Budget Debate

That was a Budget for benefits, not for jobs. The Budget is the time of year when hard-working New Zealanders look to the Government for hope and for a plan. They want some peace of mind that their tax dollars are being wisely spent, that the Government is investing on their behalf in the things that will create opportunity, that will generate growth, that will help them provide for their own families. Perhaps this year more than any they are looking for signs of hope on the horizon. They’re looking for some sign the Government has a plan for growth.

Instead, today what we saw is a Budget that’s light on hope and utterly lacking in ambition—that’s setting New Zealand up to fail. Our debt as a country is set to climb to $184 billion—more than $100,000 for every household. New Zealanders want to know what they’re getting for that debt. They understand that borrowing only makes sense if it’s invested well. The fact that our economy has held up better than feared gave the Government some options. They could have left our children with a smaller bill. They could have made it easier to hire or do business. They could have provided tax relief to hard-working families. They could have incentivised firms to invest in new technology and upgrade to more productive equipment. Instead, today all we heard of was 19th century technology and no plans for building technology for the future. They could have invested in infrastructure that would actually get the economy moving. Instead there’s Meccano lessons now going to be held in Dunedin to put together presumably Chinese-made products. That seems to be the answer.

But this Government doesn’t really care, actually, about our children, do they, or grandchildren? Because what they’re doing is they’re actually investing and hoping for the number of people who are going to become dependent on the State. That’s what this is all about. I’ll agree with the finance Minister that New Zealanders made huge sacrifices last year. Thousands lost their jobs and entire sectors of the economy were decimated, and they’re the ones looking for a reason to stay in New Zealand. But I’m sorry that under this Government and this Budget, New Zealand is going to lose more nurses, more teachers, and more engineers, and they’ll lose them to Australia, because they’ll be looking for a better life.

We’ve now seen four Budgets from Grant Robertson and zero evidence—it doesn’t matter what he promises; he will not deliver. The finance Minister knows it. He said right now, surrounded by Cabinet Ministers he’s openly admitted he’s got no faith in, that’s why he’s had to put himself in charge of an implementation unit. When we were in Government that was called Cabinet, and the person in charge was the Prime Minister. But not under this Government.

There’s a lot of talk on that side of the House, but there’s no action. There’s a lot of announcements. But let’s have a look at those results, because unless someone really does have a better idea for New Zealand—and we do—we’re going to just keep waving our kids and grandkids off to Australia, and we’ll Zoom them, because, actually, we just don’t have that much confidence in vaccinations ever being put in place in this country.

Let’s have a look at these results of the announcements. In 2017, Labour announced a $5.5 billion family welfare package. They were going to take 100,000 children out of poverty. That’s what they said. Let’s have a look at the Budget. I heard Grant Robertson talking about all these kids being lifted out of poverty. Page 31 of the Budget documents, in the child poverty report, acknowledged that economic conditions have gotten worse—and listen to this—“particularly inflation, rent, and unemployment”. So the figures he was talking about today forgot the rent. Well, I suppose it’s probably easy for him, isn’t it? Then they said that they would have $400 million for fees-free. Well, how long did that last? It’s now abandoned.

They announced in Budget 2018, $300 million for 1,800 new police. Then what they did is they shut the training college at the police college to stop the police reaching their target. They also said there was $2 billion for KiwiBuild. Well, I don’t want to gloat, but I think we all know what happened there. Three billion dollars for the Provincial Growth Fund—they’ve got a lot of debt, but not much else.

Actually, in 2019, the Budget had $1.9 billion for mental health, and I actually thought, yeah, that was good. But, actually, two years later and a lot of these projects haven’t yet received a dollar. So, no, that was a shame.

In 2020 the Budget was full of announcements. We had—this is one of my personal favourites—$1.2 billion for Jobs for Nature. So far, that’s cost taxpayers $830 for every hour of work it generated—for every hour. Not a day—for every hour. That’s better than the best Queen’s Counsel ever gets in the Supreme Court. Five billion dollars they announced for so-called shovel-ready projects, and a year later more than a hundred of them haven’t even got shovels, let alone the ground to stick them in. Then we had $6.8 billion for 36 New Zealand Upgrade transport projects. Well, just ask Chris Bishop on that one. Twenty-one of those 36 haven’t started.

So I’ve just outlined $26 billion worth of Labour spending announcements—$26 billion of failures—and still they keep announcing. It’s really easy making announcements and getting other people to pay for your public holidays, but how about some of those big campaign promises in 2017? Child poverty—well, we know that’s got worse. That’s why they’re doing this Budget today. Homelessness—worse. Mental health—worse. Climate change—worse. Housing—worse. Every single one of those promises—worse today.

Have a look at their four years—astonishing. There are 1,500 more children in poverty since Labour took over—that’s why they’re having to pay more in benefits. The Prime Minister said the end of homelessness. Remember her lecturing Bill English about it? “Oh, Bill, that’s just a failure of leadership,” she said. Guess what: 17,000 more on the State house waiting list under her Government; four thousand children growing up in motels—that’s a million dollars a day. The motel generation—a shocking indictment on a Government that just loves photo ops and announcements.

This Prime Minister said that climate change was her David Lange moment—nuclear-free moment. Well, what’s happened? Emissions have gone up. [Interruption] Oh, David Bennett, you’re wrong! They’ve gone up. Something’s happened. They said they’d improve the mental health system, and even the Mental Health Foundation said it’s got worse. Their answer to the Mental Health Foundation is to call the chief executive a liar—yeah.

They said they’d build 100,000 KiwiBuild homes. I know you want an update: 871 so far, four years in. They said house prices would stabilise; they’re up $300,000. They said that rent would be stabilised; that’s up a record $100 a week extra, on everything else. Then just last year Grant Robertson promised no new taxes, no taxes on housing, no changes to the brightline test. He even laughed at the suggestion from that pesky media person who asked the impertinent question. Well, no one’s laughing now, are they? Tenants have got more rent increases and fewer houses to rent because of his changes, and all because he’s desperate to look like he’s doing something.

The Prime Minister’s first announcement as Labour leader was to build light rail in Auckland by 2021. Oh, what’s this year? It’s 2021. They have delivered Aucklanders the fuel tax to pay for it, but where’s the train? Where’s the light rail?

Andrew Little—and this is actually quite sad—promised the Pike River families he’d retrieve their loved ones. That was a particularly cynical promise, because he must have known, on all the evidence, that there was no way, and yet he made that anyway—$50 million and four years. That was really cruel.

We’ve been promised multiple times by this Government and that Prime Minister that border workers are being tested, only to find out they weren’t. Chris Hipkins promised we’d be at the front of the queue for the vaccines. We’re second to last in the OECD. We’ve got 3 percent of our population vaccinated under this Government. The only Minister, though—and be fair, there is one Minister who has kept his promise. I know you want to know.

💬 Hon Member: Yeah, who?

