Imprest Supply (Second for 2023/24) Bill

I move, That the Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2023/24) Bill be now read a second time.

This is the conclusion, effectively, of the Budget debate, and I will return to the Government’s Wellbeing Budget in a moment. But firstly, to deal with the Imprest Supply (Second for 2023/24) Bill, what this does—as all imprest supply bills do—is provide interim parliamentary authority for expenditure decisions made, or to be made, by the Government through to the end of the financial year that are in addition to the amounts in the Estimates, in this case the 2023/24 Estimates.

The second imprest bill provides for any operating or capital spending decisions, including pre-commitments against future Budget allowances, and expenditure incurred against the between Budget contingency and national resilience plan. It also covers fiscally neutral adjustments which increase one appropriation but decrease another, confirmation of expense transfers, increases in demand-driven appropriations, and draw-downs of existing tagged contingency. Provision is also made for any risks that may materialise during this period.

The amount requested in the Imprest Supply (Second for 2023/24) Bill is $28.5 billion made up of about $16 billion of expenses, $11.5 billion of capital expenditure, and $1 billion of capital injections. This is the same amount sought in last year’s second imprest supply bill and significantly lower than the $41 billion sought in the Imprest Supply (Second for 2021/22) Bill. The amount sought in this imprest supply bill will be sufficient to cover any expenditure that may occur in the financial year that is in addition to what is in the 2023/24 Estimates, including responding to extreme weather events.

Treasury reporting indicates that actual expenses incurred against imprest supply Acts are consistently lower than the authority provided for by the legislation. For example, the June 2023 controller report indicates that the actual expenses incurred against the Imprest Supply (Second for 2022/23) Act 2022 totalled approximately $11.4 billion. That’s less than half of the authority provided in the Act, which totalled $28.5 billion. All expenditure incurred under the interim authority of the second imprest bill will need to be appropriated by Parliament before the end of the financial year, as is the case every year. This will be done through the Appropriation (2023/24 Supplementary Estimates) Bill, which gets introduced on Budget Day 2024.

In addition to the imprest supply bill, as I said earlier, this is the final reading of the Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill. The Budget debate comes to a conclusion. Can I reiterate, as I have said several times during this debate at different readings, how proud I am of Budget 2023. Because what that did was strike a balance, an important balance, for New Zealanders facing cost of living pressures but, equally, knowing that the Government needs to return to a more sustainable fiscal approach after the significant investments made during the COVID period, also knowing that we need to balance that against making sure that public services are provided to New Zealanders in the way that they both need and expect them to be provided, and that we responded to the weather events of January and February.

It’s there that I want to start. I am proud that this Government stepped up straight away with the kind of emergency response that New Zealanders need in these moments. That we were able to be there and provide hundreds of millions of dollars of support in that immediate emergency response phase is both a tribute to the people on the ground in New Zealand—those who work within our civil defence apparatus—but also the marae, the local communities, and those who do that work. We are for ever grateful for that, and as a Government we have backed them. We can only do that as a result of the balanced and responsible approach that we take. But we added to that in this Budget with a further close to a billion dollars, making a total of $2 billion that has gone towards the recovery and the rebuild from that cyclone. That is made up of many, many different things.

I just want to highlight a couple of those. The fact that we now have transport networks across the affected regions reopened—virtually every part of the network now usable—is a tribute to some extraordinary work. And when we see the Bailey bridges being deployed and how much that meant to the communities around it, I am proud that we funded that in this Budget. But it goes all the way down to smaller initiatives as well: the work that’s been done to roll out mental health support in the regions that have been affected by the cyclone, particularly for children as well. As we’re working day in, day out to improve the delivery of those services, we know that they make a difference as well. So that was a big part of Budget 2023: to step up to use our balance sheet to make sure that we look after New Zealanders in times of need. That is what New Zealanders rightly expect of their Government and that is what we have done in this Budget.

But alongside that, we have sought to ease the cost of living pressures that New Zealanders face whilst doing that in a way that does not exacerbate inflation unnecessarily and achieves other goals that the Government has. That includes, for example, the $5 prescription fee being scrapped, meaning that the 135,000 New Zealanders who didn’t pick up a prescription because of the cost last year will now get the health care that they need. The important thing here that Dr Ayesha Verrall was indicating today is what that means is that many of those people end up in our emergency departments because they haven’t picked up their prescription. So this is actually a win-win, in terms of the Budget, just as, I might say, making free public transport is for under - 13-year-olds and half price for under 25year-olds, because that is not only relieving a cost of living pressure; it is also good for our environment to see more people in public transport.

Then there is the early childhood education commitment that sees the 20 hours’ free policy extended to two-year-olds. As I went around the country promoting this Budget, it was that initiative that was raised with me time and time again by people who knew that this would make the difference for them. [Interruption] This is an example where members on the other side of the House who are interjecting might actually think about the fact that this policy is not only good for families; it’s also good for our businesses because this means that people can return to work earlier than they might otherwise have done. That was the comment I got from young parents, particularly young mums, saying this is the chance, this is the opportunity, because this Government and this Budget delivered that cost of living relief.

The other significant part of the spending in the Budget is around public services and making sure that we invest in our teachers, in our nurses, in our hospitals, and in our schools. That investment does not happen by accident. Sometimes when we’re in this House, it appears that members opposite believe that it is a given that that sort of investment will be made. Well, it’s not. And the reason we know that it’s not a given is because it didn’t happen the last time that National were in office.

This brings me to the other theme of the Budget, and that is around fiscal responsibility. It is always a balancing act, putting a Budget together. There are hard and tough decisions to be made. We know New Zealand households are making hard and tough decisions, and we have been doing the same thing as we bring our spending back down from the necessary levels of COVID. To get that balance right, to be able to provide public services, to be able to ease the cost of living pressures that people are facing, to be able to make our country more resilient to climate change—to do all of those things and make sure that we’re being careful fiscally is tough.

The thing that would undermine that is proposing huge—billions of dollars of—unfunded tax cuts, tax cuts that would see millionaires receiving a thousand dollars a year while those on the minimum wage get two bucks a week. That kind of tax cut, worth billions of dollars, can only be funded in this environment by making sure that public services are cut. That’s the only way it can be done, because otherwise it means increasing debt, and that’s been ruled out by the National Party; they’re not going to do that. So apparently they’re going to do it by cutting services—billions of dollars—cuts to education, cuts to health, cuts to housing, cuts to the services we rely on.

Nicola Willis: No, no.

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The member opposite says no, it’s not. Well, she should have a chat with her coalition partner David Seymour. She should have a chit chat with David Seymour, because what he says is we can get rid of thousands of public servants. Well, that’s one thing that’s bad. But the second part of it that’s bad is that, actually, that would be the end of the screen sector, which is funded in this Budget. That would be the end of the game development rebate funded in this Budget. There would be the end of the major events fund that brought us the FIFA Women’s World Cup. All of that gone. So there will be cuts—there will be cuts if there is a change of Government.

This Budget is something I am extremely proud of. It is a Budget that got the balance right in tough times. We continue to face those tough times, and as a Government we will step up to meet our fiscal rules, to get back into surplus across the forecast period, to keep debt under 30 percent, but all the while we will invest in our people and we will support them through these tough times. That’s what Budget 2023 does and I am very proud to present it back to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

This is a valedictory of a Budget. It is a farewell Budget from a Government that has been unable to respond to the times and the needs of the New Zealanders they are meant to serve. In this Budget, we have Grant Robertson at his symbolic best: taxing more, spending more, and digging us into deeper deficit, more debt, and lower growth. That is the testimony of six years of Labour.

In 2019, before COVID came to New Zealand, our core Government debt was $5.4 billion. In this Budget, Grant Robertson has delivered, as we stand here today, $73 billion worth of debt, and it’s set to blow out even further to $95 billion. The question that New Zealanders ask me up and down the country is, “Nicola, what do we have to show for it?” Because, when they look around them, they see that in their family and their household they are beset by a cost of living crisis that means they struggle every fortnight to balance their bills and their income. Groceries have gone up, petrol has gone up, their rent has gone up, their mortgage has gone up—everywhere they look, costs have gone up.

Steph Lewis: You want to drive their rent up further by allowing foreign investors back.

NICOLA WILLIS: Well, to that member, let me inform you: rents have gone up $175 a week on average under Labour. That’s what you have delivered for renters, and that’s before we talk about those with a mortgage, who have seen interest rates climb so fast that those with mortgages—firsthome buyers in particular—have been left scrambling, trying to find hundreds of dollars a fortnight to service their mortgage. While, on that side of the House, they like to say, “Oh well, incomes have gone up”, New Zealanders aren’t foolish; they know that, while their incomes have gone up in nominal terms, it hasn’t kept up with the real increase in costs. So, every fortnight, they find themselves slipping backwards. What National says to the members opposite is that you can’t care for people if you don’t care for the economy, and in this Budget we have all the signs of a Government that has given up on caring properly for the economy.

What it does is it increases spending without delivering more for the people that spending is meant to serve. When we compare the amount the Government promises to spend in this Budget, this year, with how much was spent in 2017, we see an 80 percent increase. Again, wherever I go in the country, New Zealanders say to me, “Nicola, which public service is 80 percent better?” It’s not as if the hospital waiting lists are 80 percent shorter. It’s not as if people are waiting 80 percent less time in the emergency waiting room. It’s not as if educational standards have risen 80 percent or violent crime has reduced by 80 percent. What this Government has done again and again, in Budget after Budget, is mistake the act of spending money with the need to deliver results.

