Appropriation (2021/22 Estimates) Bill, Maritime Transport (MARPOL Annex VI) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Maritime Transport (MARPOL Annex VI) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 16 September 2021 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196(1)(b) and (c).

If I can just take a couple of moments to speak to the referral motion and why it is that the Government is seeking from the House a shortened report-back date and the other conditions that I have just outlined on this piece of legislation. The driving reason is that we are very keen to ensure that New Zealand can accede to MARPOL Annex VI in early 2022 in line with international commitments that we have made to ensure that New Zealand can benefit from the reduced air pollution that will come from ascension to the treaty and, very importantly, to ensure that New Zealand can assume a credible role in negotiations at the international maritime organisation that will be beginning to occur from that time onwards. Our ability to be able to stand up and say that we have acceded to MARPOL Annex VI is an important part of New Zealand’s ability to engage in a meaningful way in that process.

Once a bill has passed through Parliament, it will take about three months until the instrument of ascension is deposited for Annex VI for MARPOL to come into force in New Zealand. Therefore, to meet that deadline of around about February 2022, we do need to deposit the instrument of ascension before the end of this year. So, working back, that means that a select committee report-back date by September allows us to have the bill passed at around about that time and for public consultation to carry on.

I do note, in respect of this piece of legislation, that there has been extensive public consultation over a number of years and that the select committee consideration of the bill occurred between February and June 2020. It received a small number of submissions from interested parties, but the select committee unanimously reported back to the House and recommended that we do proceed with this piece of legislation. So it’s a non-controversial piece of legislation that there is support around the House for. I do note that the proposed report-back date still does allow 3½ months for the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to examine the legislation and take submissions, but it is a reduced report-back date for the reasons that I have outlined previously.

So, in conclusion, given the extensive public consultation that has occurred, given the unanimous nature of the select committee’s examination of the international treaty that this piece of legislation springs from, and given the important need for New Zealand to accede to the treaty by the beginning of next year, I think that the reasons for a shortened report-back date are sound and I look forward to the House’s agreement to that proposal.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Look, National doesn’t support the referral motion and it’s very simple: because we’re not following due process and there’s no really compelling justification for it. The first thing that the Minister’s talked about is that, you know, we’ve got a requirement under MARPOL legislation to get it there on time. Well, the question is: why didn’t you bring it to the House earlier? If you thought it was that important, why hasn’t it been done earlier? It just feels lazy, shambolic—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Not me.

—sorry, why didn’t the Minister bring it to the House earlier so we could actually discuss it in time, if that’s the case? I thought James Shaw made a very articulate speech last night and he talked about the urgency around climate change. But we declared a climate emergency; it could have been done the very next day. This legislation should have been done under urgency if we thought it was that important as a result.

So we oppose it because now this is the 34th bill that’s been coming to this House since this Government came to power that’s been under four months in terms of time for us to go through the process, and I think that’s the key issue. So we don’t think there’s an adequate reason. We just think it’s sloppy and lazy and shambolic as to why it’s come here so late. If we believe it’s so fundamental, then why wasn’t it done under urgency? It’s just becoming a practice and a habit that we don’t, fundamentally, think is good for debate in this House.

I have to say, we know the key issue with this Government is, fundamentally, implementation. We know execution is their enemy. Now this Minister’s probably better than the one that delivered the oil and gas ban, but we now deliver an oil and gas ban, we don’t follow through on execution, we import Indonesian coal, and our emissions are up. So we really want to make sure that when we go into understanding—you know, we need to be reassured, given that track record, given this thing is being done with a truncated process, that we actually do answer some specific questions like: what fuel will be available in New Zealand—low sulphur fuel? Who will it be available for? Where will it be available and in what bunker port?

So I think we need time from the officials to understand some of those questions and, again, we see no justification and, again, we’re going against due process. We can’t work out why we’re doing it this way.

The member Christopher Luxon has raised some valid justifications as to why a shortened or truncated period at select committee is unacceptable. I’ve had advice today from stakeholders that this is a rush to a low sulphur fuel. The case has been made last night that actually it’s not a rush, because the treaty was signed some time in the 1990s. However, we’re talking about New Zealand here, a couple of dozen ships, many which rely on the fuel that’s currently available and manufactured by the refining company in New Zealand, and will have no choice but to switch to—essentially—diesel, at two to three times the price. So at a time when the supply chains are under pressure, where our manufacturers and importers are under pressure, and there’s a risk of all of those costs passing through into the economy—we’re talking about transport bulk cement and bulk solvents and other chemicals around New Zealand, as well as transporting containers and other goods up to the Pacific Islands. All of these shipping companies will be at risk of increased cost pressures that flow through to the wider economy.

Now, it’s clear that New Zealand is about to face a very uncertain energy future. Many of this Government’s policies have been announced on the hoof, potentially by mistake, later backside-covering exercises involving working groups to try to justify decisions taken on the hoof. It seems unreasonable—given all of the risks raised by the shipping industry, by the fuel suppliers, by the refinery, even by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that pointed out New Zealand is woefully short of the strategic petroleum reserves that the IEA requires its member countries to have, those 90 days of storage that New Zealand doesn’t have—that all we are currently holding are IOUs that we might go begging around the world for a few ships to come and save us in the event that we face a supply problem here in New Zealand. It’s not acceptable to refer this bill to select committee for a shortened period of submission and consideration when all of these risks are coming through this very narrow point at one time and the solutions for them—while they might be available, are not available soon, and they’re not available without cost.

So it is for that reason that the ACT Party does not support this truncated and shortened period at select committee and for submissions. In fact, we think, in this case, the full period should be allocated to hear from submitters, to hear from stakeholders, and to give the industry—as well as Government—time to come up with solutions to come up with these important environmental objectives.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Green Party supports the referral motion. I just wanted to pick up on a couple of points that the previous speaker, Simon Court, made. He talked about the “rush” to low-sulphur fuels. It’s a rush that has so far taken 25 years to get to this point, given that MARPOL VI was agreed to in, I think, 1996! I think it came into effect in 2002, and we started work on it in this Government at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018. It’s still taken, even with a Government that actually said, “OK, let’s get into this thing”, nearly four years to get to this point. So I would say we’re hardly rushing into this, given that that is most of my colleague’s life to get here.

I would also say, when you look at the weight of submissions, there were only 48, and that somehow it took two years to process. Forty-four of those submissions, I think, were in favour of the transition, and those were from the industry itself. So what that suggests is that this is an entirely non-controversial process. It is, clearly, carefully considered, given that it’s taken us 25 years to think about it so far! I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that’s going to take an enormous amount of time from the select committee to have to go out and ask all of the same questions that the Ministry of Transport has already asked many times over, in workshops and in submissions processes, and so on and so forth. Therefore, we do support the referral motion. Let’s get this done finally. It’s time to put this thing to bed.

It’s a privilege to stand up and speak in the Budget debate today. What I am most relieved about is that a central part of the Budget 2021—[Interruption]

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! Far too much noise. It’s very impolite.

—was with respect to the welfare system and making some crucial adjustments and changes to ensure that those who are having to access support from the welfare system are able to do so with a level of dignity. And what was great to see is that, by and large, there was support from across the House, bar perhaps ACT but including National, and I think that is recognition of the fact that the changes, particularly the benefit increases, were long overdue, needed to be done, and actually, I think, reflects a public sentiment and empathy that has grown towards those in the welfare system, an understanding of the fact that, actually, yes, they deserve to get a little bit more.

Yesterday, I heard a speech from an Opposition member of Parliament—I think it was Simeon Brown—talking about the “mother of all Budgets”. He made the point that in 1991 he was only just born. His point was that he felt it was of no relevance and he felt that it was important just to continue to look forward. But I would argue with him on that. We do need to look to our past to understand why we are in the situation that we are currently in, and we need to look to our past to see where mistakes were made and, in any way possible, look to rectify those.

In 1991, the “mother of all Budgets” hit us. There were massive slashes to benefits at the time. Many of us can remember it for our personal reasons; mine was that I had parents who lost jobs at the time. They had always worked. They had always wanted to work. And then, all of a sudden, with not their own choice but because of the economic conditions of the time, they were no longer able to—and then, on top of that, hit with cuts to benefits, which saw them further impoverished, not just because of the economic conditions but because of the political decisions that were made during that period of time. And they were unwise political decisions. They had impacts on generations after as well, and we should not forget that. To finally be able to increase benefits to a reasonable level, a level that was in line with what the Welfare Expert Advisory Group have recommended—in fact, a level that went beyond what the Welfare Expert Advisory Group have recommended for those with children—is actually a relief for me as the Minister for Social Development and Employment and, I know, is a relief for many people in the House.

But it wasn’t just about the increase to income support, although that is incredibly important; it was also, in the Budget, about ensuring that we continue to put investment towards supporting those in the welfare system to be able to work. We are very much focused on that. Last Budget, we put $200 million towards front-line work-focused services through the Ministry of Social Development. The year before, we had put money into work-focused case management. We recognised, when we came into Government in 2017, there had been a decline in the work-focused case management because of the fact that there was more of a focus on hardship, which is important, but the levels of staffing had not been lifted to be able to ensure that anyone who walked into those Work and Income offices could also get the support that they wanted for employment and upskilling. And they do want it. This came out when the Welfare Expert Advisory Group were going around the country and consulting. The vast majority of people who are on benefit want to work, and they want support to get into work. So that investment is as important as the income support or benefit increases that we’ve put in place.

But it wasn’t just about the front-line work focus. We’ve mentioned a number of times in the House, and I will continue to shout this one from the rooftops, how proud we are that we have finally reinstated the training incentive allowance. It was one of the meanest moves, actually, by the previous Government, in 2009, as one of their first actions, to cut the training incentive allowance and cut off that additional support for sole parents, for disabled people, and for carers of disabled people to be able to get that additional money that would support them to get level 4 to level 7 qualifications. Now, why we wouldn’t want sole parents and disabled people and carers of disabled people to be able to access higher-level degree study is beyond me. Of course we want that to happen. So, when that cut was made, it seemed like one of the most mean-spirited cuts and, I will say this, particularly given those cuts were made by a woman who said she got the training incentive allowance herself. So I am proud that we get to reinstate this opportunity. There will be many women out there, disabled people, carers of disabled people—in fact, there will be about 16,000 over the next four years—who will take up this opportunity to enrol at levels of study from level 4 to level 7. And not only will they be better off but their families will be better off.

One of the points I want to make—or the last point I want to make—on the training incentive allowance and the reinstatement of it is that we should not forget that all of the research shows that a child’s level of academic achievement will be determined by, or one of the main determinants will be, the mother’s level of academic achievement. So, when we’re looking for generational change and ensuring a whole-of-whānau wellbeing, it is this type of investment that actually makes a very meaningful difference. So I am very proud of the fact that we’ve been able to reinstate that, and I look forward to hearing the stories of the sole mothers and the disabled people and the carers who actually take up that opportunity to upskill and train.

Another area that we haven’t had a chance to traverse to the extent that I would like, with regards to the changes to the welfare system, is with respect to process. So we’ve talked about the increases in income support, we’ve talked about the increased investment with regards to work and supporting people to work, but also there are process changes that have needed to take place in our welfare system. Of many recommendations that have come through the Welfare Expert Advisory Group on this, one of the key ones that we managed to get across the line at Budget 2021 was with respect to the expectations and the processes around medical certificates. This is raised all the time by beneficiary advocates, by people with health conditions and disabilities themselves, and even by health practitioners—the fact that, through the welfare system, we’ve had an expectation that if you have a health condition or a disability you are, for the first two months, every four weeks, to go and get a medical certificate and present it to prove that you still have that health condition or disability, and thereafter every 13 weeks.

This doesn’t work for people who have conditions that are clearly not going to change in a four-week period, and I think this was recognised back in 2017 when the process was changed for people who have cancer. The process was changed for them because there was so much media around the fact that people were undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and still expected to go and get this medical certificate on a four-weekly basis, and it was deemed to be unfair. But it wasn’t changed for other people with health conditions and disabilities in the welfare system, when they may have been in similar circumstances. So we have changed that. We will take the advice of the health professionals with regards to how often they need to produce a medical certificate to prove that that a health condition or disability still exists, and the flow-on effect means that those people are not going to be having to pay for GP visits, to get that medical certificate unnecessarily, because of this unreasonable bureaucratic process. But it also means that we will save ourselves about 20,000 visits to GPs a month, clearing up that space for people who are actually sick to be able to go to the doctor. And how many of us here have wanted to make an appointment with the doctor the next day only to ring in and find, no, you can’t get in to see your GP for three or four days? So this will assist with that.

I’m very proud of the changes that we have made to date with regards to the welfare overhaul. This was not a beginning; it comes off the back of many changes stretching back to the Families Package that we introduced early in 2018. We have made some significant moves, and I don’t have time to rattle them all off, but Budget 2021 provides some key milestones, and I look forward to continuing this work, continuing the overhaul and the transformation of our welfare system for the better outcomes for New Zealanders.

The clear signal in Vote Health 2021 is that Labour no longer cares about older people. They have turned their eyes away from older people and towards the mirrors on their wall. Labour doesn’t care about older people.

It is the Budget where older people pay for the ideology of this Labour Government to centralise everything, in Wellington. It is the Budget where older people are fobbed off so that the Minister and his increasing band of expensive consultants can decide from Wellington what is good for older people and good for New Zealanders. It is the Budget that hides more than it helps; it hinders more than it hastens. It is the Budget that takes from older people. Labour doesn’t care about older people.