💬 Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Kelvin Davis. I have been quite mean to Kelvin Davis over the years, but, actually, kinder than he deserved. He has promised to reduce the prison population, and that’s very good. Isn’t it nice? And he has. He’s dropped the prison population by around 20 percent. But did he achieve this by improving outcomes for young people? Is crime down 20 percent? No. But he did let a whole chunk of criminals out early, and that’s how he did it. He freed up the bunks. That’s one way to keep a promise. And, unsurprisingly, serious assaults have doubled and gang memberships are at a record high. Very soon we are going to have patched gang members outnumber sworn police officers. That is actually a shocking—shocking—indictment of that Government.

Well, the Prime Minister promised she would lead a transformational Government, and then she changed it to a promise to be foundational. Now, how about “aspirational”? How about a bit of ambition for the country? But, despite all their press releases, we know—and this is why they’ve had to put up benefits—that almost 200,000 New Zealanders are now on the dole. That is one in every nine New Zealanders are now on a benefit. In the last quarter, the last three months, New Zealand spent $33 million on emergency food grants, and last month, 360,000 New Zealanders relied on the accommodation supplement to afford a roof over their head. If anyone’s looking for a lack of leadership from the Government, it’s on that. That means there’s not enough places to rent.

Meanwhile, we’re borrowing millions of dollars a day just to deal with it. Grant Robertson said, “That’s not a big problem. Interest rates are low. It doesn’t really matter.” It doesn’t really matter if he’s worrying about wasting $100 million, $200 million, a few more million here! But, actually, every time they do that, it means there’s not enough money to buy the cancer drugs for Pharmac. So today they announced $200 million extra for Pharmac. Well, we announced $280 million at the election.

💬 Hon Member: Way more.

💬 Hon JUDITH COLLINS: We announced way more. It’s also one less dollar—every time he does that, there’s less money to train new teachers and nurses. There’s less money for infrastructure, research and development, or tax relief to grow the economy and help our hard-working families who are paying for this. And, ultimately, it means Kiwis get to keep less of what they earn and the Government gets to keep more. We’re spending $2.8 billion every single year on interest alone. That’s a heck of a lot of money. That’s a heck of a lot of training for nurses and doctors. That’s a heck of a lot of people, and that’s what they’re doing. That’s actually more than the entire cost of our early childhood education.

So today’s Budget—let’s have a look at it. They said it’s the “Securing our Recovery Budget”. I actually thought it was more like a “Cement New Zealand’s Stagnation Budget”. But it’s definitely a “Broken Compass Budget”, with nothing to take New Zealand forward. It’s another Budget full of empty announcements; another Budget with zero plan for growth; another Budget that shows us Labour’s planning for failure. Last year, our economy shrunk by almost 3 percent, the largest fall in GDP ever recorded, and, somehow, this Government thinks that’s a good thing.

So Grant Robertson thinks that COVID’s given him the blank cheque. So this is what he’s been doing. All this money being spent on restructuring a health system in the middle of a pandemic—he’s planning to pile more costs on to businesses, to insert the Government into more markets, to help unions hold small businesses to account and to ransom them. He’s the one who’s actually wanting compulsory unionism, to weigh down our economy with regulation, to push rents higher, and to keep New Zealanders in poverty—to make it harder to buy a house, to make it harder to start a business, and to take more of what New Zealanders earn.

We think Grant Robertson would have presented a plan to unleash the economy—well, we hoped, but he didn’t—to cut red tape and reduce the tax burden; to incentivise investment, innovation, and risk-taking; to attract foreign capital and fire up private sector job creation. And instead of bringing us any ideas to get the economy going again, what we’ve got now is a total lack of ambition. These people can’t even bring back the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme. They can’t even get apricots picked. They can’t help the Pacific in the one way the Pacific wants it, which is, actually, money going into the Pacific earned by their own people, able to be spent by them. Instead, their answer is always more handouts—more money on Wellington bureaucrats.

The one thing I’d say that’s really gone up under this Government is the price of housing in Wellington. The reason why? Because there’s 10,000 more bureaucrats. I heard one of their Ministers—I can’t even bother to remember the name—say the other day that these are not bureaucrats; these are the people who secured our border. Oh, the jolly border’s actually secured by the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea, haven’t they noticed? It’s a border where people have to come in either on a ship or in an aeroplane. It’s not like they’re running across the border. It’s not like we have to put up a big wall. They think they needed 10,000 more bureaucrats for that. What are they going to do? Stick them in the ocean? Stop the ships?

I mean, here, today, you don’t need a big complex Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. They were going to sort it out; they were going to do this; they were going to do that. Oh no, they don’t actually want to do that now, until 2024. And what’s in 2023? Oh, that would be an election. They don’t want to tell New Zealanders what’s in that RMA reform, because we know what they’re planning in that, and it’s is not about more development. It’s is not about getting more people into work. It’s not about growing our economy. It’s not about bringing more money into the country so that we can have more nurses, better hospitals, and so that we can get cancer drugs for our people. It is actually about shutting down development, shutting down our economy, shutting down people from having aspiration.

National has an alternative vision for New Zealand. We believe in ambition and we believe in people being able to do what they can do for themselves. And we’ll get results. We will move quickly to address the growing infrastructure deficit that Labour’s dithering has compounded. We’ll improve the key transport connections. We’ll all depend on getting around our cities. We won’t tell people how they’re allowed to go to work. We won’t tell them that they’re very naughty if they want to drive their own car. We won’t tell them that they have to wait for that light rail up Dominion Road that we’ve been waiting for for four years and still hasn’t occurred. We will, however, say to New Zealanders that we will back our New Zealanders, and we won’t say to our new migrant New Zealanders that we don’t want them because they’re not properly skilled. We will back our migrants and we will back our businesses.

When it comes to slashing red tape and backing Kiwis to take some risks and to innovate, we will welcome smart foreign investment and immigration so that our entrepreneurs have the capital and the talent they need to get things done. We know this: we back entrepreneurs well over ministries any day. We’ll invest heavily in science to give our farmers new tools to cut their emissions and meet their sustainability goals. We trust science. We trust technology. We trust our farmers. We’ll end the constant addition of new costs on businesses that drive up prices and lower productivity. Just think about what’s happening with electricity prices at the moment. We’ll eliminate the wasteful spending, let Kiwis keep more of their money, get them to be able to invest.

One of the great areas for investment is technology. This has enormous potential for us. But we’ve got a Government that wants to look backwards, wants to look at the way things were in either the 19th century or the 1970s. They don’t want to look to innovation. They don’t want to look to technology, apart from the fact, you understand, that they don’t understand anything of it. They’re threatened by it. What they don’t share is our vision for New Zealanders to have high-paid, highly skilled jobs that allow them to grow their own wealth and to keep more of it and to help their families.

Our emergency legislation on housing the Government has rejected. We said, “You want to get some housing built? Do what we did after Christchurch. Emergency housing, emergency powers. Get the planning rules sorted. Get it now, get it sorted, get houses built.”

Then have a look at hardship and what there is there. Their policies, in Labour, are always about welfare first; work second. Actually, one of the cruel things in the Budget is they’ve taken away prisoners’ ability to get work after they leave prison. That’s the shame. That’s the thing. So National does not grow dependency. We grow the economy. We grow New Zealanders, and we are ambitious for a better country, unlike that lot.