It is not enough to simply take more tax from New Zealanders—more of what they earn—and throw it at big promises; actually, what New Zealanders want is the delivery of results, and they have not had that under Labour. This is another Budget which refuses to give them more of what they have earned, to allow them to keep more of it, and instead promises to spend and spend and spend.

This Budget should have delivered income tax reduction. It should have put more dollars in the back pockets of working people, who have been pushed into higher tax brackets because of inflation. The Government is collecting around $100 million a day more in tax, and yet it says it couldn’t possibly afford to let New Zealanders have income tax reduction. Well, I would put to you that a Government who even in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with New Zealanders unable to pay their bills, can’t see the case for tax reduction but thinks it must continue to spend New Zealanders’ money is a Government that has lost sight of the people it is meant to be serving. This is a Budget that continues to allow the cost of living crisis to burn on. I remember when Grant Robertson promised New Zealand that inflation was a short-term challenge. Well, here we are and we are entering the third year of a cost of living crisis in which inflation is outside New Zealand’s target range.

What all of the economists warned was that, if the Government keeps doing these expansionary, big-spending Budgets, they will add fuel to the inflationary fire, but Grant Robertson took no heed. In fact, in every Budget he has delivered, according to the Treasury’s own analysis, he has, on average, spent $600 million more than he promised he would six months prior in his Budget Policy Statement. This is a Government whose spending is completely out of control and who has allowed that to fuel the cost of living crisis. We learnt last week that, as a result of that persistent and sticky inflation, interest rates are likely to stay higher for longer. That will burn not only New Zealanders with a mortgage, who will find that they have less discretionary income in their household because they’re having to service bigger debt repayments; it will also hurt the small and medium businesses which we desperately need to see growing this country out of recession.

Those who took on debt during COVID to get through are now flipping on to higher interest rates that many of them simply can’t keep up with. So we see the recession rolling on. What this Budget should have done is provide a path out of inflation and high interest rates with disciplined spending. It should have reduced the taxes that New Zealanders pay, and it should have had a focus on delivery for results.

The finance Minister, in his remarks, talked about his fiscal goals. Well, when this Budget was set out, it promised that New Zealand would return to surplus in 2026. The surplus noted is around half a billion dollars. We’ve now had multiple people come out and say it is highly unlikely that the Government will meet that target, because recessionary conditions are such that the books have completely blown out. So, actually, what we have in this budget is a Government that is delivering higher deficits into the future, huge debt, huge spending, and huge tax. And could there be anything more Labour than that? Six years of a Government that got the money hose, sprayed it all around—with very little care for what results they would get for it or what discipline they would take from it—and who has left New Zealanders worse off by almost every measure: health services, described by those who work on their front lines, are in crisis; schools, where standards in the basics of reading, writing, and maths have declined so much that the education Minister, Jan Tinetti, has decided to adopt the National Party spokesperson Erica Stanford’s policy; crime that’s up so much that, when I knocked on someone’s door recently, she was almost in tears when she told me what her staff have had to put up with in the shop that she owns, including being bitten by another human being and threatened with a hammer.

So the point here is that Labour has not only managed to spend without getting results, they’ve now burdened future generations of New Zealanders with cleaning up the mess that they have left. As we stand here today, New Zealanders are being overtaxed, paying more tax than ever, both in individual terms but as a proportion of the economy as a whole. The amount of money that the Government is soaking up into its own spending is much greater as a proportion of the economy. Our deficits are bigger and deeper than they should be, and we have debt that, as I say, has risen to $73 billion and is forecast to go up to $95 billion.

As I said at the beginning, this is a valedictory of a Budget because it’s a farewell Budget. It’s a typical end of a Labour Government: to leave the next Government with the books in a mess, huge amounts of debt, public services that have gone backwards, and everyday New Zealanders struggling because they lost sight of the basics of economic management, of disciplined spending, of ensuring that their actions didn’t put more pressure on inflation and interest rates.

They can dress it up with all of the slogans and attack lines, as Grant Robertson attempted to do, but the reality is being felt by New Zealanders, who know that under Labour they are worse off than they once were and that the team opposite me cannot be trusted to deliver for them. The good news is that a National Government can deliver, will reduce their tax, bring discipline to spending, solve the cost of living crisis, and deliver better services by ensuring value for their money. That’s what a good National Government will do.

The last 10 minutes has been a chilling Dickensian view, window, into what the future would look like under a National/ACT Government. We have heard nothing but the coded rhetoric of cuts to core public services, from the Opposition finance spokesperson in what she just gave us in the last 10 minutes. Listening to that, I’m once again reminded of how lucky this country has been to have six Grant Robertson - led Budgets. It is an absolute privilege to take a call in this debate to talk about that Budget, what it means for New Zealanders, and what it is delivering for New Zealanders.

As the Minister of Finance said in his address in this debate, this was a Budget that had to strike a balance, and a difficult balance. I want to congratulate our Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson; and our Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, for threading the needle once again through those difficult times, for finding a way for us to provide support for everyday New Zealanders who are finding it tough, but never losing sight on the fact that we have to plan and build for tomorrow. That is exactly what Budget 2023 did. We focused on what mattered most to New Zealanders right now, like dealing with measures that will deliver on the cost of living.

But we did not shy away from facing up to those issues that no Government should take its eye off, like dealing with climate change, like properly planning for our infrastructure. Sadly, that is exactly the lack of vision that we have seen for decades from the National Party and that we are being reminded of again—that their short-term thinking would be delivered in any Budget that they served up.

So if we think about what we did to support New Zealanders in these immediate times that are difficult, in Budget 2023: cheaper childcare. As my colleague, the Minister of Finance, said, not only is the support for two-year-olds in early childhood incredibly important for our families in dealing with their household budgets, but this is also incredibly important for businesses in terms of the women—largely women—returning to the workforce after having children.

We also saw Budget 2023 dealing with helping New Zealanders with their health costs. Now, like probably far too many colleagues in this House—well, certainly on this side of the House—I visited pharmacy after pharmacy in my electorate of Wigram and saw the boxes of unpicked-up prescriptions; or talked to the pharmacists about their customers who have come in and asked the pharmacy staff to help them make the difficult decision about which of their medicines they’d pick up that day. Would they choose their diabetes medication? Would they choose their heart medication? Would they choose their blood pressure pills? These are the kind of choices that New Zealanders were having to make, and is why in Budget 2023 our Government saw it as such a priority.

Nobody benefits from those left-behind prescriptions sitting in the boxes of pharmacies all around this country—certainly those individuals and their families that are having to make those hard choices and certainly not our wider health system that ends up dealing with the ramifications of someone not taking their medicines that their GP provided them, when they turn up at an emergency department with a far more serious health concern.

They’re the kind of issues that we looked at in Budget 2023—for cutting transport costs, for making sure that we are continuing to support New Zealanders and take some of that burden off budgets. Also one that I am particularly proud of: reducing power bills through continuing to roll out our Warmer Kiwi Homes that now not only provides for the insulation of thousands and thousands of New Zealanders’ homes to help them cut their power bills, but also allows for installing efficient heating sources like heat pumps, but also, for the first time ever, making minor repairs to homes so you can insulate them. You cannot insulate a home properly with rotting windows and holes in the roof; you simply cannot do it. So I was very proud that we were able to do that.

What I was also very proud of is that we continued to see an investment in our public services. It is our Government’s commitment to supporting our public services that has meant that we have delivered pay rises for nurses, that we have delivered pay rises for teachers, that we have been able to invest in these professions that are so critical. We were only making up for nine years of absolute neglect in this area from a National Government previously. As the Opposition’s spokesperson told us, that our Budget exemplified Labour, I think what we heard from that member did nothing more than exemplify what a National Government would deliver and what a National Budget would deliver.

What we have heard from National and its coalition partner, ACT, of what would be gone: fair pay agreements, gone, cut; the things that will deliver wage increases for working New Zealanders, gone under a National/ACT Government; cutting free prescriptions, gone under a National/ACT Government. Instead, we’ll see the return of those boxes filled of unpicked-up prescriptions, which sit there doing nothing rather than treating the New Zealanders they should be.

We also know that a National/ACT Government: cut KiwiSaver contributions. We know that a National/ACT Government will raise the age of superannuation eligibility. We know that a National/ACT Government will cut benefit levels. We know that a National/ACT Government will cut the winter energy payment. We know that a National/ACT Government—despite many of its members picking it up themselves—will cut the clean car discount. We know that a National/ACT Government will neglect to do anything on climate change and try and roll New Zealand back into some kind of 1970s sitcom. They want to restart oil and gas exploration offshore. The rest of the world is facing up to the fact that we have to take decisive climate action and that our future and our prosperity lies in a renewable future. But not this Government that is intent on taking us back to some kind of dystopian past.

While we hear the crocodile tears from the Opposition that there is a plan that will benefit working people and put extra money in their pockets through their unfunded tax cuts, the reality of that for working people is two bucks a week while the highest earners receive over $1,000 a year. So spare us the crocodile tears.

The reality for working people is they will have their fair pay agreements cut. They will be back to paying for their prescriptions. KiwiSaver contributions will be cut. The age of eligibility for superannuation will be raised. There will be a cut to benefit levels and that money to help with the power bill over winter in the form of the winter energy payment: gone. Their ability to shift to a more affordable form of transport in the form of electric vehicles through the clean car discount: gone. All of this so the highest-earning New Zealanders can get an extra thousand dollars a year. So the National Government and its ACT mates need to come clean with New Zealand.

