Appropriation (2026/27 Estimates) Bill

I move, That all of the words after “That” be replaced with “this House has no confidence in the Government because after promising to grow the economy, it has shrunk it; after promising to get Kiwis back to work, it is presiding over record job losses; after promising to fix public services, it has gutted our public health system; after promising to fix the cost of living, it has made it worse; and after promising New Zealanders relief, it is prioritising corporate interests over the interests of everyday New Zealanders.”

This Budget was the Government’s last chance. It was their last chance to show New Zealanders that they actually get it, that they understand that it’s really tough going out there for New Zealand families. The backbench in the National Party are waving goodbye already! [Gestures at members leaving Chamber] They’re already giving up. Don’t be so pessimistic—there’s still about 163 days to go! It was their last chance to show New Zealanders that they get it, that they feel the pain that New Zealanders are under, and they have failed to do that. Kiwi families will be asking themselves one question after this Budget: are they feeling better off today than they were three years ago? And for the vast bulk of New Zealand families, the answer to that is categorically no.

This Government is asking those with the least to sacrifice the most. They are taking from the poor to give to the poor. Robin Hood would not be proud of this Budget. They are asking those who have the least, those who are the most disadvantaged to make the biggest sacrifices in this year’s Budget. They are desperately trying to create the illusion of progress, using smoke and mirrors, while Kiwis continue to go backwards. There will be no spinning their way out of the tangled web that they have created, that has seen Kiwi families facing tougher and tougher times.

This is a Government that said they were going to fix the cost of living, and the cost of living has never been higher. It is a Government that said they were going to get Kiwis back to work, and yet unemployment is continuing to grow, and this Budget shows that it is getting worse. It is a Government that promised to support businesses, and yet company liquidations are at recent highs under this Government. Unemployment is staying higher for longer.

Claims by Nicola Willis that the Government is getting the books back into surplus a year earlier than previously forecast neglects the fact that that’s still two years later than it was before she got her hands on the Government’s books. This Government took everything backward. New Zealanders can go back and they can see what was forecast before the last election, and they can compare this Government’s track record with what the Treasury was predicting then. It will show the books are taking longer to get back to surplus, Government debt is going to be higher, unemployment is going to be higher, the economy is going to be smaller, and the going for Kiwi families is going to be tougher. That is the legacy of this Government. Higher inflation, lower economic growth, higher unemployment, higher debt—that is what National leaves New Zealand. Forty thousand fewer people in jobs today than there were when National became the Government—that is their track record; business liquidations at a 15-year high.

Twenty thousand jobs have been lost in the building and construction sector—this, from a Government that said they wanted more hard hats and fewer lanyards down Lambton Quay. Well, the people in hard hats had their jobs taken away by this Government, who decided to pause everything, review everything, cancel everything, and it is the people on the front lines doing the work who found their jobs disappeared as a result of those decisions. So as the economy recovers and as the Government goes out there about the country touting the infrastructure projects that they want to spend money on, the question is: who’s going to do that work? A lot of those 20,000 building and construction workers have given up and left the country. They went across the Ditch to a country that would actually give them jobs, because this Government took their jobs away. Record numbers of Kiwis have been leaving the country—young New Zealanders just giving up on this Government and voting with their feet, because they do not see a future under a Government that is simply offering more pain, higher costs, and more cuts.

National promised to fix things, and instead, they’ve made them worse. This is a Government that’s failing. It’s failing on growth, it’s failing on job creation, it’s failing on the cost of living, and this isn’t happening by accident. These are the consequences of the choices that this Government has made—their choices that see families facing higher bills every day. The cost of going to the supermarket has never been higher. The cost of going to the petrol station has never been higher. The cost of paying the rent has never been higher, despite the promises of this Government. The power bill that Kiwis pay has never been higher—20 percent higher, in fact, than when this Government took office.

So many families are having to make so many tough decisions. This Government doesn’t understand those families who are sitting around the dining room table every night and trying to figure out how on earth they are going to make things add up, how on earth they’re going to deal with that sudden one-off unexpected expense that they face—the car that breaks down and sits in the driveway because they can’t afford to get it fixed; the kid that needs to go to an orthodontist but can’t because their parents can’t afford it. These are the decisions that Kiwi families are making every single day, and this Government is offering them nothing. This Government does not see them, it does not hear them, and it does not care about them.

The Kiwis who are doing everything right, who are working harder, longer hours than ever, and yet they have less at the end of the week to show for their own hard work—their wages being squeezed, their bills continuing to go higher, and tens of thousands of them simply giving up because they don’t see their future here in New Zealand. [Interruption]

💬 SPEAKER: I’d just remind Government members to read 141 of Speakers’ Rulings—141/3.

Nicola Willis painted a very rosy picture of the country today. It’s not a picture most New Zealanders would recognise. Those who are struggling, those who don’t know whether they’re still going to have a job in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, they won’t recognise the country that Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters and David Seymour think that we live in. They simply won’t recognise that country, because it is not their reality. This Government lives in a different reality to what most New Zealanders face on a day-to-day basis.

Nicola Willis called this a “tough love” Budget. There was no love in this Budget—there was no love at all. There were more cuts, more pain, and higher costs—a Government that’s built its Budget on cutting the jobs of others and celebrates that. They’re real people with families and homes and mortgages and kids to support, and this Government is celebrating cutting thousands of their jobs. They see those as just numbers to be shifted around to make their own balance sheets add up. They are real people, and they are being forgotten by this Government. In fact, they are being treated with contempt by this Government—cutting jobs, cutting services, kicking people out of their homes, hoping that nobody notices the consequences of the decisions that this Government is making.

Sacking 9,000 New Zealanders—the social workers who work with our most vulnerable families; the Department of Conservation (DOC) rangers who preserve and protect our conservation estate. Our tourism industry, by the way, is based on our clean, green reputation—a lot of tourists come here for our clean, green conservation estate—and this Government wants to cut the very foundations of that in this Budget. Hundreds of millions are being cut from DOC. We’ve seen what happens when that was done by previous National Governments. It doesn’t end well.

Customs officers being cut in this year’s Budget—those who protect our biosecurity. Our farmers rely on our biosecurity that’s being cut. Members on that side of the House like to say they’re pro-farmers. How pro-farmer are they going to be when foot-and-mouth arrives in New Zealand because of the cuts they are making to our biosecurity? This Government is cutting funding for biosecurity at a time when it has never been more important. At a time when the risks to our primary sector have never been greater, this Government are cutting the very protection that that entire sector relies on.

People who rely on superannuation are finding those who process their superannuation having their jobs cut. Cuts don’t grow the economy; they shrink it. If you sack a social worker, you don’t just lose a social worker; you lose the wages that would have previously been spent in the local cafe, in the local supermarket, with the local tradies. It has a downward spiralling effect, and that is what we have seen from this Government. When people lose their jobs—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Have a cup of tea.

💬 SPEAKER: No, that’s enough.

—businesses lose their customers. My message to Nicola Willis is very clear: businesses in Wellington aren’t struggling because people are working from home; they’re struggling because those people are losing their jobs, and the ones that still have them don’t know whether they’re going to be keeping them.

It is not just here in Wellington. Half of the jobs on the chopping block now are outside of Wellington—20 percent of those in Auckland, where the number of people without work has already doubled under this Government. Auckland is our biggest city, and yet the number of people without jobs in Auckland has doubled in the last three years under this Government’s watch.

This Government say they want to get people back into work, and yet across the country, people are seeing the consequences of their choices. In regional and provincial New Zealand, many of the jobs in those communities are also on the chopping block. Our customs officers work in every port across the country, not just those in Wellington. They work in every part of the conservation estate, which, by the way, is mostly spread across provincial New Zealand. Those are the jobs that are now on the chopping block, and every local community will feel the consequences of those jobs being lost.

If you want to see how much this Budget relies on smoke and mirrors, just look no further than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where, on the one hand, Nicola Willis is giving them some extra money, and then you go a few pages ahead and you’ll find that almost exactly the same amount of money—in fact, slightly more—is being cut again. Yet Winston Peters says, “Oh, those cuts aren’t going to happen.” Well, there’s the first big hole in the Government’s Budget already, because there are literally hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade reflected in this Budget that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has already said are never going to happen.

This whole Budget is based on the notion that there are all of these cuts that the Government is going to make, and yet, one by one, you watch as those Government Ministers say, “Oh, but it won’t be this and it won’t be that and it won’t be this and it won’t be that.” Then suddenly that surplus, that mega-thin surplus that Nicola Willis promises, will disappear in a heartbeat, because this Government’s Budget is based solely on smoke and mirrors, while New Zealanders continue to go backwards.

Let’s look at those cuts from the poor to give to the poor that we’ve already seen announced a few days ago—those most vulnerable New Zealanders who live in State housing. It may escape this Government’s attention, but it’s damn hard to get into a State house already. We deal with so many people through our electorate offices who struggle to get into State housing. I have sat down with many of those people, where they have brought their bank statements in in tears, asking “What am I supposed to do?” Many of them don’t live nice, neat, tidy lives. Their lives are difficult; their lives are complicated. And this Government simply turns its back on them.

