like to finish by saying I am extremely proud of this statement, and I am proud of the values that underpin it. I’m proud of Grant Robertson’s work in this area. I’m proud of the committee’s work. I’m proud of the submitters who came to us and talked to us about wellbeing. They did that because the door was opened by the vision that was shared with them, and so we heard from all sorts of people who may not necessarily have agreed or disagreed with everything we had to say but contributed at that level. We’ve changed the conversation in New Zealand, and I’m proud of that.

The next call is a split call.

Labour’s so-called wellbeing approach is a hoax, and it is completely proven by that last speech. Here we have a Budget Policy Statement that claims to be about child wellbeing, to be about reducing child poverty, to be about growing social capital, and yet what we have in front of us is a Minister who is overseeing the biggest number of children living in motels in this country that we have ever seen in our history. And that Minister knows, because I have read the advice that she’s been getting for two years—I’ve read the advice, Minister, I’ve got it under the Official Information Act, and you’ve been advised for more than two years that those children, those families, those New Zealanders living in motels are not being given the support they need. They’re not in stable accommodation. That Minister has been told by her officials that her department can’t ensure the quality or safety of the accommodation providers that she is letting thousands of children be raised in. And they’re not being raised in these motels for seven days or so, no, because now the average length of stay on Minister Sepuloni’s watch is when someone turns up to the Government and says, “I’m in desperate need, I need a house.” Minister Sepuloni says, “I’ll put you in that motel there, and, on average, you’ll spend 12½ weeks there.” But don’t worry, you could be one of the hundreds—the hundreds—of people that on Minister Sepuloni’s watch have spent months and months living in a motel.

But Minister Sepuloni came into Government promising that she had a solution for all of this, didn’t she? And we’ll see it continuing to be reported in here, and the solution was really simple in Opposition, wasn’t it, Minister? KiwiBuild. That’s right, New Zealanders were promised 100,000 KiwiBuild homes, and that was going to ensure that children weren’t living in disgusting circumstances. But, instead, what we have seen is that we are now in a situation where we are spending a million dollars a day putting kids up in a situation where, in questions I have asked that Minister, I have said to her, “What health and safety check do her officials do of these accommodation providers?” I have said to her, “What wraparound support”—

💬 Hon Carmel Sepuloni: I don’t think National did any on cars.

You can keep defending it, Minister; it’s indefensible. That Minister knows that her officials have been advising her, not for months but for years they have been saying to her, “Minister, putting people up in motels at up to $450 a night is not only more expensive than building houses or putting them in transitional housing, it also doesn’t provide those people with the wraparound support and services they need to get back on their feet. And that Minister has received briefing after briefing, memo after memo that has said to her, “This Government must exit from the motels. It must build houses.”

And so they failed on KiwiBuild. So then what they like to say is, “Oh, well we’re going to build 18,000 houses.”—that’s what they like to say. So let’s actually analyse that, shall we? Because I think what that Minister also knows, because she’s been receiving these briefings too, is that they’re running well behind schedule on that, because it turns out they’re not actually that good at building things—12 progressive homeownership homes so far.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: How many?

Twelve—792 KiwiBuild homes when 100,000 were promised. It was a hoax—it’s a disgrace.

Now, I want to say to that Minister what New Zealanders have been saying to me. They’re saying, “If this Government actually cares about kids, if this Government actually cares about value for money, wellbeing, social capital, why don’t they take that million dollars a day that they’re prepared to spend on cheques for motels—take that money and get some houses built with it?” Minister, right where you live, VisionWest, the Salvation Army, they have begged me. They’ve said, “Just tell the Government to take that money they’re spending on cheques for motel rooms, invest it in us, the community housing sector; let us build homes for our people. Let us support them back on to their feet.” But no, this Government thinks it always knows best. You can’t just talk about wellbeing, you have to deliver. And when thousands of New Zealanders and 4,000 children are living in unsupported motels, it is not delivery.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! This debate is interrupted. The House is suspended until 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Tēnā rā tātou katoa. The House is resumed. Members, before the dinner break, we were debating the Budget Policy Statement 2021. We’re on call nine, which is a split call. I believe it’s the Māori Party’s call.