Over the last few weeks we’ve heard that the Leader of the Opposition has this habit of calling almost every document she happens upon a secret agenda—from a commissioned piece of work to something she finds on a website, to possibly even her own caucus minutes. I thought I’d get right in front of that claim for this Budget. Here is our agenda: good decent jobs—in fact, 221,000 people are projected to gain employment over the next four years. Unemployment is forecast to fall to 4.2 percent, lower than National ever got in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, when, apparently, they called our economy a rock star economy. Our agenda is an economy that is growing. Our strong recovery is expected to continue with annual average real GDP growth of 4.4 percent in 2023. That puts us back to pre-COVID levels, and, importantly, our agenda is to leave no one behind.

The changes we have made as a Government mean more than 100,000 families will be more than $175 per week better off, and child poverty will reduce. This is our agenda and I am proud of it. But the Leader of the Opposition in her rebuttal to the Budget shared what I can only describe as clearly a pre-scripted speech. That’s the most generous way that I can acknowledge that she clearly did not engage in the facts that were included in the Budget. The Leader of the Opposition talked about debt, and that completely ignores the fact that according to Treasury’s projection, our debt levels are forecast to be lower than they had previously been described. That is because of the decisions and the investment that we made.

And as if to make the point, the Leader of the Opposition decided to draw comparisons with Australia. Well, let’s do that, shall we? On real GDP, Australia’s four-year average is 2.9 percent; New Zealand’s is 3.5 percent. In terms of employment by 2024 not only are we currently lower, we are due to finish at 4.2 percent; they’re at 4.5 percent. Our operating balance is healthier and our net debt is lower—our net debt is lower.

I will tell members about my view on the idea of ambition and aspiration. Ours is not to be somebody else; ours is to carve our own path, and our own path has been successful. But I would also say it is time for us to look at debt in more than just fiscal terms. Decisions that we make, whether we choose to invest or whether we choose to cut, determine whether or not the next generation carries a social debt. Now, we saw the tendency of National Governments of old. The Budget in 1991 chose cuts. They chose user-pays and they left a burden of debt that generations have carried for decades. We are still paying for that decision.

From there I would’ve shared more rebuttal on the Leader of the Opposition’s speech, but once we got past roughly five minutes of describing the “Collins dictionary” definition of what a border is, I wasn’t left with very much, because, ultimately, I didn’t hear anything about how the Opposition would deal with those big challenges we have. What would they do about the housing crisis they left us? What would they do about child poverty? What would they do about climate change? They would do absolutely the same thing they did last time they were in office, which was nothing—absolutely nothing.

On climate change, yes, they went overseas and they signed New Zealand up to international targets, as they well should, but they never had a plan on achieving them. And now when they stand up in this House, all they tell us is we need to trust everyone in order to achieve them—trust every sector that’s involved—but they have shown a complete lack of trust in one of the most important things, and that is science. The science tells us that we cannot wait. When it comes to this issue we cannot wait and just hope, and that is a good message not only on climate change but on Opposition politics, I would say.

Yesterday, I want back to the Budget speech that our Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, gave in 2018. It was our first Budget at that time as a Government and our first Budget for Minister Robertson as the Minister of Finance, and the title of that Budget he gave was “Foundations for the Future”, and in it he said, “Budget 2018 lays the foundations for New Zealanders to have better lives in the decades to come. … We want an economy, an environment and a society which are sustainable, productive and inclusive. … This means caring for our environment as a core value, not as an after-thought. … We have to work smarter, build our skills and resilience, explore new innovations and adapt to change. … Our economy must be more inclusive, too. This means a society where everyone has an equal chance to fulfil their potential, to contribute, and to live meaningful, connected … and fulfilling lives. … we want New Zealand to be a place where everyone has a fair go,”

Mr Speaker, much has changed in the last four years since Grant Robertson gave that speech—you have not! The Leader of the Opposition has a few times, and the world most certainly has, and yet for all of that, the driving force, the motivation, and the focus of our Minister of Finance has remained. I want to pay tribute to Grant Robertson. He has one of the hardest jobs in this place—one of—but never have I questioned what motivates him, what brings him here every day. He is here for people. He is here because he believes that the economy is there to serve our people, and he’s here to make changes that will leave the next generation better off than the last. Thank you, Grant.

It was no accident that that Budget at that time was titled, “Foundations for the Future.” Our intent as a Government was to make sure that that Budget and every one thereafter built on the legacy of the last. We have never viewed Budgets in isolation, because we are not just here to govern. We are here to make progress. So in 2017 we began. We cancelled the tax cuts that the then National Government had planned. We created the most substantive redesign of support for low and middle income New Zealanders that this country has seen in decades. We introduced the now much-loved winter energy payment. We brought in the payment for children called Best Start. We increased the family tax credit, and, of course, we extended paid parental leave. It was a $5.5 billion package, and it represented change for New Zealand families, and it represented change for children in poverty. But when we introduced the child poverty legislation and we started working on our targets to halve child poverty over the next decade, it became clear to us that much more was required, and so we kept going.

In Budget 2019 we made what the Children’s Commissioner has called one of the most significant changes you can make for the long-term health and wellbeing of our children in poverty, and it was to index benefits to wages. Then COVID hit. Some Governments might have seen this as a cause for, as I’ve said, austerity or cuts, but we saw it as a time to invest in our people. We lifted main benefit rates by $25 a week—the first time we’ve seen a general lift in benefit rates in decades. The last National Government, of course, targeted solely beneficiaries with children. We also made changes to the in-work tax credit in recognition that it would be likely that individuals may lose some of their working hours and we did not want them to lose that tax credit as well.

But as the reports that we released just in the last week have shown, our child poverty indicators show that there is still more work to do. In New Zealand we currently have nine measures of child poverty. They are a mixture of relative income measures that tell us how well our children and whānau are doing relative to others. They also include material deprivation measures. They tell us whether or not families have the basics that they need. In the last two years we have seen improvement across all nine of those measures. We have already exceeded our three-year target on one of our measures: 43,300 fewer children are in poverty since 2017-18, when we factor in their income after housing costs. But there is still much more to do.

More than 200,000 children live in poverty in New Zealand, and it isn’t just a number. It means, for instance, that 20 percent of children are in households where food runs out sometimes or often. This rises to 30 percent when we look at Māori children and a devastating 46 percent for Pasifika children. Now, some might ask the question, and I believe I heard the question being asked while finance Minister, Grant Robertson, was outlining our plans in this Budget: can we afford to take the next step in addressing child poverty in this country when we are in the middle of recovering from COVID-19? My answer is simple: we cannot afford not to.

So today we lift main benefit rates by between $32 and $55 per adult in line with the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. And due to the urgency, we are beginning the increase on 1 July and completing them in April 2022. This is a major next step in our measures to address child poverty and inequality in New Zealand, and the reason for all of this work over the last four years is still quite simple: we must address need in this country. This is about the basics: the ability of someone to put food on the table, their ability to pay their power bill, or, as the Minister of Finance said, the basic need of just placing shoes on the feet of our children. We are targeting what we need to do in New Zealand with these decisions. They are the most basic of needs and it is the right thing to do.