Let’s be clear on exactly what is taken from older people in Budget 2021: $200 million of healthcare, the annual free GP check, has been taken, dissolved, and removed—a broken promise with older people simply dismissed by this Government. They have every right to be angry.

What is even worse is that the draft document papers show cynical discussions, how this Labour Government can pull $200 million out of health but pay off a paltry $8 million towards an aged-care commissioner to keep older people happy. They will see through the smoke and mirrors.

The business case to David Clark for the free annual health check is fascinating as the Labour Government makes the case for why it is so important. The benefits of the annual over-65 health check are: reduced mortality, Labour doesn’t care about older people; reduced health costs for out-patient and in-patient care, Labour doesn’t care about older people; reduced emergency department—ED—visits, Labour doesn’t care about older people. And while we are talking about emergency visits, please explain to me why, in the month of January, from the hours of 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., 156 people over the age of 80 were discharged from DHBs—that is not just in an emergency department; they were in in-patient status in a bed, and 156 sent home at 1 a.m. in the morning. Oh, and what is even worse: three of them were over the age of 100. Explain that to me; that surely is unexplainable. The final benefit: improved mental and social wellbeing. That is another benefit that is being cut. Labour doesn’t care about older people.

So $200 million is what older people have given up in this Budget. What have they got in return? More hip replacements? Nope. More knee replacements? Nope. Half of the cost of this Government’s restructuring has been borne by older people in the experiment for three new statutory entities, three new health systems, and layers and layers of bureaucracy. That is what older people are paying for.

Andrew Little knew that when he was taking money away from older people, it was a bad decision—a very bad decision—because he was even afraid to take it to Cabinet. Written parliamentary question (WPQ) No. 202—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member’s not allowed to say that.

Oh, OK. Then, if I can just talk to WPQ No. 20233: “What communications has”—this is to Andrew Little—“he taken to Cabinet, if any, around cancelling the free over 65s seniors annual health check and eye screening … ?” “I have not taken any papers to Cabinet around cancelling the free over 65s seniors annual health check.”

Is the $486 million a good business decision? Well, let’s check the business case. Oh, wait! There isn’t a business case—$486 million on health restructuring, and no business case. Andrew Little wrote back to me, saying that no, he had not been provided with a business case for the restructuring. So I thought maybe Grant Robertson might throw further light on this. “A formal business case is not part of the review case” is what Grant Robertson writes to me.

So if older people are giving up $200 million for half of the health restructuring—that $486 million—where else is the rest of the money coming from? Well, some of the Associate Ministers were clearly told, “We’re already taking money away from older people and out of core health to pay for this, so don’t even make a Budget bid. Don’t even ask.” WPQ No. 20585, from an Associate Minister of Health—I got this last week—“What communications with the Ministry of Health or Minister, if any, describes Budget 2021 bids that the Minister made … ?” “I did not submit any separate bids”, from an Associate Minister of Health. Wow. No health bids into Budget 2021 from an Associate Minister of Health. What does that say?

I can tell you where the rest of the money to pay for this experiment is coming from: it will come from cutting costs, delaying programmes, and repurposing existing programmes. I know that because that is exactly what the Minister told me. WPQ No. 20827: “Did he send or sign a letter to the Minister of Finance, between Dec 3 and Dec 11 2020 inclusive indicating ‘To live within a smaller funding envelope will require choices to be made about whether to progress these initiatives, how they might be phased, and whether they can be scaled, or I look at what existing programmes may be able to be repurposed’?” The answer to that was “Yes, or reprioritised”—as we heard today; another word for cutting costs.

So what programmes in Budget 2021 were phased, scaled, and repurposed to pay for this experiment? The Pharmac budget is $200 million. In campaign 2020, we had three revenue streams for Pharmac: the first was $200 million for cancer, the second was $20 million for rare disorders, and the third was to index Pharmac funding to the increase in Vote Health that goes up every year. What we know is that it has gone up about 10 percent this year on a $1 billion Pharmac fund—that’s $100 million. We would have been looking at around about $320 million in our hands this year; understandably, still not the $700 million that is required for unfunded medicines, but at least 50 percent more than what this Government was putting in Budget 2021.

What else was scaled? Who else is paying for this experiment? Well, DHB funding has been scaled back by $305 million from last Budget—$980 million is what the operational expenditure for cost pressures for DHB was last Budget; $675 million this year. How will the lights stay on, when operational funding has been cut to DHBs?

Dental care was cancelled. An absolutely clear broken promise, when the Prime Minister stood on the campaign trail nine months or so ago and said, “We promise 20 mobile dental clinics in 2021 and to increase the emergency dental benefit”—nothing in this Budget.

We already have a health Minister who is struggling to stand up to Grant Robertson with his health bids. And we know that because we asked the health Minister whether he made a bid or had he had any correspondence suggesting that Budget 2021 might have 20 free mobile dental clinics. The answer to that was: “I indicated which of the manifesto commitments I believe should be progressed, alongside the work on the health and disability system reforms, which included an initiative around additional mobile dental clinics.” Andrew Little seemed to have understood the importance of the mobile dental clinics, but couldn’t get it over the line with Grant Robertson. Dental care was cancelled. As I say, there are no teeth in this Budget.

I think what we are also concerned about is what else has been removed from the 2021 Budget. I think that a real concern is where we are seeing cost cuttings around rationalising specialist services at provincial hospitals. Now, I actually asked Andrew Little this question on 8 April. It was my second question in this House, supplementary No. 4. I asked him: “Has he read any briefings around rationalising specialist services at provincial hospitals … ?” He said: “No.” Then, imagine my surprise this week, when in reply to my WPQ No. 20767, he replies—my question was: “Has he read any briefings around rationalising specialist services at provincial hospitals to manage funding down pressures, and if so, what?” And he replied: “I received a briefing on 3 December 2020.” Quite different to what he indicated to me on 8 April in the House. He knew specialist services would be cut to fund this experiment—this experiment in centralising health from Wellington—but told me “No.”

If I can just conclude, how else could we spend that $486 million that is to go to restructuring? Well, a few weeks ago, there was an anomaly in cancer drugs for children who currently receive Pharmac-subsidised drugs in hospitals. The Ministry of Health has realised there is a policy anomaly and are considering whether newly diagnosed children with cancer should still be able to receive those medicines in public hospitals. I would strongly suggest that they could. A tiny, tiny part of this $486 million would cover that.

We could completely eliminate the waiting list for cochlear implants—not just double what we’re currently doing; completely eliminate it. We could fund more than half of the total cost of unfunded Pharmac medicines. It turns out that we could do nearly 30,000 hip replacements with $486 million that is being put aside. That would likely clear the waiting list so well that we would be doing normal hips—30,000 hips could be done instead of the $486 million.

In conclusion, there will be no more Pharmac funding, there is no closing or clearing of the cochlear waiting list, and there are no more hips to be done, because, in this Budget, the Government takes from older people, they take from DHBs, they take from Pharmac, they take from dental health, and, finally, New Zealanders are also taken to the cleaners in this Budget. This is a poor Budget. I cannot commend it. Thank you.

This year’s Budget does what Labour Governments do well—driving economic growth while looking after our people—and I’m proud to be part of the Government that has delivered Budget 2021. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge some of my colleagues that made this happen: our Prime Minister for her leadership around the areas to focus on but also our Minister of Finance. Putting together Budgets can be a lonely time for Ministers of Finance. They do need to phase, they do need to scale, they do need to insist on reprioritisation. Every Government comes in with a manifesto full of three years of activity that it will deliver, and in every term of Government, the first Budget that a Government delivers does a third of what that Government promised to do in its manifesto to the people.

So I want to acknowledge the work of Grant Robertson for crafting what I think was an incredibly clever Budget that allowed us to focus. It allowed us to address the long-term structural issues that New Zealanders need to address, but it also allowed us to deliver on critical manifesto commitments with clear pathways over the next two Budgets. I think it’s not a three-part harmony, as he called it, but a trilogy that we will over this term of Government need to deliver on our manifesto promises.

Of course, Budget 2021 was set against the backdrop of 2020. It took the next steps in our economic recovery from COVID-19, and we cannot divorce this Budget from that. The collective effort and strong health response from New Zealanders to keep COVID from spreading in our community is paying off, and this is backed up by a number of commentators. We see the OECD economic forecast this week that expects New Zealand to be one of the strongest performers due to our swift and decisive response to eliminate the virus and support households and businesses. In line with the Budget update, the OECD forecasts growth of 3.5 percent in 2021 to 3.8 percent in 2022.

We are investing in our people. We are investing in infrastructure, and we are tackling those long-term issues like inequality, housing, and climate change. These are all issues that need to be addressed.

We’re investing $57.3 billion in infrastructure over the next five years to drive our economy. This is a massive investment for New Zealand and it goes some way to addressing the infrastructure deficit that we face as a country, and that, we know, is critical for us to be able to deliver on our desires and aspirations for New Zealanders around housing unaffordability.

In this Budget, of course, is included the appropriation for the $3.8 billion housing acceleration fund that we announced back in March, and this will enable us to maximise the potential of the land that we own to get more pace and more scale into those large-scale projects. It will also allow us to work with councils, it will allow us to work with iwi, and it will allow us to work with Māori to ensure that we are setting up more land for development and that we are finally doing something to address affordability in our housing market.

As we came out of COVID, as the Minister of Housing, when everyone was prophesising that, actually, what we were going to see was a collapse of our housing market, one of the things that we looked very carefully at was what happened post the global financial crisis. What we saw was a development community that, not unexpectedly, went to the safest part of the market for them, and that wasn’t high-density, affordable housing. It was large houses on single sections, and what that did was it reduced the number of first-home buyers that we had able to access housing in New Zealand.

As a Government, as we came out of COVID, we were determined that that was not going to be our fate. We had a chance to build this back better. As it was, as we all know, we far from saw a collapse of the housing market. We far from saw that slump that so many people thought was going to happen. Instead, we saw a period of hyperinflation, and we have to recognise that, actually, if we just leave the market unfettered, we are not going to get those affordable housing outcomes that we know that we need to deliver economic growth while looking after our people. That’s why that was such an important investment in this year’s Budget.

Another important investment that was appropriated in this Budget is the ability for Kāinga Ora to borrow an additional $2 billion to make strategic land purchases. We don’t want the Government to be a passive bystander that looks on and says, “Tut, tut! Isn’t it sad? Housing’s really unaffordable.” We are a Government that is making the commitment. We are showing that in our Budget decisions—that we want to be an active player—and it is our responsibility as a Government to ensure that housing affordability is one of the issues that we put at the core of things.

What we want to do is to stimulate more development that builds upon the critical work that we have done already and the further work that we are going to do, and, as we look to increase intensification, we can look to increase scale and we can look to increase pace, and I hope that we can work across the House. I hope that we can have a shared commitment to New Zealanders that we, as a Parliament, do put things in place that address this most fundamental of issues for New Zealanders.

We also saw in this Budget, in the area of housing, some packages to address the longstanding deprivation that we have in Māori housing. What we know, if we look at all the indicators across Māori, is there are greater rates of homelessness and lower rates of homeownership. Across the housing continuum, we want to address this. Ultimately, opening up homeownership for more Māori is an aim of this Government. If we are to address fundamental wellbeing around health and if we are to address fundamental wellbeing around education, the stability of long-term, secure, dry housing is absolutely critical to that, and homeownership is important as well. That is why we have carved out $350 million from the housing acceleration fund to open up more land, whether that be papa kāinga or whenua Māori, or it be land held in other forms by Māori. That is for the infrastructure under the ground to allow the houses to be built, but it’s also matched by another $380 million fund for Māori housing—housing for Māori—and this is really important. We’re looking to those funds to deliver over 3,700 warm, dry homes, as well as repairs to existing homes.

One of the issues we have with our insulation schemes in some parts of New Zealand is we simply can’t insulate the houses because they’re not in such a state of repair that you can put the insulation in and it will make a material difference. So I’m looking forward to us being able to deliver on that.

Despite the rhetoric that we just heard from the deputy leader of the National Party, Budget 2021 was also a Budget that delivered on health. We saw $4.6 billion in new day-to-day spending over the next four years. We saw $704 million for one-off expenses like building coming through this. We, as a Government now into our fourth Budget, have shown that we are going to address the infrastructural deficits that we have in our health system. We’re not content to have hospitals in the states of disrepair that we found when we came into Government.

DHBs receive another $2.7 billion to keep up with cost pressures, and this represents a 45 percent increase in DHB funding since we came into Government in 2017. It also includes in Budget 2021 an increase of $200 million for Pharmac.

In the last minute that I have available to me, there’s one other colleague that I want to acknowledge for her work in putting together Budget 2021, and that’s the Hon Carmel Sepuloni for the work that she’s been doing through the Welfare Expert Advisory Group to turn around what has been an injustice in this country for 30 years now: to increase benefits to make them at a level where people can live with some dignity. That is something that has been a key priority for our Government. No one has had more tenacity in their advocacy for us to undertake this work and deliver for those New Zealanders than Carmel, and I want to acknowledge her for that work.

