Imprest Supply (Second for 2021/22) Bill

I move, That the Appropriation (2021/22 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and that the Imprest Supply (Second for 2021/22) Bill be now read a second time.

It always surprises me when this current Opposition decide to vote against making sure the Government’s got enough money to pay for all of the things that they ask for every single day in this House, and then they come down here and they vote against actually having the money to do the things—to pay the nurses, to pay the doctors, and to make sure Mr Bishop’s got all of those people who he constantly encourages to get out there and do the vaccinations. Then, they come down to the House and say, “No, no, we’re not going to vote for that.”

Today, I am immensely proud to be in this House with the Appropriation (2021/22 Estimates) Bill at its third reading. What that is, for those who follow along at home, is, essentially, the initiatives in the Budget that we presented in May. I want to start this part of my speech by acknowledging the very hard work done by select committees to take the Estimates process through, to analyse the spending that the Government has in place, and then to make their reports back to this House and, indeed, to members of this House, and while I was less than charitable at the beginning of my speech, I can be more charitable now and thank the Opposition for the agreement at the Business Committee to undertake the process that we are now undertaking here in the House today, and to assure members who feel that they might have missed out on the committee of the whole House process that the Business Committee has agreed that that time will come again a little later in the year for those who haven’t had the opportunity to have input.

The bill in front of us today puts in place a Budget that focuses very tightly on the Government’s three priorities. They are the recovery of New Zealand from COVID-19 and building on that, they are making sure that we continue to reduce inequality, they are making sure that we get on top of a housing crisis that we inherited, and, fundamentally, they make the first and very important steps in what will come in the next few Budgets around the area of climate change.

In the interests of time, obviously, I can’t run through every single initiative in the Budget, but one thing I want to indicate is the importance that I put on the fact that this is a Budget that has increased main benefits by the greatest amount in a generation. This is a very much overdue initiative. It’s one that the Government is very proud to have put in place, and we did so knowing that we needed to make a difference quickly, so we brought forward part of that benefit increase to 1 July, and then we have got the remainder of it coming in, as would normally be the case, on 1 April. This will make a demonstrable difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders and, as I say, it is not before time. We are very well aware that there are further recommendations from the Welfare Expert Advisory Group that we will continue to work through over time, but this does represent a very significant and important shift in giving some dignity and respect to those of our lowest-income earners.

Another very important part of this bill in terms of the response to and the recovery from COVID-19 is the significant investment in the area of infrastructure. That totals across the Budget period a $57.3 billion programme. That covers everything from our transport budget through to health, through to what we do in our schools, in our hospitals, and in making sure that we actually have a long-term plan and pipeline of work for infrastructure. This has been asked for time and time again by both the industry that does that work for us and the sectors in which we will spend it. It is a significant investment in certainty, but it’s also a significant investment in the productivity of New Zealand, and it is a very important element within this Budget.

As you would expect, there is a significant focus on the area of health. Not only is that important in terms of what we do for the COVID-19 response but also to make sure that we invest in the significant change programme that the Government has in the health sector, and it keeps the health system running. The total expenditure on health in this next financial year is some 45 percent higher than what was spent by the National Government in its last year in office, and it is a continuation of this Government’s commitment to making sure that we look after New Zealanders, their health, and their wellbeing.

As I also mentioned, climate change is an important element, and within this Budget we have quadrupled the amount of funding available for New Zealand Green Investment Finance Ltd (NZGIF). That is around $300 million extra to do what I believe is a vitally important role, and that is not only to recognise the obligations we have around climate change but also to look to the opportunities that exist for New Zealanders to be able to develop technologies that will help us reduce our emissions, and that is the role of NZGIF—that’s what they do. They crowd and private sector finance and they help make that happen, and that is a very significant part of this Budget.

As I said, there are many, many other elements of it that I don’t have time to go into today. But what the Budget also speaks to is the fact that the New Zealand economy has recovered extraordinarily well from the shock of COVID-19, to the point that we find ourselves in a position where net debt is significantly lower than where it had been forecast to be in both Budget 2020 and also—as we see from the Crown accounts to the end of the month of May—in Budget 2021 as well. We have seen an economy that has unemployment falling to 4 percent and also has growth back to where it was, going into COVID-19. This is a sign of the hard work done by New Zealanders over the last year, and there are many initiatives in the Budget that continue to support this work.