This is also a bit of double duty, because we do it at a time when we need to maintain extra stimulus in the economy. We know that lifting the incomes of those who have the least discretionary income means we’ll see that effect on the economy. It will go to food, it will go to services, it will go towards the things our children need to thrive, and that will happen across the country, including in our local economies.

But there will be some who question whether the substantial changes we make today have gone too far, and I note from some of the interjections across the other side of the House that they are amongst those who would ask that question. To them I would answer with numbers: $315. With the changes we have announced today, that is still how much a job seeker will receive as their main benefit per week from April next year. No one can argue that we lack incentives to work in this country. We have those incentives. What we have been lacking is dignity, and that is what we are working to bring back today.

I would use another number, to the Opposition, and that is 30 years. That’s how long it has taken to get benefits back to the rates they were before the “mother of all Budgets”. Now, yes, we have made progress for families with children, but for those who are single or those who are couples with no dependants, it has taken us 30 long years. And I say to the Opposition: 20 percent. That is how much Treasury predicts that the number accessing a job seeker benefit and emergency benefits will fall over the forecast period. Finally, a last number: 33,000, the number of children that will be lifted out of poverty.

There are a number of other changes that we will make that will make a difference to children and families in this Budget. Of course, they include things like the training incentive allowance. It includes movement in childcare assistance to more low and middle income families and continuing investment in health and education. But we know job opportunities are critical too, and this is where once again our challenge becomes our opportunity.

We have a massive infrastructure deficit in this country. When we took office we saw it everywhere, be it public transport, classrooms, hospitals, or the lack of State housing. We continue to right that wrong today. Budget 2021 sees a 50 percent increase in the Government’s multi-year capital allowance to maintain momentum around job creation and to build critical infrastructure. If you want to see a graphic representation of what that means over the years, it looks a little like this [Holds up graph]—a significant increase in critical infrastructure, which is part of our recovery plan. It grows jobs, good jobs, up and down the country.

I do want to dwell on one particular infrastructure challenge we inherited, and it is housing. That is why we are pulling every lever that we have. We are building more public houses than any Government in decades. We are fully funding the 18,000 houses that we want to build, but also we’ve already delivered more than 7,600 public housing places. We have more building consents issued than at any other time in our history. We’ve closed tax loopholes. We’ve banned foreign buyers. We’ve extended the brightline test. We’ve introduced progressive homeownership. We’ve expanded support for first-home buyers. And meanwhile, one third of the 100,000 New Zealanders who have taken up the offer of free trades training are in the construction sector. They will pick up tools and work on the pipeline of infrastructure that we have created as a Government.

We’ve also brought in the healthy homes standard, supported insulation and home repair schemes. We’ve got rid of letting fees and limited rent increases to once per year. This House is well familiar with the $3.8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund to build the infrastructure we need to support new developments. Today we are ensuring that $350 million goes to greater partnerships with iwi to build houses on whenua Māori. And with Māori homeownership rates at a devastating 30 percent, these are exactly the partnerships we need.

The third long-term challenge that I want to address today is the issue of climate change. We’ve already seen the investment and the announcements we’ve made around decarbonisation of the public sector. We’re also working with industry, particularly agriculture, with $37 million going into integrated farm planning systems, $24 million into greenhouse gas mitigation research, and you have already heard, of course, the Minister of Finance make that really important signal that we will be hypothecating emissions trading scheme revenue into climate mitigation in the future, not to mention the quadrupling, of course, of Minister James Shaw’s established Green Investment Fund. That will continue to invest in green climate solutions.

The final and most present challenge, the issue of COVID-19. It has highlighted how critical it is that we have strong health services, but there is no question that people who work in health are exceptional, but they too know that our health system can and should be better. Our health system, for instance, is failing Māori. In this Budget we start the largest health reforms we have seen in this country in decades as we establish Health New Zealand and the Māori Health Authority. In total, a 45 percent increase in health funding when you compare this Budget to when we took office in 2017.

But the reason we can do all of this, the reason we are securing our recovery today, is because of the decisions we have made every day since 2018. It is because we have chosen to invest, to back our small businesses and our employers, to support vocational training and education, to invest in significant infrastructure. That is why we have unemployment rates that are half of what were estimated. It’s why we’re doing so well compared to the rest of the world and Australia. And in response to COVID-19 we banded together. Now we ask that we continue to do that as a nation as we take our next challenges. I am proud of this Budget. It will leave a legacy for the next generation and start to do undo the harm of the last.

Whakarongo ki te tangi a te manu o te taiao, nāna te tangi kia tuituia tātou ki te ao mārama. Tuia ki runga, tuia ki raro, tuia ki roto, tuia ki waho. Ka rongo te pō, ka rongo te ao. Tuia te whare e tū iho nei ki ngā muka here o te motu e!

Tēnā tātou e te Whare me ngā iho kōrero o ngā tōpito whenua o Aotearoa whānui. Tuia te muka here i huaina mai i te Tiriti o Waitangi, ko te muka o te pono e ōati ana e ngā mātua tūpuna kia mahi tahi tātou i roto i te ngākau pono, te mahi ngātahi hei oranga mō te whenua me ngā tāngata o te whenua i te Tiriti.

Me mihi ka tika ki a koutou ngā Minitā, ngā mema Pāremata. Āe, ko koe tērā, te Māngai o te Whare. Ki a ia hoki te Minita o te Pūtea tae noa ki a ia e te hoa, te Pirīmia. Tēnā koutou, otirā, tēnā tātou e te herenga Whare.

[I listen to the call of the bird of nature, the bird that binds us to our natural world. Bind us to our world above, our world below, our world within, our world outside. Let us feel the presence of those who have gone to the long night, let us feel the presence of those of the world of the living. Bind everyone of this country to this House!

Greetings to all in this House, the representatives of the many regions of New Zealand. Bind us to the Treaty of Waitangi, the truth that was honoured and pledged by our ancestors so that we could work together with integrity, so that we may work as one for the betterment of all of the people of this country under the Treaty.

It is only right that I acknowledge the Ministers and members of Parliament. Yes, that includes you, Mr Speaker. I would also like to acknowledge the Minister of Finance and my colleague, the Prime Minister. Greetings one and all in this House.]

When the Green Party and the Labour Party entered our cooperation agreement in November, we both knew we were building on the relationship we forged last term. It was important that the work we had started together continued together for our people and for our planet. We also promised to keep our independent voice for our longstanding kaupapa: our Green voice. And so, with our independent voice, I speak for the Green Party to say we will vote for this Budget. We don’t have to—we have that choice—but we will because right now there is too much at stake. Our communities and the natural world that sustain us need our Green voices in this House and in this Government so that we go further and faster.