Budget 2021 is a Budget that I am immensely proud of. It is a Budget that allows us to address our long-term issues and it puts us on a path going into the future with some optimism. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This was a Budget that could have been so much more than what it is. A Budget is a way for the Government to show the country the direction that the Government wants to lead us. It’s an opportunity to address the key issues that face New Zealanders and provide a road map to improve the lot of all of us. It needed to do three things. Number one, it needed to provide a credible plan for how we maximise the opportunity of our COVID-free status to allow Kiwi firms to grow and to create a more prosperous society. It didn’t do that. Number two, it needed to take the issue of an out-of-control housing market seriously. It didn’t do that. And, number three, it needed to show us a strategy to keep New Zealanders safe from a rapidly growing gang problem in New Zealand—and it didn’t do that. It did none of these things. Instead, what New Zealanders were shown was a Budget that mapped out a course for increasing debt, putting more burdens on businesses and workers, and increasing wasteful spending. So let’s focus on what it should have addressed.

We needed a credible plan for maximising prosperity. Jacinda Ardern told us on election night that she would govern for all New Zealanders. Well, where was anything in this Budget for middle New Zealanders—the battlers of this country who work hard to look after their family, people who are trying to save for a first home? These are people that are being squeezed from every direction right now and the Budget does not provide a single dollar for middle New Zealand. At a time when we have near record terms of trade, we have milk prices sky high, and interest rates at record low, New Zealanders could be forgiven for thinking that the Budget would actually look to lift some of the burdens that the Government has placed on them. Instead, we see a Government focused on increasing the rate at which they spend our taxpayers’ hard-earned money. By 2024, Government debt is set to exceed $94,000 for every New Zealand household. This is borrowed money, borrowed from New Zealand workers, and it will need to be paid back. It will be our children and our grandchildren having to pay back for this Government’s reckless spending.

Now, we’re very grateful to have had the ACT Party in Parliament because we had an alternative budget to show us a different way, a different road map. It’s our battler’s budget. ACT’s plan would pay down that debt faster. It would give New Zealanders some much needed tax relief. ACT’s budget was made for the battlers, those hard-working Kiwis who are striving to succeed, but are increasingly being punished for their efforts, for trying to get ahead and do well for their families. Instead of facing higher taxes and regulations, ACT would have delivered them a $3.8 billion tax relief package aimed at middle-income workers. Instead of increasing debt by billions of dollars, ACT would have mapped out a path to surplus. We can provide tax relief and reduce debt faster than Labour without any cuts to public services. All we need to do is to ensure that we’re spending our taxpayer money wisely and putting it in place where the policies will actually encourage growth. So, we would stop paying hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign wealthy countries in subsidies and we would end ineffective policies like fees-free—and the Government even acknowledges that it’s an ineffective policy, so why are they putting money into it? But we would also lower barriers to investment and cut back the costs and red tape the Government has piled on small businesses.

We needed a realistic plan to build more homes. Beyond support for middle New Zealand, the Government has been unable to rein in an out-of-control housing market. Just this week, another of the seemingly endless reports of further increases to house prices was released. Wellington’s average house price is now over $1 million, Auckland’s average house price is over $1.25 million, and the prices continue to rise. They’re rising across the whole country and it’s increasing the costs of rents, mortgages, and all living costs for all New Zealanders. The problem is actually quite simple, though. We’re just not building enough homes. But the Government’s response in this Budget has been to dither and divide. They’ve announced billions for housing infrastructure, but they don’t have a single detail to support it. They’ve announced major tax changes, risking higher rents and penalising people who are simply just trying to give their families a better future. And what does the Government say to people who have told their stories to me who will suffer real consequences because of these tax changes and because of their divisive policies?

You know, I had a woman write an email to me just the other week. She’s got two disabled sons, both in their 20s, and she has bought two units for them so that they have the ability to live an independent life. The problem is, of course, that she pays or she charges them lower than market rent. With these housing tax changes, she is forced to now sell those homes and give up her children’s independence. She’s doing this out of love for her family. She is not a speculator that this Government is trying to divide and pit us against. Why are we pursuing ineffective and divisive tax policies when the problems should just be solved by building more homes?

I’ve had other stories received from tenants who are worried that these policies will see their rents increase. The Government’s own officials agree that rents will increase. It’s heartbreaking. There was one story from a person with a criminal conviction who had asked their landlord to increase their rent because they say, “I don’t know who else will take me in.” What sort of “kind” Government is this where somebody who is actually trying to make their life better could be made worse off or end up in emergency housing because they don’t have another option because of this Government’s divisive tax changes? We need to be focused on uniting people behind good ideas and not dividing them with bad ones. We need to stop looking at blaming people and focus on solving the problem: build more homes.

We needed a strategy to suppress gangs and keep more New Zealanders safe. This was one of the more telling issues of the Budget: a lack of commitment to initiatives to keep New Zealanders safe. We have seen gang numbers increase to close to 50 percent under this Government. That’s staggering. The result, though, isn’t always just what you see on the Budget sheet. It’s the cost to people’s lives. It looks like gang members taking over State Highway 2 in the Hawke’s Bay. It’s regular reports of shootings and violence in our community. And it’s a woman telling me last week, who lives in Auckland Central, that she does not leave her home after 8 o’clock at night because she does not feel safe. That’s not a country I want to live in. I want one where we are helping New Zealanders be safe, creating an environment where children are not being kept at home because parents are afraid that they might get caught in crossfire. That’s not to mention the meth in our community.

A Budget cut for police at this time is remarkable. It’s difficult to see how the Government does not see the growing problems of gangs as a priority; in fact, there’s even evidence that they’re going softer on it. You know, they’ve spent $70 million to expand community panels to allow offenders of serious crimes to face less severe sanctions than they would in the court system. The Government keeps boasting that its prison population is decreasing. Well, that’s because there are more gangs and criminals on the street, not in prison. They should not be having cups of tea; they should be serving time. For every offence there is a victim and we need to be thinking of those people.

ACT has always been the true party of law and order. We introduced the three-strikes legislation. We have a member’s bill that would require prisoners to do rehabilitation before being released. And we have a member’s bill that would increase the power of police to seize assets connected to gang members. ACT has the real solutions to crime and offending, and we have the plan to build more houses and grow the economy. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Before I call the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan—I didn’t interrupt the member because the member is still a relatively new member. But I did indicate at the beginning of the year that we are going to be a lot tighter on members reading their speeches. The Budget is a debate where members should be able to speak from notes. And I will be interrupting members from now on.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker, in recognition of Samoan Language Week. It is an absolute delight to stand and take a call and be part of this Budget 2021 debate today, and it is a delight because there’s so much in this Budget to speak of, to talk about, to highlight, and that I’m proud of. It builds on the Budget of 2020, which was very much a Budget that laid the foundations and took us through an incredibly difficult period, that we are basically still going through. However, it was a Budget that invested in saving lives and livelihoods.

It is quite unfortunate that the member who just resumed her seat chose to term that “reckless spending”. It was spending that, as I mentioned, saved lives and livelihoods and basically was an economic plan that we see is working. It is what has gotten us to the point that we’re at today, where we can actually look at investing further to address the infrastructure deficit that we’ve inherited, to invest in ensuring that we take all New Zealanders with us when we improve the economy or mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19.

We are in a pretty good position. We are seeing, for example, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the OECD. Growth has increased compared to what was forecast. Our debt as a nation is lower. But I do want to just point to something that the Prime Minister has said before: that there was no costless recovery when it comes to COVID-19. We basically had two paths that we could go down as a Government. There was the pathway of austerity and cuts, which would have seen jobs disappear, which would have seen a reduction in welfare spending.

I just want to point to something that my colleague the Hon Carmel Sepuloni—a point that she made when she spoke earlier today. She really highlighted what that austerity spending—what we’ve seen as a result of that. What we’ve seen in terms of hardship that families have gone through when they’ve lost their jobs, and cuts in benefits as well, is the entrenched intergenerational poverty that we are trying to reverse through successive Budgets. That’s partly the trajectory of that that we’re seeing through Budget 2021 as well.

It is a careful, cautious Budget. It takes into account the fact that we’re in a much better position than was forecast at the start of COVID, but it also recognises that we’re not out of the woods yet. So it balances spending in some of those areas that I touched upon earlier and will go into a little bit more detail on, but it also balances that with keeping a lid on the debt that we had to incur to invest in saving lives and livelihoods, as I mentioned previously.

When our Government took office this term, we were very clear on the three focus areas for this term for us. The first, of course, was to continue to keep New Zealanders safe from COVID-19. The second was to focus on securing our recovery in the face of the economic impacts of COVID-19, and doing so in a way that was sustainable. The third was to continue to focus on addressing some of those long-term challenges that we face as a nation, challenges like the housing crisis, climate change, and child poverty. That is exactly what you will see, what members will see, through Budget 2021 as well, and I’m, as I said at the start, incredibly proud of it. It is a Budget that focuses on creating jobs, and we know that about 221,000 New Zealanders will be supported into employment as a result of Budget 2021.

Just going back to that point about keeping New Zealanders safe from COVID, though, we see $1.5 billion that is still kept aside through Budget 2021 and is allocated to support the COVID-19 vaccine programme. We know that there will be enough of the Pfizer vaccine for everyone, and I want to underscore this point: everyone, regardless of immigration status, across Aotearoa New Zealand.

Going back to the economic impact of COVID and the steps that Budget 2021 takes to mitigate that impact, we see that there is budget to support the infrastructure spend and address the infrastructure deficit that I alluded to before. The infrastructure investment now totals $57.3 billion over the next five years to increase, for example, housing supply, and Minister Woods outlined in her contribution earlier today the $3.8 billion that goes towards the Housing Acceleration Fund. That will make land build-ready and speed up the building of new homes as one of the steps to address the housing crisis.

So as I mentioned, it takes our spending in infrastructure up to $57.3 billion, and that is money that will be invested into our rail network, roads, schools, hospitals, housing—as I mentioned previously—and energy generation. It is what others—the economist Joseph Stiglitz, for example—have mentioned is doing double duty. It’s about doing what’s right for us as a nation, and also creating jobs at the same time.

Speaking of jobs, though, I just want to also highlight the Training Incentive Allowance, which we have reinstated, expanded. As Minister Sepuloni mentioned in her contribution, it was one of the first cuts, sadly, that the National Government made back in 2009, that locked out a whole generation of people who wanted to retrain, upskill, and transition into careers, particularly to be able to take up educational opportunities at those higher levels. We are reinstating that, and that will support 16,000 New Zealanders into jobs.

Speaking of the support that we’re providing, I’ll just touch on support for small business, because I know that as the Minister for Diversity, Inclusion and Ethnic Communities, that is often an area that is raised with me. We know, through the support that we’ve provided to small businesses in the previous Budget, that one of the areas that came up as an area for further investment was to support our small businesses to be part of the digital economy and to take up opportunities in that space. Small businesses, we know, are crucial to our economy, and so I’m delighted to see $44 million invested to support digital business skills training and the package that includes advisory services to small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) as well. That, of course, is in addition to the wage subsidy scheme, the Small Business Cashflow (Loan) Scheme, the Business Finance Guarantee Scheme, and the COVID-19 Resurgence Support Payment that we’ve seen previously. We know that about 30,000 SMEs will benefit just from the Digital Boost training scheme, and 15,000 small businesses through the advisory services specifically, as well.

I also quickly want to touch on the boost to weekly benefits as well, because it is a huge part of the philosophy of this Government, where when we talk about the economic impact of COVID and mitigating that impact, we know that economic shocks like COVID-19 don’t affect us all in the same way. They disproportionately affect those who are particularly vulnerable or marginalised, and so I’m incredibly pleased that we will see a lift in weekly benefits, from between $32 and $55 per adult. That will roll out completely by April next year, and will lift up to 33,000 children out of poverty on the after-housing cost measure in 2022-23. So that, coupled with reinstatement of the Training Incentive Allowance, gives me great cause for pride, really.

I just want to use my time remaining to touch on the additional $5.3 million over the next four years, to establish the new ministry for ethnic communities, which I’m incredibly proud of, and I want to take this opportunity to put on the record that many from across ethnic communities have been advocating for this, and I’m proud that our Government is delivering that. As of 1 July, we will have a new ministry that will take the place of the Office of Ethnic Communities, keeping, of course, the expanded community engagement function. We almost doubled the resourcing to the office in the last term, and increased the Ethnic Communities Development Fund eightfold. Now, for the first time, this entity will have a chief executive solely focused on lifting the wellbeing of our ethnic communities, and driving the Government’s policy programme in a way that also benefits our ethnic communities to take up the opportunities that they have often felt left out of.

Can I just take the last few seconds of my contribution to pay tribute to the Prime Minister, to the Minister of Finance, and our Government for putting this Budget together—a Budget that will continue to lift the wellbeing of all New Zealanders. It’s an inclusive Budget, and it’s one that I’m incredibly proud of. Fa‘afetai lava.

Madam Speaker, thank you very much, and can I congratulate you for taking the chair, firstly. Secondly, can I tell you that in the good old fashion of some countries around the world, don’t give it back to the man that just left. Stay there. We probably like you much more because of your smile—and some other reasons.

The last speaker in this debate, Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan, finished by saying that this is a Budget that will lift all New Zealanders up. If that was the case then this could be a very short speech, because, as the Opposition, if it was doing that, it wouldn’t be politically great for us, but we could just agree, but sadly it doesn’t do that. Most New Zealanders actually are not better off. And where this Budget has missed a real opportunity is there is virtually nothing in it to help New Zealanders to help themselves.