What we do know is that any Government operating in the COVID-19 era needs to be nimble and flexible, and as we put this Budget together, we were aware that there were risks that there could be a further outbreak of COVID-19. The COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund that we’ve created is a notional fund to guide our expenditure in response and recovery, hence some $5 billion remaining in it at the point at which the Budget was put forward. Obviously, since that time, we have now seen the outbreak of COVID-19, and so that money will be well utilised, as will some money that had already been allocated but had not actually been used, and, together, that money is helping support us as we support New Zealanders through initiatives such as the wage subsidy scheme and the resurgence support payment.

In the time remaining, I do want to talk about the second imprest supply bill that is in front of us today, and I know that Mr Woodhouse—given that we’ve now gone through this at the select committee, in the committee stage here in the House, and in questions, there is still more energy and hunger among the community of New Zealand to talk about the technical aspects of the Public Finance Act. So, as with every Government since 1989, when the Public Finance Act first came into force, there is now a second imprest supply bill. That imprest supply bill covers off for the Government the authority for expenditure that is required up until the Supplementary Estimates are put in place, which usually happens with the Budget next year.

For the benefit of everybody else, obviously the Estimates that we’re passing today are the Government’s expectation for what it would spend, but there is also another eight months to go in the financial year. So, therefore, it is important that we have the authority to be able to spend, as indeed all Governments have had in the past.

That second imprest supply bill includes around $24 billion worth of authority of expenses, $15 billion of capital expenditure, and a proposed $2 billion capital injection authority. This is an envelope of funding. It is not a target. In the past two years, we have seen the imprest supply drawn down to the tune of around 36 percent of the authority last year—in the 2020-21 year—and 63 percent of the authority in the 2019-20 year.

So can I just reiterate that for the benefit of members: this is an authority. It is an envelope of funding. It ensures that if unforeseen circumstances occur, the Government has the authority to spend. That money then has to be appropriated by Parliament. Just as the first imprest supply bill ends today, the second imprest supply bill ends when we pass the Supplementary Estimates. Members of Parliament have the opportunity through the financial review process and through the process of next year’s Estimates to be able to analyse the initiatives that would be funded from this.

But, to confirm and to conclude, in the last two years, 36 percent and 63 percent of the authority has been spent. This ensures that the Government has money on hand to deal with the unexpected circumstances. Yes, that will include responding to COVID-19. It also includes tagged contingencies and general between-Budget contingencies. It also includes the demand-driven aspects of the Government’s support, such as through the social welfare system.

This is what every Government has done since 1989. Clearly, in COVID we are in unique circumstances, and the amount within the imprest supply bill is much higher, but this Government will continue to support New Zealanders through COVID-19 by providing them with the response and recovery that is required. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, here it is: this is the bottle of wine that I bet for anybody that we wouldn’t be here today debating an imprest supply bill that is an extraordinary sum of money.

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Every year since 1989.

And this I’m going to keep, Minister. I’m not only going to keep this; I’m not gaining another one. You know why? Because no one, not a single person, took that bet—

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Because it’s been every year since 1989.

—because they knew—they knew—we would be here. Here we go. Right-o, so let’s examine that: “We’ve been here every year since 1989.”

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: Two, and sometimes three.

Well, I’ve had a look at the second imprest supply—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! Can we just settle down a little bit. I know members are excited by having a bottle of wine in the House, but I think we can just settle down.

I’ve examined the second imprest supply Acts for the last 10 years, and the Minister is correct. We do have a process for ensuring that unexpected expenditure is able to be authorised by the Government, and, boy, we’ve had some unexpected expenditure. But what the Minister didn’t say was that that amount is usually between $7 billion and $9 billion in operating expenses (OPEX)—$7 billion, $7.5 billion, $8 billion, $9 billion, and then last year, it went to $36 billion of OPEX and $18 billion of capital expenditure. This year, it’s going to $24 billion of OPEX—

💬 Hon Grant Robertson: It’s coming down.

—and $15 billion—“It’s coming down.”, he says. Well, that is one way to gild the lily, Minister, certainly, and I must stress—it is very important to stress—that we are in an environment where the Government does need the authority to respond quickly to COVID-related matters, and I stress: COVID-related.

Now, yesterday, the Minister—and I quote him—said this: “The system that we have for public accounting and scrutiny in New Zealand, defined by the Public Finance Act, is the very process we’re going through right now—one part of it.”, he said. “What happens is committees assess through the Estimates process and the financial review process where we are—that is how it works.” I was shaking my head, not because that was not true or that I disagreed with the Minister’s description of the process, but with the implication that the so-called COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund had actually been through that process, because the day we passed the Budget was actually the first day that we see the full extent of the spending out of that second imprest supply bill and out of the Supplementary Estimates of Appropriations. That was an authority, remember, that authorised the Government to spend $54 billion.