The 30,000-odd pensioners—I’m staggered that Winston Peters agreed to increase the rent for 30,000 pensioners, but there you go—30,000 pensioners who simply don’t have an extra 30 bucks left over at the end of the week to pay increased rent. Those with disabilities who have already seen savage cuts under this Government to the supports they rely on are now facing their rent going up at a time when they can least afford it. This Government has turned their backs on those very people. There are people who struggle every single day to make things add up, and this Government simply don’t care.

And they want to make it easier to boot people out of State housing. When I saw that, I thought of a very recent case of someone who was living in a State house with a relative who passed away. The relative who passed away was the person whose name was on the tenancy. That person was given a matter of days before they had to find somewhere else to live. That person also had complex needs. That person was also in dire straits, dealing with the grief of losing a relative and facing the prospect of being turfed out on the street. You don’t solve homelessness by booting people out of State housing. In fact, we’ve now got record numbers of people living rough on the streets under this Government’s watch, because they are boasting about ending emergency accommodation and boasting about booting people out of State houses, thinking that people won’t notice.

What’s their solution to that? It should be to build more houses. It should be to find those people a roof over their head. Instead, it’s move-on orders—out of sight, out of mind. Just pretend those people don’t exist. Boot them out on to the street, keep them away from the public, and pretend that they don’t exist—literally pretend that the most vulnerable in our society simply don’t exist. That is what this Government think the solution to homelessness is, and it is absolutely shameful.

When businesses close, when families lose income, when kids lose opportunities, the entire country suffers as a result of that. And yet jobs in this Government’s Budget have not been a focus. The only focus in this Government’s Budget around jobs is how many of them they’re going to cut, not how many could be created, and yet that is exactly what this Government should have been focusing on: making sure that we can get New Zealanders back to work. Instead, they are whacking the most vulnerable. They are whacking the people who can least afford it. The people whose budgets already won’t stretch any further are suddenly being told they have to make more sacrifice, they have to find more, so that this Government can create the illusion of a Budget surplus—pushing more costs into the future, pushing more on to the future generations of New Zealanders, providing less hope for younger New Zealanders. That is only going to exacerbate one thing, and that is the number of young Kiwis who end up leaving the country.

In health, we see band-aids, not prevention. In education, we once again see some of the most vulnerable kids in our schools and in our education system being completely ignored by this Government. Think of the home-school parents who were out front yesterday, who this Government have absolutely done over in the last few weeks. Some of those parents deal with some of the most complex kids in our education system—kids with disabilities, kids with high behavioural needs, being treated with absolute contempt by this Government. And don’t let the parties opposite try and tell you that they saved the day, because they voted just this week in favour of the changes they suddenly did an about-face on. They did not care about those people, and nor does this Government,

What can we expect to see out and about in New Zealand as a result of this Government’s Budget? More people losing their jobs; more shops closing; more businesses losing revenue; more local economies slowing down; more decay on the main street, with boarded-up shop front windows; more decline; and more people giving up and leaving the country. That is the legacy that this Government will be leaving for New Zealand, and it didn’t have to be this way.

Instead of a plan for the future, New Zealanders have been offered nothing but excuses and blame by this Government. On a credible plan for growth—remember about “Growth, growth, growth”? Everything was going to be “all about growth”—right before they shrunk the economy. No credible plan for economic growth. On cost of living relief: no plan on cost of living. On detail around who’s going to actually lose their jobs and which public servants are going to face the chop: not much detail there, either, just everybody now living with a dagger hanging over their head, still waiting to find out whether they are going to have a job.

Three years, three Budgets: more cuts, more pain, and higher costs. It did not need to be this way. All Governments have choices. What did this Government choose? Tax cuts for tobacco companies, tax cuts for landlords, tax cuts for multinational tech giants like Facebook and Google—not support for New Zealanders who are struggling. More support for the fossil fuel industry. Subsidies for the fossil fuel industry have been this Government’s plan to deal with the energy in New Zealand—not a plan that’s actually going to lower household electricity bills.

This was the Government’s last chance. It was their last chance to show New Zealanders that they had a plan to create jobs, that they had a plan to lift New Zealand out of the situation that we are in at the moment. They have failed on every measure. At a time when New Zealanders are so desperate for hope, when they are looking for something to get excited about, this Government’s Budget has offered them none of those things. New Zealand is going backwards under this Government. The clear question every Kiwi family is asking themselves is: are they better off than they were three years ago? And the answer is no. So my message to the members opposite: enjoy the leather benches for 163 days more, because your time is done.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: Point of order, Mr Speaker.

💬 SPEAKER: I’ll call the member, but I’ll just suggest that the whole House needs to be mindful of Speaker’s ruling 143/3, and if you’re uncertain, have a look at it and decide how to carry on from here. The Rt Hon Winston Peters.

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: Because New Zealanders need to hear much more of this, I move an extension of time to the last speaker.

💬 SPEAKER: Well, as you know, you can’t seek leave on behalf of someone else. The question is that the amendment be agreed to.

I speak, I think, on behalf of everyone in the coalition Government when I say I would rather face 100 duck-sized horses than sit through another speech as woeful as that from the Leader of the Opposition. I have to say, I haven’t seen Labour MPs struggle that much to get through something since Ayesha Verrall took up singing. I think Chris Hipkins went to bed last night, he put on the Spider-Man pyjamas, and he woke up this morning thinking he’d be a great left-wing hero, and all we got was the same old negativity—that constant, relentless, joyless talking down of New Zealand that we’ve come to expect from the Labour Party.

And I’ll ask you, what didn’t we get? What we didn’t get was policy. We didn’t get a single credible policy—not one. I have to say, I think it’s very clear and obvious now that, officially speaking, the 2026 Labour Party are the laziest Opposition in the history of New Zealand, because all they’re doing is doing some TikToks and some singing about ducks, for God’s sake. I think, for the sake of the grim-faced members opposite, I truly do hope that Kieran McAnulty does a much better job of that speech next year, because the bar, frankly, couldn’t be lower.

I’ve always said you can judge a party by the contradictions, and on that measure, Labour is world class, aren’t they? On the one hand, they ban oil and gas, and then they complain when manufacturers can’t afford the energy. They then oppose mining—but, actually, they complain when Kiwis move to Australia to take up mining jobs. They want renewable energy, and then they vote against every single measure to actually deliver it. They like to claim—yeah, they claim that we backed the rich, because we gave working Kiwis tax relief, when they make cleaners and retail workers pay off university fees for millionaires’ kids.

Then they bang on about the cost of living while plotting a capital gains tax that you know is going to hit every farmer, every small-business owner—every Kiwi who’s ever worked hard and invested in their future. At the end of the day, I’m telling you—I’m telling you—the Labour Party only has one idea—one idea. They’ve had it for years, and they’re sticking with it, and it is, quite simply: spend more, tax more, borrow more—that’s it. That’s the whole kit and caboodle, that’s the whole plan, that’s the whole document, the complete policy platform of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition. That is it.

I’ve got to say, they have a spending addiction that is so fierce it’s going to make a Vegas poker machine blush. It’s really that bad. They want to spend money that they don’t have on things that we can’t afford, funded by recklessly borrowing against our children’s future. That’s what they’re doing—that’s exactly what they’re doing. When the bill comes, they’re going to come after your money. They’re going to come after your income, your savings, your business, your home. That’s what it’s going to be about.

If you ask them, how are they going to pay for just one of these sort of hair-brained policies they’ve had called the Future Fund—did you hear it the other day? Barbara Edmonds said, oh, she can’t give us any detail on the Future Fund because of the Treaty. But I think even worse was actually Chris Hipkins, who said they can’t give you any details because Kiwis just don’t care. That’s a pretty pessimistic view of the world. I’ve heard about Rogernomics, but I think what the Labour Party is now running on is “Don’t-care-onomics”. That’s what it’s about—it’s called “Don’t-care-onomics”. They want to spend more, borrow more, tax more, and if anyone asks any questions, you just shrug and say Kiwis don’t care. I’m telling you, if you challenge them any further, they’ll just say it’s a Treaty breach—that’s what it’s all about. That’s not acceptable.

First, they’re going to tax your house, then they’re going to tax your business, then they’re going to tax your KiwiSaver, and then everything else. Their message is really simple—their message to Kiwis is really simple—it says: if you’re successful, you need to be punished. That’s, essentially, the message that they are giving us here today. I’m telling you, there is not an ambition or an aspiration in this country that Chris Hipkins doesn’t want to actually stifle and not a success that wants to trample all over. This is without doubt no longer the party of Helen Clark and Michael Cullen; this is the party of “Don’t-care-onomics”.

But enough of Labour, because another year, another outstanding Budget from the great Nicola Willis. Aren’t we lucky, in difficult times—really challenging times—that we have such a diligent, thoughtful, smart, courageous Minister of Finance determined to make New Zealand a better place. In a year of global volatility—in a year of fuel crises and economic headwinds that no one could have predicted—she has once again delivered a Budget that is responsible, it’s ambitious, and it’s laser-focused—laser-focused—on the future of this country. In a third year, she’s knocked it out of the park, and I want to say to Nicola Willis on behalf of every New Zealander who’s now experiencing lower inflation and lower interest rates, we owe you a big debt—thank you very much.