Now, the National Party is often—it is said we talk a lot about the economy and a lot about business, and that’s correct because the economy is people, and in New Zealand Kiwis own businesses. It was the case not so long ago, and I’m sure it still is, that New Zealand had more small businesses per capita than any other country in the world. These are hard-working mums and dads that get out of bed every day and go to work, they take risks, they borrow, they put their houses up as equity, and they look to employ others so they can provide for themselves and their family—they are the economy. They’re not the large companies that often do well one way or another, it’s actually in every single suburb in every single part of New Zealand, these hard-working Kiwis that were looking towards the Budget and this Government for some help as a result of everything that’s happened over the last four years, and particularly the significant impact that last year had upon them as a result of the restrictions and lockdown and the debt that they took on. It does not do that, and therein lies the problem that it is a missed opportunity.

Business New Zealand came out very quickly on the day and, actually, to their credit, they do talk about things the Government does in a light that I may not always be politically comfortable with. They offer praise to the Government when they get it right—this Labour Government. But in this case, Business New Zealand said they’re disappointed at the lack of focus on growing the economy in Budget 2021, and I quote, “Business was keen to see less burdensome regulation, policies to stimulate growth and development, and more certainty around business policies into the future.” Kirk Hope said, “There’s not enough really in there to boost economic growth.” Well, if the economy is individuals, it’s people, it’s hard-working Kiwis that run businesses, who take risks, and there isn’t enough in this Budget for the economy—there is not enough in there for these hard-working mums and dads.

But what we have seen over the last four years, and certainly since the election is changes that come very quickly through this House, often through urgency, without appropriate time in committee that add cost to businesses. So on the one hand, we’ve got significant costs coming down when businesses are doing it hard: a doubling of the sick leave. Nobody in this House would argue that if somebody’s not well they shouldn’t be looked after, but when you double sick leave you’re imposing costs directly upon small businesses that are already finding it hard to pay the bills. An extra holiday that they must meet the cost of and the fair pay agreements that are going to be anything but fair.

Do you know the most interesting thing, if you go back in history and you have a look at countries around the world, when the leader of a country puts the word “democratic” in the name of the country, it often isn’t democratic, and that’s been the case in many places around the world. To call this a fair pay agreement means it’s not actually going to be fair; it’s actually going to revert to an area where the Government, with unions, will get to tell hard-working Kiwis and small businesses what to do. And yes, the Government says, “Well, we’ll pay attention and we’ll make sure that, say, in Invercargill they’re not treated the same as in Queen Street.”, but that won’t be the case, because this is extra cost placed upon small business through bureaucracy that they’re already finding it hard to pay the bills for.

The Government has increased the minimum wage very, very quickly over the last three or four years. It was a commitment that they made. It’s now $20 an hour and soon it will go further. The Minister responsible has said he wants to look at moving it further to the equivalent of the living wage. Every time the Government puts the minimum wage up quickly, it does have an impact upon the economy and it is on those small businesses, because when you put a cost upon a business, a small business, it can only meet that cost in one of three ways.

It has to put its prices up. Well, they can’t always do that and if they do, the very people the Government say they’re trying to help are impacted, because costs go up for that consumer—number one. Number two, they have to economise, and they don’t let people go straight away, but we see it when it comes to confidence from the business sector. When business confidence is down, it’s an indicator of what will happen in six months’ time. It’s a lagging indicator of what’s happening in the job market. And if somebody leaves, they often will not be able to replace them. It means they have to work harder for what they are doing, and the very people the Government says they’re trying to help with vast increases in minimum wage actually are worse off.

Yes, the economy creates jobs, but it doesn’t create jobs for the people that are losing them that often have the lowest level of skill and they actually earn the least and that the Government is forcing out of the workforce because of the costs they put on businesses.

Well, the final thing a small business has to do is absorb that cost. What’s happened over the last four years is—if there is a single small business in the country that can still absorb costs the Government’s piling on them, I would be surprised. That’s why in January of this year, there were a thousand fewer small businesses than the same time a year ago. The rate with which we see small businesses closing in New Zealand is escalating quickly, some of that as a result of COVID—some of it is—but not most of it. Most of it is the debt they’ve taken on, that the economy is not doing as well as the Government says, and that there is cost being piled upon them day after day after day.

There are some things in the Budget that I would like to say are good. The last speaker, the Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan, spoke about some more support for small business, but it’s not the support that the small businesses in New Zealand need. The $22 million this year to help them with some digital stuff? It hasn’t been defined. And, actually, there are a lot of small businesses out there that say—Manuka restaurant owner Peter Reeves, who says he doesn’t have time to do training as the Government’s crackdown on immigration means he’s had to wait tables rather than focus on growing his business. He doesn’t need help from that. His small business needs the other type of help that allows him to pay his bills and to grow his business, which grows the economy. But there are others in here who are saying it’s just as bad.

There are many questions. But if help is needed for small businesses, is it really about the digital economy just at the moment? Is that the most important thing or could the Government have taken some of the $1.5 billion, or whatever it was, he wants to plough into putting together Chinese locomotives down in Dunedin and applied that to things that would actually help the private sector, the small businesses, mums and dads who are finding it hard to pay their bills and therefore finding it hard to provide for their families?

There are many things that are lacking in the economy at the moment. There is a lack of skills in the workforce. The Government has said there is some money they’ve set aside to train people. But as we are waiting, as we waited for KiwiBuild and light rail and fees-free to actually deliver, businesses in New Zealand are struggling. They need the skills now to grow their businesses. You know, I’ve had a business get in touch with me, an engineering workshop, who actually wanted to employ somebody who had skills—he was in New Zealand but from overseas, needed a work permit—so that this person could train others to work in the business. And when he went to look to apply for the work permit, because the Government has resoundingly said, “The border is closed. We’re not issuing these things any more.”, he was told he had to find somebody in New Zealand, who doesn’t have the skill. He didn’t want this person to take a Kiwi’s job. He wanted them there to train others, and they said no. Time and time again they are being let down.

There is a need for labour in New Zealand, skilled and unskilled. The Government suggested it wants to lift everybody up. But I tell you what, there’s not many members on that side of the House that will be out there worrying that the kiwifruit won’t be picked or the apples won’t be picked because the workforce is not there. It is not the fault of these hard-working Kiwis and their businesses that they can’t get the labour they need. The Minister of Tourism went to Queenstown and announced money to help tourism—$20 million to help tourism not be tourism businesses any more—and they can’t get the labour they need to do what he says is “pivot”. The border remains closed without the Government talking about when they would like to open it. There is a lot more bureaucracy. There is cost being piled on.

If this was a Budget, as the last speaker said, that lifted all New Zealanders up, well, that would be a good thing. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything for small businesses who are in debt and finding it hard. It doesn’t do anything to show there is a plan to grow the economy sustainably. If the economy is going to do well, it’s through the Government’s debt-fuelled spending, and when they spend money New Zealanders don’t get their roads, they don’t get their infrastructure. It is not a good Budget.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. I’m very pleased to be able to speak on Budget 2021, a Budget that is focused on securing our recovery. Along with members on this side of the House, I am enormously proud of the progress that New Zealand has made over the last year as we have faced the unprecedented challenge of COVID-19. Budget 2021, which, as I say, is about securing our recovery, is about building on the hard work of New Zealanders, it’s about building a strong economy, and it’s about making sure that we bring all New Zealanders along with us. I want to talk about each of those things in turn in my contribution.

Contrary to the enormous and extraordinary catastrophising of the previous speaker, New Zealand is incredibly well positioned, and there would be few people around the world who would not wish that their country was performing as well as New Zealand has performed over the last year. Budget 2021 continues to make the investments to make sure that we build on that hard work and sacrifice, and to ensure that we keep New Zealanders safe. That is our number one priority. So while it is all very well for members of the Opposition to stand up and proclaim, as we have just heard, that the borders should be thrown open because we need some kiwifruit picked and apparently it’s too hard to train New Zealanders, this is a Government that says that we will put the health and the wellbeing of New Zealanders first. And that has not only served New Zealand so well in terms of making sure that we are topping the global league charts in terms of our resilience against COVID-19; the number one thing—the number one thing—that is supporting our economic recovery and that is supporting small businesses across New Zealand is this Government’s work and our country’s work, our team of 5 million’s work, to keep COVID out, and this Government will continue to stand by those policies and continue to keep Kiwis safe. But in Budget 2021, we have continued to put the investments in—$1.5 billion in Budget 2021 to make sure that all Kiwis have the opportunity to receive a free and safe COVID vaccine, and that programme is rolling out now. It is an incredibly important part of securing our recovery.

Building a strong economy is an important focus of Budget 2021. Again, I note the previous member’s catastrophising and negativity. It’s simply extraordinary that, as we stand here, 18 months into a global pandemic—a global pandemic—New Zealand has an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent, amongst the lowest in the OECD and lower than the point it got to under the so-called rock star economy of the previous Government. Growth projected to be 3.5 percent over the next three years—higher than virtually any of our trading partners. A path towards managing down our debt to sustainable levels. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, who’s done an extraordinary job of bringing these things together to offer a stable economic platform to secure our recovery. But there are important investments in here, because, unlike that other side of the House who all see it in the negative, this is a Government that believes that by investing in New Zealand and New Zealanders, we build the platform for future growth, prosperity, and fairness for all Kiwis.

That’s why, in Budget 2021, there is a record $57 billion of investment in infrastructure over the next four years. This is the infrastructure Government that is investing in infrastructure right across our country. As Minister Radhakrishnan said so eloquently, quoting Joseph Stiglitz, “Doing double duty.” Investing in our schools so we have people put to work in upgrading important infrastructure in our education system to deal with growth, but at the same time giving our kids the high-quality modern classrooms that will support their learning. Huge investment in the health system. The rebuild of Dunedin Hospital and many others around our country that were underdone, under-invested in for so many years under that previous Government. And in this Government, through that investment, we are creating jobs and we will deliver the First World health services that all Kiwis deserve.

I would be remiss not to mention the investment in free trades training for over 100,000 young Kiwis to get into apprenticeships. If we want to talk about investing in the future, if we want to talk about investing in a more productive economy, that’s where the investment needs to go. That was let go by that previous Government who said, “Leave it to the market. They’ll take care of it.” This is a Government which does believe that Government has an important part to play in partnering with the public sector, in making sure that we invest in the training and skills of young Kiwis to make sure that they get into good, sustainable jobs and support our growth in the future. I’ll repeat that figure: 100,000 young New Zealanders who have now got hope, who’ve got skills, who’ve got training, who are able to contribute—100,000 since July last year into apprenticeships, and that will continue to be supported through Budget 2021.

I said before that, as well as building on our hard work and as well as building a strong economic platform, Budget 2021 is about bringing all New Zealanders along with us. We are determined that this will not be a Government that—in our response to a global economic crisis, in getting ourselves out of that—will leave the vulnerable of our country behind. We have seen that happen before. That is what happened in 1991, when the other side of this House had the Treasury benches and we saw hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders plunged into poverty and despair because of their instinctive response to cut the support that the most vulnerable in our country needs.

Contrary to that, our Government sees that investing in our people is the way to take our country forward economically and socially because it is the right thing to do. That’s why I was so very proud of the work of my good friend, the Hon Carmel Sepuloni, the Minister for Social Development, in having the courage and doing the mahi to make sure that we got to the point of being able to reverse those disastrous cuts that were put into place on our most vulnerable in 1991. That is lifting the living standards and just giving a little bit of hope and light into the lowest income New Zealanders.

There was one other policy that the Minister for Social Development announced through Budget 2021 that really speaks to the difference between the vision and the humanity between the two sides of the House, and that was the restoration of the training incentive allowance. Sometimes in this House the word “ideology” is thrown around like it’s a bad thing. I don’t actually hold to that, I actually support people who have a coherent ideological vision, whatever that is. If you can put some ideas together, have a vision that’s linked together and works well together, then I respect you for that, even if I disagree with it. But there are few policies that were more spiteful and more stupid than the destruction of the training incentive allowance under the National Party and their previous leader, Paula Bennett. A policy that gave people on benefits the ability to get into higher education, supposedly to do all of the things that members on that side of the House consistently lectures them that they’re supposed to be doing, and here is a policy that actually gives practical support to make that happen—lifts people out of poverty, lifts their life prospects, gets them into work and contribution, and that side of the House took away the rungs of the ladder. On this side of the House we were proud to put that ladder back together for people, by restoring the training incentive allowance.

I really should say a few words about transport in respect of Budget 2021 as well, because there was so much in there. This was a Budget which made further progress in terms of restoring a resilient and reliable rail network—and on that side of the House there are few things that they hate more than investment in New Zealand’s rail system. The other thing in the Budget that I’m so proud of is investment in fair and decent conditions for New Zealand workers through fair pay agreements, and I’m very proud of the Budget for making investments in both of those things.

Rail, under the previous Government, was left to rack and ruin in a state of managed decline, assets stripped by the vultures that were let in in the era of privatisation in the 1990s. This Government, which has a nation-building vision for rail in New Zealand, is very proud of the $1.3 billion of investment that we have put in. It is so important in terms of reaching our climate change obligations. Last year, 119 out of 120 members of this House stood up and declared a climate emergency, and I take my hat off to every member across the House who did. This is a Government which is now actually doing something about it, and the investment in our rail system is an important part of that. Every year, KiwiRail takes the equivalent of 27,000 trucks off New Zealand’s roads by moving freight efficiently around our country. We stand for an integrated freight network in which we bring road, rail, and coastal shipping together to get freight around our country efficiently, and in which we reduce carbon emissions. That investment, alongside the $85 million in the Hillside Workshops, is one of which we are very proud. That investment will create jobs, it will create skills, it will really help to take the Otago and Dunedin economies ahead and create much greater resilience in our rail system.