Now, I’m not sure exactly how much of that was spent. It’s impossible to tell from the processes that the Minister lauds. But he just said that—I think he said last year it was 36 percent of the operating expenditure, so that would equate to somewhere in the region of $8 billion or $9 billion in last year alone. Remember, a lot of the things that they announced, they announced for years forward. What’s not clear to me is whether, out of those announcements, they were actually in this Budget or whether they’re going to continue to be drawn down from the second imprest supply bill. So the idea that we’ve been able to scrutinise that spending because of the Supplementary Estimates, that we don’t see until it lands on the Table on Budget day, a 1024-page document that doesn’t get tabled until then—and without any transparency over what it was for or whether it was good value for money or whether it was COVID-related.

So it’s not the system that’s the issue here, as the Minister went on to say, but it’s the bypassing of the system to increase spending without that usual level of security. Yep, we’ve got to be spending on wage subsidies. We’ve got to be spending on business resurgence payments, on personal protective equipment, on vaccines, on testing, on the extra healthcare costs. But, actually, I think we need a better articulation of how much was spent last year, how much is going to be spent this year, and, frankly, they should have potentially appropriated that so that it is subject to those scrutinies and not subject to imprest supply. But billions of dollars—billions of dollars—has been spent through imprest supply on non - COVID-related things, bypassing those processes and landing up in Supplementary Estimates. That process, effectively, gives the Government carte blanche to spend a huge amount of taxpayer funds in the name of COVID. They’re using COVID to spend it on all sorts of things that by any objective measure are not COVID-related, and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s now, as I say, in the Estimates or will be next year when the Supplementary Estimates are tabled.

So we lack the transparency needed to make a determination about whether the spending constitutes good value for money, and it may well have been spent, but it doesn’t appear to have been spent on the plethora of infrastructure announcements that this Government has made. We’ve seen the Provincial Growth Fund, we’ve seen shovel-ready, we’ve seen the New Zealand Upgrade Programme; the only thing we haven’t seen is shovels in the ground, is roads being built, is bridges being built, is tunnels being built. About half of the announcements haven’t had anything happen to them, and so it’s impossible—the Minister and I had a tête-à-tête yesterday about the so-called $57.3 billion infrastructure spend that the Government intends to do over five years. Again, very little ability to be able to scrutinise those statements, to say where they are, when they’ll be built, and what progress has been made.

Now, I want to just turn to the issue of debt, because we are dramatically increasing core Crown debt, net debt as a percentage of GDP. The Minister quite rightly points out that we have plenty of wiggle room, but we are on a spending trajectory that I don’t believe this Government is prepared to turn off, and neither does Treasury. Treasury indicated earlier this year in a report that while current spending trends can be coped with, that trajectory is basically unsustainable and tough decisions will have to be made. In fact, tough decisions should be made all the time. We dip our hands into the pockets of taxpayers and we expect them to come up with the money for these projects, knowing that it will be future generations that have to pay it back. The Government talks about wellbeing. Well, wellbeing isn’t just about this generation; wellbeing is about the wellbeing of future generations, our children and our grandchildren, some of whom, that will be required to repay this debt, have not even been born yet. We need to think very carefully when we scrutinise spending about whether or not we are thinking about the wellbeing of future generations. I’m really disappointed that we haven’t been able to do that.

In this debate, and in the Estimates debate that we’ve had since Budget day, we have actually drilled into some very, very interesting spending decisions. I think about Vote Health, where it’s been made very clear by this Government that nearly half a billion dollars to restructure the health sector in the middle of a pandemic is the number one priority. I think we’ve highlighted the fact that that is a folly, but we’ve only been able to do it because we saw what the Government’s intentions were.

Far too much of the spending that we are being asked to scrutinise has not been included in the Estimates of Appropriations. That’s wrong. Maybe it could be legally right, but in these very, very unusual times, a higher level of transparency should be expected of a Government that is spending a huge amount of money—most of it appropriately. A really, really big part of it does not appear to me to be COVID-related, and they’re using COVID as a cover, a cover for spending on things that would not have passed muster had Treasury been able to look at those spending projections and give an assessment of value for money. That’s what Treasury told the Finance and Expenditure Committee after the Budget, that they are concerned about the value for money analysis because decisions are being made so fast. But, as I was talking about to the Minister of Justice, there are some appropriations out of that COVID fund that have been in the pipeline for seven years. It’s hardly urgent. It’s disappointing, it lacks transparency, and it leaves a legacy for our children and grandchildren that will be very, very hard to bear. This is not a good Budget.