This Budget takes important steps in the right direction. Raising core benefits will make a much-needed difference to the lives of the people in our communities who need it the most. People are struggling and they cannot wait. We welcome the Government taking urgent action to raise benefits in July and not waiting until next April. I want to mihi to all the people who have pushed for liveable incomes. Today, we can see that the Government is listening. And I want to acknowledge those who may say that what is in this Budget is not yet enough. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group gave the Government a plan last term, and today we see some of that plan being put into action. In households with children, this Budget goes beyond the benefit increases recommended by the advisory group, and we need to go further and faster for everyone. We also welcome the increases to student allowances and living costs. Twenty-five dollars a week can go a long way when you’re a student. We welcome the Government’s move to bring back the training incentive allowance, which is so important for supporting our rangatahi to access education and opportunities, which, of course, National cut.

It will take time to turn around from decades of Governments treating houses as commodities instead of seeing a home as a human right, but we will do that. Our rivers will take time to heal from decades of dirty dairying, but that process has begun. Our climate is on the edge, and here in the Green Party we are doing everything we can to pull it back from the edge. We will not sit by. We will always push for more. I am talking about economic transformation. We are still living within a world view where too many people say we need a balanced Budget. But how do we balance sick kids or kids walking to school in the rain with no jacket? What is the balance for the last remaining 63 Māui dolphins? How do we balance an existential threat like climate change? The economy is a way we choose to organise who gets what. Our response to COVID-19 showed us what we can achieve to keep people safe when we make bold choices. When we support each other, we can achieve great things.

The choice the Government has made today, to lift the incomes of the people who need it the most, is a choice we welcome and have long fought for. It will make an important difference for food on the table and for heating through the winter. Raising incomes for those who need it the most benefits us all. It makes our communities fairer and happier, and it improves people’s quality of life. I continually hear that one of the most important things we can do to increase community and whānau safety and wellbeing is make sure people have enough money. Raising incomes is good for people’s mental health. It means not having to make the choice between food and power. It means having a bit left over to save or to celebrate birthdays. Raising incomes is the kind of fiscal stimulus the Greens have been calling for since the pandemic struck. And it helps our local businesses because people spend their incomes locally.

This Budget includes $132 million going into initiatives to help communities lead whānau-centred holistic services focused on preventing family violence and sexual violence from happening in the first place, and also helping those using violence to stop. I believe that it’s Government’s role to enable our communities to not just meet the need of the problems we face as whānau and as a country but to strengthen our resilience, protective skills, and knowledge, to have enduring solutions for generations to come. We do this by supporting community-led whānau-centred programmes and services to provide sustained and holistic support, built around families and whānau. We are extending early support to help people stop using violence. We will ensure that Māori leadership, Te Ao Māori thinking, and the inclusive Te Tiriti framework are at the heart of our approach, to the benefit of everyone. We will support iwi and community leadership to design their own responses to family violence and sexual violence. We will ensure that families and whānau get the help they need, when they need it, how they need it, from people they know and trust. I acknowledge the work of Jan Logie who began this kaupapa.

Our Government has declared a climate change emergency and today’s Budget takes us a step closer towards confronting that emergency at the scale it needs. The Greens’ longstanding policy is that the revenue from polluting companies should be used to fund a just transition to a low emissions economy. The Minister of Finance has said he plans to ring-fence and recycle the revenue from the emissions trading scheme so it can fund urgent action on climate change. That is hundreds of millions of dollars every year for climate action, guaranteed until we hit net zero emissions: billions over time. That truly is a response that can meet the scale of the challenge.

Also in this Budget, we have $300 million for the Green Investment Fund: more clean energy to replace fossil fuels; $1.3 billion for rail; more good green jobs. We have over $50 million to roll out the Clean Car Standard and $302 million for new incentives for electric cars—work that the Hon Julie Anne Genter began last term.

We have done more to fight the climate crisis in the last 3½ years than the combined efforts of Governments over the last 3½ decades. Is it enough? No. There will always be more to do, which is why, when we get the Climate Change Commission’s final advice at the end of this month, we will immediately start putting the detail into an emissions reduction plan for every sector of our economy. There is a huge effort right across the Government to rise to the challenge of climate change, and I would like to quote the Minister for Climate Change: “Every Minister is a climate change Minister now.”—the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Energy and Resources, the Minister of Transport, the Minister for Economic and Regional Development, the housing Ministers, the Minister of Finance, and more. That is the zero carbon Act working, which the whole of Parliament passed unanimously.

We know what needs to happen to confront the climate crisis. The science tells us what we need to do. Our Pasifika relations tell us as they stand on the beach, watching the waves lap higher and higher. Tens of thousands of rangatahi and tamariki have marched in the streets to tell us. Next year’s Budget must have a lot more funding for climate action, and I’m not just saying that on behalf of the Green Party; I am saying that on behalf of Papatūānuku and on behalf of the people who will walk in our footsteps long after we are gone.

Finally, in this Budget, we have action to protect our taonga kauri trees from kauri dieback. When I go home—to my real home in Hokianga—I am reminded of the magnificence of our kauri and I’m reminded of the urgency of taking action to save them. The funding in this Budget to protect our kauri will help stop the spread of kauri dieback while work continues to find a cure.

Year after year, you will find the Green Party saying that warm, dry homes are the foundation of a decent life that everyone has a right to. We can talk about cost-benefit ratios, we can say it’s 1:4—or 1:6 if there are tamariki or kaumātua in the home—but, actually, this is one of those things where economics are instinctive. Anyone who has ever gone home to a cold, damp home knows it is bad, and anyone who has gone home to a warm, dry home knows it is good. We’ve worked with Labour Governments and we have worked with National Governments, and today there are more than 400,000 homes that are warmer and drier than they used to be.

Many years ago when the Green Party convinced the Government to start supporting people to insulate their homes, our co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons said, “I don’t believe any Government is going to cancel this programme because I think it is going to be a very big success.” Jeanette was right, although National did start letting the funding run out last time they were in power—but then we changed the Government, and here we are. Today, there is $120 million in this Budget for Warmer Kiwi Homes—that’s going to fundamentally improve the lives of more than 47,000 households—an additional $30 million for the Healthy Homes Initiatives run by DHBs, and more homes overall. This Government is building more State homes than any Government has done since I was a child.

Last year, the Green Party campaigned on letting Kāinga Ora borrow more so it could build more homes for our people, and this Budget does that, relaxing the borrowing limit by $2 billion, and $380 million to support by Māori, for Māori housing, plus $350 million for the infrastructure to support those homes. We know what each one of those homes means to the whānau who live there.

We have $3 million in this Budget for the Election Access Fund. This will increase access to democracy for people with disabilities. It came from a Green Party member’s bill drafted by Mojo Mathers and passed by Chlöe Swarbrick.

The $1.1 billion Jobs for Nature package the Greens won in last year’s Budget is still rolling out, and it is continuing to fund vital, essential projects throughout the motu. We won significant increases to the conservation budget last term, and they are continuing to have a positive effect on this Budget today. We have a biodiversity crisis in Aotearoa, so nature still needs our help. Later this year, we will have the first national policy statement on indigenous biodiversity, in time for next year’s Budget, to properly address the biodiversity crisis in Aotearoa.