As I said, this is a Budget which is about securing New Zealand’s recovery, it’s about building on the hard work and the sacrifices of New Zealanders over the last 10 years, it’s about making sure we have a strong economic platform, and it’s about making sure that we bring people along with us. This is a Budget in the proudest of Labour traditions, and it ensures that we all move forward as a country together. While that side of the House is focused in its desperate and divided state on pitting New Zealanders against each other, this Budget is one that takes us forward together. I commend it to the House.

Talofa lava, manuia Vaiaso o le Gagana Samoa. Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I want to take the time in today’s Budget debate to talk about the kaupapa of health, specifically the Māori Health Authority, Whānau Ora, and Pharmac. The inconvenient truth is that the health system fails Māori. Systemic racism plagues our health sector and sees Māori dying approximately seven years earlier than Pākehā. The failure to ensure equality in access and outcomes for Māori in the healthcare system is a mirror image of the degrading way we have been treated by successive colonial Governments. Tinkering with the broken system will never achieve the transformative outcomes that tangata whenua desperately need and are owed.

Te Paati Māori have stayed cautiously optimistic about this year’s Budget. It is the first Budget to accept the need for a targeted approach to funding, rather than a universal one. Te Paati Māori recognise that this Government is resourcing a system that kick starts Māori ability to look after ourselves in the Māori Health Authority. There has been $98.1 million budgeted in establishing funding provided to set up the Māori Health Authority, and we acknowledge the significance of this and established funding. Many Māori health experts have been calling for a proportional approach to funding the Māori Health Authority—one that would look at per capita Budget health entitlement. This is also Te Paati Māori’s policy. Therefore, budget for the Māori Health Authority funding should be $5 billion. That would be about 20 percent of the 2019-20 health budget. So in our opinion, this falls slightly short.

We are concerned why we would spend $98 million when we have pre-established models of success in Whānau Ora and its commissioning agencies. We are concerned that money may be, and is going to be, poured into bureaucracy at the cost of quality care, at the cost of attention to growing health disparities and inequities. That is why our position is that the funding for the Māori Health Authority should be channelled through the Whānau Ora commissioning model rather than through Pākehā structures or the Ministry of Health. The model of Whānau Ora, which is by Māori, for Māori, according to Māori, is an ideal kaupapa Māori model for success. No more cash for Whānau Ora in this Budget is a major blow. We are particularly puzzled that Whānau Ora received no additional funding given that the Minister is on record saying it is the highest-performing portfolio in Government. We need to invest in what works, and Whānau Ora has proven itself to be delivering life-changing outcomes for our whānau.

Another area of growing disparity in health that is needed is Pharmac. People are struggling to survive as they can’t even afford life-saving drugs such as for cancer and spina bifida, which are publicly funded in similar countries. These people are disproportionately Māori, who are even less likely to afford drugs that aren’t funded by Pharmac. In this Budget, Pharmac received $200 million of new funding over the next four years. We acknowledge this as a step forward; however, the call has been loud to double the Pharmac budget, with an increase to $400 million a year. Many of our whānau, including Patient Voice Aotearoa and chair Malcolm Mulholland, who I mihi to, have been among those leading this advocacy. On 12 May, just a few weeks before the Budget, we heard the karanga of patients and advocates in delivering a 100,000-strong petition calling for the doubling of Pharmac’s budget. I think of young 13-year-old Casey with spina bifida, and this Budget has fallen short.

Our unapologetic voice in Opposition has given Māori in Government the kaha to fight for more, and this Budget is a reflection of that. In the bigger scheme of things, this Budget presents a significant win for Māori. The fact that it is such a great Budget is the very problem, because we are building from a shockingly low baseline. Whilst this Budget is a significant move in the right direction, we will continue to apply pressure, to keep the Government accountable, to encourage you to keep being bold, to end disparity, to end poverty and environmental destruction. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. Manuia le Vaiaso o le Gagana Samoa. Can I also thank all the members of the House for using the language here. Samoan Language Week is the second of nine Pacific language weeks that will be celebrated this year.

As I listened to Mr Todd McClay make his comments earlier, I thought thank goodness he’s speaking the truth, because he was declaring where National stands and their philosophy. They stand for keeping labour costs down at the expense of New Zealanders. They are well-prepared and don’t care if they’re socialising the cost for business, but in so far as the profits—that stays theirs. That whole speech was about reducing labour costs. That’s what he spent 10 minutes doing. On this side of the House, we are a Government that governs for all New Zealanders.

💬 Hon Member: That’s right.

That’s right. We are a Government for all New Zealanders. Remember the wage subsidy? We prioritised business last year. That’s right. Are we asking for business to pay that back? No. We’re asking business to value workers, to ensure their employment, and to pay them a decent wage. Do businesses do that? Some of them do, but not all of them do. That’s why this Government continues to lift the minimum wage—to $20 an hour, as it was as of April this year.

This Budget, I want to say thank goodness that we have a finance Minister that understands the needs of all New Zealanders. This Budget is about securing our recovery from COVID-19. They keep forgetting there is a pandemic here. They keep forgetting, and every now and then they lose sight of is this about keeping costs down or is this about prioritising New Zealanders. This side of the House is about prioritising all New Zealanders. We inherited so much harm and damage in the health sector, education, employment, and income because of that very attitude that Mr McClay has talked about: keeping labour costs low at the expense of New Zealanders. So we’re having to address the long-term challenges of housing, inequality, and climate change, while we’re making sure that we can continue the growth of our economy.

A recovery Budget is what this Budget has been about. I want to acknowledge all the Ministers, and particularly the leadership of the Prime Minister and Grant Robertson, the Minister of Finance, because it’s been hard to balance the needs of all New Zealanders. But this Budget here is a continuation from the work that we started when we came in in 2017—raising the minimum wage, lifting benefits, ensuring that we are supporting families with children. In Budget 2021, yes, we’re raising main benefits, but that will enable us to lift an additional 33,000 children out of poverty. In total, 109,000 families with children will be, on average, $175 a week better off as a result of changes by our Government since 2017. Treasury has forecast that over 200,000 more people will be in jobs in the next four years as our economy recovers.

For Pacific peoples, I’m very proud that Budget 2021 continues the work that the Government allocated—targeted, specific support to the Pacific—from 2019 and last year. I want to share something with the House. So you see, in 2018, we released a report: The New Zealand Pacific Economy Report. In that report, it showed that Pacific peoples contribute $8 billion to New Zealand’s GDP, despite inequalities, despite the barriers. Here’s something interesting that we’ve just learnt: Pacific peoples volunteer 66,000 unpaid hours per week, and, in addition, they give not only their time, skills, and knowledge but also money. Pacific peoples gifted $2.4 million to others over four months. That’s about $160 per week per person.

I’m so grateful that I’m part of the Government that recognises that in order for all New Zealanders to contribute positively to New Zealand’s economy, we’ve got to eliminate these inequalities, we’ve got to eliminate those barriers—because imagine if we do that. Just imagine, if we’re able to do that, the kind of contribution that all New Zealanders can make to Aotearoa New Zealand.

Look, a few weeks ago I spoke about how living in New Zealand right here, right now feels like we’re living in the main street of Disneyland. You walk down it, you see the saloon, you see the emporium, you see the lolly shop, you look back; it’s just a facade, and Mickey Mouse is having a smoke behind the facade. There’s nothing in this Budget that’s fundamentally changed that view for me.

I want to talk about three things. The first thing is, yeah, it was great to see the Welfare Expert Advisory Group recommend an increase in benefits, but they also made another significant recommendation that wasn’t picked up, which was do the work, make the investment to help people get from welfare into work. On this side of the House we fundamentally know you should do that work in order to make that happen. Spend significant amounts of money to get people out of a pathway of hardship where they’re sitting there on State dependence, on benefits, into a job. That’s the only way that we can get them moving forward.

The second thing is that we’ve actually got a squeezed middle, and it’s very obvious this Government doesn’t care about the workers of New Zealand. These are the people who are waking up each day, they’re taking on the extra shifts, they do the two or three extra jobs, they raise their kids right, they pay their taxes on their lower middle incomes, and there’s nothing in here to support them. And yet this Government’s gone off and increased the cost of living for those very people. Think about it. The costs are piled on to small business—that’s reflected in higher prices. The costs are piled on landlords—reflected in higher rents. Food’s up 9.5 percent, rents are up 30 percent, and fuel’s up 17 percent. Power’s up. Building costs are up. There’s a four times increase in shipping and air freight costs. All these labour and material shortages—we’re getting increasing prices and the cost of living is going up for the squeezed middle, and there is nothing in this Budget for these people. It is quite obvious that this Government, for workers and for small-business owners, they are not their tribe and they don’t care enough about them.

The third thing is that there is nothing in here about growth and private sector - led recovery, because there’s a fundamental belief in this Government that “We know best. We don’t trust you to go off and make things happen in this economy. In fact, we create the jobs.” The Government doesn’t create the jobs. It’s the private sector that fundamentally creates the jobs, and I can tell you right now the prosperity of our nation and the quality of our life is single-handedly going to be improved by improving our productivity. And who does that? It’s actually private sector and private enterprise, creating jobs and growth.

There’s nothing in here that’s pro-trade or pro-growth. And the reality is in the next two to three years all the global economies are bouncing back big time. You’re seeing double-digit growth out of China. You’re going to see high single-digit growth out of the US. And we’re not going to be able to participate in that global recovery, because we haven’t got the economy shaped up in the right way. What we’ve got instead is we’ve been talking a lot about—you know, we’ve done a tidy job on COVID and keeping it out of New Zealand, an island nation at the bottom of the world with lots of water round it. Great—good stuff. But the bottom line is we’ve got nothing going on in terms of vaccination, so our vaccination plans and our trade plans, which are we want to keep people healthy so we can get our economy powered up, are not happening. The second-worst economy in the OECD in terms of vaccination roll-out and speed. The risk here is that we’ll do an OK, tidy job on COVID, but we’ll miss the huge opportunity, economically, that sits out beyond COVID because of our settings and our vaccination plans.

I think the biggest, saddest thing is there’s nothing here about seizing on the opportunities that exist out there in the world. We know the biggest problem we have in this country is our productivity disease. It’s been with us for 30 years, and there’s some big things that we need to be able to do that. We need to power up our export firms and make sure they operate at global scale around the world and actually can raise the floor, be better firms, and raise the total business environment as a consequence. We know there’s a lot of work to do on labour skills, because it’s all very well talking about improving productivity, getting to higher-value sectors, getting more money through the front door, but when you can’t get your kids to school and then you’ve got the lowest levels of reading, science, and maths that we’ve got in the OECD—in the bottom two or three—you’re not in a great shape to go off and create higher wages and salaries and therefore give families and people more choices as a result.

The last thing is we’re not really delivering infrastructure. We’re borrowing a hell of a lot of money, but we’re not, fundamentally, putting that money in between hard, hard infrastructure that’s about nation-building, reimagining what our country can look like for the 2040s and beyond. We just continue to band-aid and number eight wire stuff. There’s no real solution around a second harbour crossing. There’s nothing nation-building that’s going on here. There’s no big plan. It’s all really tactical stuff, and yet we know, fundamentally, that improving productivity is the biggest thing that we can do, and export firms, education, and infrastructure are the way in which we can get that job done.

So what we’ve learnt in this Budget is exactly what we’ve always understood: fundamentally, a National Government grows the economy. It cuts taxes and it creates jobs, and what we’re seeing here is exactly what a Labour Government does every single time: it increases taxes and spending, and it grows not the economy but bureaucrats. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Fa‘afetai, Mr Speaker. The first thing I’d say to Mr Luxon is stop getting your lines from Mike Hosking, mate. You need to read, you need to understand, and you can see what’s going on around you. We have the lowest unemployment in the OECD. Our economy is growing better than nearly every single country we compare ourselves to.

This Government has three priorities: keeping New Zealand safe from COVID, accelerating our recovery and rebuild from the impacts of COVID, and laying the foundations for the future. There’s a five-point recovery plan that underlies all of these. It’s investing in our people, creating jobs and improving productivity, supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs, positioning New Zealand globally, and preparing for the future. This Budget delivered on all five of those.

The objectives are very, very clear, and I’m going to outline a few of those as they relate to my portfolios. But first of all, I’d like to say congratulations to the Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, and our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, for the prudent management of our economy during the most difficult of times. History will show that this Government’s policy of a health response as the best economic response has actually worked. We are yet again number one in Bloomberg’s global Covid Resilience Ranking, and it is very, very hard to argue with that. That’s because as a team of 5 million, we have worked together. We took the hit together, but now we’re enjoying the openness of our communities and our economy together.

Having said that, I acknowledge and I have always acknowledged that some members of our national team of 5 million have done it harder than others, and no more so than the tourism sector. That’s why in this Budget we allocated another $200 million, on top of the $400 million beforehand, to help the tourism sector transition from now till when the borders open—very, very important, because we understand the value of our tourism sector. They asked, we heard, and we delivered yet again.

For small businesses, it’s vital that small businesses are part of the digital market place, part of the digital revolution. McKinsey & Company, an American consultancy, did some work in the States which showed that five years’ worth of digital enablement had been compressed into eight weeks in the States, and I think that is exactly what has happened here.