Mālō e lelei, Mr Speaker. It’s good to be at the third reading of what is an important bill. For those at home, this bill, despite its fairly benign name, is the main bill that people will be talking about when we refer to the Budget. This bill seeks Parliament’s authority of individual appropriations—for example, Vote Police, Vote Health, Vote Education. For myself, this is the first Budget that I will be helping to contribute to as an MP, and for a long time, over a decade, I had been working in a different role, actually putting together budgets or helping interpret Budget appropriations for Government departments. So, at this time, I want to thank officials from the various Government departments from Treasury right through to Police, right through to Inland Revenue, right through to Justice for all the work that they’ve done putting together this appropriations bill.

But this bill isn’t the only bill in the system of public finance. We’ve had a number of debates today, and some questions yesterday from the Opposition, around the second imprest supply bill, of which we’re currently having its second reading. But this imprest supply bill was also introduced simultaneously with the third reading of this Appropriation Bill, and that is not unusual. To have more than one imprest supply bill is also quite normal. As the Minister of Finance said, every year since 1989 there have been two imprest supply bills, and in some years three, such as was seen in 2001, when the Government had to rescue our national carrier, Air New Zealand, and we have to thank for that capital injection for that third imprest supply bill the late Sir Michael Cullen, who was also really pivotal in the KiwiSaver policy, Working for Families, and interest-free student loans. So I just want to take this moment, given this is quite appropriate as an Appropriation Bill that the late Sir Michael Cullen had put that through, to acknowledge him and his family at this time—and alofa to you all.

It’s also going back to the point around the imprest supply second reading. It’s important to stress, like the Minister of Finance has said, this is a cap, not a target. Expenditure actually charged against imprest supply, in recent years, has been well below what was provided—so, for example, in 2021, $20 billion was actually charged of the $56.5 billion that was authorised, and, in 2019-20, $45 billion of the $69 billion was charged. This is consistent with the inclusion of a contingency buffer, and, as the Minister of Finance has stressed, this was because of COVID. Again, we can debate back and forth in this Chamber about the scrutiny, around the transparency, which the Minister of Finance has numerous times said is available publicly, but it comes down to a policy decision, and this side of the House decided that the wage subsidy and that pumping money into apprenticeships was incredibly important.

So now I go back to the third reading of this appropriations Estimates bill, which is now in its final stages here in Parliament. Budget 2021 is about securing our recovery from COVID-19. It lays out the foundations for coming out of COVID stronger by addressing some of those long-term challenges like housing, like climate change, while we continue to grow the economy. One of the areas that I’d like to touch upon around the Budget that actually had some impact within my electorate was Vote Education. So the decision was made to invest $266 million over four years for funding in the next phase of the National Education Growth Plan for school property. After having been in lockdown with a number of children across different years of schooling, I have a much, much greater appreciation of what it’s like for our teachers, and, in particular, it’s so important, the environment that the children are learning in. So I know the struggle is real, and I’d like to echo the comments of my colleague earlier today who said that, effectively, the struggle is real.

Cannons Creek School was one of the really great recipients of this additional money, so, in July this year, I was really fortunate to go with Minister Hipkins and announce $1.5 million to enable a new block to be built, replacing five classrooms in that school. Cannons Creek School is in the heart of Porirua East, and it’s also a decile 1 school. It is a school which has, despite the complexities of being in a low-decile area, a huge heart. So to be able to go there with the Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Hipkins, and to see the joy on those kids’ faces as the new classrooms were being craned in was a really good joy and one of those memories that I’ll hold on to as a new MP.

Other classrooms across the country are being built, as well. We’ve got four schools in Northland who are getting upgrades, and 10 schools across the Wellington region, which includes also Raumati School, which is another school within my particular area.

Another key part of this appropriations bill was the increases to benefits. The Minister for Social Development and Employment, Carmel Sepuloni, has a number of times talked about raising main benefits to lift more children out of poverty and to tackle the inequality, which also provided much-needed stimulus for our economy. When you raise benefit rates, the money comes back into the economy. It comes back into the areas where the particular beneficiaries are living. When we came into Government, we noticed a significant decline had occurred in front-line work within these Ministry of Social Development (MSD) offices. So part of this Budget also includes funding for 263 new front-line staff back in Budget 2019, and then $150 million in Budget 2020, and now an additional $99 million in Budget 2021 to improve the employment services and products, and also a further $86 million in this Budget to sustain the MSD staff to deliver the income and case management services for their clients.