There are going to be cuts. They will be deep. Make no mistake about it: if this country was to have the misfortune to have a National/ACT Budget delivered next year, it would exemplify the coalition of cuts. This would cut deep and this would go to the hearts of working and ordinary New Zealanders who deserve better. I am proud to be part of a Government that has delivered a Budget that does strike that careful balance—that does offer support for today but delivers for tomorrow.

Well, it’s a pleasure to be talking on the Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2023/24) Bill.

Gee, that was a dreadful speech. It was shocker from a senior Minister. It was actually full of a whole lot of mistruths—if I can say that—particularly around the issue of the winter energy payment. National is going to maintain the winter energy payment, and I don’t even know where the comment around the KiwiSaver reduction came from—it’s just absolute figments of her imagination.

It looks like a morgue over there. What has happened over there? There’s no energy. I reckon they’re all on their phones looking for jobs: “I wonder what I’m going to do in 55 days’ time.” You couldn’t even support your senior Minister; you’re all sitting there going, “Whoa, woo, oh, ooh.” What is happening? Show a bit of enthusiasm, fight to the last! They’re just giving up—you’re all giving up. It’s just disappointing to see.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Order! The member knows that when he refers to and uses the term “you”, he’s referring to me. Please do not bring me into the debate.

ANDREW BAYLY: I know, I know, Madam Speaker; you would never give up, I know that. So maybe it’s worthwhile just—[Interruption] Oh, look, they’ve come alive now! Well, why don’t we talk about a few figures? Because I know these people are so well versed with what’s happening in the economy. Gee, I listened to Mr Grant Robertson talking about fiscal responsibility. He loves using that term. I just wish he’d use the word “discipline”, because he has never shown any discipline. Of course, these two bills which we’re meant to be talking about are about providing a little bit of extra cash—so do you have to spend a little bit more? Well, unfortunately, he’s only got 55 days—hopefully.

So we have witnessed six Budgets where Mr Robertson has overspent what he said he would do; technically referred to as operating allowances. But we have seen year after year of him blowing these Budgets and this is partly what this is about. We have seen during the last six years a record increase in tax. What I find staggering is if you are a business with a type of growth in the amount of new tax revenue that this Government has sucked out of New Zealanders, out of their back pockets, out of businesses, it has gone from—back in 2014—about $75 billion, this year it’ll hit about $123 billion, $124 billion. That’s a $50 billion increase this year—a $50 billion increase in revenue.

Gee, if you had a business that suddenly went, in a matter of six years, to suddenly having $50 billion extra of revenue—or basically more than half of the value that you were getting six years ago—you’d think that’s a pretty good business. This is what the Government’s had, because we’ve had such rapid inflation, partly driven by the Government. Tax revenue has gone up because people have gone up into higher tax brackets and they’re paying more out of their back pocket. It’s called fiscal drag, the technical term.

But even with this $50 billion of extra money, this Minister of Finance keeps spending even more. That’s been the most appalling thing about what’s happened over the last six years; we have racked up these incredible losses. And do you realise, Madam Speaker—and I’m talking to you—that from the period 2020 to 2023, four years, this country has racked up $45 billion of losses. You imagine going to your bank, even if it’s $45,000 or $45 million, whatever, going to your bank and saying, “Every year for the past four years, we continue to rack up losses”.

What’s worse, the Budget even anticipates another $10 billion of losses over the next two years. That’s $55 billion. But what is even worse, as we’ve heard from Westpac, who are normally pretty conservative, they think, because we have got a declining economy, even worse than it was projected in the Budget, that this country will rack up another $15 billion of losses on top of that. That’s a staggering amount of money. That is $65 billion of losses because even though our tax revenue has gone from $75 billion to $125 billion, we cannot—and this Government has not been able to contain itself. It is unbelievable how wasteful, how inefficient, how inept this Government has been. That Minister who was just speaking before, Megan Woods, she is an associate finance Minister; she should be appalled at their record because whatever way you cut it, it has been disastrous management of the economy. And most of it has been driven by wasteful spending.

Most of it has occurred during COVID. We would have done some of the $60 billion of additional spending that was spent by that Government during COVID. We would have done the wage support, we would have done some more support, but there’s probably a missing $25 billion that has just gone into the ether. As Nicola Willis said before, “What have we got to show for it?” What have we got to show for that $25 billion that’s just gone into the ether? Have we had a new harbour crossing in Auckland? Have we seen new roads around the country? Have we seen lots more projects with hospital builds? Well, we’ve seen the Dunedin Hospital build; even though we signed off on the business case six years ago, it’s only just really starting—six years later. That’s how inept these people are and that is why we’re so worried about it.

We have just got rid of truckloads of money out the back door with nothing to show for it. I’ll tell you another thing: if you think about the increase in the Public Service, and I know the members opposite love talking about this, but we have seen a 14,000 increase in public servants, and many of them are well meaning, don’t get me wrong. But that 14,000 increase in the Public Service is a cost to the country, to all of us, of $1.4 billion. If you extrapolate that over 10 years—and remember this Government has been in power for six already—another four years of that would be the equivalent of $14 billion. That is the same amount of money that we could do an across Auckland Harbour crossing without even talking about funding. That is the scale of the wasteful spending that has gone on from this Government. Of course, what we’ve seen is this rapid increase in debt because where do you go if you’ve got increasing tax revenue but you spend more and you waste it, what’s the balancing factors there?

So we’ve seen debt go from roughly $6 billion to $73 billion. That is a staggering increase. Our gross debt stands at about $135 billion. If you were a household and you kept going to your bank and saying, “I want to keep spending it like this”, they would have made you bankrupt—they would have put you into bankruptcy.

Of course, the other really worrying thing—and we started asking the Reserve Bank about it; I started asking questions about this 18 months ago—is the current account deficit. Of the top 40 economies in the world, New Zealand has currently got the highest current account deficit. I’ll tell you what: going from the bottom back upwards—this is in the first quarter of 2023, to be factual—we are at the bottom; we’re behind Latvia, Belgium, Hungary, and Colombia. Oh God, Colombia is a wonderful financially managed country, I’m sure. Nice country, but I’m not sure. Mexico: they’ve got a lower current account deficit than us; Brazil: Brazil’s had a few economic issues, I believe, but, hey, don’t worry, they’ve got a lower current account deficit; India; and what about Greece? Greece has got a better current account deficit, or lower than we have.

That just shows how shameful this management of this economy in New Zealand has been by this Government, and people know it. People in the street know it. They don’t always know the details and they don’t all know about the tax revenue and all that sort of stuff. But they understand it and it’s burning a hole in their pocket because what this Government has been doing is taking that money out of their back pocket and just spending on this wasteful stuff, and, eventually, people work that out and this Government finally is being found out. It is horrendous what’s going on and the worst thing is it’s working New Zealanders now—mum and dads who are working for a wage, have got children—seeing their interest rates on their mortgages just dramatically increasing, their food costs skyrocketing, fuel prices gone up. They are the hard-done-by in New Zealand.

We will come in and have to fix this mess. But it is such a bad state that this Government has driven New Zealand back to. It is appalling when you actually look at it and analyse it and think about it for more than five seconds. It has been pitiful. This is a Government bankrupt of ideas. This is a Government that needs to leave. This is a Government that needs to be voted out of office.

Oh, it’s really difficult to sit and listen to the previous speech from the National Party member Andrew Bayly because of the hoodwinking that National tries to do when it comes to financial statistics. We’ve heard about the so-called high debt ratios. Well, New Zealand sits in the lower half of debt compared to our GDP of all the OECD. But, actually, the other statistic which the previous speaker didn’t mention is how our relative incomes fare, and, actually, our relative incomes and income inequality are really low. That’s what this Government has been seeking to address throughout these two terms.

Budget 2023 shows a Government that targets the support to those who need it. We take inflation seriously. We understand the urgency of climate change. But perhaps most importantly, we have a costed Budget, one where the numbers add up and where we are really clear and transparent about those numbers. I cannot say the same for the other side.

Of course, the cost of living has been hard for everybody. That is why this Government took the fees off the prescription charges so that there are free doctors’ prescriptions for those who really need them. That is a double win. It means that people get their medicines on time, they can afford their medicines, but it also takes pressure off the health system. We don’t see the same levels of chronic illness that we did prior to that happening.

There is cheaper childcare. There are the 20 free hours’ early childhood education (ECE) for twoyear-olds, which makes a significant difference to families that are working—for women, in particular, who want to get to back to the workplace where previously the economics haven’t stacked up for them to do so. They now can make that choice to go back to work for their families, knowing that their families will be up to $138 a week better off.

There is free or half-price public transport for children and young people. That’s made a really big difference in my electorate for those who need to get out, not only to be able to contribute to society but also for their own mental health, who previously have been homebound. We have very high numbers of public transport users in the electorate of Taieri and they have told me the benefit that that has given them.

There’s also the winter energy payment. Now, let me make no mistake: in cold climates like Dunedin, this is an absolute game-changer for our families and, particularly, for our seniors. Let’s be under no illusion: if this winter energy payment goes, that is going to mean that seniors are going to have to choose between putting food on their table or paying for heating in their house. I know that prior to the winter energy payment coming in, we had people who came down to our Labour rooms in Macandrew Road for social events simply to be able to get into a heated room. That’s what they told me.