I used to say, pre-COVID—and I certainly reiterate it now—that this is the last generation of business owners that would survive, let alone thrive, without being digitally enabled, because everything we are doing in this Government is based on a digital platform, whether it’s paying your taxes—and no, there were no new taxes, Mr Luxon, as you mentioned in your last speech. It’s paying your taxes, it’s interacting with Government, it’s procurement, it’s paying invoices—everything we are doing is based on a digital platform. It’s why we allocated another $44 million to the Digital Boost programme, to ensure that small-business owners could learn about what digital technologies can do. They can learn about this in their own time, in their own place, in their homes, but it will drive a level of innovation that we have never seen before.

I talk about the digital adoption curve. That has been thrown on its head. There’s a whole lot of small-business owners who understand now that it’s not about success; it’s about survival, and digital technology is a part of that, and that is not the only one but a major, major focus for this Government.

The previous member talked about driving productivity growth. We are concerned about the lack of productivity across our economy. It’s why we have instigated industry transformation plans, and this Budget reiterated that. There are five areas—five areas—in our economy where we believe we need to increase productivity, where we can develop some form of global competitive advantage, and we need to get all the stakeholders in a room, working together to come up with a plan to drive this forward. We can’t do it as a Government—I acknowledge that—but neither can business do it in a vacuum of Government, so that is why we’ve got the unions, the iwi, key stakeholders, Government, and the private sector working together. That is the only way we are going to get the sort of results we require. I know that there are really smart, engaged people on the other side, like Erica Stanford, who get this, who know that the only way to drive productivity and growth across this economy is by working together, not in isolation.

Let me talk about regional economic development. This is a Government that, for the first time ever, engaged in the level of economic development that has made a huge, significant difference across our economy. In the new fund, the Regional Strategic Partnership Fund, from which the Provincial Growth Fund has morphed, will be a much more targeted fund, working with local regions in order to help them to drive opportunity, to achieve their objectives—again, in partnership.

I could talk about this for 45 minutes, around what this Budget delivers for businesses, what this Budget delivers for Kiwis, for economic development, for regional economic development, for our regions and this country, but my colleagues will elaborate on that. But I am very, very proud to be a member of Cabinet in this Government. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Firstly, I’d like to give a big talofa lava to all of our Samoan community for Samoa Language Week, especially my Samoan brothers and sisters over there, from me, their Cook Island cousin in the Green Party. This year’s theme for Vaiaso o le Gagana Samoa / Samoa Language Week 2021 is “Poupou le lotoifale, ola manuia le anofale.”, which means “Strengthen the posts of your house, for all to thrive.” That sounds like a Budget announcement to me! I like that whakataukī because it is like when you are building a foundation for a fale, it can’t have a weak foundation or post, because it will just fall over.

I would also like to acknowledge that it was Samoan Independence Day, actually, yesterday, and acknowledge the connection and history and the importance of the Mau movement to Samoa and also to us here in Aotearoa New Zealand. I also do hope that the political situation in Samoa comes to a conclusion which is in line with the aspirations of the democratic institutions of Samoa, as well.

I don’t pick sides—I don’t pick sides at all—but wasn’t Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson great in the latest version of The Fast and the Furious? Talking about going faster, the Greens do like the direction of travel of this Budget, but, like with all things Green, we would like it to go faster and furtherer—is that even English? Maybe. So it was good to see the wellbeing investment into our Pasifika communities. We welcome the $108 million boost for Pasifika-led initiatives, giving Pasifika people more revenue to gain employment, training, and education that will boost the livelihoods of our families—that is a great thing. Pasifika whānau come to Aotearoa for better education and employment, which is supported through this Budget. So it is good to see that on top of the commitment to Pasifika housing earlier this year.

However, there are some things that I did hope to see in this Budget, and perhaps they are hidden in the back balance sheets of the Budget somewhere where my seventh-form calculus was unable to interpret in the Budget book. I wanted to see something signalled in this Government’s Budget that was about giving an apology for the Dawn Raids—perhaps that is going to happen, and perhaps that corner of the House will surprise me pleasantly. For me, this apology is long overdue. The dawn raids are a shameful stain on New Zealand history, defined by racial tension and unrest, as police and immigration authorities victimised Pacific Islanders who they suspected of abusing the terms of their visas. I also wanted to acknowledge the legacy of the Polynesian Panthers and the role they played in standing up for the rights of Pasifika communities, particularly in the 1970s. They organised against the dawn raids. Any apology that does happen needs to be meaningful, and that means also ensuring that that history is remembered and taught in our schools. So if it is somewhere in the back balance sheets of the Budget, perhaps it is in the curriculum review—and I hope so.

The thing is that in order to ensure that we have learnt from our history, we also need to send signals that we won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. I’d like to acknowledge the leadership of the Pacific Leadership Forum, who I managed to connect with just after the first lockdown, and the concerns they had about providing pathways to residencies and an amnesty for overstayers.

In this Budget, I would have liked to have seen a greater emphasis on emergency benefits so that Pasifika migrants could be connected and delivered more effectively without them having to show they have a return ticket. I have concerns about Pasifika migrants being exploited, and also understanding that many of these workers are essential workers. They are the people that got us through the COVID crisis; they are the people that continue to get us through this COVID crisis.

I would like to end by recognising that we are just starting into Matariki, and I know that we began our Matariki season today on top of Tangi-te-keo, and I know that, in the same way that we can see Matariki from our hills in Aotearoa, they can see them throughout the Pacific. It is a reminder that Aotearoa and the Pacific are deeply, deeply connected, and the need for us to embed ecological sustainability in the curriculum review, which, I hope, will begin to talk about our Pacific histories, including the history of connections between Māori and Pasefika communities, but also more recent history around the dawn raids and about our connections and our responsibilities as people from Aotearoa and the Pacific. Fa‘afetai tele lava.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. I am honoured to talk about our Budget this year: a Budget which is about continuing to keep Aotearoa New Zealand safe from COVID-19, a Budget which is about accelerating the recovery and rebuild from the impacts of COVID-19, a Budget which is about laying the foundations for the future and addressing some of the key issues that confront us. In particular, this year we focus on child poverty, and that motivates the benefit increases—the benefit increases this year that finally expunge the levels of cuts from the 1991 “mother of all Budgets” and a benefit increase that meets the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. Of course there is more to do, but it is wonderful to see this action being taken. And those increases in benefits will flow back to the local communities as families spend the extra money on their children and on the resources to support themselves—it’s a great move.

I want to cast our minds back to the lockdown last year, which was, I guess, very difficult for many of us. In my neighbourhood, what I noticed was many, many people out walking about, enjoying the native bush where I live, and that bush is very precious to us out west in Auckland. The Waitakere Ranges are our jewel, our treasure, but, in the Waitakere Ranges, the kauri are dying. Kauri dieback has taken a really strong foothold there. We have all sorts of measures in place to try to reduce its impact, but for many—in fact, ever since I’ve entered this Parliament I’ve been advocating for a better approach to kauri dieback, and this year this Budget delivers that.

This year, this Budget delivers $28 million towards rolling out a national pest management plan for kauri. Now, what is that? Well, it’s a legal framework that brings together the work of Government, of councils, of iwi, and of NGOs all together in a framework that means that activity is coordinated and that everyone is at the decision-making table and involved in understanding how to fight against kauri dieback.

It’s pretty interesting having a national pest management plan for kauri dieback. We have three in place currently: one for Psa-V in kiwifruit, one for bovine tuberculosis, and one for American foulbrood in bees. But, interestingly, those are all there to protect commercial crops and commercial species. This is the first time that a national pest management plan will be rolled out for a taonga species—for our kauri, which have no commercial purpose, but they are deeply important to us, and we do need to do some astonishing work on trying to save them.

I mentioned that it had been something that I’d concerned myself with since I entered this Parliament. I have a report here from the previous Parliament from the Environment Committee where, at the time when I was chair, we led a series of briefings into kauri dieback. And what we found at that stage was that the work around kauri dieback was fragmented, it wasn’t coordinated, that there were lots of people trying to do lots of things, but altogether the effort wasn’t adding up to enough. As we talked to the various Government agencies, we found that work was beginning on putting together a national pest management plan or some kind of coordinated plan. Our committee recommended that that be followed—that that go ahead as soon as possible. So it took a bit of time for the money to arrive, but I would like to commend the Minister for Biosecurity, the Hon Damien O’Connor, for finally pulling together this package of funding, which will ensure that kauri dieback is addressed properly.

But as well as commending the Minister, obviously, I also would like to acknowledge the other people who’ve worked on this for many years and have been raising their concerns around it: people like Te Kawerau ā Maki from the Waitakeres, who have this deep commitment to kauri; people like Dr Nick Waipara, an absolute expert in plant pathogens, who has brought his considerable knowledge to bear on this issue; people like the Save Our Kauri Trust—all people working to save our kauri. I’m very grateful for their work and for their advocacy, for their input into the select committee briefings on kauri dieback, for the contribution they have been making to the development of this national pest management plan, and for creating the will to do it. So there’s a lot of work that has gotten us to this point where, in the Budget this year, finally, with the support of the Minister and to my great delight, that money has been allocated. And it does contribute to our future, it does contribute to our security, it does contribute to our recovery. Why? Because it is part of our bush, part of our New Zealand native species, part of our treasures. Kauri are magnificent trees—they are absolutely fabulous trees. It has been heartbreaking to see them dying in my neighbourhood, and it is wonderful to see this plan now rolling into place so that we can save our kauri.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. Budget 2021 was the chance for new initiatives and aspirational reform in the immigration space and to provide hope for all New Zealand businesses who are, frankly, sick and tired of being chastised for keeping their operations alive by employing desperately needed migrants. Businesses are doing everything they can to find and train up locals, and have to prove this to Immigration New Zealand, but they’ve also told me that it’s not particularly helpful when the Government constantly implies that many of these sectors are low skilled, unattractive, and not a great career pathway. The Government isn’t exactly selling it to locals. Businesses all over New Zealand have been through the wringer when it comes to their workforce needs in their interactions with Immigration New Zealand.

In terms of managing expectations around Budget 2021, that wasn’t really a problem for business owners. The recent commentary from the likes of the Minister of Immigration, the Minister of Tourism, and even the Prime Minister provided the backdrop to what they could expect from this Budget, which was absolutely nothing. No new initiatives at Immigration New Zealand, no aspiration, no real solutions for migrants overall—just a Government that after four years still tries to put all the blame on business owners and migrants themselves, who pay their fair share of tax and got absolutely nothing other than continued headache and heartache.

What we’re left with is a significant missed opportunity for reinvention, and the chance for a positive strategy for the so-called immigration reset has gone begging. Talk of an immigration reset has been going on since before the 2020 election, so there’s been no shortage of time to develop a strategy and use the opportunity of Budget 2021 to map a clear path forward. But, perhaps, they’ve just been too busy trying to deal with their self-inflicted visa application chaos. All we’re getting is the usual reviews in the policies and processes, and even the forthcoming changes to work visas took far longer than originally promised. And given the way the roll-out is designed, it will almost certainly create unintended consequences.

Businesses and migrants have been asking why the Minister of Immigration has not confronted the obvious when it comes to immigration’s role in our post - COVID-19 economic recovery. The rhetoric from the Government, particularly in recent weeks, is divisive and tone deaf. To suggest that businesses nationwide need to stop employing hard-working migrants, drive up costs and therefore their prices, and fill vacancies in areas with skill shortages is not only ignorant, it’s economic sabotage, especially in the regions. I’ll be honest, though. I suspect the Government’s strategy, if you can call it a strategy, is actually just going to fizz out into nothing, and subsequent rhetoric will be a mix of backtracking and verbal gymnastics—probably during question time—because they can’t change reality. Sectors will be crying out for migrants, whether highly skilled or in more manual jobs, and the Government may just have to give in and quietly put the whole immigration reset concept on ice.

It was also intriguing to hear from the Reserve Bank last week in a select committee when my colleague Damien Smith asked if the Government had given them any indication as to future immigration levels to assist with their economic forecasting. Evidently, the Government hadn’t, and I think we can safely assume that this is because the Government doesn’t know either, and the bankers are left guessing in their models. I suspect there’s a fair bit of that going around, particularly as we look at forecasts around productivity, employment, and inflation.

Not everyone in the immigration space was left empty-handed by Budget 2021 though. Immigration New Zealand itself got a significant bailout in February, with more to come. And I sincerely hope that they use this stake to get on with the job at hand: get visas processed, reunite families, and get investment back into New Zealand fast. We have an immigration system that is at breaking point, a visionless Government that seems totally disconnected from the realities of doing business. Whether a person owns a small cafe, a restaurant, a high-tech start-up, or an apple orchard, they’re paying their weight in tax, providing jobs for migrants and Kiwis, and they want some answers.

ACT would start again with the whole system: create aspirational and efficient pathways that reward skilled migrants and be truly business-led when it comes to work visas, as opposed to the Government’s plan, which may drastically increase migrant exploitation and unemployment. We certainly wouldn’t blame businesses for lacklustre Government policy around training initiatives. We would empower them because it’s business owners who know best when it comes to their workforce needs and the needs of the economy as a whole. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Talofa lava. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. What an opportunity to be able to speak today on such a magnificent Budget. I must say that in the recess time, I’m lucky enough to be able to get out into my community and talk to people about what’s in the Budget. I never get sick of doing that. It’s a great opportunity, because Budget 2021 was about securing our recovery from COVID and people can see this. When you look at what’s happened in the past, people know that New Zealand has delivered a strong health response; they can see that. People know that through the wage subsidy, our local businesses and local workers continue to be employed and our local economy in the Hutt is thriving. We can also see there’s been a significant investment in infrastructure, and that translates not just to the things that we need to drive or trains or hospitals, but it also means jobs—jobs in terms of our apprenticeships and our people working and bringing home a good wage, and that’s what people see when you talk to them.