The Green Party will vote for this Budget because it does do a lot to make life better for the people in our communities who need it the most. It takes important steps to embrace clean energy and clean transport and confront the climate crisis. It puts hundreds of millions of dollars into the prevention of family violence and sexual violence. This Budget begins to deliver on many of the shared commitments in our cooperation agreement with Labour. Today, the Government is taking steps in the right direction for Aotearoa. They are steps that are big enough for the Green Party to choose to walk alongside, because we get further and we get there faster when we walk together. Kia ora tātou katoa.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Each year, people try to name the Budget. I suspect that this one will be named in hindsight, several years hence, as the “la-la Budget”. The “la-la Budget” because the Government was in la-la land unaware of the circumstances surrounding it when it brought this Budget down. This Government has benefited from a tail wind like no other. We have, at this time, record low interest rates, an official cash rate of 0.25 percent. We have terms of trade, export prices, a milk price, as high as they’ll ever be. And yet, we are taking on Government debt at a rate of $100 billion, to the point where New Zealand’s average household will have $95,000 in Government debt to their name. That is the background. And all of those things that the Government has taken for granted are things that sooner or later will reverse. Nobody believes we’ll have an official cash rate of 0.25 percent, cheap Government borrowing funded by the Reserve Bank’s money printing programme, or mortgage rates at 2 percent, for ever. The cost of borrowing will increase, and the debt that this Government has taken on will seem very expensive when people look back at this Budget. Nobody believes terms of trade can stay high forever. They always go up and go down, and that boost will be gone.

But there’s another boost this Government’s had that they have taken the credit for and banked but they haven’t properly allowed for when they’ve assessed the situation around them, and that is COVID-19. So far, New Zealand has had the most extraordinary natural advantages when it comes to fighting a pandemic. We are isolated, we are young, we’re spread out, we’re First World, and we have a population that is so civilised that if the Prime Minister asks nicely, they’ll actually stay home for seven weeks. No other country went into a pandemic with that sort of advantage. I actually asked the Minister for COVID-19 Response if he could name one, and he couldn’t. But unfortunately for this country and this Government and this Budget, those natural advantages will erode as COVID-19 changes.

Four mega-trends underlie COVID at this point: new vaccines that are going to change the amount of risk people are prepared to take around the world, variants of the virus that may turn out to be vaccine-busters, then there’s new technologies for testing and tracing that make it easier for countries to open up, and finally, fatigue with COVID-19 measures. Public balance sheets, including ours, are fatigued. People, in general, just don’t feel like going home for five weeks and that learning about sourdough would be quite as appealing this time, let alone the fact that their private balance sheets are also stressed from last time. Terms of trade, interest rates, the COVID response—all of it is going to get harder, and this Government will have used a golden opportunity to rebuild a New Zealand we could all be proud of. But instead, we’ll have the same old policies, throwing more money at the problems we had, and the only change is—the problems are still there—the next generation gets a lot more debt with higher interest rates. That is why this Budget should be described as the “la-la Budget”, and the Government’s made no acknowledgment of that.

They’ve actually tried to claim the credit, saying that somehow it’s all them. Well, actually, even the forecasts that the Treasury have given them are absolutely heroic. You open up the Treasury documents at 2 o’clock today when they’re released to the world. You know, they’re saying that we’re going to have 4.4 percent economic growth and 4.4 percent unemployment in 2023. Really? When we consider what the Government is doing to people who are actually trying to grow businesses, provide for their customers, make a return on their capital, employ people—fair pay agreements, restrictions on oil and gas exploration, restrictions on mining, restrictions on farming, new public holidays, extra sick leave, a minimum wage that’s increasing at about 6 percent a year faster than any firm’s productivity. And this Government thinks that somehow the economy is going to be growing at 4.4 percent in a couple of years’ time? I don’t think so. Even the forecasts that the Government has are dire—$95,000 of debt for every household. But once you consider the direction of travel and the restrictions this Government is placing on people doing business and creating wealth, those assumptions—such as the economy growing at 4.4 percent and unemployment also being 4.4 percent in a couple of years’ time—are absolutely heroic. The reality is going to be much, much worse.

So what should the Government have done? Well, I’ll give you a couple of examples of what it shouldn’t have done. I’m always astonished to hear when Marama Davidson is allowed by her party to give a speech, and part of me wishes that they’d do it more often. She actually said—I couldn’t believe my ears. Marama Davidson said that the problem is too many people are saying Budgets should be balanced. I mean, what is the acceptable level of people wanting a balanced Budget in Marama Davidson’s world? You have to ask yourself. She seems to believe that somehow the Government can just continue to print money, endlessly hand-over-fist borrow. This is a party that’s supposed to care about kids. Borrowing money like that is a form of fiscal child abuse, because it’s the next generation that are going to pay for it.

Then I heard Grant Robertson get up. This is the guy—and we’ll come to this later. This is the guy whose example of economic development is to have a Government-sponsored train factory in Dunedin. I mean, what’s the theme song for this Budget? Something from the 1970s, is it going to be Led Zeppelin—Mr Speaker, you might know, did they do Dazed and Confused? He said they did. That should be the theme song for this Government’s Budget, because they want to take us back to the 1970s. Their idea of economic growth is a train factory sponsored by the Government and Dunedin. Even in Pyongyang, they are not taking on policies like that.

Then Grant Robertson came along and he said, “We’re raising Budgets because it’s the right thing to do. It’s morally the right thing to do. We’re going to reverse what Ruth Richardson’s Budget did in 1991.” And I thought, “I wonder if Grant Robertson has ever met Helen Clark.”, because I seem to remember—I was a bit younger, I was at school at the time, but I’m pretty sure she was the Prime Minister for nine years with the same level of benefits. Then the National Government a few years ago—I was a bit older by now, I’d graduated to Parliament at this point—raised benefits from Helen Clark’s levels. And Grant Robertson comes along and says he’s doing it because it’s the right thing to do. I’m pretty sure he was advising Helen Clark. Clearly, she didn’t listen to him, and I wish these Treasury officials wouldn’t either. Then Grant Robertson said he’s got to reverse what happened in 1991. Does he know any history? The reason there were Budget cuts in 1991 is because the country was broke, and that’s where this Budget is taking us back to.

The Treasury forecasts, the optimistic forecasts, say that spending on jobseeker support and emergency benefits is going to go up from $1.8 billion a year pre-COVID to $3.8 billion every year post-COVID. Let’s just think about that for a moment. This is when we have heroic assumptions that unemployment is going to be less than 5 percent or thereabouts every year. We’re going to be spending $3.8 billion on jobseeker support and emergency benefits each and every year. Now, is it really believable that you’re not going to have a few more work-shy people, where $55 in a remote part of New Zealand is actually a lot of money, and it’s going to be harder for employers to get people to come to work and use their skills. That’s how we got into trouble under Holyoake, and Kirk, and Muldoon. That’s the unsustainable model that necessitated the 1991 Budget, and this Government, myopically, is taking us back to it, because they don’t know their own history, they don’t remember Helen Clark’s Government, they don’t remember what she knew. We now have a much more radical Government than we had under Helen Clark.