Kia ora. Tēnā koe. The wellbeing of our people and our w’enua should be at the heart of every decision a Government makes. So when this Government delivered its first Wellbeing Budget two years ago, it was a step in the right direction. It sent a strong signal that the strength of an economy can’t be measured by GDP alone but by the wellbeing of its people and our environment it serves. We have long known as tangata w’enua that GDP is not an accurate measure of the success, let alone the health, of our people, yet standing here today it is clear that the Government must do more to address decades of under-investment, deregulation, and liberalisation of the economy. So while it was a step forward, the Wellbeing Budget fell far short of the transformative policies our people need.

As we always have been, Māori are at the sharpest end of the disparities of our broken economic system. Pākehā have net worth almost five times higher than Māori. Non-Māori have 13 percent higher median wages. There has been no significant decrease in poverty for w’ānau Māori despite decreases for the general population. Homeownership is becoming completely unattainable for Māori. Māori homeownership rates have fallen since 1999. In the latest census, Māori individual homeownership fell to 26 percent, compared with 41 percent for non-Māori. Eleven thousand Māori are currently on the social housing register waiting list. Half of the entire waiting list are Māori, and for those who can get into social housing, it is still unaffordable. Current data indicates that 30 percent of Māori pay rent that is over 30 percent of their weekly income. Māori unemployment rose in the first quarter of 2020 to 9 percent, and the rate of young Māori not in employment, education, or training is at nearly 20 percent.

We continue to see our w’ānau disproportionately suffering complex social problems, including high rates of poverty and the worst youth suicide rate in the developed world. It should hardly be a surprise, then, that this remains the situation for our people when the so-called Wellbeing Budget only delivered 0.3 percent of its overall funding in targeted Māori funding. A true measure of Budget success is how many structural barriers were removed, how many of our people’s aspirations were advanced, because only then will we make a real difference for our w’ānau.

Te Paati Māori are very clear what our Budget priorities are and what we would be doing. We need to massively ramp up targeted Vote Māori funding and ensure resources get to our people on the ground. Our people have their own solutions. This includes increasing Whānau Ora funding and ensuring that it goes directly to the commissioning agencies; not lost in Government departments. We need to invest in what works and Whānau Ora has proven itself to be delivering life-changing outcomes for our w’ānau. We would ensure all Māori medium education is funded equal to its mainstream equivalents through equity-based funding models and establish a $200 million fund to drive w’ānau, hapū, and iwi education and training initiatives, including the establishment of new hapū-based wānanga.

Te Paati Māori would double baseline benefit and student allowance levels, individualise benefits, and cancel income support - related debt. We would intervene directly in the housing market to build thousands more homes and introduce a targeted Māori housing plan that includes specific financial support schemes for home loans. We would create business and employment opportunities for our people by ensuring 25 percent of all Government procurement contracts are given to Māori organisations. We would establish a Māori health funding authority with a budget of $5 billion to oversee purchasing, distribution, and operational delivery of the per capita Budget health entitlement for Māori. Te Paati Māori would listen to the pleas of our people and address inequities in cancer funding, reduce the screening age for Māori, and ensure the life-saving cancer drugs are subsidised by Pharmac.

The Government’s books are much healthier than expected. Interest rates are low. Now is the time for transformational investment across social services. Our people expect nothing less. In this Budget, I’m hoping to see a lot more than 0.3 percent of the total allocation targeting specific Māori disparities. We know how making positive impacts the wellbeing of Māori. We need a Budget that truly improves the quality of our lives for w’ānau through good jobs; high incomes; warm, affordable homes; and equitable access to health and education. This Government has an outright majority in this House; probably something we won’t see again in my lifetime. They have the mandate to truly uplift the quality of life for our people if they have the will to, and they are running out of time to use it. We ask that this Government prioritise its focus on our people and that both sides of the House stop scrapping and focus on our people once and for all. Kia ora rā.