But this Budget builds on that. It builds on that platform that’s already been delivered over the last Budget and it lays the foundations for coming out of COVID stronger and building back even better by addressing some of those challenges that we know are systemic within New Zealand: the housing crisis, inequality, and also climate change. There is a whole lot of good work in there that continues to develop the hard work that’s gone on before.

When you think about real examples and you talk to people—I met an early childhood education teacher the other week, who knew that they were going to get as much pay as kindergarten teachers, and that was making a significant difference to what they could afford to buy. A local business owner who now had two apprenticeships going, under his watch, instead of just one, because of the apprenticeship scheme. And because that had worked so well for his business he’d taken on two in Mana in Mahi who were previously unemployed, and had got the benefits through that, and he was looking at taking those lads from Mana in Mahi into doing apprenticeships.

When you talk to someone who knows they’ll be able to now get the Training Incentive Allowance, that their bus fare, that their books, that their additional support to be able to get to and learn and improve and drive stronger—that is what New Zealand wants. It’s to give opportunities to people to make the most of what their lives can be. And it even helps so much more to have the mum or the dad who knows they’re getting that extra money in their benefit to buy some shoes, to buy some food, and to buy those extra things to help get by.

I could talk about all of those things a lot, because there are so many things in this Budget. There are so many great things to pick out. But I’m going to use my remaining time to talk about something that I’m really passionate about, and that’s Te Pae Oranga, which is Māori justice panels. Just today we’ve had the announcement in Hamilton that Budget 2021 will invest in reducing reoffending by funding an additional 12 Te Pae Oranga community justice panels, or iwi community justice panels. This will include nine new rangatahi or youth panels, and that will fund approximately 35 fulltime-equivalent positions within police to work within communities.

I was waiting to hear the cries from the benches opposite of “Soft on crime.”, but they seem to have gone quiet today. But I came prepared just in case they did cry out “Soft on crime.”, because I have a couple of great quotes. The first one I’d like to quote is—

💬 Hon Members: Soft on crime!

Oh there you go, thank you. “Sending someone off to jail for their first shoplifting offence might make society feel good, but if that then sets them on a lifetime path of crime, then I don’t think society has won out of the deal.” That was by the former Minister of Justice the Hon Amy Adams in 2016. Here’s another one: “Having sat through these panels, they are not soft on crime. The offender certainly has to pay the price.” So it’s great to know that there’s agreement across the House on the fact that having a community response, having an offender work within their community to address the underlying issues of what is driving low-level offending, is actually how you drive transformational change within the justice system.

When I first worked on police and sat on these panels and saw how they operated, I can say firsthand that people who would have entered the justice system were prevented from doing so. They provide real opportunity for local autonomy, local communities, local marae to work hand in hand with police and their people to make sure we have positive long-term outcomes for our next generation. I’m proud to be part of a Government that delivers a system that enables that engagement early on and does not resort to just courts and prison as a knee-jerk reaction, instead of addressing the underlying factors that are driving that offending in the first place. I think that is the way we will work forward to have a better New Zealand, and that is what Budget 2021 delivers.

Mr Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to this Budget debate. I stand here on behalf of the National Party to oppose this Government’s Budget and to support the Hon Judith Collins’—National Party leader’s—amendment that “this House has no confidence in anything this Government promises, because after just four years its track record of failing to deliver, of broken promises, of spin over substance, and of announcements over results speaks for itself.”

To bring that amendment to life, I want to focus on mental health. Absolute four years of failure from this Government. If I can begin by the context when this Labour Party was in Opposition: they politicised mental health, they weaponised suicide statistics, they raised expectations with vulnerable New Zealanders, and they got thousands of New Zealanders to turn up to an inquiry and tell their traumatic and heartfelt stories. And what do they do? They kick them in the guts. They announce a lot of funding in 2019, wash their hands and say that’s all.

Why do I know that Budget 2021 is an admission of absolute failure in mental health? They’ve raised the white flag. How many times did the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern mention mental health in her Budget speech? None. Zero. De nada. How many times did Grant Robertson mention mental health in his Budget speech? The Minister of Finance—one. The two top people mentioned mental health once. That’s why Budget 2021 for mental health will be known to sweep mental health under the carpet. They don’t want to talk about mental health anymore, because what does a Labour Government do in Opposition? They say, “Here’s a problem: put us in Government and we’ll make a difference.” They promised New Zealanders they would change the mental health system and they have failed.

In the context of this Budget, they turned up after announcing record amounts of mental health funding in Budget 2019, and just before Budget 2021, as of 30 April, they were supposed to have spent $247 million in new services. They promised vulnerable New Zealanders. And as of that date they were supposed to have spent $247 million. They have only spent $147 million. Already, going into Budget 2021, they’d underspent $100 million. I know New Zealand Association of Counsellors working in secondary care and in DHBs are crying out for funding to respond to the growing referral numbers in response to COVID-19—and they’re not spending the money.

Grant Robertson has record underspends in his mental health bank accounts. And what was there for mental health in Budget 2021? Nothing. They wouldn’t even mention the word. Nothing for mental health. They don’t talk about it anymore.

Tomorrow, I will accept a petition from Rebecca Toms from my region of Canterbury—a heartbreaking story. Many New Zealand parents around the country, they’ve got kids with eating disorders. They go in to get treatment and they’re told that their kid is not near death enough to access the treatment service. They went to Andrew Little, the health Minister, and asked for funding. Currently, eating disorder services are funded by a paltry $15 million. If addiction services are poor second cousins to mental health services in New Zealand, eating disorders aren’t even on the radar. Their stakeholder group is voluntary; they get no funding. They went to the health Minister and asked for funding in Budget 2021, just a few million so they can develop a strategy for New Zealand. They got nothing.

Here we have, I think, the actual epitome of how these guys have absolutely failed. Many will know what I’m going to say, and that’s Mike King handing back his Queen’s honour. He says there is more than enough money in the system. It’s just the incompetence at the top. It is so up the creek without a paddle, it’s ridiculous. Families are suffering. Shame on them for letting down vulnerable New Zealanders.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Talofa lava. I’m extraordinarily proud to stand here today talking to what is my first Budget in this House, and what a Budget it is. I was preparing for this speech and I was finding it really hard to find the best bits to talk about, and so I had to really just stick to the bits that were relevant to me. Relevant to me as the proud MP for Ilam, relevant to me as a woman and a healthcare provider, and relevant to me as a breast cancer survivor. But, of course, they’re not just relevant to me; they’re relevant to many, many thousands of other women and other people in New Zealand and beyond.

Now, Ilam, where’s the relevance, you might think. Ilam is actually home to Antarctica New Zealand and one of the six bases from which our scientists travel to Antarctica. Now, Scott Base is, as you know, in the Ross Dependency in Antarctica. It’s actually 3,800 kilometres south of Christchurch. It houses world-leading scientists from New Zealand, and they are completing world-leading science in what is an old set of buildings that were in urgent need of upgrade and repair. So our scientists are going to be better equipped in a fantastic new series of buildings that will be constructed in New Zealand and probably, I hope, in Christchurch. They’ll create 170 jobs at the peak of construction and 700 over six years. And that will enable us to continue to understand how climate change affects Antarctica, affects Aotearoa by extension, and the rest of the world. It’s absolutely vital work that we need to continue to support, and, hopefully, in a way that doesn’t mean our scientists are having to stand on the roof to sweep the snow off as they do currently—not ideal in minus 50.

As a breast cancer survivor—moving on—I see a Budget that is literally lifesaving; 3,200 people a year are diagnosed with breast cancer. So, currently, at the moment, our screening programme provided by BreastScreen Aotearoa, who are doing an amazing job, does screen eligible people between 45 and 69 every two years. But it’s an opt-in service. What we’re doing in this Budget is allocating $55.6 million for a major upgrade of our breast-screening programme, which will mean that we’re able to screen 271,000 extra women who are not currently accessing this screening programme. Currently, we have an opt-in programme, so you have to know the screening is available and actually access it yourself. But what we’re going to be doing is using technology to ensure that it’s an opt-out programme, and that’s why so many more women are going to have access to it. This disproportionately affects Māori and Pasifika women, who are much more likely to be benefiting from this opt-out programme.

Speaking of lifesaving, more money is being spent by this Government in this Budget—$53 million—as we move into a new test for cervical cancer. Each year, 160 women develop cervical cancer. And I’m noting, as I say that, that I’m standing at the desk of the Hon Kiritapu Allan, who was one of those this year. Kiritapu Allan has been absolutely vocal in her support of cervical-screening programmes and has encouraged all of us to make sure that we do access the programmes that we can to make sure that our cervical screens are up to date. And when I describe this new programme, it’s not to say, “Please wait for it.”, but to “Please have your cervical swab now.”, and the screening programme will be rolled out from 2023. The new programme will be self-administered, it will be quick, it will be a swab that’s less invasive and more effective, and it will be preventing 400 additional cervical cancer diagnoses, saving 138 lives over the next 17 years. Of those 138 lives—138 lives will be saved—a third of those will be Māori, because, at the moment, 61 percent of eligible wāhine Māori are not accessing our cervical-screening programme. I think that’s because it can be a little invasive and it can be a little embarrassing to go for that smear, but I do encourage everybody wholeheartedly to make sure that they do do that and don’t wait for the new screening programme. Thank you so much.

Talofa lava. Fa‘afetai. We all deserve a strong safety net that helps people live with dignity, and that’s why the Greens were so pleased to see in this Budget the increase in income support for New Zealanders living in poverty, in line with the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. That means 33,000 children will be lifted out of poverty.

This Budget has also seen a huge investment in climate-related activities: $2.1 billion. It quadruples the size of the Green Investment Fund to kick-start low-carbon technologies, with an extra $300 million, and there’s been a major commitment in this Budget to recycle the revenue from the emissions trading scheme (ETS) from next year’s Budget into green initiatives. That will mean approximately $3 billion can go towards climate action in coming years, and when the Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw, is going to release the climate commission’s final recommendations on 9 June, knowing that all this ETS revenue can be invested in climate action, it is really exciting.

This Budget 2021 has been about people. It’s been about investing in people and infrastructure and climate action. Papatūānuku also needs investment. There was a big increase in funding for conservation in Budget 2018 and in 2019, and then we saw in the COVID recovery package with Jobs for Nature an extra $1.3 billion across four agencies.

In Budget 2021, there’s an extra $132 million in Vote Environment for the design, enactment, transition, and reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA), because of the recognition that it has really failed to protect the environment. It is too cumbersome and takes too much time, and, unlike in 1991, when the RMA was passed, there is funding to help with implementation and the guidance that councils will need.

There’s also $28 million for kauri dieback, to protect the taonga of our kauri forests, but what’s missing in terms of this Budget 2021 is an increased investment in our oceans, in fisheries, and in marine protection. So we haven’t seen that. In the words of the Ministry for Primary Industries, in answer to select committee questions, there is—and I quote—“no significant change” in the fisheries appropriations as a result of Budget 2021. There are no new policies or outputs, no reprioritisation of funds, and just no change to the outlook. So that is same old, same old, but same old, same old is not delivering for fisheries management. It is not delivering for our oceans.

We’ve got a huge information deficit in terms of fisheries management and big shortfalls in information about fish stocks, about species bycatch, and about ecosystem impacts of fisheries. That’s long been recognised, and it was highlighted by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, Dr Juliet Gerrard, in this report about the future of commercial fisheries. But this Budget has no additional funding for fisheries research. That’s despite some fish stocks being in freefall.

In 2020, nine fish stocks were reported as collapsed, five were virtually certain to be experiencing overfishing, and two were likely to be experiencing overfishing. We need more funds for stock assessment and we need more funds for that to be done every year. In 2019, only 160 fish stocks had been scientifically evaluated. There were 228 fish stocks that hadn’t been assessed. Those 228 fish stocks account for 30 percent of our commercial catch. Expecting sustainable fisheries management without real-time assessment of those stocks is not sustainable management.

Forty-six percent of our commercial catch comes from bottom trawling. The Budget in 2022 needs to provide for significantly more investment to tackle the impacts that bottom trawling has on beds, the ecosystems, and the habitat. Overseas, there’s been a lot more effort to protect seamounts as biological hot spots, but not here.

There’s no extra funding in the Budget for reform of marine protection. That may be being done under Fisheries New Zealand’s baseline and the Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai’s baseline. It is urgent, because the 1971 Marine Reserves Act is outdated. It doesn’t provide adequately for Te Tiriti. It’s focused around protection for scientific research. We need major reform of marine protection, and we need an investment in that.

We rely on our oceans. They’ve helped protect us from a warming climate, and we need more investment.

Talofa lava. It is a privilege to speak in this, my first Budget debate as an MP and a Minister. This Budget lays the foundations for coming out of COVID stronger and focuses on securing our recovery. This Budget builds on the strong position New Zealand is in thanks to our world-leading health response to the global pandemic. It means we can tackle long-term challenges like housing, inequality, and climate change. We can take a balanced approach that will create jobs and keep a lid on debt, and we can invest in our infrastructure, lifting children out of poverty, and building a stronger, more responsive health system.