On this side of the House, we’ve been busy. We’ve been busy working on behalf of every Kiwi to secure New Zealand’s future—not spending more, not borrowing more, not taxing more; delivering more. That’s what it’s about. If the Leader of the Opposition’s speech couldn’t wake the members opposite up, they should just stop quacking and pay attention for a little bit, because here’s the key things they need to know: average economic growth at 2.7 percent per year. That is faster growth this year and next year, and the year after that, than Australia, the UK, EU, and Japan. Just let that sink in a little bit. Pay attention: 220,000 new jobs being created—how good is that? Wages growing faster than inflation, and that’s how Kiwis actually get ahead so they can actually do more with their hard-earned cash. We know on this side, widening the gap between wages and prices is the key to making life more affordable for Kiwis, not random cost of living payments to dead backpackers and French people, basically.

I know the members love to talk up other countries and talk down New Zealand, and you heard it again today, but here are the facts—and they’re not going to like hearing this, and sometimes the media doesn’t like hearing this either: March saw the second-lowest number of Kiwis live in any month since January 2023. If you just take the last year, the past year that we’ve just gone through, 9 percent more Kiwis have come home and 6 percent fewer Kiwis have left New Zealand. That is funny how that doesn’t make any of their press releases or media stories.

This Government’s mission from day one has been simply: fixing the basics and building the future. Fixing the basics that Labour broke—the economy, the cost of living, law and order, and all the public services that Kiwis rely on—and building the future by investing in infrastructure and education and defence and energy security and the trade relationships that are going to determine New Zealand’s prosperity for decades to come.

We know the past few years have been incredibly difficult for Kiwis: shock after shock after shock. We’ve had COVID, we’ve had Labour’s high inflation and recession, extreme weather events, Trump’s tariffs, and now we’ve got a fuel crisis with its origins in the Middle East. That’s why this Budget also includes temporary, targeted, and timely support for households facing pressure from the fuel crisis—the $50 a week in the in-work tax credit and an increase in mileage rates for support workers and for those travelling for specialist treatment.

It's a volatile and uncertain world, and it demands a Government that understands national security in all of its dimensions: economic security, financial security, energy security, international security. The bottom line is you don’t get prosperity without security, and you don’t have security without prosperity, because the two are interdependent and linked. That has been the logic behind Budget 2026, and it’s a logic you simply don’t hear from the members opposite, because they have no strategy, they have no plan, and they have no ideas—just songs about ducks and bottomless wish lists, and absolutely no way to pay for it except coming after your money.

I just want to talk about the numbers, because without fiscal discipline, we can’t have anything else. It’s as simple as that. Every dollar we spend servicing debt is a dollar that we don’t get to spend on schools and hospitals. It’s that simple—a simple fact as true for a Government as is for Kiwi households up and down this country, and one that has apparently never ever even crossed the minds of the members opposite in this House today. Their approach is pretty simple: if you run out of money, just borrow money. If your borrowing gets embarrassing, just tax some more. If anyone dares to point out that spending more, taxing more, and borrowing is not actually an economic strategy, well, just remember, Kiwis don’t care. That’s what it’s about.

Well, we care, and New Zealand’s future depends on us caring. Across three Budgets, this Government has found $50 billion in savings and we have returned that investment to where it belongs—out there on the front line in schools, hospitals, police, cancer drugs, hip and knee replacements. I’m very pleased to confirm we are forecasting to borrow $6 billion less in this year’s Budget than we were in December and that we remain on track for that surplus in 2028-29—a year earlier than previously forecast. For the third year in a row, we have achieved significant savings across Government, and that’s what it looks like when you’re actually fixing the basics.

Let me give you just one example, and that was that it was costing Labour $1.2 million to build a classroom in New Zealand. We standardised the design, we halved the cost, and now we can build twice as many classrooms for the same amount of money that Labour actually had. That’s not austerity; that’s called competence. That’s called delivery and knowing how to get things done, and that’s what this Government does—that’s exactly what we are all about. Let’s not forget the tax relief that we delivered in 2024, delivering on average about $5,500 to an average household that would be worse off today without that package of help and support. And yet, disgracefully, for parties that purport to be about working New Zealanders, every single one of those members didn’t support that single initiative—every single one of them—because their instinct is “We want to spend more, tax more, borrow more, and it’s your money that we’re going to go spend.”

While we stay disciplined on operating spending, the recent fuel crisis has reminded us that we need significant capital investment to build the future, too. Modern, reliable infrastructure; a defence force that is fighting fit; the schools and the hospitals that Kiwis rely on—this is what building the future actually looks like, not a TikTok, not a press release, and definitely not a song about ducks.

This year’s net capital package is $5.7 billion—and, yes, that’s larger than we planned, but don’t take it as a signal of permanently higher borrowing, but as a deliberate, targeted investment in resilience. Roads of national significance are under way: Hawke’s Bay Expressway, Ōtaki to north of Levin, Warkworth to Te Hana. This Budget adds Cambridge to Piarere, completing the Waikato Expressway—and you know the roads that Labour’s cancelled, well, we’re now building them. We’re also building the schools and the hospitals and the courthouses and the police stations in a considered way that gives certainty to business and to the tradies and builders we want staying here in New Zealand.

Now, if you can’t produce abundant, affordable energy independently, you do not have a national security. You do not have economic security, full stop. It’s that simple. New Zealand’s strategic energy vulnerability is no longer theoretical. We see it every day in the Strait of Hormuz, and our Kiwis are experiencing it at the pump and on the factory floors up and down this country. But I’m telling you: the oil and gas ban was the most economically reckless decision ever—ever—made from a New Zealand Government. It was a disaster for working people. It was a disaster for manufacturers. It was a disaster for energy security. It was “don’t-care-onomics” in action, a feel-good decision made without thought to the real cost to real Kiwis. And if there’s just one thing that Labour and Green MPs could do to help Kiwis, it would be to drop their commitment to reintroduce that ban. Just one thing. Do one thing. But I’m telling you they’re not going to do it because they’d sooner be on the right side of a Labour Party dinner party than they would be actually on the right side of the Whakatāne Mill dealing with their energy bill.

I want say a challenge to the members opposite from Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori, because when you’re going to head out into regional New Zealand for the first time since the last election to try and make the case for why people should vote for you, you need to be real straight with them. You need to be straight about the failed policies of that last Government and what that did to our manufacturing sector. You need to be straight with them about the fact that the livelihoods of working people were sacrificed in exchange for a nice headline about banning oil and gas, and you can’t say you care about the cost of living and working people unless you’re serious about energy security.

We are taking actions to build strategic coal reserves, $90 million worth of extra diesel at Marsden Point. Is it costly? Yes. Is it less costly than the alternative? Absolutely, and this Budget certainly builds on big commitments into energy. I want to be extremely clear that going forward from this point in New Zealand, our energy independence must be treated as a national security action instead of an agenda about contributing to long-term climate strategy. The bottom line is we are never going to compete in a globally technological world without abundant affordable energy. As we keep saying, we’re going to prioritise the solar farm over the skink each and every day.

Now, I can talk about health because we are fixing the basics of what New Zealanders get from their health system. This Budget delivers three-day postnatal stays, paediatric palliative care, expanded bowel screening, and a new hospital block in Whangārei. Thank you, Shane Reti. When a dollar doesn’t go into growing the bureaucracy—which is the only thing that grew under Labour, let’s be honest about it—it goes to what actually makes a difference to people across this great country.

It didn’t get much pickup but there was a really excellent piece by Harriet Laughton in The Post which uncovered more detail on Labour’s GP policy, and I don’t think Labour really wants us to know too much about it. But do you know you won’t actually be allowed to choose whether you see a GP or not. No? The Labour Government will decide that. Their plan is that you’re going to ring them up, tell them what’s going on, and then they’re going to decide if you’re actually allowed to go to a doctor’s appointment. I think if you’ve paid any attention over the last 10 years to how Labour manages big projects, I just don’t think setting up a call centre to triage 26 million GP visits a year is a good idea. I actually think it will go as well as last weekend’s list ranking meeting that they had. I think the only other thing they didn’t tell us was that, actually, when you ring up, they’re going to thin out that call line queue even further because Ayesha Verrall is going to be singing that duck song again.

We are also fixing the basics in education. Cellphones are banned; kids are learning an hour a day of reading, maths, and writing; we’ve got structured literacy, structured numeracy, standardised reporting, a brand-new curriculum, a replacement for NCEA. I’m telling you, it’s working. Our kids are going to school in greater numbers. Thank you, David Seymour. Our maths acceleration programmes are working and we’re seeing big improvements amongst our year 6 students in particular. You know who was in charge in that damaging decline? It was the Labour Government. It was Chris Hipkins who was the Minister of Education for 5½ years, and they were just too busy spending more, borrowing more, taxing more than worrying about what was going on with our kids and why they were falling behind.