Order! The member’s time has expired.

It’s been an interesting debate this afternoon, or two debates, actually. One of them was an urgent debate around Air New Zealand, and now, of course, we’re discussing the Budget Policy Statement. The two aren’t very much related. There’s just the mere fact that Air New Zealand is still flying, despite the doom and gloom on the other side of the House. Even as a comparative with Qantas, Air New Zealand continued to fly internationally, but Qantas was grounded and, for all intents and purposes, remains so, and that’s something of a metaphor for New Zealand. Air New Zealand became a metaphor for this country—it actually continued to fly.

Just to put in some context, again, if you sat and listened to some of the debate here, you’d think things were going to hell in a handcart. I’ve just been fortunate over the meal break to be at a function for Business New Zealand: Kirk Hope and his team, and a lot of small businesses in New Zealand, many of them from Auckland. I was privileged enough to be moving among those people with my ears open to hear what they’re really saying, and just the mere fact that their function was able to take place—the mere fact we were rubbing shoulders, the mere fact that we were able to cram into a room to hear the welcome from Business New Zealand—that too was a metaphor for the success in the context against which we are now speaking and which we are going into this next Budget round. For those listening at home, what we are now debating is the scene-setting for the next Budget, for the money that will be distributed to ensure that New Zealand grows, continues to grow, and thrives in the coming period.

I think it’s also really important that we just take a moment and sit and all think where we were this time last year, in the surreal world we were entering where the world was closing down. New Zealand was closing down.

Closing down meant different things to different countries. In New Zealand, closing down came to a choice: we could either concentrate on our people—as Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, the previous speaker, has been talking about—or we could concentrate fully on the economy. Obviously, the two are not mutually exclusive, but in New Zealand, and, I would say people with a background like myself, who’s been quite reasonably heavily involved in business, the concept of shutting down an economy for four or five weeks was a very scary thought. No one knew what we would end up doing, and so, as a result, most countries weren’t as courageous as New Zealand was. Most countries didn’t go to the end and work backwards. Everyone in New Zealand knew what the rules were. As COVID cases started to grow—and it was interesting, just checking up—we didn’t quite get to a thousand cases. In mid-April, we were at just below a thousand.

We sat at home and we watched, and we wondered had we done the right thing, because our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, what she made a decision to do was to focus on the people, not on the economy. As a result—and you’ve heard people talk about it, and it’s been mentioned oft-times in this House—and as it turned out, the best economic approach was the health approach, the people-based approach.

As we moved through and as we had all the terrible doom and gloom, and you could see in the Budget Policy Statement the projections that were being made of unemployment at around 10 or 12 percent, an economy diving—nobody really knew. But what we did learn—and this is what I hope the uptake from this will be when we are faced with anything similar in the future—was that, actually, if you concentrate on the people, the rest will follow. I think many a time we hear he tangata, he tangata, he tangata—it is people, it is people, it is people.

So by doing that, what we saw—and many times people have talked about economies. Have a look at the economies overseas that actually just focused on the economy. You know, we had a “President of the Free World” who denied it and said that it would go away and that the economy was more important, and look at that—half a million. I haven’t seen the latest figures. I believe they’re up to nearly 600,000 dead now, with probably 400,000 or 500,000 of them unnecessarily, because that was a focus that just left people out of the whole decision-making.

The UK did the same thing. They caught up, but that was what they did. By focusing only on the economy and by not shutting down, they allowed it to seed.

Ireland was very interesting. People talk about Ireland. In Ireland, actually, it did seed. Ireland’s actually got pretty terrible. I’ve got a sister in Ireland who’s been locked down for months, and they still continue to do so. They’re only just looking at maybe opening the pubs. So these are the things that are happening around the world.

So go back, and I’d ask you to please look at this as we go into this next Budget, and you see what this Living Standards Framework is going to be about. It’s a continuation. What we’ll look at COVID as being is it will be a start. It’s the way the world will refocus, if we allow it to refocus.