I do want to take a couple of minutes to highlight some new initiatives that will make a real difference to people. And let’s start with COVID. In this Budget, we’ll see that public health units will receive a $53.2 million investment. That is building on $40 million for public health units in the last Budget. Not many people know the day-to-day work of public health units, but they are the people who respond to all our COVID outbreaks, who do school testing, who coordinate public health responses to every outbreak, who do the contact tracing, and who often coordinate COVID-related activities across the DHB. In addition to this, they are also promoting health in their communities through things such as smoking prevention or improving food environments. As part of this investment, there will be $15.4 million to train 10 additional public health specialists each year. This, plus the Government’s plans to develop a public health agency as part of our wider systems reforms, means that the future of public health in New Zealand post-pandemic is in good heart. We will never need to rebuild our public health infrastructure in the face of a pandemic again.

Other initiatives that are related to preventative health include the HPV testing and breast-screening announcements. Budget 2021 will deliver a better cervical-screening test and a major upgrade to breast screening that will save lives. We’re investing $53 million to implement a new human papillomavirus test, which is the cause of the majority of cervical cancers. As my colleague Sarah Pallett has mentioned, the new test will replace the current smear test, and it will mean that, for 1.4 million eligible women, they will soon have a simple and quick swab rather than an invasive speculum exam. We know from clinical trials conducted in New Zealand that this will increase the number of Māori and Pacific women who are willing to participate in the screening programme. These are groups that we have traditionally underserved. Our modelling predicts that we’ll detect an additional 400 cancers over 17 years, and save over 138 lives. Around a third of those will be lives of Māori.

In breast screening, we are also investing in new technology. We’re building a better register that guides the information technology for our breast screening. As has been mentioned, the opt-in model is currently a barrier to women accessing breast screening and, through the new register, we’ll be able to reach the 271,000 women proactively who currently are not on the screening programme.

In the final moments, I want to draw attention to some of the other health and vaccine investments, particularly those that are of interest to seniors. One of the biggest investments—I think it’s underappreciated how important it is—is the $1.4 billion we’ve invested in the COVID vaccination programme, to ensure that a New Zealander can receive a free vaccination. Yes, it’s a massive investment, but it is also an investment that is most likely to save the lives of seniors in New Zealand, and I think that will be one of the biggest impacts that we’ll have on the health of seniors in history. These investments sit alongside other major investments in health, including $200 million for Pharmac, so that New Zealanders can access more medicine, and $100 million for ambulance services.

Finally, we have also put aside money in the Budget for an Aged Care Commissioner, which we’ll be able to provide more details on in the future. There is much more in Budget ‘21 that I could talk about, from the investments in warmer, healthier homes to the major increases in weekly benefit rates. This is a Budget for recovery and that looks out for people in need and tackles our long-term challenges.

As I call Erica Stanford, I want to indicate to her that she has less than five minutes because, when there’s 10 minutes to go in the debate, I will call the Minister of Finance in reply—about four minutes.

OK. Thank you. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to this Budget 2021, and I don’t think anyone will be surprised about the fact that I’m going to talk about immigration, because when you add it up, all the money that they’ve bailed them out with and the money that they’ve given them, it totals about half a billion dollars. The single overarching purpose of this appropriation—and this is the funny part—is to provide efficient immigration services that generate positive economic and social outcomes for New Zealand. Now, anyone listening to this debate, to me speaking today, who is either an immigration agent, an immigration lawyer, or anyone who has to actually interact with the immigration service, will be laughing or crying, or a combination of both, because they know how broken our immigration system is.

Let’s, firstly, just take a look at those words: “efficient immigration service”. We’ve got residence queues that are the longest we’ve had in history. We’ve got an immigration department that are on a go-slow, producing one outcome in residency a week, where they used to do 1.2 decisions a day. We’ve got an expression-of-interest (EOI) queue being frozen since March last year. We’ve got secret priority queues, split migrant families. All of this is not because of COVID; this started as far back as 2018—they are not allowed to use that as an excuse.

Poor Minister Stuart Nash had to get up on behalf of Kris Faafoi the other day and talk about the immigration reset, where we’re going to, you know, have highly skilled migrants. Well, if you google “how to do immigration”, that is pretty much what it tells you on any immigration search. There wasn’t anything new in that speech, and yet everyone flew to Wellington for it, thinking that it was going to be some great announcement, and poor Stuart Nash had to deliver the bad news: there was nothing in it, apart from more anxiety and stress for migrants.

If we take a look, the most important thing about our immigration system is to encourage highly skilled migrants here. If we take a look at the expression-of-interest pool that is now reaching 10,000 people, that has been frozen since March last year: 235 doctors are sitting in there, 900 nurses, 543 teachers—one of them at my local high school, Rangitoto College, is a great maths teacher, and she also coaches my daughter at netball; stuck in an EOI queue, thinking about leaving—150 plumbers and electricians. Those are just the registered occupations. If we want to have the very best people, the most highly skilled people, come to New Zealand to help us claw our way out of our economic decline that COVID has caused, then we need to do the best—

💬 Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Take a breath.

—and we don’t have the best—I’ve only got four minutes, Carmel Sepuloni, and you know that well; no time for a breath.

If we want the best, we have to be the best, and we are currently one of the worst. People think that people want to come to New Zealand to live and work. Right now, they don’t. In fact, the good people we have here, the highly skilled people that Stuart Nash is talking about trying to invite, are already here: they work for our local businesses, they are our teachers, our nurses, our doctors, our IT workers, and they are all looking to leave because they can’t get residency, because they are stuck in a queue that is going nowhere or it is going to take two years or they are split from their families for over 500 days and can’t see their children. Why would they stay here? They are all looking to leave—our doctors, our nurses, our teachers, these good people, these skilled people that Stuart Nash and Kris Faafoi want here in New Zealand. They are already here but they don’t want to be here any more because we treat them so appallingly.

A man I spoke to today who owns a company whose staff are looking to leave, a Kiwi, he said to me, “I am embarrassed about the way we treat our migrants.” We all should be embarrassed about the way we treat them. It is appalling. The immigration system is broken, and here we are spending half a billion dollars on an immigration system that is supposed to be efficient and have good positive economic and social outcomes, but, actually, when it boils down to it, is delivering the exact opposite. We will be watching every single dollar that is spent—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

I thank all members who have contributed to this debate, including the member who’s just resumed her seat, Erica Stanford, who did, I think, manage some kind of world speed record with her speech. But I do thank her, and all members, and I also thank members in advance for the work that they’re about to do in the Estimates hearings as we go through the full Budget process. It is a very important part of the accountability of Parliament to look through the processes. Some hearings will be better attended than others, as we go through this period of time, but they’re all important and all ones that are going to contribute to the debate.

This is a Budget that I am intensely proud to have presented on behalf of this Government. It is a Budget that builds on the hard work of New Zealanders over the course of the last year and a bit. When I stood up in this House in May 2020, we were facing down a period of significant economic restriction, of a reduction in our GDP that had not been seen before, of unemployment being close to 10 percent, and we can proudly look today at a country where we have overachieved against those predictions, and relative to the rest of the world. We continue to be able to look across the world and see that our strong public health response has enabled a limited amount of restrictions in our economy and has seen us able to operate in a way that other countries are still not able to do. Whatever the other side of the House want to say, we take a look at whatever measure you like, and the Bloomberg Index is the one that is being used by a lot of people—New Zealand sits at the top of that index. That index is not just about our health response, it is not just about the work that New Zealanders did to support one another to get through COVID; it’s also about our economic response.

I can think of nothing more than that—and this Budget builds heavily on this—in the area of apprenticeship and trade training. I remember sitting in this House after the global financial crisis—in fact, I remember being at a select committee hearing and asking how much money was going into making sure that apprentices could stay in their jobs. The short answer was that money was actually put aside and it wasn’t spent and it wasn’t used, and apprentices got laid off. It meant that when it came time to do the recovery and to do the rebuilds, there were not people trained up to do it. Well, we made sure we didn’t repeat that mistake, and since 1 July last year, as a result of this Government’s policies, more than 100,000 New Zealanders have taken up apprenticeships and trade training for free—57,000 of those people are new apprentices. Of that, a third are in the construction industry, an area where we now see a 7.1 percent increase in filled jobs in that sector over the course of the last year. That is the kind of thing that we have been able to do to make sure that we have got through this in a way that is, relatively speaking, better than a lot of the rest of the world.

But COVID is not over, and every person who watches the news each night—and tonight people will watch the news and they will see that the lockdown in Melbourne has been extended by another week—will look around the world and see the places that some members of this House have wanted to compare us to, like Vietnam, like Taiwan, and see that those countries have further outbreaks and are now in restrictions and lockdowns. So we need to continue to invest in keeping New Zealanders safe from COVID and in making sure that we continue to play an active role in the economy, to continue to stimulate the economy, because every single economic forecast contains the words “uncertainty” and “volatility”. So that is why this Budget sets a very balanced approach, investing in the areas where it is needed most, but keeping an eye on the future, keeping a lid on debt, and making sure that we are looking out for future generations. The Budget invests heavily in the Government’s number one priority of keeping New Zealanders safe from COVID-19, with $1.5 billion going into a vaccination programme that is ahead of schedule. You’re not going to hear that from Mr Bishop, are you? Ahead of schedule, 9 percent ahead of schedule, 235,000 people fully vaccinated. On this side of the House we know that we will achieve our goal of making sure that every New Zealander who wants it, over the age of 16, is vaccinated. At the same time, we’ll keep investing in the managed isolation facilities, we’ll keep investing in making sure that our border is safe and secure, and this Budget does that.

But what it also does is it has an eye to the future on the two other priorities of the Government this term: accelerating our recovery and our rebuild, and making sure we get on with addressing those long-term challenges around climate change, around housing affordability, and around child wellbeing. There’s $57.3 billion into infrastructure. This is the pipeline that the infrastructure industry asked for year after year after year under the previous Government, and they did not get it. They got inconsistent, haphazard investment in our infrastructure. Rather, from this Government, what they get is a long-term pipeline. Now, there are constraints in the New Zealand economy at the moment, caused by supply constraint, caused by lack of labour supply, but that means that at least those companies now know where that investment is coming from, and that the Government is prepared to put its money where its mouth is. It’s not about putting out press releases, it’s not about standing in the middle of a field and saying, “This is where a road’s going to be built.”, and putting no money in; it’s about making sure that that money is actually on the table and ready to be spent. In addition to that is our ongoing investment in skills and in training and the reform of our vocational education system, of looking ahead to a future where New Zealanders have high-paid jobs wherever they live in the country.

In the time remaining, I do want to focus on the third of those key priorities, and that is the work that we have done in this Budget to improve child wellbeing. I want to congratulate the Minister Carmel Sepuloni for the hard work that she has put in over several years now, in terms of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group and our ability to now be able to respond to further of their recommendations. I heard, in one of the opening speeches in this—actually, I didn’t, I heard about it later—from the Leader of the Opposition, where she used the phrase that this was a “broken compass Budget”. It’s not. It’s a “moral compass Budget”. It’s a Budget where a Government has got the moral compass back for New Zealand that has been lost over so many generations. We are not creating a world in which people who are living on main benefits are somehow or other going to be flush with cash. We are still expecting a 25 year old person to be able to live on $315 a week. Now, that is a boost, that is going to make a big difference to that person’s life, but that is far, far from being some kind of lap of luxury life that we hear from some members across the House. This is about restoring dignity, and it’s about restoring hope, and the same applies to the reinstatement of the Training Incentive Allowance for degree-level qualifications. It is another thing that is about giving a chance and an opportunity and a hope to those who want to go and get those qualifications and then add to the productivity of New Zealand through doing so. Alongside that, we’ve got additional support around the childcare allowance, additional support around the unsupported child and orphans benefit as well. All of these are things that add on to what we have already done, meaning that New Zealand families will be better off, 109,000 of them, by more than $175 a week since this Government came into office.

The other two of those priorities are also important. This is the Budget that appropriates the $3.8 billion for the Housing Acceleration Fund, practical work, funding that will go out and build the roads and the drains and make sure that land is build-ready to put those houses on. It’s what local governments asked for, it’s what the private sector has asked for, and it is delivered inside this Budget. It is also a Budget where we finally take some proper steps around Māori housing, and I do think it’s really important that we note today the work of our Māori Ministers who are out there at the moment, in our communities, talking to the communities about where we can build houses, where we can repair houses, and give a clear basis for good development for our Māori communities. The same applies to the work being done in the Māori Health Authority establishment, also funded in this Budget.

Then there is the third of those priorities, that are around climate change. This Budget—and I know you, Mr Speaker, will understand this, as somebody who has helped put Budgets together—does something very significant. It says that all of the revenue that we will get through the emissions trading scheme will be hypothecated, recycled into emissions reduction initiatives. This is not something the Treasury’s always a particularly big fan of, but it is something that is important, because if we are truly to deal with an intergenerational issue like climate change, then we must take a step such as this.

So this is a Budget that secures our recovery. This is a Budget that gets the balance right, between making sure we invest where it is needed most while being responsible and careful with the financial management of our country. It is a Budget that starts to get on top of our long-term issues around inequality in our society, around making sure everybody has a warm, dry, safe home to live in, and looks to the future of a low-emissions economy that will produce high-paying jobs. It is a Budget I am immensely proud to have delivered in this House.

The question is that the amendment in the name of the Leader of the Opposition be agreed to.