The last particular for me—which, as a new MP, was probably my Budget highlight—is the launching of the Housing Acceleration Fund. This was to tip the balance in favour of first-home buyers and speed up the pace and scale of house building. One of the biggest issues we have in Porirua is our infrastructure under the ground. In order to build more housing, we have to absolutely strengthen the infrastructure underneath. So we were really fortunate that in July this year, Eastern Porirua was the first to reap the benefit of that Government Housing Acceleration Fund. I’m really grateful to the Minister Megan Woods for $136 million to unlock capacity for an additional 2,000 homes. This funding goes to the replacement of water infrastructure to service existing and future homes and address long-term degradation to our harbour, Te Awarua-o-Porirua. It also goes to addressing land remediation and development work around Cannons Creek—again, a low-decile area—and, together with the water infrastructure, will help the capacity for the additional 2,000 homes but also some of the work around Bothamley Park, which is one of our parks towards Porirua East. So that particular housing acceleration fund wouldn’t have gone ahead without the working together of both our local council, Porirua City Council, our local iwi, Ngāti Toa iwi, and central government, and so I thank our mayor, Anita Baker. I also thank the CEO of Ngāti Toa iwi, who is Helmut Modlik, and the Minister, again, for working together to come together with a package in order to help the 2,000 homes being built.

I just want to be able to reiterate my points around the beginning of this speech. I’ve been involved with a number of Budgets over a decade of public service. Imprest supply bills are not unusual. Sometimes there are three, and we’ve seen why we’ve needed to have three. We can debate in the House around the amount that is in the second imprest supply bill—we can debate that right through to the next term. However, this Government has made the call that to support our small businesses, to support our businesses, to support our employers, and to be able to support the over 12,000 food packages that have gone out just in this lockdown alone through Pasifika Futures, that money in the imprest supply bill is incredibly important.

So I’d like to thank the Minister, again, for being able to make those calls. Yes, we can debate the amount, but the actual fact around the imprest supply bill No 2 being unusual is just wrong. It’s not unusual; we have had second imprest supply bills. So I’d like to thank the Minister, and I thank the Speaker for the call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. So, for those who are watching this debate on the Appropriation (2021/22 Estimates) Bill and the second imprest supply bill, yes, this is about money, it’s about Budget, and it’s about priorities. It’s about the Government’s priorities, and, unfortunately, what the current lockdown has clearly shown is how woefully unprepared the Government has been. With low rates of vaccination, its own advisers saying lockdowns were inevitable makes the situation worse, and it makes it even worse that this Government hasn’t prioritised the preparation and the avoidance of such lockdowns. Even three days ago, the Minister for Social Development and Employment has said on Māori TV that the Government wasn’t ready for this outbreak.

It begs the question: why? So when we talk about budget, we talk about priorities, and preparation for this outbreak clearly has not been a priority. So the question is: why hasn’t the Government prepared for this lockdown? If you look at the Budget, where is the contingency funding? Why are we here today with this second imprest supply bill—$24 billion? If you look at each Government department that’s allocated funds and has bid in an intensive and competitive Budget process, whether it’s health, education, or social development—oh, that’s right, because the top priority for health is to restructure or get rid of the DHBs. The top priority in education is to get rid of the polytechnics and the industry training organisations. Barbara Edmonds, the member before me, talked about significant investments in this Budget for school property. Well, it’s all very well, but there’s no point if the kids physically can’t get to school because of yet another lockdown.

In terms of the top priority in social development, yes, this Budget increased benefits. What about lockdowns and the reality that more and more people end up going on to benefit because they lose their jobs and, under this Government, they’re staying there for longer? The Budget is about priorities. With such low rates of vaccination and New Zealand coming last, or perhaps now second to last, in the world, the Government should have been preparing for this crisis in this so-called year of the vaccine.

So where is the vaccine and the all-of-Government plan to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate reflected in the Budget? Well, you’d have to dig pretty deeply to see where. So we heard from Minister Sepuloni only a week ago that the Ministry of Social Development had no brief to support the 350,000 New Zealanders receiving a benefit and those who are receiving a pension to get vaccinated, many of the very New Zealanders that we know have the highest risks of COVID—older New Zealanders, those with health conditions and disabilities. But no plan.

We heard from Minister Henare that advice from Te Puni Kōkiri, or, actually, a recommendation from them saying there is funding that is available—the recommendation that Whānau Ora commissioning agencies are at the table to help get more of the Māori and Pasifika populations vaccinated. But, no, the Minister turned it down, and, instead, what is there? No plan.

The Government were forewarned, and, unfortunately, what we’ve seen yet again—he announced funding last week, I think, $40 million. So, my colleague Michael Woodhouse, that’ll be part of the $24 billion in the second imprest supply—$40 million to Whānau Ora. Now, I don’t disagree with money going to Whānau Ora providers, but it would have been better to have spent it in March and to have got higher proportions of our population vaccinated so we wouldn’t be spending money on hardship at the bottom of the cliff when it’s too late, yet again.