We also have better pay for health and ECE workers and funding for 500 more nurses. When the previous speaker complained about what he described as the bloating of the Public Service, he was talking about nurses, he was talking about teachers. They are vital; we know that. That’s why this Government has increased their pay and that is why we are continuing to bolster that workforce. If he wants to see cuts in those areas, that means that we will have fewer teachers in our schools; fewer nurses in our in our hospital system. It just doesn’t make sense.

He also talked about the Dunedin Hospital. Well, it is Labour who builds hospitals. The National Party talked a good game for years about building a hospital in Dunedin with absolutely no intention of building it. The good people of Dunedin and of Otago know that. That’s why they are not buying the lines from the National Party.

What would happen under a National-ACT Government for all these particular initiatives is the free doctors prescriptions would go. Now, we know how difficult that will be for people. But what really concerns me about National’s announcements to do with cancer funding is not only the lack of competition and the high price that New Zealand would pay for those medicines—because there would be no competition; they’ve been promised by politicians—but it is a very, very dangerous precedent to have politicians meddling in something as fundamental as healthcare. That is really dangerous. How do we know that those politicians don’t have vested interests? How do we know that they’re not acting on behalf of particular family members? That is why we have clear rules around Pharmac. That’s why politicians have stayed out of it, and that’s the way it should be.

When National start saying they’re going to meddle with that, what else are they going to meddle with in terms of our really important democratic principles? What about 20 free hours’ ECE for twoyear-olds? That will be gone. Changes to Working for Families: that will be cut. Half-price transport: cut. The winter energy payment: cut. Now, National said they won’t cut it. Well, good luck to that, because if you’re in Government with ACT—which is what the reality would be if there was a change of Government—they have made it very clear they will cut the winter energy payment. Minimum pay rises: frozen for three years, if not gone, depending on who you believe—National or ACT. And yes, really tricky for my constituents.

They have made it very clear that they would raise the superannuation age. That is the superannuation scheme, the taonga of this country, introduced by the very good former member of my electorate, Sir Michael Cullen. They would tinker with that as well, and they would make it really difficult for our seniors.

What happens about the tax cuts that National want to introduce? It’s not only that they will benefit the rich but they won’t be funded; they haven’t been clear on where their funding has come from. So we’ve heard from previous speakers on this side that there would be cuts to health, cuts to education, cuts to the environment. The reality of the tax cuts being proposed by the other side is that they will actually benefit the rich, and people need to be really clear about that. We know that it’s hard for working families, but when people hear tax cuts, that sounds promising. They need to do the math. They need to understand where those tax cuts will go.

Under an ACT regime, it is actually the lowest paid who would be paying $800 more per year, because the lowest tax threshold would actually increase, and so they would be paying $800 per year. Under National, a person earning $180,000 would pay $7,270 less per year, but a low-income earner, it’s around $2.00 to $2.50 per week. That is the reality. Now, I don’t think the richest New Zealanders need a tax cut and I don’t think that ordinary New Zealanders think so. They’ve been enticed by the rhetoric. They hear the words “tax cut”, but they haven’t done the maths to understand where that sits for them and what that will mean.

Let’s not forget the high net worth individual research data that came out this year that shows some people in our society—the top richest in our society—pay a real tax rate of only around 9 percent. The rest of New Zealand—middle New Zealand—pay around 22 percent. That is the reality. That is the reality that caused Treasury to actually revise its figures upwards around the redistribution of wealth to say that the most wealth is concentrated in the top 26 percent of people, rather than the top 21 percent. That’s what that data shows. So why would we want to give tax cuts to those people?

Now, the other issue is just looking at how things will or won’t be funded. We know that the National Party are not being clear about how they’ll fund, particularly around transport, for example. Simeon Brown has said toll roads. Well, that’s a lot of toll roads to make up for a $9.5 billion shortfall over 10 years. Nicola Willis has said transport would be hypothecated. She stopped saying that, so there’s some disagreement now.

But the leader has talked about allowing the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party—to fund roads in New Zealand, and I find it absolutely staggering, actually, that the media hasn’t picked up on that more, and I say this as a co-chair of IPAC—the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. National either don’t know how else to fund those roads or they’re blatantly ignorant of the geopolitics happening in the world at the moment, including in our own backyard, in the Solomon Islands. Or there could be more sinister motives. Are they in the pocket of the CCP? I don’t know.

But if that’s not the reality, the other thing that they possibly may do is raise GST. Why not? The National Party love GST. They’ve said before that they wouldn’t raise it. They raised it in 2010 under John Key. He tried to say that that was different from the promise that he broke, because it wasn’t around funding deficits, but—

Hon Judith Collins: Point of order. The member who has just resumed her seat has made an allegation in Parliament questioning whether the National Party is in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party. From my recollection, that’s a breach of our Standing Orders.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The member will withdraw and apologise.

INGRID LEARY: I withdraw and apologise. In the final moments of the speech, I just ask New Zealanders to—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member’s time is up.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker, tēnā koutou e te Whare. I want to talk about the opportunity that we have: together we could build an Aotearoa where every person has a warm, dry, secure, affordable home. Where that home gets some or most of its electricity from rooftop solar and rooftop wind, that’s generated for community benefit—not private profit. Where people have the opportunity to get public transport: fast, frequent electric buses, trains, light rail. Where they can walk to the shops. Where the kids can walk and cycle to school and the park and the playground and the sports fields. Where we’re spending so much less time commuting in our cars. Where we have cleaner air and quieter streets—except when people gather there, and people do gather there because it’s not a traffic sewer anymore.

We can build an Aotearoa where native birds and forest are regenerating; where our jobs that people do are actively restoring nature, helping each other, providing the caring support that is needed right across our communities. Where we’re undoing the harms of our history of colonisation. Where Māori can get stolen land back—we’ve set up a framework for that—and use that as an economic base to look after their whānau. And now into the future where education is a human right, where tertiary education—whatever it is, vocational, or at university, or at polytech or some other—is something that anyone can access at any point without having to live in poverty. Where people’s power bills are lower. Where we are combating the climate crisis.

The work that we need to do is great. As a society, we have a lot of work to do to look after our people, to tackle the challenges of climate change, and to restore nature. Yet, we can do all of that but it does mean changing our priorities. In this Budget, I can say the Greens—we’re proud of the accomplishments of our Green Ministers and we have made a positive influence on this Government. There was a number of Green wins that will make a difference to people’s lives, but they’re too little and it’s almost too late.

People need to know, at home, that in the next few weeks they have a choice. They have a choice, and they can ensure that we have a Government that is bold enough to take on the systemic inequality in our tax system—where, right now, New Zealand ranks 136 out of 161 countries in terms of an equitable tax system. We can change that. We can ensure that our Government agencies have the funding that they need to provide the services that people need, like free dental care. How amazing would it be if every New Zealander could access the dental care that they need, when they need it? That’s something we could do together. How amazing would it be if we were making Government grants and loans available to everyone to be able to put rooftop solar on their houses, to insulate their homes, to upgrade their appliances, and switch off fossil fuels for good? That would lower their power bills. It would help reduce fossil fuel use, which we have to end very, very quickly.

There is such a stark choice, and I don’t blame people for being disappointed. Because while there’s some good stuff in this Budget, it is not going fast enough or far enough to tackle the systemic inequality that we still have in our society. People are feeling the pain, but that will continue to happen. Climate change means we are going to see more frequent and intense severe storms. We’ll have times of drought. We need to rapidly reduce our fossil fuel use to zero, and we can work with nature to help both make our communities more resilient, and to ensure that we’re reducing our emissions and restoring biodiversity at the same time—because people know that’s what really matters.

What matters is if you have a home, if you’re able to power it, if you have enough resource to put healthy kai on the table, if you have some form of stability in your life—and you know, whether you rent or you own your house, you should have the right to that stability. Our communities are going to need to cooperate on a scale that we have never before cooperated if we are going to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

I’ve seen reports, and I’m sure many other New Zealanders have seen the scale of the tragic and devastating fires in Canada that are raging right now, the unprecedented storms that hit Aotearoa but that have been hitting other parts of the world with flooding. There is a cost to that and we do not have the luxury of carrying on like we have in the past. Most of the changes—if not all of them—that we need to make to reduce fossil fuel use, to live sustainably in harmony with our environment, with a stable climate, will actually enrich people’s lives. They will actually make lives better. I tell you what they won’t do. It won’t line the pockets of the billionaires who have been making tons of money off of the sale of fossil fuels, which are slowly killing the planet—and now rapidly, potentially, killing the planet.

So yeah, the Green Party makes no apology about standing here and saying the system needs to change and it can change, but we need a more equitable distribution and access to resources for that to work. We need to have a clear plan. We cannot rely on the goodwill of billionaires or a hundred millionaires to come to the rescue and save us when we are being hit by severe weather events. We can’t rely on them to donate through charity to ensure that we have the public services and infrastructure that people need to live good lives.

Only the Green Party has consistently been standing in this House for over 25 years saying, “Climate change is real, wake up, we need to do something about it.” Only the Green Party has been standing here saying, “We can have an economic system that actually looks after people and protects our planet.” That’s the whole point of it. But we are different than the parties on the right, and so while people right now might be concerned that the Labour Government has not been as competent as it could be, I have to agree. OK. Tunnelled light rail in Auckland makes zero sense. Two new tunnels for cars under the Auckland Harbour make zero sense. The enormous amount of money being promised on massively carbon-intensive infrastructure projects that will provide little to no benefit to people’s ability to move around the city is absolutely astounding. The National Party and the ACT Party will take us backwards much further and faster.