But I saw a really insightful story the other day involving Ginny Andersen. It was in the Herald, and it was her views on education. What she said is there are some ideological differences between National and Labour on what our kids should be learning. An example she gave was, and I quote, “If you’re waiting for the bus and it doesn’t arrive, and you can tell it’s 22 minutes late, what are you going to do now?” Now, I’ve got to tell you, if her time as a police Minister is anything to go by—and God help us if she ever ended up running education—I think the answer would be something like, “If the bus is late, just steal a car and drive it into a vape shop.” I mean, that’s basically, I think, what we would be getting. We are investing in education. We have got more teacher training. We’ve got 232 new classrooms. We’re doubling the number of trades academies out to 20,000 kids. Because to build the future, you need builders, you need roofers, you need plumbers, you need sparkies, and this Government backs them.

Finally, I want to talk about law and order because we are securing our communities and that’s another basic that we’ve had to fix. Three strikes restored, gang pitches banned, youth crime cracked, stalking criminalised, and more police on the beat. The result: 49,000 fewer victims of serious violent crime, 22 percent reduction in youth offending. But any victim is one victim too many, and so the work continues. The work carries on, and that’s why we’re investing more in police and corrections to manage prison growth. Because, to be honest, it shouldn’t be controversial to say that criminals belong in prison, not out on our streets. On that side of the House, they believe in repealing three strikes, they believe in abolishing prisons and defunding the police. But I’ve got to tell you, on this side of the House, we have a coalition Government, it is the Government of law and order, and we believe the rights of victims come ahead of the rights of offenders each and every day. We make no apology for that.

This is a Budget that is honest about the world that we face and clear-eyed about what it takes to succeed in it. There are politicians in this House who think that the answer to each and every problem is quite simply to spend more, tax more, borrow more. They think spending your way out of a cost of living crisis, borrowing your way through a fuel shock, taxing your way to growth. Well, I’m telling you, it’s not a plan, it’s an addiction, and like all addiction, it feels fine until the bill arrives—and the bill always arrives.

You will not find those politicians in the National Party. This is a Government that came here with a mission—fixing the basics, building the future, and three years in, this is exactly what we are doing. We are fixing the basics of the economy—inflation down, interest rates down, growth up, wages rising. We are fixing the basics of law and order. We are fixing the basics of how we teach our kids to read, write, and add up. We are fixing the basics of our energy security, our fiscal position, and our place in the world. We are building the future in roads, in hospitals, in classrooms, in defence, in trade relationships with India and Singapore and the wider Indo-Pacific, in renewable energy projects now coming out of the ground, in the young Kiwis who are staying home, who are coming home, and are building their lives here.

I’ve said it before, but our inheritance from what I call the “Greatest Generation”—those who built the peace after World War II and the rules-based order that followed—is not guaranteed. As I’ve said before, it must be chosen. It must be worked for by every generation. Budget 2026 makes that choice. It’s a responsible choice, a courageous choice, a choice to secure our future, not by spending more, borrowing more, and taxing more, but by building something that lasts. Mr Speaker, I commend Budget 2026 to the House. We are fixing the basics and building the future to secure New Zealand’s future.

💬 SPEAKER: Chlöe Swarbrick. [Interruption] Right, that is a completely unacceptable outburst. I’ve called attention to Speakers’ ruling 141, so people can expect that there will be some consequence for abusing that. Chlöe Swarbrick.

Mr Speaker, the Greens want every New Zealander to feel proud of our country. Not just for our history, for granting women the right to vote, standing against the United States for a nuclear-free Pacific, splitting the atom—we want New Zealanders to feel proud of our country that they live in today. We want New Zealanders to be able to swim in their rivers, to be able to grow food in healthy soil, to catch abundant fish from our ocean to feed their families, to be able to afford their groceries, to be housed, to heat their homes, to have the right to a good education and a secure job, to innovate, to create, to have fun.

We want New Zealanders to be happy, healthy, and safe—unified. But this Government is telling us, “Computer says no.” Today, they have released a Budget which tells us that they have no hope, no plan, no ambition, and no vision for this country—unless, of course, that hope, that vision, and that plan is just what we see here: allowing corporations to profit handsomely off the misery off regular New Zealanders; subsidising and supporting the very fossil fuels that Treasury’s Budget Economic and Fiscal Update tells us are the major vulnerability in our economy. This is not a cost of living crisis; it is a cost of greed crisis.

Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis: aren’t you sick of pretending—pretending that there is no money? The National Party can find money when it wants to. I’m not just talking about their rich-lister donations. In the last two years, they have found billions in their Budgets—in the tax cuts for landlords, tobacco companies, and the wealthy and sorted. There have been billions for fossil fuel production—billions and billions to meet Trump’s request to spend up large on new military equipment. So they’ve taken billions and billions from the poorest New Zealanders, cutting access for the homeless to emergency housing and cutting access to benefits, while thousands of New Zealanders are being pushed out of their jobs by this same Government, to the highest number since 1994, the year that I was born.

The books today show us that unemployment will in fact be higher in the next few years, as a result of the decisions that this Government was just clapping for, than were forecast in December. That means another 6,500 New Zealanders will lose their jobs thanks to the decisions of Christopher Luxon. These books show us that Christopher Luxon’s responsible fiscal management has resulted in further downward revisions of GDP growth forecasts.

Treasury today has also warned that his obsession with fossil fuels will raise costs for households and for businesses, which can slow spending, investment, and the very growth that they love to crow about, ultimately reshaping our economy’s structure and lowering our output and economic performance. It’s dressed up in a heck of a lot of fancy language, but today the Government is, effectively, choosing where our collective resources will go and who gets to be in charge of this country, who really gets to make decisions.

Throughout this week, Christopher Luxon has shown us, albeit being dragged kicking and screaming into broad daylight, as to who he sees it is his job to serve. We have seen laws stripping people’s rights to hold big polluters accountable, originally actually drafted by the country’s largest polluters, Fonterra and Z Energy, introduced by this Government with glee. And the Greens have exposed that the Government is taking on an extra $1.5 billion more in debt in order to try and quietly cover the tracks of their failed climate policies. This is why it is so important to understand that every time that this Government makes decisions to push more of our country’s wealth up to the top, they are also damaging our democracy. Fewer and fewer people get less and less money and less and less influence, while more and more people are being left with scraps that they are being told to fight over. Those regular people are being told to not look up.

Let’s run through some important facts, because despite this Government’s best efforts to starve our economy, New Zealanders are slugging away and working hard, and we have been lucky with global commodity prices. Our economy is growing in size, but more and more people are getting poorer and poorer, and the Government is cutting away investment in our basic collectively owned and operated public services. Our economy is growing, but regular people are getting poorer ,and our Government is shrinking while taking on more debt.

Where is New Zealanders’ money going? Well, just last year, the 100-odd households on the NBR’s rich list increased their wealth by almost $8 billion in one year. Supermarkets are making a million dollars a day in documented excess profit. Power companies’ net profits were $457 million in just the second half of last year. Banks raked in profits of almost $7 billion in 2025. That is $1,248 in profit for Australian banks, for every single New Zealander. But our economy is worth $445 billion. It’s actually bigger than it’s ever been. Yet our hospitals and our schools and our nurses and our doctors and our teachers who staff them are struggling. Our firefighters are striking twice a week because the fire trucks meant to save lives are falling apart.

But those public services don’t fail overnight. When we don’t invest in them properly, those services get slower, more stretched and further away with every year that passes. And there’s a word for that: austerity. It is how you break a country in slow motion. This Government is boasting today about new money for health and education. But once you actually count inflation, a growing and ageing population and what it really costs to deliver these things, much of that record investment is actually a cut in everything but name.

This Government will do anything in order to avoid taxing the mega-rich. They’ll take our school kids’ lunch money. They’ve made real-term cuts to our schools and to early childhood education, meaning higher fees for parents. They’ve cut $300,000 from programmes that help New Zealanders with energy hardship, when record numbers are struggling to pay their power bill. They have raided millions of dollars from food banks and taken away almost $700 million from public housing tenants. I guess just some of us are entitled to our entitlements.

Their decisions will close down sexual violence prevention services. Christopher Luxon promises that growth means more money in our economy. And, actually, he is right about that. But what he’s not being straight up and honest about is that he knows that that growth is not being shared. He knows that under his economic rules, that wealth goes straight to the top. But maybe I’m being too generous. Maybe he actually truly does still believe in trickle-down economics, just like some believe in the tooth fairy. Maybe he believes his own shtick about hard choices as he entrenches an economy that has been designated as a speculator’s tax haven by Australians—the same Australians from the same Australia where higher tax rates on those who can afford to pay means that there is the Government revenue necessary to invest in better public services and infrastructure; the same Australia that this Government is sending so many of our best and brightest to, because under this Government, New Zealanders are having a really hard time imagining a better tomorrow, here at home.

Look, I know politics is hard. I know that changing your mind and doing something differently in this environment, of all places, opens you up to all kinds of attacks—that you’re U-turning or backtracking or whatever we want to call it. But I would like to think, if I was privileged enough to be sitting in those seats over there making decisions about where our country’s collective resources are used, if I had spent two years making decisions that were hurting regular people‍—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: That’s not going to happen. You better start learning the song “Lonely Street”.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —that I would pause and reevaluate, Mr Peters—that I would listen to the chanting of the emergency service workers on strike for the longest industrial action in a generation, to the cries of babies that this Government knows are being born into unnecessarily and entirely preventable poverty; to the New Zealanders down at the returned services club who just wants some leaders with a spine.