Now look, I don’t blame the people across the floor. They’re doing what they’re here to do—you know, to destroy and to pull down. They don’t believe—most of them—what they’re saying, but that’s all right, I say to those at home, because they have to say it. What we have proven here—and this is the lesson, I hope, that will come out of this COVID—is that we should concentrate on the people.

Look at the building sector. Now, there’s a very interesting stat out there when we’re talking about housing. One of the most interesting stats around housing is we now have 21,000 more people involved in the construction industry than we did in 2018. Now, compare that with what happened during the GFC. There are many reasons why we have a housing issue, but one of the reasons is we simply don’t have enough people to build them, because in 2008, in the GFC, the first people to get laid off were the people we need now: the tradies. If a business closed down, anyone who had an apprentice shut down. All the money that went into apprentices, it shut down, and so nothing ever happens in isolation.

I know that when I left my last job, I said, “Don’t say that I’ll be a success until I’ve been gone for three or four years. If things are still doing well then, I will have been a success.”, and that’s the way we have to look at it. Nothing happens overnight. We live in this society these days where it’s instant—you know, just add water and stir. Unfortunately, that doesn’t allow for the long-term strategy we need.

So I go back to this Budget now, and what this Budget is about is people. This is a continuation. It isn’t new. This is a continuation of what we learn: if you concentrate on the people, then the rest will look after itself.

We come to this House from various experiences, and we’re challenged to sit down there and look at the formative experiences we’ve had. I know that from when I spoke here in my maiden speech about what I learnt. Basically, I was a middle-class, white farm boy from the South Island, and I then went and worked as an undercover police officer in the North, with communities I had only ever seen through one set of eyes before—I’d seen them through a police officer’s set of eyes. But it was what I was actually able to see, and do you know what? I came out of there seeing how much talent was in there. It was talent that if it was turned in the wrong direction, it meant they became very good drug-dealers, very good armed robbers, and good at all those things that they did. But, unfortunately, in the past, the only time that really captured that was, often, in the western desert, and places like that—they were the people who came through it.

But the talent that’s out there, if we can capture that talent, and, yes, we won’t capture it all—we won’t capture it all. There will be examples. But if we can get half the people that would otherwise have had lives that they weren’t satisfied with and no one around them was satisfied with, then we will have succeeded. You know, you don’t give up. There will be some, and we have to accept that there will be some, and there will always be a need for prisons—you know, those who will stand up.

In fact, it was quite interesting. One of the submitters we had when we were talking about the Budget Policy Statement, and I think Mr Webb might have mentioned it, was People Against Prisons Aotearoa—you know, defund the police. Well, as I pointed out to that particular individual, who looked like he was probably a fairly safe, liberal, from the leafy suburb he came from. So what I pointed out to him on the only statistics he had there—and this goes back to Māori victimisation—was that the vast majority of people who are victims of crime are Māori. So do you ignore the victims by actually ensuring that—yes—what we’ve got to make sure of is that as much as we stop Māori offending, we stop Māori victimisation? Nothing in isolation, and that’s why it’s important.

Again, I go back to this. Just some examples: the Living Standards Framework. Look, one of the most important things that came out of this when we look at the success of the last year is unemployment. OK, at 4.9 percent, it’s still too high. No one is standing from the chandeliers waving a flag, but it is a heck of a lot better than what we were looking at, which was up to 10 or 12 percent. So at least, with that 4.9 percent, there are 1.5 percent more people working than were projected to be working. That’s 1.5 percent—I don’t know what numbers are on that, but that’s 1.5 percent more people who are actually getting out of bed in the morning, or at night on whatever shift they’re working, who are actually getting out there and doing something, and who are participating in our economy, participating in this world.

So, again, pointing back to this Budget and where we’re going now, it is very heavily focused on the people. We will continue to train apprentices. We will continue to make sure that people can participate in our world, and that’s what having a Living Standards Framework means. A thoroughly—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, the Budget delivers a lot of money for the COVID response, and that is quite right, but the question I have to ask is: is the oversight and the efficacy of that money being monitored properly? Because it was an extraordinary morning at the Health Committee this morning. Three things came out today that I want to make mention of, because, sadly, in April 2021 we are still talking about issues at the border around testing that were identified in September last year and then again in February earlier this year.