So people at home need to know if they are dissatisfied with the status quo, with the cost of living, with the fact that we’re having to deal with increased storm events, with the fact that the health system is not yet where it should be, with the fact that housing is still too unaffordable, that rents are still going up: you have a choice. People at home, people of New Zealand: you have a choice to vote for the Green Party. We have a clear, consistent message. We have delivered in Government. We have been a positive influence. We have brought forward the home insulation programme that both the National Party and the Labour Party claim a success—that was our co-founder, Jeanette Fitzsimons, who did the work to bring that to New Zealand, and it has had enormous benefits and it has carried on. It has created jobs, it has helped communities, but we can do so much more.

The public transport projects that the Green Party has consistently advocated for have been proven to be a success when people in the National Party were saying they’d be a white elephant, like the Northern Busway and the electrification of Auckland’s rail network. We campaigned hard for the City Rail Link and it hasn’t been delivered as fast as we would have liked; National Government at the time delayed on it.

At the time National was last in Government, the carbon price was $2 a tonne and there was absolutely no Government direction to invest in things that would address climate change or that would really help nature. We had a Predator Free 2050 goal with absolutely zero funding to achieve it. Now last term we saw Jobs for Nature make a huge difference to our natural areas, creating jobs that will restore nature. We can continue to do this, but to do this we have to change the system. And to change the system the Greens need to be at the heart of a coalition Government, with many more MP’s and many more Ministers.

I see the opportunity that we have. I know that New Zealanders care about nature. I know that they care about pulling our weight in climate change. I know that they want more investment in public transport, rail, and coastal shipping. There was a poll recently that showed that 72 percent of New Zealanders think the priority for transport investment should be public transport, rail, and coastal shipping. And yet the three other major parties in this Parliament all are promising more roads. Some are promising it financed by overseas interests, at which we will definitely have to pay back at a much higher rate, and the Labour Party’s still not going far enough in seizing the opportunity and the desire from the public for better public transport. Only the Green Party can help deliver this vision and we can do it with your vote.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill, and it is with great pleasure that I do so. I have spoken before in this House about how in the good old days when I taught economics, we would have parties on Budget day. Yes, there are people in this country who are excited about this process, and I think it’s because they understand this is a democratic way that we decide, as a society, how best to invest in our nation.

But I’m wondering if, actually, it would be better to have our little party on this day, because what we’ve had an opportunity to do since Budget day is go out into our communities and listen to people when they say, “Oh, it’s wonderful that you’ve continued to invest in this great project.”, or “It’s great that you’ve decided to back us in this way.”—whether it’s been with public housing, whether it’s been in health, whether it’s been in education or infrastructure, we have made sure that we are investing in our society, and I think it kind of feels like today is a much more appropriate day, and I’ll be giving that advice to my former colleagues who are excited about economics in their classrooms.

So this Budget has been pretty unique, and I can understand why the Minister of Finance was so proud of it. That ability to balance the significant challenges being faced every day by New Zealanders around the cost of living, but at the same time, moving to a more sustainable way of approaching a budget—having that more sustainable approach while we have still been able to push back with COVID investment and sustain and build our public services that everyone holds so dear, and also to respond to those significant weather events in January and February. How do we manage to do this? How do we manage to pat our heads and rub our tummies at the same time? I think I’d like to reflect on a few parts; but I’d like to start with the really big, really global context and pull it right back to a particular example in education.

So when we talk about our Wellbeing Budget—and this is not the first one, but it is world-leading. The fact that our Budget is built on OECD and best practice internationally; and it is world leading. We have a Living Standards Framework that allows us to be inter-generational in our thinking and our investment. This isn’t about just what others would call “just spending money”. When we keep hearing challenges from the other side, it’s all about making cuts to spending, when what every line in this Budget is about is investing.

When you look at our Living Standards Framework and you look at the dashboard and it talks about the indicators of the wealth of Aotearoa New Zealand, you’d think, from the other side, that would simply be the financial and physical capital that our nation possess, but that’s only one aspect of wealth. We’ve heard so many speakers speak since Budget day about our natural environment—the wealth that that provides us—and this Budget invests in that. Our social cohesion, our human capability—these are aspects of wealth that our Treasury values and makes sure is considered when we put our Budget together. So that approach—that ability to be thinking inter-generationally, to be progressive, to be ambitious for our nation, for our economy, our people, our whenua—is why this Budget looks very different from anything that could possibly have been suggested from the other side of the House.

So I’m just going to narrow it down a little bit, and I am going to talk about wealth with regards to human capability. When we think about education, we’ve heard about the thousands of classrooms that have already been built and the commitment in this Budget to building 300 more. The four new schools, the 175 small rural schools that are getting retrofitted. The significant investment in the place within which our students learn and our teachers teach, we’ve got to make sure that they are warm, they are dry, they are fit for purpose. We invest so much in our students, and they deserve to have good places to learn so we’re investing in them.

We’re investing in our tertiary system. We know that not just the Apprenticeship Boost, which is going to be enabling tens of thousands more workers to become more highly skilled—that’s 57,000 to date; another 30,000. This is about enabling a just transition. This is about making sure that we invest in our human capability and capacity to make sure that we are where we want to be in a generation’s time. We’ve had the largest increase in investment in our university system in 20 years, because we know it isn’t just the significant commitment we’ve made to the reform of vocational education through Apprenticeship Boost and supporting employers who are taking on those magnificent people who have so much potential but in our universities as well.

At the other end, we’ve heard a lot in this House about the 20 hours’ additional early childhood education. We know that by having these incredible early childhood educators, these experts, who really are at the most critical part of human development, being able to support families and support children as they start off on their lives—it’s really exciting. And talking about having to think intergenerationally, I think that’s such a fine example.

The continuation of school lunches and, of course, making sure that not only do they have full tummies but actually they can get to school. The continuation of under-13s having free public transport. For our young people, under 25, every penny counts to be able to have half-price public transport. That isn’t just about making sure that life’s a little bit more affordable for our young people but that’s about having a modal shift and making sure that you get into the habit of using that train or that bus—that’s an investment, not just in our environment but in growing a great society.

At this point, I want to talk about—because I could talk about a huge number of wonderful things that are happening in education, but I just want to come on to one more, in particular; narrow it down a little bit more. I want to talk about alternative education. It is our most vulnerable students, the ones who are at risk or are already disengaged from mainstream education that we’ve seen those students and we’re investing in them, because we know that they have such potential and they deserve our backing.

I just want to reflect for a moment about what an alternative budget might look like from the other side of the House. While we choose to invest in our schools with buildings, with investing in our teachers, with supporting the schools through investing in those who are trying to bring their students back to class who’ve been absent, we see on the other side of the House that they intend to—when they see the challenges that our public education system is facing, they say, “Let’s just abandon them.” On the other side, they want to abandon our public education system. They want to say, “Good luck. We’ll cash you up and you can become a charter school.” That’s what they want to do.

I want to be very clear in this House today what charter schools are and where they came from. We know they are a direct result in the United States when in 1954, as a result of Brown v Board, they outlawed segregation in public schools in the United States. So there were parts of that community who didn’t like integration, so they decided to set up schools where there was more choice. That choice isn’t for our most vulnerable students and their families; that is a choice those who sit outside of the school. What charter schools do is they give more choice for those who are inside the school gate to exclude students and say, “You know what, we’re just going to look after the ones we want to look after and good luck to the rest of you.” That is not an investment approach. That is not something that I can see Treasury supporting when we are looking at building the wealth of human capability, and that is one thing I’m really proud of in this Budget. So I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call in opposition to the Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill. This is the bill that Parliament passes in order for Parliament to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. We’ve had people say it’s a great tradition and there should be parties. To some extent, that’s true. It is a great thing that we have no taxation without representation. It is a good thing that the Government—the Prime Minister and his Ministers and their Government departments—cannot spend money without it being debated transparently in this House and examined by select committees so that people know at least where their taxes are going. That’s a wonderful process and a tradition of parliamentary democracy we should hold dear.

One of the problems, though, is that when we see what this Government is doing with our money, we almost wish that we didn’t know. You actually think ignorance could nearly be bliss, because we have a Government that, in round terms, has increased Government expenditure from $87 billion to $137 billion in just five years. It’s increased the amount that it spends every year by 70 percent. That money, I know, has partly been required because of inflation—that much is true—and it’s also spread amongst more people. It’s surprising how fast the New Zealand population rises—we’re not actually the team of 5 million; we’re over 5.2 million now. So, to some extent, the extra spending is needed because there are more people, and this Government’s management of the economy has led to so much inflation.

On the other hand, once you strip away the growth in the population and the amount of inflation people have seen with the cost rising in everything they buy, well, then you find the amount of money that’s spent per person after inflation has risen 29 percent. The number of people employed in the core Public Service has gone up from 47,000 up to 62,000—almost exactly 29 percent as well. The question might be: what have we got, at the end of the day? What are we getting for all of this extra taxpayer money being spent by the Government through this process?

You see, Mr Speaker, that’s where things get a bit tough. I’ve challenged, in this House, over this year, many times, Grant Robertson, the Minister of Finance; and Chris Hipkins, the Prime Minister, to explain how they are guessing better outcomes—better outcomes—not spending more money, but, actually: what is better, at the end of the day, for all of this extra money? A $50 billion, 70 percent increase in spending that means we’re spending 29 percent more money per person after inflation, after population growth—29 percent more money on each person. What are they getting that they weren’t getting five years ago for 29 percent extra?