But let’s talk a little bit about what we could have done—actually, let’s talk about a few more things we shouldn’t have done. I think there’s one part of this Budget that is an absolute disgrace, and that is the $200 million for Pharmac—for two reasons. Number one, I suspect, when people drill down into the detail, they’re going to find a lot of it is repurposed money, because Pharmac doesn’t have a budget; the DHBs decide what they will put into Pharmac. And, actually, I suspect the amount of money that Pharmac has in the pharmaceutical budget won’t increase by that much. But even if the Government is correct, why on earth would we put $200 million in a Budget for Pharmac? The right thing to do, the mature thing to do, that a Government that truly cared about those people suffering and in need of pharmaceuticals would have done, is they would have actually put funding in the Pharmac review.

So here’s the situation with pharmaceuticals. This Government won’t put funding in the Pharmac review. And what does that mean? It means that, when we’ve got a kid with Crohn’s and colitis, the Government will fund them to have operation after operation, slowly removing their intestines, making them live the rest of the life with a colostomy bag, but they won’t consider whether it might have been better to fund Ustekinumab. Pharmac is not allowed to consider those sorts of opportunity costs under the current model, and they’ve kept Pharmac funding out of the Pharmac review, so that we can wait “a few more sleeps”, as the finance Minister loves to gleefully say, before people find out if their medicines are funded in the political theatre of this Government’s Budget. That is an absolute disgrace.

Let’s say they’re spending $200 million on pharmaceuticals, they’re spending $486 million on restructuring the healthcare system—nothing that’s going to affect the quality of care that patients get—on changing the plumbing and wiring of the healthcare funding. Now, in every other sane world, restructuring saves money. Only under this Government does a restructure cost half a billion dollars. That’s what we’re dealing with.

And it’s no better in education. We had a report two years ago from a guy called Bali Haque called Our Schooling Futures, and it said we are going to take the control away from parent-elected boards of trustees and put new entities called “hubs” in charge of your child’s education—“Parents, stay at the gate.” And people up and down this country came out and protested and were outraged. Gary Hawke, Emeritus Professor of Economics from Victoria, pointed out that they were awfully like education service centres that had existed before and failed in the early 1990s. I was astonished to read the Government’s proposal that they they’re bringing back the hubs, and they’re going to be called Education Service Agencies. What an extraordinary thing. This Government is so myopic it’s bringing back a failed policy of the 1990s and telling the parents of this country, “Don’t bother getting elected to your board of trustees and take an interest in your kids’ education. Stay at the gate.”

The biggest beneficiaries of this policy are going to be the private school operators of New Zealand, because those who have money will get out, and those that don’t will be left with schools run by diktat by the neo Education Service Agencies that are a failed model from before. That is the standards that we’re faced with—nothing about improving the quality of principals and teachers, and teaching, and ensuring that teachers are experts in their subject matter, passing real information on to the next generation of students so that they can succeed in the 21st century. No, this Government is focused, in health and education, on restructuring the bureaucracy.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the trains. This is a 1970s union fantasy that men—and it will be men; I can guarantee it—will be working away with hot steel and sledgehammers, banging together locomotives and wagons in a big warehouse in Dunedin. This is this Government’s idea of innovation! And it might be OK if people were actually going to use the trains, but has anyone heard of that initiative where thousands of people go up and down and commute between Hamilton and Auckland every year, every day? Actually, every year is about how often. Thousands of people a day are on the train between Hamilton and Auckland commuting to the future! Has anyone heard about those thousands of people? No, I haven’t either. Even John Campbell’s not taking that train any more.

Here is what the Government could have done and should have done, because the ACT Party is not only leading the Opposition, we are leading the proposition. We are the party that has put forward an alternative budget, showing what a responsible Government could do to look into our future and confront our challenges, solving the problems that New Zealand faces. And, under this budget, people whose main way of getting money is a concept called working, unbeknownst to anybody on the Labour Government—30 percent of Labour MPs used to be union organisers by the way. People whose main way of getting money is working, those people, working—yes, Barbara Kuriger is making eyes at me; yes, Barbara, working—get no relief. Under the ACT Party’s alternative budget, middle New Zealand, those who are being squeezed with rising electricity prices, rising rents, rising food prices, the people who know when they see reports of no inflation that that’s absolute BS, the people that need some relief, will get a 17.5 percent tax rate all the way up to $70,000. We’re going to cut that middle income tax rate from 30 percent down to 17.5 percent. And for middle income families who work for a living, that means you get $1,200 to $2,100 a year more in your pocket through working. That is the ACT Party idea of an alternative budget.

But we’re also going to reduce wasteful expenditure, stop handing out money to groups of voters that the Government thought it could curry favour with, and actually do something—here’s radical—for the next generation, the silent people, the ones that can’t vote in this election or for this Budget, but the ones that are going to be lumbered with the debt as interest rates rise and borrowing $100 billion, retrospectively, didn’t seem so smart. We can show how you balance the Budget by 2025, not never-never land or la-la land where this Government made its Budget.

Then there is a whole lot of initiatives to make it easier to do business. No fair-pay agreements. We allow oil and gas exploration. We allow mining. We allow people to develop their property. We fund infrastructure with comprehensive partnerships over 30 years between the central government and every city or region so that infrastructure actually gets built and people can afford a place of their own that’s connected to opportunity, by which I mean jobs and education. Those are the initiatives that a responsible Government would take, and then we’d implement our COVID 2.0 plan so that we can intelligently get out of this mess. The ACT Party would follow Taiwan, establish a central epidemic command centre, augment our COVID response with actual technology so we can test and trace like the best, and safely reconnect with this increasingly complex COVID world in a way that is sustainable, not just locking up, locking down, and hoping.

That would be a budget for the battlers, a budget for those people who wake up, make the kids’ lunches, go to work, pick them up from school, take them to practice, put them down to do their homework, and get up and do it again the next day—the people that pay the bills and actually make this country a great place to live. That is what this Budget is for, but sadly we do not have a Government at the moment that is this connected with reality. We have a Government dominated by former union organisers that is pursuing an agenda that is alien and unknown to the overwhelming majority of New Zealand. But unfortunately the tailwinds they’ve taken for granted are going to run out and eventually turn against them, and at that time, with rising interest rates and terms of trade not being as good as they have been, a whole lot of debt and no real preparation for COVID or raising productivity or skills or getting infrastructure and homes built, people will look back and ask “What was this Government up to?” They’ll say, “This Government was in la-la land. We wish we’d had ACT earlier.” Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Tēnā koe e te Pika, tēnā tātou e te Whare, tēnā koutou katoa e te iwi.

[Greetings, Mr Speaker, greetings to those in the House, greetings to one and all.]

I want to acknowledge the Government on the delivery of their Budget today. In particular, I acknowledge my whanaunga the Māori Ministers, who have secured some important funding decisions for our people. There is a lot to like in this Budget, particularly in relation to targeting Māori housing packages and the long overdue increase in baseline benefits. There are new initiatives that will make a real difference to the lives of tangata whenua. We give credit where credit is due.