Instead, this Government ploughs ahead with their economic doom loop. They’ve decided to mercilessly cut back on spending without any idea of how the market that they worship is going to fill the gap—that shocked business confidence that they said that they cared about—and the private sector investment also contracted by 2 percent. They cancelled thousands of new State builds and hundreds of infrastructure projects, which has meant the loss of 15,000 construction sector jobs. But each job lost isn’t just devastating for that person and for their family; it is devastating to the local community and to the local economy and to the small businesses where they brought a morning coffee or went on a date or did their home renos through. And what is this Government’s response to this doom loop of their own creation? It’s not to stop and think that maybe this thing isn’t working, because maybe instead of a plan, they’re running on instinct, a well-documented, well-exercised National Party instinct to hand over our collective wealth and control to a few people at the top.

Former National Governments sold off State housing, which now means we hand out billions to line the pockets of private landlords. Former National Governments sold off parts of our State-owned power companies despite an overwhelming referendum in opposition, and now we all pay for an energy system driven by profit at the expense of innovation and renewable generation. Former National Governments shut down and amalgamated ministries and departments, closing factories and putting a wrecking ball through the regions. This National Government is no different.

New Zealanders deserve so much better and the Greens have shown that better is possible. If we dared to tax multi-multimillionaires and billionaires so that they contributed fairly to the country that helped them to build that wealth, we wouldn’t have to rely on charity to get new ambulances on the road. We could use this big, old economy democratically to achieve the things that no one of us could achieve alone, because very few people have the individual wealth to build a hospital or refurbish old classrooms, but together we have more wealth than we have ever had. We can create jobs, we can build the things that we need, we can protect the natural environment that we literally rely on for life on Earth as we know it. Or are we just going to keep pretending that megalomaniac billionaires are going to solve our problems?

I actually agreed with the Prime Minister when two months ago as the fossil fuel crisis was hitting, he said boldly, “Hope is not a plan.” However, at exactly the same time, his Minister for Energy was quietly cancelling the long-awaited energy plan. The fossil fuel crisis has put a spotlight on the ticking time bomb sitting at the centre of our economy. While Luxton’s Government seems intent on finding new ways to lace this time bomb into the fabric of everything that we do, as this Government hopes and prays for new fossil fuel shipments and every time one is confirmed they just hope to restart that time bomb countdown timer, if that counter gets to zero, our entire country, our entire economy grinds to a halt. It’s not just sensible—

💬 Rt Hon Winston Peters: It’s meant to be at zero already. That’s what you guys said 10 years ago.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: It’s not sensible, Mr Winston Peters, to spend all of our resources fixated on feeding that beast in the hopes to just reset the clock. We need to diffuse the time bomb.

The next step is rewiring our economy and country around something that will not blow up in our faces, because we do not get affordable, secure energy from expensive fuels that have to be hauled in from the other side of the planet; we get it when we tap into the abundant water, wind, and sun, and the geothermal activity beneath our feet. We get it when we electrify everything. That is what it means to build resilience. It’s what it means to insulate ourselves against imported inflation. It’s what it means to build a country.

It’s not just about nation-building; it’s common sense. It’s taking control over the things that we have control over. But this Government is giving up control, not to regular New Zealanders, but to corporations, to offshore shareholders, and the fewer and fewer people who are getting more and more of our resources. Funnily enough, if our country was the business that Christopher Luxon seems to think it is. It would also be a failing business, because in business you don’t succeed by firing all of your staff, cutting off your sources of revenue, and then begging rich out-of-towners to maybe pop over because they can avoid paying tax—close your eyes to the crumbling infrastructure. If things aren’t going right, you get a new business plan. You find a new strategy. But a country is not a company, and a Prime Minister is not a CEO.

Prime Minister, I have spent two years inviting you to come and walk the streets of Auckland Central, to meet the people, including the children, who your policies have made homeless. I invite you to go and stand in the middle of Bendigo in Central Otago and tell New Zealanders with a straight face that you want to poison the local waterways and churn out our pristine biodiversity into a mine to make a quick buck for an Australian mining company. I invite you to come and sit with me, with the regular people, at Mount Smart Stadium during a Warriors game to talk to the couple from Hamilton who sit next to me, who drive up every other week for the game, who tell me that your Government has been a wrecking ball for small businesses because you’ve sucked all the money out of customers’ pockets.

Prime Minister, I invite you to go outside, to touch grass, to breathe the air, to look the New Zealanders that you are supposed to serve in the eye. Those things are real; those things matter. And when your made-up economic rule book is destroying those very real things, those silly rules have got to change.

Here is the hardest truth, and it’s actually not for the theatre that is this place; it is for the New Zealanders beyond these walls: no one is coming to save us. New Zealanders are going to have to do this for ourselves. On 7 November, New Zealanders can resign this Government to the history books. But we are not going to spontaneously end up with a Government that is willing to take on the well-resourced lobbyists in this country and to work actively in the interests of regular people.

We are going to need a new kind of coalition. I am not talking about the boring circular talkback talk of which politician is going to negotiate with which. I am talking about New Zealanders coming together with a common, intentional idea about who we are as a country and where all of us want to go. Because when everything feels complicated and chaotic, I believe that we can agree on some basic things: every New Zealander is entitled to a safe home, a good education, affordable food, a secure job, reliable transport, renewable energy. Those are the non-negotiables that every New Zealander is entitled to and they can be the building blocks to help us rebuild our country, for all of us. These are the things that we should fight for, not just for ourselves, not just for the people who we know and love, but even for the people who we don’t know and don’t like.

To anyone and everyone who is listening, I am asking you not just to believe in the Greens; I am asking New Zealanders to believe in themselves, to believe in each other, and to believe in the country that we can create if we are willing to work together to make it a reality. I am asking New Zealanders, though, not just to believe; I am asking them to act, because if New Zealanders are feeling powerless right now, it’s kind of by intent. That’s exactly the strategy and the plan of this Government, to have regular people switch off so that power and wealth gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. I promise New Zealanders that they will find their power when they go out there and they talk to other New Zealanders about these basic things that we have in common that we are willing to fight for for each other. New Zealanders can do more than vote this election; they can join the campaign to rebuild this country.

There are easy lies and there are hard truths, and after years of easy lies about our nation’s finances, we are coming to the hard truths. We cannot spend and borrow our way to prosperity. We have to pay the bills and we have to balance the books. And finally, in this Budget, we are bringing together the hard truths to chart a course to honest prosperity where we pay our way, we balance the books, and people can again afford to live comfortably because the Government is managing its money as carefully as they’ve been forced to manage their own.

This Budget is backing the hard-working people who get up and make a go of it while cutting the things that don’t work to provide more of what does.

It is, I think, a tribute to three parties working together, associate finance Ministers and a Minister of Finance from ACT, National, and New Zealand First coming together to create this third Budget of our three-party coalition. That is a triumph that is better than our worst enemies’ worst nightmares—that we are able to deliver, in challenging times, in the middle of a global oil shock, a pathway to a balanced Budget earlier, with no new taxes. That is the choice that countries are facing around the world, because there are two paths to balancing the books: there is either tax more or spend less. As I remember Nicola Willis once saying, we don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem in Government. If you want to solve the problem of borrowing and deficits, you must get on top of wasteful Government spending.

There is a contrast opening up, not just across the divide of this aisle but across the Tasman Sea. You look across the Ditch, and we’re not feeling like the lucky country so much now, are we, cobber? I mean, those guys are going to have deficits through to 2035, and new taxes to try and balance their Budget. What that tells you is that, if you try to squeeze people until the pips squeak, if you believe the path to prosperity is to take money from anyone you can find that has it, until nobody wants to create wealth in your country, eventually you will all be poor. In fact, the only thing that socialist thinking has done for the poor is give them a lot more company. That’s why this Budget is just what the doctor ordered.

The spending amount—the new spending—was going to be $2.4 billion in December; it’s now going to be $2.1 billion. That’s $300 million less, and it’s the same for the next four years. That’s $1.2 billion less spending than was expected just six months ago. That is a triumph, and it has been done with a plan to have fewer Government departments and fewer bureaucrats. It’s just what the doctor ordered, and it’s something the ACT Party doctor was prescribing years ago. It’s a prescription that has become increasingly popular. We’re going to see the amount of money taken up by Government down to 30.3 percent of GDP, after it peaked under Labour at 35 percent of GDP. That means that, for every $20 in the economy, we are saving people $1 by spending less every year. That is the kind of progress towards the smaller, more efficient Government that we need.

What are the dividends? Over 200,000 new jobs forecast, 2.7 percent economic growth year on year, and the surplus coming forward a whole year to 2028-29. This is a Government that is fixing what matters, and what matters is not finding new taxes and new revenue tools but fixing the spending to do more for less. On that, this Budget will be familiar to many New Zealanders, to many households. It will be familiar to many businesses, who have to cut something that doesn’t work if they see something new that they want to spend on. That means, wherever we’ve spent something new, the chances are it’s come from the $1.7 billion in savings that we have been able to make. If you want something new, you have to make savings elsewhere, and finally, after years of thinking that somehow economic gravity did not apply to Governments, especially those filled with Labour politicians, we have come back to Earth, back to reality, because, “Oh, there goes gravity.” We are passing a balanced Budget in just a few years thanks to our responsibility.