It’s worse than that, because, while taxes have risen, a lot of that extra spending over the last five years has been paid for by borrowing. You see, this Government, in six Budgets, has increased debt by $121 billion. It’s hard to put that in any kind of perspective. What is $121 billion? Well, if you say there’s 5 million of us, then it’s $24,000 of borrowing per person over six Budgets. That’s $4,000 a year of Government borrowing for every person in this Chamber—in fact, every person in this country. For a family of four, the Government’s been borrowing 16 grand a year on their behalf—but they’ll have to pay in taxes one day—in order to try and get the same results.

And where are those results? Where is it that this Government is now doing better for its people, for the money that’s gone in? Well, it’s not in education. In broad terms, over the last 10 years, we’ve gone from about 70 percent of kids regularly attending, to about 60 percent—a disaster. We have gone from around 5 percent who are chronically absent, to around 8 percent. There are fewer kids going to school, even though the Government are spending 38 percent more on education. What do the kids get when they go there? Well, they’re learning less; they’re tumbling down the international league tables in reading, in maths, and in science. Kiwi kids know less and can do less than their older brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts who are 20 years older. In fact, they’ve got about half a year less learning than kids of the same age 20 years ago. This is a disaster.

What about transport? Do we have more roads with fewer potholes that get us where we would like to go faster and safer? Actually, the road toll has flatlined, the speed limits have come down anyway, and the potholes are damaging people’s cars up and down this country nearly every day. This is, again, a disaster.

What about law and order? Are we getting better value for money or safer streets? Is it safer to run a dairy? Is it safer to run a jewellery store? Is it safe to run anything in this country? No. Victimisation, according to the Ministry of Justice’s own surveys, has got worse.

But, then, there’s healthcare. What about healthcare? Do we have more doctors and nurses? Are people getting more drugs, are they finding it easier to get into their GP, and are the waiting lists getting shorter? No, they’re not.

So, in every area, this Government is spending more money—even after inflation; even after population growth—and they’re getting worse results. That takes a special kind of incompetence.

Why has this happened, and what will the next Government, in just—what is it now?—52 days, do about it? Well, first of all, we need to get back to giving the chief executives of Government departments clear objectives, and then say, “If you do well, you get paid more.” You see, Mr Speaker, in every private business on the NZX, the chief executive gets paid more if the company performs. In New Zealand’s Government, we have people who are responsible for multibillion dollar organisations—the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Education—and they get no reward for doing better, and no penalty if their agency lets New Zealanders down. They’re not even trying to measure what they’re trying to achieve. No wonder we’re spending more money and getting worse results.

So one of the things the next Government has to do is follow the Australians’ reporting on Government services’ objectives and start giving the chief executives of the departments clear writing instructions on what we need to achieve. If they do well, they do well, and if they don’t do well, they might lose their job or some of their salary—that’s how the real world works, and it’s how Government departments need to work.

For example, the Ministry of Social Development should be measured on how many people get off the dole and into work, and how long they stay in work. We’re not even trying to do that, right now. We’re just throwing money at every problem, and still the results get worse.

Just this weekend, the ACT Party released a policy to show how we can make sure that New Zealand is better off and better served by its Government departments by actually telling them what we want and demanding they achieve it, and rewarding them when they do. Then, we start cutting Government waste. We cut the Government departments that can’t produce any good outcomes. We cut the enormous bureaucracy that’s grown by 15,000 people—from 47,000 to 62,000—and achieves nothing. ACT’s alternative budget shows how we could reduce expenditure by over $8 billion a year and nobody would notice. People say, “Oh, that’ll be the end of the world.” Just remember: this Government has increased expenditure by $50 billion a year. We want to take it back $8 billion. You’re still $42 billion up in five years. The difference is we want to get some more results.

What can you do if you reduce expenditure by $8 billion a year? Well, you can give tax cuts. You can actually start paying back debt faster. ACT’s alternative budget will not only demand better results from Government departments, it will also cut people’s taxes. So someone on the average wage—$78,000 a year full-time—would get to keep $2,200 more of their own money each and every year to fight the crippling price rises that New Zealanders up and down this country are facing.

That is the kind of fiscal management that this country needs so that people feel their efforts in life make a difference—that, if they work hard, save, and invest, life will actually get better, rather than having their money and their effort poured into the gaping maw of this Labour Government; this Labour Government that wants to give kids mandatory lessons in financial literacy. Well, here’s another idea: I think the children of New Zealand could give financial literacy lessons to Labour, and we’d all be much better off. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

It’s my privilege to be taking a call on the imprest supply bill and the appropriation bill. I was recently at a retirement village in the Waimakariri electorate, having a yarn about what happens in the House, and one of the things that came up was, “Dan, maybe it would be good to discuss the mechanics of what you’re discussing when you’re in the House?” So for those listening in today, the imprest supply Acts are a regular part of the annual Budget cycle, and the Crown cannot spend public money, or incur expenses or capital expenditure without an appropriation or other authority of Parliament. So spending that occurs outside of these categories is considered unauthorised expenditure, and the third reading of the appropriation bill is the final stage in Parliament for passing Budget 2023 by appropriating the various appropriations set out in the schedules of the bill.

I first want to highlight how this Budget continues to embody the spirit of our independent, nuclear-free New Zealand, which is something that’s not discussed very often. Recently, we discussed in the House the time that we sent one of our Ministers to protest against nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll. As he sailed vessels across the Pacific—very important in the Pacific with what’s happening right now; it’s always important to look outwards while everyone else is looking in—it led to the Treaty of Rarotonga, where we worked with our Pacific neighbours to establish the world’s first international nuclear-free zone, known as the Treaty of Rarotonga. This Budget continues that tradition of Pacific cooperation.

This Government is investing into building up that Pacific resilience with a $14.1 million investment in Pacific community wellbeing. It aims to strengthen the capability and leadership of our Pacific workforce. There are also capital injections of over $16 million planned for 2023-24 as part of our blue Pacific investment, and we’re also investing $1 million into the Pacific Cooperation Foundation for the promotion of mutual understanding between New Zealanders and other countries and the people of the Pacific. These are just some of the initiatives in this Budget that build and strengthen our special relationship with our Pacific neighbours.

I also want to touch on what this Budget does to ease the cost of living. I’m proud that through this Budget we’re tackling the cost of living by putting money back into people’s pockets with cheaper childcare, free prescriptions, and free or half-price public transport for young New Zealanders, and we’re easing the pressure on struggling families by providing targeted support that won’t drive up inflation.

Now, it’s a no-frills Budget, but it suits the times, with a particular focus on support for families under the pump. There are things like 20 hours’ free early childhood education for two-year-olds, the $5 prescription fee being scrapped, also free public transport for our under-13s—very important—and it being half-price for under-25s, and then we can never forget the extra 100,000 more Warmer Kiwi Homes.

When I’m out and about in the electorate—and I’ve been doing a lot of constituency clinics over the last few weeks and doorknocking, out in Pegasus, which is just north of Woodend—people are concerned about what the scrapping of fair pay agreements might mean if an ACT-National coalition came into Government. They’re also worried about what the freezing of the minimum wage would mean to them and their families and they’re worried about the investment hole that’s in the strategic infrastructure plan of what National is proposing—you know, that foreign investment and what that might mean to everyday Kiwis—because they certainly don’t want to be tenants in their own country. With the Labour Government, when we invest in infrastructure, the people of New Zealand will 100 percent own it, and that’s very important.

The other thing I just want to touch on is what they feel is at risk. There are a lot of working people in the Waimakariri electorate. There are a lot of tradies and people in physical jobs, and they’re worried about the increase in the retirement age. They’ll get to that stage where they’re not in the position to work an extra two years because their bodies are wrecked, and with a Labour Government, we are committed to keeping the retirement age at 65, which is very important.

Now, we’re also strengthening the economy by investing in the basics for growth with skills that will better position our workforce for infrastructure—science, technology, and the economy—to address the shortages in our workforce. The economy is through the worst, with inflation having peaked and returning to the target range next year. We’ve got good growth, tourism is back, and more workers are plugging our skills shortages—we’re seeing that firsthand in the Waimakariri electorate, where, again, the Waimakariri economy continues to grow strongly, up by 4.3 percent over the year to June 2023—and then GDP is up 1.7 percent per annum in the June 2023 quarter.

Waimakariri’s housing market remains relatively strong relative to both Christchurch and the rest of the country. Tourism activity in Waimakariri has benefited from the return of international visitors to New Zealand over the past year, and with tourists’ electronic card spending in Waimakariri up by 14 percent over the year to June 2023, there’s a good story to tell in North Canterbury. Guest nights at commercial accommodation in Waimakariri have also grown by 38 percent to the year June 2023, which is very promising.

Also, I just want to talk about jobseeker support. Recipients in the Waimakariri District in the year to June 2023—that figure has decreased by 7.6 percent compared to a year earlier.

Non-residential building consents to the value of over $58 million were issued in the Waimakariri District during the year to June 2023. So this is an increase of around 90 percent over the year to June 2023 compared to the year earlier, and this has placed us in a great position to build for tomorrow in North Canterbury.

We’re also providing a massive boost to our nation’s infrastructure across the country, which has been tested during the recent flooding and cyclone. We saw roads and bridges as well as telecommunications and power wiped out too easily, and we can’t let that happen again. We’re building back more resilience so that we can be better prepared for more extreme weather events in the future, and some of those examples include 300 new classrooms to be built across New Zealand. We’ve got 100 more resilient roads and 3,000 additional public homes.