So if we look at the levers that the Government has to have increased vaccination rates earlier this year in the “Year of the Vaccine”, they haven’t taken it. So, looking at the Budget, where was the all-of-Government plan ahead of this lockdown? So the advisers had said, “With low rates of vaccination, with Delta on the horizon, we expect it will come to New Zealand. That’s likely to mean more lockdowns.” You might ask, “So how was everyone prepared for that?”—how was everyone prepared for that? As we know, significant hardship for those in Auckland who are still at level 4; for those outside Auckland, it’s still pretty tough. So the team of 5 million is paying for the fact that the Government has not prepared.

So the Minister of Finance talked about the Budget priority being securing our recovery. Well, for a third of New Zealand’s population, they’re in the midst of a COVID level 4 lockdown; there ain’t no sign of recovery any time soon, and for many businesses, households, and communities, we’re going backwards fast. We’re definitely not going forward, we’re definitely not securing our recovery, so it makes a bit of a mockery of the title of this Budget. What happened? What happened is the Labour Government became complacent—quite happy to crow internationally that New Zealand had this beaten and, unfortunately, started to use the $50 billion COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund to spend that money on all sorts of projects. Many of them—far too many of them—had zero to do with COVID. So here we are, and, as my colleague has quite rightly said—he predicted it—no one was willing to accept the bet that the Government would be asking the Parliament for more money: another $24 billion. I put that down to a lack of preparation, a lack of planning, and a lack of vaccination. It’s quite simple. It is not rocket science why we are here and why there’s another $24 billion that this Government is asking New Zealand taxpayers to get from their pockets, at a time that they’re already struggling.

So I’ve got a couple of requests. One is a letter that I’ve sent to the Minister of Finance and the Minister for Social Development and Employment to say the wage subsidy is an important investment. Why they only allocated $500 million in the imprest supply is a bit of a joke—$500 million didn’t even cover a week of the wage subsidy. The Minister of Finance changed the rules in December 2020, but, by the way, didn’t bother to tell anyone about the new rules. So, when they came into effect, when this lockdown occurred, hundreds of businesses got caught out, and then at the close-off of the system—oh, they closed it early. So with the deadline of 11.59, then three hours before, people who wanted to apply for the wage subsidy couldn’t, and so I’ve written to the Minister to request a two-week extension to ensure that businesses get paid and workers get paid. So I call on the Government to honour those applications and ensure New Zealanders who are playing their part get paid.

💬 Jobseeker: two weeks in and we’re seeing 5,000 more people on the jobseeker benefit. So, yes, the Minister of Finance might say demand-driven parts of the Budget are provided for, but guess what! When you come back for an imprest supply bill of the scale of $24 billion, it’s because you know that demand has already gone through the roof and, unfortunately, the human cost of that is high. We’re also seeing the human cost of hardship very high right now. And the organisations who are supporting New Zealanders in tough times do an amazing job, but the reality is we are already seeing hardship grants for food having doubled, grants increased by 50 percent in one week from nearly 28,000 to over 41,000 during this recent Delta outbreak, and that’s before we see organisations like the Salvation Army have an 84 percent increase of emergency food parcels in the first week of lockdown.

The year 2021 was meant to be the year of the vaccine, so Budget is about priorities. We were expecting that this year would have been the year of the vaccine, but here we are, in September, in another level 4 lockdown, and the Government has finally figured out they didn’t do what they needed to do to get more people vaccinated, and they haven’t done what they needed to do to prepare at the very front line—whether it’s schools, or whether it’s businesses. It was 10 o’clock last night before mask requirements were clarified for businesses that hoped to open this morning and for students going back to school. Now, that is a disgrace. The Government should have been planning in advance. The questions remain: why was the Government not ready for this lockdown, why was the Government so slow with vaccinations, and why did the Government not budget for this crisis? Those are the questions the Prime Minister should answer.

I know one is not permitted to use irony in this House, but I don’t think there’s any danger of that because we are really in an irony-free zone here, because what we hear from the Opposition, they’re either berating Government for too much expenditure or berating them for not spending enough. There has not been a speaker that has spoken in the last week and a half now who has not spent at least half of their time—Opposition speakers I’m talking about—berating Government for not spending more. One speaker even berating Government for not, basically, bribing Pfizer.

So those watching here will be rightfully scratching their heads. So what we really need to understand is what we are here to do today. I think it’s—my maths is not that good—three months ago in this House we passed the Budget. Now, the Budget was where the Minister of Finance stood and outlined the expenditure for the next year, essentially. That then required, like all expenditure by Government, to have a legal basis for that expenditure. I’m on the Finance and Expenditure Committee. We had the Minister of Finance come to our committee and explain what he intended for the expenditure. Various committees had various Ministers come in with their appropriations and talk about how they were going to spend the money.