Engari—but—let me contextualise for you what Budget day means to us. At the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840, my ancestors, and many others from around the motu, consented to Kāwanatanga and the establishment of this Parliament. But they also affirmed our existing rangatiratanga. As article 2 explicitly states, the Crown guaranteed to Māori the undisturbed possessions over our land, our rivers, our seas, our forests, our traditions, and practices—our people.

This covenant envisioned the relationship of equals, a partnership that would enrich Aotearoa. Rangatiratanga and Kāwanatanga must be working together based on a relationship of respect, partnership, and goodwill for the betterment of people, tangata whenua and tangata Tiriti. The only way this nation can work is where tangata whenua assert our right to tino rangatiratanga, our self-determination, our governance, and our self-sufficiency.

A new Aotearoa is on the rise. There is an unapologetic generation of tangata whenua who recognise that being forced to work within the system no longer suits our struggle for mana motuhake. That is what we must do—dismantle the system and create our own. Tangata whenua and tangata Tiriti living and working together in peace is the Aotearoa that Te Paati Māori is fighting for.

Our people sent us here to be the unapologetic voice for our tino rangatiratanga as tangata whenua: to rebalance the scales of power in Aotearoa and realise the partnership that was envisaged by our ancestors, tangata whenua and tangata Tiriti in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. You might be wondering, Mr Speaker, what on earth Te Tiriti o Waitangi has to do with the Budget. I can certainly hear that from my colleagues either side of me, and they have no idea, so let me enlighten you.

The covenant that gave consent to all Pākehā to live in Aotearoa is, and will always be, Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The realisation of our tangata whenua rights under the covenant will always be our benchmark. Te Tiriti o Waitangi demands that tangata whenua secure 50 percent of the resources and decision-making power. Equality demands that tangata whenua secure 16 percent of all the resources and decision-making power. Equity demands the tangata whenua secure 25 percent of the lion’s share. On every level, of those benchmark indicators, we fall short. One week of COVID subsidies to businesses added up to more than the total sum of Treaty settlements over 30 years. One year of corrections funding adds up to more than the total sum of Treaty settlements over 30 years. This is a disgrace.

I mentioned in my maiden speech about how we will no longer accept that the State continues to fund itself every year to steal more of our babies, to lock up more of our people, to keep our people sick, poor, and homeless. The point is that more money is not always the answer. Ultimately, we seek for our people to be at the decision-making table, with regard to where the resources are allocated, rather than being the recipient of. These are our rights under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Āperahama Taonui prophesised: “He taniwha kei te hāere mai. Ko ōna niho he hiriwā me te kōura. Ko tōna kai? He whenua. Kaua e mataku ki ōna niho hiriwā me te kōura, engari kaua e tukua te hiriwā me te kōura hei atuatanga mōu.”

[“There is a taniwha on its way, with teeth of silver and gold. What does it crave? It craves land. Do not fear the teeth of silver and gold, just do not allow it to become your God.”]

The key is not to allow ourselves to become intoxicated by the euphoria of the million-dollar signs, and look at the gains from a perspective of proportionality. Last year, Vote Māori received 0.3 percent of the entire operating Budget. This Budget announcement sees an increase to 0.37 percent going to Māori—a whopping 0.07 percent increase. It appears as though this Government has an obsession with putting zeroes and a decimal point in front of what they give Māori. Funding for Māori programmes will not work if those programmes are not conceptualised, designed, managed, and governed by Māori. Funding for Māori programmes will not work—mā te Māori ki te Māori mō te Māori e ai ki te Māori; by Māori to Māori, for Māori, according to Māori is the only way. This is what we mean when we talk about mana motuhake. Let us not confuse the oranga of our people with money and dollar signs or silver and gold; mana motuhake means we make our decisions, and receive our resource equally, because that is our Treaty right.

The Māori Health Authority is an important step—a start—but there is so much more to do. This Budget announced $240 million over four years, which also equates to 0.3 percent of the total health budget. There goes that 0.3 percent again. We have underfunded primary healthcare, underfunded dental care, ambulance services have had to beg for funding every year to stay operating, and the Government refuses to fund lifesaving cancer drugs that are funded in comparative countries. Far too many people simply can’t afford to go to their GP, let alone the dentist.

Just last week, we had people suffering from a life-threatening cancer on the steps of Parliament in the pouring rain, calling for Pharmac funding to be doubled to fund medicines that could save and extend their lives. The announcement today didn’t get anywhere near that. Recommendations to lower cancer screening ages for Māori have fallen on deaf ears. We need to ensure we have a health system that actually works in keeping our people well and protecting our whakapapa as tangata whenua. I am also perplexed as to why Whānau Ora received no additional funding, given it has the Minister on record telling us that it had the highest-performing portfolio in Government.

The disparities and inequities in income for Māori are disgraceful and are reaching new levels. Pākehā have a net worth almost five times higher than Māori, while non-Māori have a 13 percent higher median age. What we are seeing is the result of decades of under-investment, deregulation, and the slashing of the social security system. We welcome the increase to baseline benefit levels and the reinstatement of the Training Incentive Allowance. These have been long fought for by the grassroots. Since 1986, the number of Māori forced to rent has increased by 88.3 percent—70 percent of Māori cannot afford a home and are living in rentals. One third of Māori live in houses considered damp and overcrowded. Māori make up 50 percent of the waiting list for social housing.

Because I only get 10 minutes, I am going to go straight to the last page, the most important part of my speech. It is evident that we are already delivering real change, and that the Māori across this House, each coming from their own position and using their own platforms—we can succeed. Te Paati Māori will continue to play a constructive role in both working alongside this Government and holding them to account. Sitting on the cross-benches, we will oppose when our people’s interests are at stake, and we will support when support is warranted.

Today, I call on the Government to continue adopting policies from our manifesto. In only six months, we have already seen so many Te Paati Māori policies adopted: the purchase of Ihumātao; the removal of barriers to establishing Māori wards, with the procurement of 5 percent, which is still way off our 25 percent; the replacement of the Oranga Tamariki chief executive with a Māori leader; investigations into our broken criminal justice system; the public holiday recognition for Matariki; te reo Māori and Māori history in schools; new investment in kōhanga reo and Whānau Ora; ratings reform for whenua Māori; and, of course, as already mentioned, the Māori Health Authority and the Māori housing package. This is what we have achieved in Opposition in six months, and I can’t wait to see what we can achieve in the next Budget. Nō reira e hika mā, tēnā tātou.

[Finally, thank you one and all.]

I’m going to call the Hon David Parker in a second, but I want to thank the member Rawiri Waititi for drawing my attention to the fact that he was reading his speech. I want to make it clear, going forward—normally, there’s some flexibility around the first day of a Budget debate vis-à-vis reading speeches, but going forward, the rules on reading speeches will be enforced, and I’m pleased that we have the whips, at least, from the major parties—and I’m sure Ms Davidson will pass that on to—and, of course, the ACT Party.

💬 Hon Member: Oh!

Well, I could—there’s some re-definition going on there, but anyway, the member will take it, all right? But I am going to enforce those rules going forward.

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

This debate is adjourned and set down for resumption next sitting day.