So things are tough right now, and we totally understand that, but the numbers are moving in the right direction and we’re easing the costs for families through targeted investments that will avoid stoking inflation. I’m proud of what this Government is doing for working battlers and young strivers, in particular. We’re creating opportunities through our prudent management of the economy and building a New Zealand where there are greater opportunities and access to homeownership as we build back better. We’re getting inflation under control and back in the target range next year. We’ve got half-price public transport, and then also free apprenticeships and innovation investments to prepare our workforce for the future.

In the electric vehicle (EV) space, we’ve got 23 EV multi-charging hubs around New Zealand. Again, in the Waimakariri electorate, they’re springing up in Woodend and out at Rangiora, which is great to see, and pretty much almost every town around New Zealand is getting additional EV chargers.

Then we’re also seeing major investments in things like science and skills, which is great, and we’re growing our tech and gaming workforce, which is, in my view, a form of investment. Last week, my colleagues and I in the Pacific caucus visited PikPok, which is just in town here. They are world leaders in the gaming sector, and it was great to chat to them about the 20 percent rebate for game development and how that sector is benefiting. PikPok is a home-grown business here in Wellington and they employ some of our best and brightest people in New Zealand.

The gaming sector shows some great promise, and so that development scene—we’ve actually saved it from going offshore to other nations. So it is very, very important that we grow, raise, train, and sustain that workforce for the future.

Getting out and about in Waimakariri, people know that they have a clear choice. They have a clear choice about who to vote for this election. The movement for Labour out there is fantastic, and I’m really looking forward to hitting this election on 1 September. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is the final debate on this year’s Budget. Frankly, we’re on the second to last week of Parliament and this is the last will and testament of this Government, and what a grim set of accounts it is.

We’ve got 6 percent inflation. Remember, about two years ago the Minister of Finance and the Reserve Bank Governor said, “Oh, inflation will be transitory. It’ll come; it’ll go. It’s going to come down fast.” Two years later, we’ve still got 6 percent inflation. We’re in recession, and the Government has managed to increase debt at the same time from $5 billion when they took over to $91 billion in five years. They’ve increased Government spending by 80 percent, and I defy a single person in this country to be able to stand up and say, “We’ve got an 80 percent better outcome in education or health.”, or any area of Government policy. So this Budget is the final Budget in what has been six calamitous years for the New Zealand economy and everything else that hangs off it.

Now, we’ve heard, for the last few days and the last few weeks—it seems to be the line from the Labour Government’s spin machine that they’re supposed to be empathetic, so they keep on saying, “Yes, times are tough. Yes, it’s very tough times for New Zealanders. It’s been a difficult three years.” I heard the Prime Minister say, people are grumpy—it’s been a difficult time; very hard times. Well, they don’t seem to appreciate that the reason for the hard times, primarily, is their own mismanagement of the economy and of this Government. They should take some responsibility for it and, frankly, hold their head in shame.

So what did they inherit? Six years ago, they inherited a strong, positive, upbeat economy in a strong, positive, upbeat country, where people looked and saw a great future for themselves and their family, were managed to absolutely reverse the flow across the Tasman so that more people were coming to New Zealand from Australia than the other way around, and people felt like they could get ahead. Unfortunately—and everybody sees this right here, right now—too many New Zealanders are concluding, the 35,000 of them that left to go to Australia this year, that they don’t actually have great opportunities in this country because the economy is not strong, because the cost of living is too high and inflation is not under control under this Government.

They’ve seen the $175 extra a week they are paying on average rents, driven largely by the misconceived and ill-considered housing policies of this Government and their war on landlords, which has forced costs on to renters. They see the 9.6 percent increase in the cost of vegetables—the cauliflower, the squash, the pumpkins—and the only thing that the Government can come up with is a hare-brained scheme to exclude fresh fruit and vegetables from GST, which has gone down like a lead balloon because nobody can see the logic for it. They can’t understand why it wouldn’t apply to meat or nappies or any other thing, and all it would do would be to mess up a simple system. They’ve seen the $700 increase in fortnightly mortgage costs under this Government, primarily because they haven’t been able to control inflation properly.

So that’s why National has come forward with a strong plan to get on top of the cost of living. We’re going to get the Reserve Bank focused on its knitting, which is fighting inflation, not doing all the other things that the Governor is keen to do, and the law requires them around employment. Secondly, we’ll get Government spending under control—that 80 percent increase in spending with very little to show for it is one of the reasons why we’ve had this burst of inflation in this country. Then we’ve got to deal with a Government that keeps on adding costs to businesses, particularly small businesses, and then wonders why things are more expensive.

We’ve heard about the fair pay agreements, the misnamed “fair pay agreements”—what they really are: mandatory union deals to make our workplaces less flexible and less adaptable at a time when they need to be both those things. We’re going to repeal that; we’ll get rid of it, because we need to have flexibility in our employment relationships so that people can actually sort things out for themselves and work out what works for them.

Then we’ve got to reduce taxes so that people aren’t paying ever more taxes because the Government is using that old trick—that old trick that goes back hundreds of years: if you have lots of inflation and people creep up the income tax brackets, they pay more tax, which is why—

Anna Lorck: Then you’re going to up GST; that’s what you’re gonna do, isn’t it?

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: That member’s got an opportunity for a valedictory soon. But we’ve got, on average, $22,000 per household more in tax that has been taken from this Government. Can you believe that? New Zealanders, on average, are paying $22,000 a year more in tax under this Government—$22,000. You could actually get a decent car for $22,000 every year, for the extra money that this Government is spending on tax.

And what are we actually getting for it? What are you getting for it? Are we getting better education? Oh, no; the kids don’t even go to school. We don’t get better education. Are we getting better healthcare? Well, no, you can wait for ever for anything. You’re not going to be getting inoculated from the various diseases because that’s not working. You’re going to have to wait ages for your hip replacements, Mr Speaker—I’m sure you’re not needing one yet. For all these things, we’re not seeing the improvement that we should be from the money that’s being spent.

Then, of course, that’s only just the start of it. I mean, heaven forbid, if Grant Robertson got another chance to have another go at it, he’d be introducing his insurance tax; the jobs tax, which would be adding another 800 bucks or so a year on to annual bills; they’d be coming back to their wealth tax. If the Greens had their say, they’d be coming back to the wealth tax. So when it comes to the economy, this is the end of the Budget and it’s a woeful Budget and it’s the end of six years of economic mismanagement.

Then we come to the other things. What do we come to? Well, what about law and order? What progress has been made on that? Now, if anybody is tempted to vote for the Greens, let me suggest this one to you, because it is their stated policy—and I’m glad we’ve got Ricardo Menéndez March here. It is the stated policy of the Greens that if there’s a warrant out for your arrest and you’re on the run, you should still get your benefit, because it’s a nasty thing that the Government currently does that if you’re on the run with a warrant out for your arrest, we cut your benefit. But, oh no, the Greens think you should have some money when you’re on the run and there’s a warrant out for your arrest; therefore, you should still have your benefit. Well, I think that sums up everything you need to know about the Greens and law and order and welfare. I think it also sums up how it all would work in a Labour-Greens Government if they had their time.

So we’ve actually got to restore some law and order in this country and actually have real consequences for crime. We go round the doorsteps and what do we hear from people? They’re worried about what’s going on in their communities. They see the increase in violent crime—40 percent increase in violent crime—and they are perplexed and confused and can’t understand why the only priority of the Government that’s been clearly articulated in the justice sector is to reduce the prison population by 30 percent, irrespective of what’s going on in the community. That makes no sense to anybody and it is part of the reason why we’re having this breakdown on law and order that we’re seeing.

It’s part of the reason why, frankly, Countdown is having to spend $45 million on fancy new trolleys that stop people from running out of their supermarkets without paying for the food, which is a metaphor. It is a metaphor for everything that’s wrong. I’ll have you know that I’m a regular at Glen Innes Pak ’N Save. It’s a good supermarket and they shouldn’t have to have electric trolleys that clam up because there is a breakdown in law and order in our supermarkets. So it’s a metaphor for how things have got out of control. Yet, we’ve got a Government whose only target in the whole justice sector is to make sure that we have fewer people in prison, irrespective of what’s going on in our community. We think that’s wrong, it’s misguided, and we’re going to change it.

We’re also going to get a little bit of clearer guidance around the sentencing principles so that we restrict the ability of judges to massively reduce sentences. So we’ve got to fix the economy. We’ve got to restore law and order, the third and fourth areas around health and education, and everybody is concerned about the decline in standards from education. We’ve got a budget here. Like I say, the Government has increased spending by 80 percent—80 percent. It has gone up to $137 billion a year, $61 billion more than what they started with, and yet, in education, fewer kids are going to school and they’re not learning the basics. So we’ve got to get back to the basics.

When it comes to health, it’s about priorities, basically. We can’t do everything. This Government thinks it’s better that families that can afford to spend $5 to get their prescriptions shouldn’t have to pay that money, and yet they don’t have the resources to invest in 13 cancer drugs that will make a real difference to a thousand people a year. We think it’s far better to use scarce healthcare resources to help those people who have got real serious cancers rather than just putting another $5 into the hands of people who can perfectly afford to pay for their prescriptions. Now, that, to me, sums up muddled priorities. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call in relation to the Estimates and the imprest supply bill. I brought along a copy of my wellbeing Budget 2023. I do carry this around with me as I’m travelling, because there is so much in here for New Zealanders—there is so much in here for New Zealanders. But a Budget is more than a collection of bound papers; it’s been said several times through the Estimates debate: a Budget is a moral document. It is more than a set of papers; it is an inherently ethical undertaking we go through when we’re deciding what to spend funds on.