These choices allow us to do a number of new things that I believe will ensure New Zealanders have the opportunity in education, the care in health, the safety in the street, and the prosperity of knowing that, actually, your efforts can make a difference. If you make good choices, the deal can be kept: you can find yourself with a home and a career and a family and security by doing the right thing. For too many people, that has been lost for too long because the Government has been sucking up any extra cream that they created. We’re going to see $54 million more in Pharmac, all of these things made possible by saving more money. That comes after we gave $1.774 million extra money to Pharmac to fill in a fiscal hole left by Labour, and then another $604 million for extra medicines that have so far benefited a quarter of a million Kiwis with new medicines they would not have had access to, had it not been for this extra spending. And we’re now putting another $54 million into Pharmac, the largest of the specific headline initiatives under this Budget. Pharmac and medicines have experienced a revolution. I’d like to thank all of my colleagues, especially Todd Stephenson, who had been such a strong advocate for making better use of medicines.

It is now seven years and two months and 13 days since I sat over there and stood against the whole Parliament, against rushed gun laws, and I said these people who have firearms are not actually bad people. What has happened is bad, but they do not deserve to be punished for it. As a result, we, as the ACT Party, have stood up for the simple idea that, yes, firearms can be dangerous, and, yes, we need to ensure that people are kept safe from them, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of treating legitimate firearms owners with the basic respect and dignity that is due to all law-abiding Kiwis. With Nicole McKee, we see $45 million in this Budget put towards a new firearms safety authority. It never should have been the Police, and that will also ensure that those licence fees don’t have to go through the roof to pay for it. They will be stable.

All over the country, we see wilding pines sucking up water that could have been used to grow food and generate electricity. There’s $79 million in this Budget for Andrew Hoggard’s initiative to cut down those wilding pines. You might have seen on TV ONE that he’s already started. He’s not the kind of politician that leaves it to other people.

Then, with Simon Court and my good friend Chris Bishop, we have seen enormous effort to fix perhaps the biggest handbrake on New Zealanders’ opportunity in this country, and that is the bureaucracy called the Resource Management Act that has made it so easy for so many people to say no, leaving a whole lot of people wondering when on earth we are going to start saying yes in this country. Well, I’m proud that we have a Resource Management Act currently before select committee, coming back to this House soon, that will put property rights at the centre of resource management law. That is an ACT Party achievement. It’s probably something I’m prouder of than anything, but it also has got to be put in place with enormous expertise. Having Simon Court and Chris Bishop on the case makes me very confident and very determined to win the election so that they can do the implementation. They’re going to put in place electronic record-keeping in consents—like we’re a modern, civilised country—so you can get your consents faster and be able to develop your own property, which some would call tino rangatiratanga. Who says the ACT Party doesn’t support article 2 of the Treaty?

Then there’s infrastructure, and there are so many projects, but I just want to talk about two. My mum was the chief pharmacist at the Northland District Health Board, and in the school holidays or after school, I sometimes used to go into the hospital pharmacy. That was a wee while ago, and the building wasn’t in great shape back then—

💬 Rima Nakhle: Three years ago.

Fifty years ago?

💬 Rima Nakhle: Three—three.

Three years ago? Oh, you’ll keep. It was a while ago, and the building was not in great shape then. To see Whangārei Hospital built for the people of Northland, and restored, I think is a long-overdue investment. And the Waikato Expressway—whenever I venture down south, past the Bombays, I’m brought to life by the amount of energy in that part of the country, the “golden triangle”, and we have a road that is ready to go, has a benefit-cost ratio—or, as Julie Anne Genter would say, a “bee-cee-arr”—of 3.2 to ensure that we’re getting real economic growth and opportunity in that very fertile part of the country.

We’re also doubling the number of trade training apprentices. Paying wealthy constituents of mine their entire university fees for one year so they could kick the tyres—that was wasteful spending. I don’t know how many people came up to me and said, “My kids don’t need this.” They even said, “I don’t need this.”, the really honest ones. We’re going to finish that and double the number of people in trade training.

I see Cameron Luxton up there. I think it’s important. We haven’t had enough respect for the trades. We’ve sold the cap and gown dream with subsidised university degrees to all and sundry who show up for one, but the quality’s gone down and the trades have been neglected. Some people even get one of these degrees and retrain in the trades anyway. I actually met with the plumbers guild. They said the number one source of recruits for apprentice plumbers is Auckland University of Technology (AUT). I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with AUT, but that’s what they told me. We are slowly rebalancing from this oversold cap and gown dream to a practical reality of trade training.

We’re seeing $1.5 billion on naval capacity. In our party campaign, we said it’s not sustainable to have one ally that spends twice as much and expect them to help us when we won’t help ourselves. We were spending only 0.9 percent of GDP on defence. That’s heading quickly towards 2 percent. With Chris Penk, our defence Minister, a former submariner in his own right, we are seeing an enormous investment in naval capacity, and not just buying conventional stuff but the kind of drones, some of them made in New Zealand, that will define future military conflicts. Anyone who’s watching anything in Ukraine will know all about that.

I’m pleased to see $40 million in uplift for early childhood centres. We’re deregulating, we’re cutting the red tape, but they face cost pressures and they’re getting a 1.5 percent uplift, which, critically, will begin on 1 July. They don’t have to wait until the end of the year, like they normally do under Budgets. That money will start flowing. There will be additional funding for people who are bringing up the youngest New Zealanders. That will start almost immediately.

But the thing I’m perhaps most proud of in this Budget, of the new things that this Government is spending on is the council growth incentives. Brought together again with my good friend Chris Bishop, we have put together this policy that makes a long-term dream a reality. I announced this policy as ACT’s housing policy in 2016, much closer to when I was visiting Whangārei Hospital. We went out and we said, “Look, if we don’t give councils a reason to say yes, then they’ll look at all the reasons to say no.” All the infrastructure costs, the grumpy neighbours, the liabilities—so many reasons to say no to someone building a house. Why don’t we give them a reason to say yes?

Back then, we called it GST sharing. The spirit of that is here. If a council consents a building, then they will get a quarter of a percent of the value of that building. But if they do more than 1 percent of their existing housing stock, it goes up to half a percent. If they do more than 2 percent of their existing housing stock, if they consent that many houses in one year, then they will get 1.25 percent.

What that means in real terms is that if Auckland had done this last year, they would have got $32 million. If you think about the Queenstown Lakes District—one of the fastest growing regions in the country, under massive infrastructure pressure—they would have got $7.5 million. You think about Christchurch, you think about Selwyn—a lot of people flocking to Christchurch. It’s a cool place these days, you know? They’d get about $8 million each of those two adjacent councils. In the context of a council balance sheet, this is serious money.

What’s more, you have people—the mayor and the chief executive of the council—going down to the planning department and saying, “Hey, why don’t you issue a few more consents? We’ll get more money from the Government.” We’ve got to change that political economy. This was something that Brooke van Velden put up in a member’s bill five years ago. The whole Parliament except Labour voted for it and now it’s become a reality, because everyone on this side of the House knows if the next generation’s going to have the security and the affordability of housing, then it’s going to take getting the incentives right.

The ACT Party is the party of sensible economists. By the way, 100 percent of the economists in this Parliament are members of the ACT Party. Same with engineers; we’ve got 100 percent of them too. If it starts with “E”—we’ve got all the Es. I just want to say one other thing about this—

💬 Hon Member: Building practitioners.

And 100 percent of the licensed building practitioners, yeah. This is being done with no new taxes. In fact, there are even some reductions in taxes. For a long time, the Foreign Investment Fund tax has been a bugbear where people have said, “Look, I want to live in New Zealand, but sometimes I want to invest overseas and I don’t want a stealth wealth tax taking my money—5 percent deemed return that I just have to pay.” Lately, it’s been pretty hard to make that return and so we are introducing the revenue accounting method, not just for people who moved here recently, but for all New Zealanders who are liable for the Foreign Investment Fund tax.

We’re increasing the threshold for paying that tax to $100,000 from $50,000. I hope I’ve got that right, revenue Minister. Yes, I do. Thank you. I write my own speeches, so you can never be too sure. That amounts, on the Foreign Investment Fund, to a $72.5 million tax cut to encourage people to stay in New Zealand and invest, and that, to me, says hope and growth.

That is the choice that we face in this Government and that we face in politics in every country around the world. I said in my maiden statement to this House 12 years ago nearly, if you know the answer to a simple question, you know everything about a person’s politics. There are people who think there is only so much to go around and the point of politics is to take from one person and give to another person who will vote for you. That is zero-sum thinking. If you listen to, say, I don’t know, the Greens, that’s all they ever say, that your problems are caused by someone else’s success and we’re going to take their money to give it to you and you’ll be better off. That’s the only thing they have to say. I see poor Lan Pham, who in fairness is kind of a hostage in the Green Party but sometimes does talk about the environment. She’s honest with herself. She knows that’s all her colleagues ever say.