Now, I can just, as I go through the bill, talk about this expenditure. Now, there’s two things you can do when an economy starts to change. One of them is you can stop spending. You need look no further than what happened in 1929 in the United States and the world when we had the Depression. Well, it was only a recession. It turned into a depression because everybody stopped spending money. It was only during the late 1930s—particularly in New Zealand—with the New Deal plan in the United States that we started spending money that, actually, living standards started to rise.

Now, I grew up on the West Coast of the South Island and we used to drive to Nelson. We’d drive through the Golden Downs forest. The Golden Downs forest was built with borrowed money by those who went back to work. I remember going through my uncle’s belongings when he died, and finding a little slip telling him to turn up there. Now, the generation that benefited from those forests weren’t that generation; it is the generation today where those forests are being harvested. That’s what this is about.

Now, we’re again hearing the Opposition talking about how the size of the spend in the Estimates bill, and I was lucky enough to speak in the general debate today. During that debate, I talked about how New Zealanders can be reassured, and I referred to what had happened up in Auckland last week and the fact that we had people on the ground there at the time that that offender offended means that the system was working. It meant that the ticks and balances were working, and—without repeating the speech—essentially, it showed that those at home can have faith that we have systems that work in this country.

The other thing we hear is those opposite talking about how terrible things are with COVID. It was only, I think, earlier this week I heard Mr—oh, I could call him “the honourable Michael Hosking” talk about how brilliantly they do things in Singapore and asking why we aren’t more like Singapore. Singapore are about to enter another lockdown. They have lost control.

💬 Matt Doocey: Back to the bill.

So at some stage just actually have a look—

💬 SPEAKER: Order!

—and have some faith in our system.

💬 Matt Doocey: Oh, I was just helping you out.

💬 SPEAKER: That’s my role.

That’s why I bring this back—as, Mr Speaker, I know you’d be very keen for me to do—

💬 SPEAKER: It can’t get any broader than a Budget bill.

—to the imprest bill, and what people can do is ensure that we have the systems in place, so that when we make decisions and when we decide that we do need to spend, we’re not going to lock ourselves down. We’re not going to cancel the apprentices, as we did in 2008 during the global financial crisis, but we’re going to ensure that for this generation, this is actually an opportunity.

What I see here is the spending that we’re looking at through this—and this is spending that is actually an opportunity. Already we are seeing the results. We look at the unemployment rates, and how our unemployment rates, despite the predictions of where our unemployment would be at the onset of COVID—actually, I understand we are the third most employed people in the world. We’re way ahead of people we like to compare ourselves to: Australians, United States, Canada, etc. The OECD average is 6.6 percent, at a time we have 4 percent. Yes, the previous speaker talked about the inevitable increase in benefits over this time of this second lockdown. That is an inevitability. But it isn’t the expenditure we have; it’s the faith that we have in the systems that bring us here, and that is what this bill is about.

For those listening at home who will be confused, perhaps, by the plethora of terms being used, essentially, this is about making sure that the money that has been appropriated for running this country for the next year is done so. We, as the Finance and Expenditure Committee, represented by members of all parties here, have put the Minister, and various Ministers, through the scrutiny to make sure that the money is going to be spent correctly, in the way it should be. This bill is about ensuring that now there will be sufficient money for this country to do the right thing, to continue with its COVID recovery as soon as we are able to put this latest lockdown behind us, and to ensure that should there be another one, we’re in a position to handle it. So it gives me great pleasure to speak on this bill, and I commend it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to take a call in this—what I’m just going to loosely call the Budget debate—third reading. The Green Party, as we supported it at the first reading, supported this Budget, and we still do. I think, when the Government announced the Budget, the headline was primarily around the increase to benefits, and considering we’ve dedicated a huge amount of our political effort over many decades to raising income support levels to enable every person in this country to be able to live a decent life, we would have been shooting ourselves in the foot if we had not supported this bill that does take a significant step towards increasing those baseline benefits. I’ll speak a little bit more to some of the qualifications to that support on that point a little bit later.

I also want to recognise, though, that the Budget invests over $2.1 billion in climate-related initiatives, including, quite significantly, $300 million to quadruple the size of the Green Investment Fund, to kick-start—so belatedly—low-carbon technologies, while we await with bated breath at the moment the Climate Change Commission’s recommendations—which we’ve received already, actually. We’re now awaiting the consultation around how we progress those recommendations as a country, and that work will guide the next round of climate action from the Government.