There is the sense of déjà vu in the building, because Mr O’Connor talks about the strong border response of the Government, and to some extent that is correct, but there are critical failings in the system and they have been exposed today. The first point was what we heard this morning in relation to case B from the latest cluster at the Grand Millennium. It was a generally farcical select committee process this morning, but in and amongst the 25-minute lecture from Dr Bloomfield and Carolyn Tremain—including the description of the end-to-end user experience of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) and a description of the science of COVID-19. After we had the 25-minute lecture, we got a chance to ask some questions—not many, but some—and I asked the very simple question: case B was tested on 8 April; when was the last time he was tested?

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: And what was the answer?

Well, the answer was, firstly, obfuscation, and I asked again, and eventually we got the answer. The answer is November last year. So for six months, we’ve had a border worker, a front-line border worker, working in MIQ who has not been tested. He’s meant to be on a fortnightly cycle. So from November to April, there were meant to be fortnightly tests for COVID-19, but for six months that did not happen. It’s worth noting in passing that if I hadn’t asked the question and actually pressed the officials on that question, when were we going to find out about that? When were the officials going to tell us that salient fact? So that’s the first point. Now, I think we can all agree that that is very concerning. We kept trying to ask further questions about it, but Labour members don’t like the scrutiny, and so we were forced to end the session.

The second point flows from the first, which is that 450 workers, it transpires, are not being tested regularly according to the law. And, again, in September last year, we had a big hullaballoo here and in the public domain around the testing regime. Members opposite will remember the shemozzle in August around the August cluster. We were assured by Ministers then that things were going to get better, and they put in place these mandatory testing orders. The rules are clear: if you are within the scope of the testing order, you have to get tested every two weeks or in some cases every week. What we learnt this evening, broken by Michael Morrah on Newshub, is that 450 people in the last two weeks have not complied with the testing order. And it’s worse than that: the Government admits that 85 of those 450 may never have been tested—may never have been tested.

So what we’ve got is a situation where we’ve got dozens of people working at the border who are in our front-line response who may never have been tested. At the very least, 450 of them haven’t been tested properly in accordance with the rules laid down by the Government. Now, I think we can all agree that this is not good enough. So that’s the second thing.

The third point is it transpires—again, from the committee this morning—that not all the companies that work at the border are actually using the COVID border testing register. We know that there are dozens of companies and, therefore, hundreds of people that are not using the register that the Government has belatedly provided, and that is really important, and I’ll come back to that.

So quite a lot flows from those three facts. The first question is: why have there not been any checks? Well, the Government says today, “Well, he was lying.” OK. The Prime Minister just asserted that. Chris Hipkins says there’s going to be an inquiry. The Prime Minister has helpfully pre-judged that inquiry for the rest of us. So I hope it doesn’t turn out to be like the situation with the KFC worker in February, when the Prime Minister essentially went on national television and vilified them, and it turns out she owes them an apology—an apology, by the way, we are all still waiting for, as is the KFC worker. So the Prime Minister said that that person is lying, and Chris Hipkins had the temerity to say, “Well, we can’t have an urgent debate, because we might end up litigating what case B did or didn’t do.” Well, his own boss, the Prime Minister, was already on the record alleging that he had lied. So they say that he’s lying. OK, we’ll wait and see what the truth is there.

That obviates or at least obscures the major point, which is: how have we designed a system where someone can go six months without being checked? How is it that the system allows someone to get away with not being tested and not following the law? Then they said, “Oh, we’ll have an investigation.” And by the way, it’s worth nothing that we didn’t find that out this morning. The officials didn’t bother to tell us that there would be an investigation this morning. The media had to ask them that afterwards, and that’s something that we’ll be following up. Then we heard from the Prime Minister that there were private security companies involved. Well, yes, that’s irrelevant. Of course there are private security companies involved at the border. Although, it’s worth noting in passing that we were told last year that the Government was phasing out private security. It turns out that hasn’t happened either.