The other alternative is positive-sum thinking—positive-sum thinking that actually we can trade value for value with each other and get stronger together, that when people save and invest and put something away today, that’s not a bad thing. That’s actually the only way that we’re able to produce more each day, to save a bit more, to consume a bit more, to do things smarter and actually be able to provide the things we need while having the innovation to reduce our impact on the planet. That is positive-sum thinking that the only real resource in the world is human creativity. Human creativity thrives in a free society where we back people, even if they’re a bit different, even if we don’t quite like them. We say, “You’ve got a right to make the most of your time on earth.” You never know when somebody in that position—I see Julie Anne Genter; she’s perplexed. She’s shaking her head. She’s never heard of this before. Well, buckle in, Julie Anne Genter.

This is the way that people discover new things—new medicines, new technology, new sources of energy, new ways to move around the world, new ways to live happier, healthier, wealthier lives. On this side of the House, and particularly in the ACT Party, we stand for that simple idea that the creative powers of a free society are the only true resource that we have. If we unleash them under the rule of law, with respect for the equal dignity of each and every one of us who inhabits this free society, then you just don’t know what we can achieve, but maybe we will show that Kiwis really can fly. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. In about 20 weeks, we will be trotting off around the country and New Zealanders will be making their way to the ballot box, casting, offering their views, and showing who they prefer to run the country. We’ve just heard from the Leader of the Opposition as to why the nation should prefer his menu of rhetoric, his preferences, without that individual offering one concrete idea as to why New Zealanders should move from this side of the House over there.

That is a classic case of him believing vacuous-sounding rhetoric, saveloy sausage—I was about to say pie eating, but I enjoyed the pāua pie the other day—but other gimmicks that, sadly, New Zealanders have begun to see as the distinguishing feature on that side of the House—not one single policy intervention, not one concrete idea, not one justification as to why they condemned New Zealand to the state of penury, fiscally speaking, where we find ourselves. We are not in a position to offer a Budget of glitz, of fiscal profligacy. We are rebuilding the nation. We are rebuilding the economy. If anything, it’s a brick house Budget. The analogy is when you’re rebuilding something brick by brick, you have to start with the foundations.

That is why one of the most handsome features of this Budget—and I have to acknowledge my colleague the Minister for Infrastructure—is the substantial amount of capital that this Government, facing straightened circumstances, has put into capital projects. Just to give a little bit of background, the size of our GDP is $450 billion. Now, sadly, Treasury tells us that we have rather challenging growth trajectories in front of us—sub - 3 percent. I personally would love to see it much higher; 3 percent is at the very bottom range of what New Zealanders expect us to do. However, we are still stuck with the overhang of what we inherited as a consequence of the massive spend-up on that side of the House.

When you do take an approach of rebuilding your economy and starting with the foundations, you need capital projects that are ready to be assembled and ready to be delivered, but for that, you need people who think and who represent the public in the State service and who are capable of delivering. Look no further than what our Government inherited, the Dunedin Hospital, a project driven by the last Government that left us with some very difficult capital project choices. Fortunately, we were able to make them. Fortunately, we were able to find the money as a coalition Government. But, boy, there are some sobering lessons in there! We need to ensure that our civil service is fit for purpose. We need to ensure, going forward, that when we spend 6 percent of GDP on capital projects, which basically means $27 billion—i.e., 50 percent of that is the Crown, the next 25 percent is local government, and the last 25 percent is private sector, including gentailers and other entities that are regulated in terms of their earnings, although you know as well as I do the gentailers aren’t regulated, but, taihoa, there will be more on that during the upcoming election.

So, yes, it is a rebuilding Budget. Of course, it’s not the Budget we thought we would enjoy passing back in 2023. However, when you are confronted by geopolitical challenges and unwanted outbursts of hostilities in the Middle East, and the imposition of uncertainty coming from the United States of America, then it does require skilful navigation. It does require a reordering of priorities, but that requires fiscal stewardship, not these empty promises from that side of the House, not these hackneyed phrases that, somehow, there’s a fiscal tree that you can shape every week, every month, and golden apples will just float around on the ground and that you don’t ever have to take account as to who’s funding them. So, yes, New Zealanders, this may not be the Budget that you hope to see in the context of an election year, but we are rebuilding—coming from a set of challenging circumstances—the foundations of your economy with new hospitals, with new roads, with a revamped military, and with energy.

It’s not our fault that firms up and down New Zealand find themselves marooned as a consequence of the Labour Party closing down the oil and gas industry and refusing to spend any money on finding other sources of energy. That fell with due modesty to the man standing in front of you to find the money, to ignite the investment in oil and gas with the $200 million, to underwrite the new investment in geothermal energy, to underwrite the new frontier developments in terms of nuclear energy, and to underwrite the developments of hydrogen. New Zealanders, these may not be the most sexy things in the middle of an election year, but unless we sink deep the foundation poles of our economy, in the capital sense, we will struggle—we will struggle. Please do not buy into the hollow, empty promises. Sadly, they believe that by saying nothing and keeping a small target either on the forehead or the back, votes will fall like leaves in an autumn storm into their electoral kete. I have more faith in the belief system of the average Kiwi for us as a country to fall into that rubbish.

No better remedy lies in rebuilding your country than investing in young people, rangatahi. That’s why I have to acknowledge my leader, who showed a level of pragmatism and adaptability to change our coalition agreement in consultation with Nicola Willis to steer the money away from universities to get the nephs off the couch—$300 to $400 million dedicated to meeting the costs of more of the young teenagers, school leavers, to prepare them for the jobs associated with building the infrastructure of the country. To all of the critics out there listening to Radio Waatea and listening to Waipareira, hearing that there’s nothing for the whānau in this Budget, that’s where you’ll find your young people knocking on the door, looking for a job, and the only way you’ll develop their skills for a job is to prepare them for the labour market. I personally have nothing against kapa haka, but my haka days are sadly over, but please don’t believe that you’re going to unleash a level of passion, skill, or talent only by focusing on cultural pursuits. Unless we prepare all young New Zealanders and endow them with the human capital capacity, we will not fulfil their ambitions. There will be thousands of young men and women, irrespective of their ethnicity, who will be the beneficiaries of New Zealand First working with the National Party and the ACT Party to transfer the dough that was originally dedicated to, and being enjoyed by, the students at university back into that area where we find people struggling, the blue-collar communities, the communities at the earthy end of our economic equation.

Now, look, I want to talk about the fact that our revenue is forecast to be about $9 billion in terms of growth. I know as well as you do that, up to 2030, it has to grow much quicker than that. But the question is: are we as politicians up for the interventions, the changes, to accelerate the growth in revenue? I can tell you there’s one party over here who wants to ban mining on the Department of Conservation estate. They are never going to be up for the growth of revenue.

Thirty-four, 35, 36 percent of our landscape is under the imaginary title of Department of Conservation land. We have got to agree, within certain guardrails, we can use the resources of this country. We must use the resources of this country, create those jobs that are high paying, attract the New Zealanders who have gone to Australia and other such places, because we can do what our forefathers and their wives and their aunties and their uncles did, and grow rich by using our own resources. Because, without a growth narrative, we will not achieve what we expect our children, and hope that our children will achieve.

It’s important that I move on and talk about another area of uncertainty in New Zealand society. As we have sought to boost the size of our New Zealand population through immigration and we’ve changed the demography of our country, it’s heartening to see nigh on $20 million has now been dedicated to cope with migrant exploitation. To all of the naïve scribblers with their breathless belief that somehow, by boosting—uncritically—our population and remaining blind to the opportunities that are exploited within those communities to do wrong to their own, we cannot remain blind to those practices; they are rampant.

Therefore, the labour inspectors need to be a lot more vigilant, and if it’s good enough for all those cuzzy bros of mine on Tairāwhiti, in the East Coast, to be snapped every month bringing illegal pāua back to shore, I expect to see the illegality rampant in those migrant communities snapped on television, on the radio, in the media, so that sunlight shows it offends what it means to be a New Zealander and to watch that level of exploitation, watch that level of criminality, offending every tenet of our Judeo-Christian background in New Zealand, to satisfy what? A new wave of migration to keep a small cast of employers happy? I can’t wait for the campaign to begin so I can really ramp my rhetoric up about that.

So full marks—full marks—for the migrant exploitation allocation that sits almost as comfortably with New Zealand First as the $50 million for front-line policing. I am that part of the rose tree between these two petals—the two police Ministers on either side of me—and I want to acknowledge their efforts for the $50 million of front-line policing. I won’t continue the analogy.

There are some deluded souls who regard policing as an affront and an attack on indigenous rights. Sadly, members of that political movement are akin to the moa: soon to be extinct. They misrepresent the bulk, mainstream Māori opinion in our New Zealand society. No one should fear the police; however, all should be capable of holding the police to account because they are not only the protectors of the community, safeguard our standards, but they know they operate under the law, and when we rely upon the law, we need to know that the police will be visible. We need to know that a new cadre, a new group of New Zealanders, will be attracted to represent their communities and uphold the standards of what it means to belong to a secure, safe element in our society.