I do need to acknowledge at this point the sense of urgency and compounding anxiety that many people in our communities are feeling not just relating to the pandemic but relating to the climate change that is so much more visibly in front of us now, as we look at the floods that are happening in our country and around the world, when we’re watching entire towns being erased off the face of this earth with wildfires. It is a real sense that we need to act with as much urgency as we possibly can, and, for the Greens, a large reason for our presence in this House is to get us acting as quickly as we can, taking the actions that will matter for us to be able to provide a future for ourselves and our young people.

We’re not there with that action, and I want to point to the general debate speech of my colleague Julie Anne Genter today in relation to the announcement of the land transport fund. Disappointingly—and “disappointing” doesn’t feel like the right word when we’re talking about the significance of this—only 25 percent of that funding is actually going to climate-friendly transport initiatives. At a time when the world is literally burning around us, that more money is being put into new motorways that will just help and speed up the burning of our planet is, to say the least, a shocking thing, and I do hope that people will react and engage in the conversations we will be having over the next few months to urge for a turn-around and more urgent action, consistent with our duty to save the planet.

To speak back to some of the points around this Budget, and there’s been quite a bit of discussion around the Government’s fiscal responsibility, I do think it is fair to say in this Budget that the Government has been balancing a sense of “fiscal responsibility”—is the phrase that’s usually used—with responding to the absolute decay of a lot of our core public infrastructure and the need in our community. We’ve seen our nurses, who have been looking after us so, so incredibly well over the last decades, up against short staffing, people leaving—same with our midwives and many home-care workers—because their work hasn’t been being properly valued, and there aren’t enough people doing the work because of that. It’s a compounding situation. Government is using pay parity to address that. Pay parity is just, actually, removing acknowledged discrimination, and that will help, I hope, keep people in the sector, but it is not the core of the discussion in those negotiations.

It was deeply disappointing to hear from the Government their, I guess, commitment—well, not commitment; their direction—to suppress public sector wages earlier this year. That really seemed to fly in the face of the acknowledgment of the really difficult work our public servants have been doing, including our nurses and our border workers and all of those people in the background who are making the wage subsidy work, as well as everything else. That’s an indication of that sense of balancing and trying to be fiscally responsible.

We hear people talking about the high levels of debt, but, in actual fact, Labour went into the election saying they were comfortable with Crown debt rising briefly to about 50 percent of GDP, whereas Government debt levels in Aotearoa at the end of May were 31 percent of GDP. That was $6.9 billion lower than forecast, and the cost of borrowing at the moment is incredibly low. It’s a real opportunity to invest for the future. Comparing this to international debt from other countries—Australia’s level is close to 50 percent of GDP, the UK and the US close to 100 percent—there is quite a lot more room for the Government to be able to move to invest in those things that really matter for our communities.

It doesn’t have to be done through borrowing alone. The Greens had huge support at the election for our policy of a wealth tax, which would have affected 6 percent of people in this country, just asking them to pay 1 percent on the net wealth that they had over $1 million. That pool of funding would enable us to ensure that every single person in this country had a guaranteed minimum income that put them above the poverty line. We wouldn’t have had to have this massive effort every time we go into lockdown of scrambling around to get people food parcels, because people would actually have enough money themselves, within their whānau, to be able to make those decisions and be able to keep the roof over their head, and food on the table and their whare warm. That is just not the reality at the moment.

So much of our system is spent on making people go here and ask for help, and it was really—again, not to be down on the Government, but—disappointing to see the announcement around the increase in the student hardship fund as the answer to poverty being experienced by tertiary students around the country at the moment. I understand that that will reach about 15,000, at max, tertiary students, as opposed to, I think, the over 200,000 students that we have. They’ll be required to go through their university to be able to access that money, and I saw Auckland University apparently are asking people to provide two months of bank statements. From a student to their university, to be able to disclose that much detail of your life, of where you’ve been spending your money, to be able to get some support, when we could’ve just given and taken the money from those with more than they need, to those people to be able to make those decisions for themselves, to be able to have enough to go to the shop and pay for it themselves, without having to have an intermediary—to restore some dignity in our communities.

I really do hope, while we support the Government moving in the right direction—and I cannot imagine if the National Party had been in Government what a disaster things would have been for the last two years. But the Greens really also want to provide people with that vision about what if we looked up and thought about how we could do this better, how we could ensure that everybody had a sense of security for the future, that our environment and our climate were taken care of, and that everybody had enough to care for themselves and their whānau.

Members, in accordance with determinations of the Business Committee, this debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 5.51 p.m.