So that’s the first question. Then the second question is: what has happened to the register? Why is it not working? And, again, this is not a new issue. We talked about this in August; we talked about it again in February. Today, we discover, in response to questions, that the Government will make it mandatory from 27 April. Well, why are we only making something mandatory from basically the start of May when we’ve been having these problems since September? How hard is it to design a system that records people’s testing status and design a system where that is checked every fortnight or at least sufficiently enough to assure ourselves that people are being tested? Where are the checks more generally? Because if we make the testing mandatory, New Zealanders rightly expect that the Government will follow that up.

This is a very important point, because as members opposite have told us on so many occasions, ad nauseam, the border is our first and best defence against COVID slipping into the community. The reality is that it just takes one error. It just takes one mistake. This is not theory. We know this to be the case because we have seen it over the last few months and running back into last year. All it takes is one error or one slip and COVID is caught by someone and then it spreads.

The reason we have the testing regime at the border is to make sure that people who are working on the front line, who are coming into contact with people from overseas who have COVID—and we know that there are more and more people arriving in MIQ from places like India, for example, who have COVID. The reason we make them get tested is to make sure that they’re working there without it, so that they don’t spread it like case A did to case B, who spread it to case C. Now we’re all hoping beyond hope that this cluster does not spread any further. So that’s why we have the testing regime. But the quid pro quo of establishing the testing regime is that the Government goes and checks that people are being tested.

It’s not just good enough for the Government to say it’s incumbent on the employers. Firstly, half the employers at the border are the Government, and, secondly, don’t punch down and blame security guards who can’t fight back because they’re in quarantine. Don’t punch down and blame them and try and obscure the Government’s own ineptitude and incompetence for setting up a regime that does not work. It’s deeply unedifying from the Prime Minister. It’s deeply dispiriting for the country, and the country deserves better than the shemozzle we have been dished up as revealed today.

I rise as the final member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) to speak on the Budget Policy Statement (BPS). I do so knowing, not only from reflecting on the speakers who have gone before me but from my life time, this BPS reflects to me a Budget Policy Statement that is going to touch on all New Zealanders—where the Government, in the face of COVID-19, had our backs. In a time where we needed a Government to invest in us, we had one.

I reflect now on the speakers that have gone before me. Duncan Webb, chairman of the FEC—he spoke of a world-leading wellbeing approach, where the world is looking at us as we measure making lives better. He also talked about Government agencies and how they’re moving away from being in silos to a collaborative and cooperating approach to working together.

Then we heard from finance Minister Grant Robertson, when he referenced the IMF, Bloomberg, and the Lowy Institute ranking New Zealand’s response to COVID-19 among the best in the world. This is due to our public health approach, at the same time as providing cash flow and confidence to New Zealand workers and businesses. We’ve succeeded in keeping unemployment under 5 percent, compared to the OECD average, 6.4 percent. Austerity isn’t our goal; recovery and rebuilding is. Now we must make sure that the balance we’ve struck continues over the years. It is the strategy of a balanced approach, which our Minister of Finance spoke of this evening, that invests in our infrastructure; that supports the core Public Service, like health and education; that has a plan for making sure we address climate change; and that gives our young people a future—an ambitious plan for New Zealand.

My colleague Barbara Edmonds, deputy chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, spoke of a focus on wellbeing objectives to lift Māori and Pacific incomes, skills, and opportunities. She spoke of going forward and investing in our people because we must keep moving.

My colleague Helen White spoke of innovation, vision, supporting workers and decent wages, leadership, and having the right values, because Labour is for all working people and for giving people a fair go. She spoke of our investment and a housing plan to get more families into affordable homes.

Greg—Greg, my other colleague—spoke not of doom and gloom, as from—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member needs to use the full name of other members.