Now, there has been a mad rush to claim authorship for the money associated with the road ambulance service. I know, it’s often said that success has many authors and failure is an orphan. Once or thrice in my career, I have been described as an orphan. However, we should all celebrate the fact that these are front-line service workers. We have managed in the final Budget, over our three-year journey, to address the needs and interests of, and support, our fellow Kiwis delivering those essential services; men and women often overlooked. Indeed, I know there are people in this House, including Minister Watts, who have volunteered their time, actually being members of this distinguished group of New Zealanders. It’s a matter of great pride for my leader and our caucus to have played a small role in contributing to the resilience associated with that group of Kiwis.

I can’t go much further before I finish this speech and remind everyone about the fuel resilience challenges. We most certainly can no longer continue blindly into the future and ever allow ourselves to be held hostage to Hormuz ever again. Sadly, it was Megan Woods, in her fanciful belief that somehow New Zealand under her leadership and that political refugee from electoral justice, otherwise known as Jacinda Arden—that somehow by closing down the refinery, New Zealand would save the planet. We now learnt 720 million litres of storage was destroyed.

I shall be there very soon; I shall be celebrating the arrival of the diesel storage, a recommissioned $100 million tank funded by a $1.2 billion fund negotiated by Winston Peters at the formation of the last Government. The $1.2 billion fund reflected the 2023 coalition Government. There will be another coalition—God willing—agreement, 2026-27. I don’t want to be boastful and talk about what that figure will be; that’s really up to the electorate. But those matters lie in the future. We have put pūtea tea aside; we have put money aside—$150 million - plus to ensure, in the event circumstances do worsen, we are not so flinty, we are not so short-sighted that we won’t allocate the necessary fiscal succour to keep our economy turning over.

Yes, it’s important that we retain an eagle eye over the scale of the size of the State, but this party will never buy into these very shallow, Thatcheristic ideas that we can walk away and completely trust the market. That’s just never ever going to happen in terms of any Government that Winston Peters, myself, and our caucus are blessed to be a part of, which is why we don’t actually believe it was a bad thing to spend money to secure resilience. We look forward in the future forming other governments to protect firms that we’ve done through the $1.2 billion gas resilience fund—i.e., the bank guarantee.

To all the businesses who came to see me, came to see Simeon Brown, came to see other Ministers, and complained that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, I say to you: “We need a dose, at all times, of optimism. We can grow, we can be strong, we have the resources that our forefathers could only dream about.” But what we need is to be unshackled from this risk-averse, woke-riddled, doubt-riddled culture that we have inherited. If we do that, the world will be our oyster. Kia ora tātou. [Applause]

Thank you for that, New Zealand First. I didn’t expect applause this afternoon.

All I wanna say is that

They don’t really care about us.

Throughout this term of Parliament, Māori voices have been consistently denied, and today Te Pāti Māori rises to give its contribution in one of the most important debates before November’s election. Here’s the gist of it: overall, Māori got 0.24 percent of the Budget, non-Māori got a $13.4 billion increase, and Māori lost $34 million, and there was a $136 million reduction of Māori development funding—the lowest investment into te iwi Māori in 15 years. It appears that it does matter if you’re black or white.

As Māori voices continue to be silenced inside this House, this Government continues to ignore the voices of struggling whānau outside of it: the voices of whānau at the supermarket checkout, the voices of kaumātua choosing between power and prescriptions, the voices of parents skipping meals so their babies can eat, and the voices of rangatahi packing their bags for Melbourne, Perth, and London because the Government has made it too hard to build a future at home. This Government might want Māori to beat it from the Budget debate, but our people are saying something much clearer: “They don’t really care about us.”, and the Budget proves it.

This Government has lost focus on the real issues facing our people. Instead of fixing the economy, they have been fixated on overseas culture wars, importing division, stirring up fear, and trying to start their own thriller here at home. But there is nothing entertaining about families struggling to survive. There is nothing iconic about poverty. There is nothing smooth about a criminal economy that keeps working whānau struggling. This economy is no longer designed to serve ordinary people.

Te Pāti Māori believes Aotearoa should be run like a marae. On a marae, we welcome you, we house you, we feed you, and we care for you. On a marae, you do not leave people standing out in the cold while a few sit comfortably inside. You do not lock the cupboards while whānau struggle to afford kai. You do not measure the strength of the marae by how much wealth one person has accumulated; you measure it by the collective oranga of the people you have cared for. But this Government’s Budget does the opposite.

This is not a Budget built on manaakitanga. This is not a Budget built on tikanga. It’s a Budget that looks our struggling whānau in the eye and says that it does matter if you are black or white, because the reality is Aotearoa has had two years of the worst economic performance in history.

The cost of living crisis has become a cost of survival crisis. The electricity costs are up more than 20 percent. Rates are up nearly 22 percent. Health costs continue to rise, food prices continue to climb, and behind every statistic is a whānau making impossible choices. Our parents are skipping meals so their tamariki can eat first. Our kaumātua are putting off doctors visits because the power bill comes first. Our aunties and uncles are putting $10 in the car and praying the fuel lasts until next payday.

This Government talks about economic growth, but whānau do not experience the economy through GDP graphs. Whānau experience this economy at Pak ’N Save, at the petrol station, when the rent comes out, and when the power bill arrives. Our people are asking will you be there—will this Government be there for workers? No. Will this Government be there for renters? No. Will this Government be there for kaumātua? No. Will this Government be there for rangatahi? No. Will they be there for Māori? Absolutely not—at 0.24 percent.

Under this Government, Māori unemployment has risen from 6.8 percent to 10.8 percent. That is not accidental. That is not just bad luck. That is political failure, and when our people are asking for help, this Government is telling them to look at the man in the mirror, as if poverty is a personal failure, as if unemployment is a character flaw, and as if homelessness is poor budgeting. But Te Pāti Māori says to look at the system—look at who benefits and look at who pays the price—because this is no longer the story of the haves and the have-nots; this is the story of the have-nots and the have-yachts.

The top 10 percent now own nearly half the wealth in Aotearoa, while the bottom 50 percent share just 6.7 percent between them. The bottom 20 percent now hold negative wealth. Meanwhile, billions remain protected inside family trusts while ordinary whānau are struggling to put kai on the table, and still this Government tells our people that there is no money. No money for housing, no money for health, no money for kai—no money for Māoris. Somehow, there’s always money for landlords, consultants, and tax cuts for the wealthy.

Te Pāti Māori believes in having an economy grounded in manaakitanga and collective wellbeing, but this Government has built an economy where the reward rises to the top, while the burden falls on working whānau. This is not a Budget for workers. This is not a Budget for renters. This is not a Budget for whānau trying to survive, let alone live. This is a Budget that rewards privatisation.

This is a Budget that pits people against each other. This is a Budget that sells off the strategic inheritance of our mokopuna, a Budget that asks our people to keep paying more, while the wealthy keep taking more, and then they wonder why rangatahi are leaving. Our young people are looking around and asking whether Aotearoa still has a place for them. Born here, raised here, educated here, loved here, but now forced to search for their Aotearoa hou somewhere else—Melbourne, Perth, London—not because they want to leave home, but because they no longer believe they can afford to stay. They are leaving because this Government has priced them out of their own future. You cannot build an economy by forcing our next generation offshore. You cannot claim to care about the future while selling the inheritance of our mokopuna today.

Te Pāti Māori believes Aotearoa should be a place our people can afford to call home: a place where everybody has a role, everybody is cared for, and nobody is left outside; a place where the vulnerable are protected, where our kaumātua are honoured and our mokopuna are supported; and a place where every whānau has the right to be housed, fed, cared for, and loved. That is not radical; that is manaakitanga and that is tikanga. That is what every marae already understands.

Why? Tell them that it’s human nature—and the truth is the wealth already exists in this country, but it is simply trapped at the top. That is why Te Pāti Māori will implement a wealth tax. Under our policy, 98 percent of Aotearoa will pay less tax. That means that more stays in the pockets of our working whānau, instead of the ultra-wealthy. A nurse should not pay proportionally more tax than a millionaire hiding wealth in trusts. A cleaner should not have to carry more of the load than someone whose wealth grows while they sleep. A whānau working three jobs should not have to be told to tighten their belt while the wealthy keep changing the rules to protect themselves. Our Te Pāti Māori tax calculator lets whānau see it for themselves. We are saying to check the numbers, look at the impact, and see who benefits under our policy, and while this Government attempts to suppress Māori representation, our people continue to rise.

Since this Government took office, 35,000 Māori have switched to the Māori roll, and 55,000 new voters have joined the Māori roll. Right now, there is an eighth seat waiting there, but only if our people enrol. That is why this election matters. This election is not just about changing our Government; it is about deciding what kind of whare we are building together. Will Aotearoa become a haven for wealth and corporations, or will it remain a home for its people?

This Government wants our people to stay quiet, but Māori are not quiet. Our people are rising, and this year our message is simple: get on the Māori roll, vote in this election, and make this a one-term Government, because when a Government shows us again and again that they don’t really care about us, then we do what our people have always done. We organise, we mobilise, we rise, we vote, and we tell them, once and for all, “Beat it.” Kia ora tātou.

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Debate interrupted.