Yes, Mr Speaker. Greg O’Connor spoke not of the doom and gloom from the other side of the House but of the fortunate things we are doing and of Business New Zealand talking, just at the dinner break, about the success stories that we’re hearing, where we’re growing and thriving. We’ve heard from business leaders applauding the wellbeing approach and moving from the public sector into the private sector, and we’ve even heard from a developer in the room, who spoke about the fast-tracking of land for building and the success of those things. These are the things that we’ve heard about in the dinner break.

I now turn to what my colleague Helen White spoke about here in the House about housing. Housing is where I will talk, on the home front. Our district is leading on the housing front. Hastings suffered under the National Government. I know that for years publicly owned State houses were left to rot and ruin in Hastings. Today, under the Labour Government—land that was going to be sold off and sold down—we now have 44 public homes built, for warm, affordable homes for families. Hastings is an example where this Government is working with the regions. It is an example where, together with local council, iwi, local industry, and trades—I’d like to report—534 building consents were issued in 2020. That is the highest level of homes built in the history of Hastings—the previous high: back in 2007. This includes Government investment in public housing, with 180 public houses being built over 2021, with purchasing intentions for a further 288 homes. Hastings has also been enabled to fast track much needed housing on council land in Flaxmere, where, thanks to the Government, the council received, in the face of a critical housing shortage, $11.5 million to go towards building the water and roading infrastructure to support affordable quality housing.

I now turn to the “Future of Work” as part of the Budget Policy Statement, and I talk about the investment that is being made in enabling all New Zealanders and New Zealand businesses to benefit from new technology and lift productivity and wages through innovation and support into employment for those most affected by COVID-19, including women and young people. I’d like to talk now about the investment that is being made into the human capital—our people; our skills. This is where we are making a real difference in growing the trade skills we need to grow business and build houses in our region.

I would like to also highlight that, on the weekend, I had the privilege—an absolute privilege—of meeting four talented building apprentices from local companies at Hawke’s Bay Homes to understand this. I heard from Martin E, who told me that before he was building as an apprentice, he was making sushi, and now, thanks to Hawke’s Bay Homes and the Government’s free vocational training and apprenticeship scheme, he’s becoming a builder with a great career ahead. Over 100,000 Kiwis have now signed up for this scheme, and across New Zealand—since we introduced it in July last year as part of our response to COVID-19—this newly skilled workforce will play a crucial role as we invest in infrastructure projects, continue our economic recovery, and build New Zealand back better. I’d like to wish good luck to Trent, one of the four young building apprentices I met in the weekend who are now off to represent Hawke’s Bay at the nationals in Wellington.

On top of this, at our local Eastern Institute of Technology we have over 1,250 learners enrolled in this trades training and apprenticeships scheme eligible for programmes. Therefore, they are having their fees paid, and this is the equivalent of approximately $3 million invested in the young people of Hawke’s Bay thanks to this Government. This demand is an increase from previous years, and it really shows how we are working with people on the ground in the regions.

We are a Government that invests in people. We invest in jobs. We’re supporting and backing business right here and growing the economy. We will keep going, and we will never stop. This is the type of thing that you are seeing from this Government, and it’s with this type of investment, unlike what we have heard is nothing but negative naysaying from the other side of the House. I have never, ever heard so much disappointment. Who is really speaking to business? Who is absolutely doing this country proud? Who is making a difference? Who has touched the lives of New Zealanders this year, in the face of COVID-19? It’s—

Order! The member’s time has expired. The question is that the motion be agreed to. Those of that opinion will say Aye; to the contrary, No. The Ayes have it.

💬 Hon Members: Party vote.

A party vote has been called for. The Clerk will conduct a party vote.

A point of order, Mr Speaker. I wonder if the Speaker could just advise what the motion is so that we can consider it. I wasn’t aware that we actually had a motion on this debate.

Oh, all right. The question at the beginning of the debate was moved by Dr Duncan Webb, and he moved that the House take note of the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Budget Policy Statement. After that speaker, I was in the Chair, and I stated that the question is that the motion be agreed to. And now, the motion is in.

Just speaking to that. Those words are used and there are times when a vote isn’t taken.