This is Labour’s fifth Wellbeing Budget, and I think there is some poetry that the phrase “Wellbeing Budget” now rolls off our tongues, like the two terms are inherently connected. But they aren’t—they’re not—for every party around this House. They are a choice that this Government has made to put people’s wellbeing first. We have done that consistently for the last five years. We’ve put people first in terms of making the most of opportunities that are available to them and responding to their wellbeing needs and responding in a crisis.

I must say I was actually kind of tickled to hear David Seymour speak about a special kind of incompetence, but perhaps I will be kind, rather than using those words about him, and say that what we have in his case is perhaps a perplexing kind of amnesia. Mr Goldsmith appears to be demonstrating the same kind of amnesia. Both of them asked what we’ve seen in terms of the results of our Government spending over the last five years. There has been something we’ve gone through called the COVID experience. “What have we seen?”—what have we seen? The lowest morbidity rates in the OECD; the lowest hospitalisation rates in the OECD. Lives, health, and wellbeing may not matter to that side of the House, but it does on this side of the House.

We put people first, and Budget 2023 is no exception. In north-west Auckland, our communities, our businesses, our whānau are still feeling the effects of the Auckland anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. I have walked through the homes of people in Massey who have been affected. I’ve spoken to the red-stickered residents of Muriwai. There are devastating impacts that continue in those communities, which is why Budget 2023 builds on the $889 million already provided to provide an immediate response to those events, with supporting the reinstatement of our roads, our rail networks, repairing and rebuilding homes and damaged schools as well. We invested in providing direct support, in terms of temporary accommodation, to those who were suffering most, but also we recognised that there were wellbeing needs and we provided counselling support, including to some of the children who had been affected.

Again, I went out to Muriwai and a family spoke to me about the huge numbers of children who went to the local school who were affected, where Visionwest went in and provided immediate support. But, for us, it’s not just about responding to the immediate; it’s also about keeping a weather eye on the future, which is why we also look to protect communities from future climate impacts, including a $100 million fund to help councils invest in future flood resilience. Support for today, building for tomorrow.

We are a Government that is about putting people first, and supporting families is absolutely key to that. At one stage in my life, my husband and I had three children under 5½ years old, and almost every conversation I had with others who were parenting kids of that age would be about what the tipping point was: when can you afford to go back to work, go back into your workplace? The 20 hours of free early childhood education for two-year-olds is going to be a game-changer for so many families, who can make that choice when they want to, which for many would be earlier, and for those who would have chosen the option anyway, it puts extra money in their pockets. I think of the families who attend the Seeds Early Learning Centre just up the road from my electorate office. They will be saving up to $133.20 per week. That is huge. That is this Government addressing the cost of living for families.

We are about putting people first. We are about bread and butter issues. The $5 co-payment issue—we removed that. While it might seem small to members opposite, I’ve spoken to pharmacists, including one on the corner of Moire Road in Massey, who spoke to me about the fact that people who lived locally and had never—never—picked up their prescriptions before were coming to pick up their prescriptions. This is a game-changer for people in terms of the cost of living, but it’s also smart policy that’s squarely focused on multiple benefits. The fact that these are people who can pick up their prescriptions means that they won’t be turning up a month or two months later at Waitakere Hospital or at North Shore Hospital.

I have a wonderful youth advisory group in Upper Harbour who talk to me about the issues that matter most to them. I spoke to them about what matters most in Budget 2023, and they spoke about the free fares for young people. They spoke about the half-price fares for under-25s. There is a huge cohort of young people in Upper Harbour who travel across the city to get to school, to get to university. This is another example of a policy that will not only benefit them, in terms of addressing the cost of living, but also has a multiplier effect in terms of the reduction of carbon emissions as young people start to embed taking public transport in their lives.

This is not a Budget that’s just about sound policy, though. I’m also proud of the methodology of this Budget. This is a Budget that sees women. For the first time, Budget 2023 includes a gender budgeting snapshot. Gender budgeting is a powerful tool for understanding how and to what extent people will be affected differently by initiatives, depending on their gender. It applies a gender lens in 15 agencies. That’s triple the number from last year’s pilot that have been using this methodology. It covers 27 initiatives. Which initiatives? Well, one is funding to permanently reinstate the Training Incentive Allowance, which will support sole parents and disabled people and their carers to enter higher education and training. Now, since 2021, the initiative has supported approximately 5,000 clients, of whom 90 percent have been women. There are several other initiatives that, because of this budgeting methodology, will influence what women have access to, including the digital tech industry transformation plan package, which aims to increase the number of women participating in the tech sector from 27 percent to 50 percent by 2030. This is a game-changer.

I’ve started to use the word “game-changer” far more frequently in the last six months, and the reason is because this is what people are telling me across the country. In Upper Harbour, I go into schools, and principals talk about what a game-changer it is that kids have access to free lunches in schools and free period products. I talk to people on the doors who talk about the winter energy payment being a game-changer in terms of their lives. These might seem small to that side of the House; they are game-changers for everyday New Zealanders. Under our Labour Government, you will continue to see these investments—an increase in the minimum wage, access to medicines, funding supports for our minority communities, including through our essential ministries.

Budgets are moral documents; I wholeheartedly believe this to be true. I’m incredibly proud to be part of a Government who, at every corner, in the face of crisis and in identifying opportunities for New Zealanders, puts people first and makes sure we all thrive together.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to the appropriation and imprest supply bills. This Budget is a continuation of this Labour Government blowing out even their own spending limits. It’s really important that we are under no illusion about how bad the situation is with our economy. We have $73 billion of debt—the most in the history of our wonderful little country—but when you team that also with high inflation; high interest rates; a recession; a current account balance worse than 40 other countries, then you see just how difficult our economic situation is.

Whenever I’m out in my community, people express to me their absolute disgust and despair at how the Government could possibly keep spending at the rate that it is. They compare how much they have had to haul back their farm, their business, their household spending in the face of a cost of living crisis and inflated prices.

I see farmers who are trying to face the reduced milk solids payout by going through their expenditure in their budgets, line by line, looking at where they can reduce or cut out completely expenditure. I see businesses going through their budgets trying to cut out unproductive expenditure, and you see households going through and cutting expenditure that is going to hurt but they know they have to do it—cutting out things like kids being able to play sport or undertake cultural activities—because they have to prioritise their expenditure.

But they are doing that and they see a Government that is doing none of those things to try and trim expenditure. They see a Government that is spending 80 percent more than it was back in 2017 when they came into Government. They see a Government that is spending $1 billion more every week—week after week after week—than was being spent back in 2017. They see a Government that has had record tax takes, but that money has been literally sprayed around through undisciplined spending, which does nothing to make New Zealand more productive; to get out of this incredible debt that we are in. They see a Government that has, through its financial incompetence and lack of discipline, saddled taxpayers with years and years of debt repayment. They see a Government who has treated our valuable agricultural sector with disdain and disrespect, despite them being the ones keeping our economy afloat.

There’s been much talk recently of financial literacy and basic economics being taught in schools. But, by golly, what an own goal that set Labour up for. Because the ones that need this the most are Labour MPs who need to understand that if they keep spending, the economy gets worse. If you hammer the productive sectors that bring in export dollars, you impact the amount of money that is available to be spent on schools and hospitals and police and other essential public services. Because so many in this Government don’t seem to have that basic economic connection. But I guess it’s less obvious that you just keep borrowing and borrowing, like this Government has, but you can’t keep doing that because eventually it comes to a very sticky end—and that sticky end is where we are at, right at this moment.

So I look at the education expenditure in this Budget and see the damage that has been caused in the early childhood sector: the absolute avalanche of home-based providers that have closed this year; the stress and uncertainty that centre-based providers are under. Then we take a look at the tertiary education sector, where universities are being hit by the perfect storm of declining domestic student numbers, international student numbers still not back to pre-COVID levels—unlike our Aussie neighbours—and the impact of inflation on their operational costs.

For too long, this Government tried to convince the New Zealand public that these were issues that were worldwide. But the universities know that we have lagged behind Australia, Canada, and other competitive countries in getting the borders open and getting international students back. So, now, the universities’ strained finances are impacting on staff and the range of programmes that can be offered to local New Zealand students.

Then we look at the mess of our vocational education sector: polytechnics and industry training organisations centralised into Te Pūkenga. And my goodness, if any management tutor or lecturer ever wanted to see an example of how not to restructure, Te Pūkenga is going to give them the information for years to come. How did Chris Hipkins get this through Cabinet in 2018 without full costings?

In October last year, Te Pūkenga put a business case through saying, “Oh gosh, look what’s happened. We need $1 billion dollars more over the next 10 years to make Te Pūkenga work.” The Minister said, “Oh, that’s too much. Go away.” Fifteen times they reworked that business case, and they finally came back with, “Oh, we need $423 million over five years.” Those who have done even primary school maths will understand that’s about half what they were asking for over 10 years.

Quite rightly, Treasury said they shouldn’t be given anything. So what was put into this Budget? A $220 million loan—oh, that’s on top of the $200 million that’s already been spent—to solve a $40 million problem. So, now, Te Pūkenga is faced with a $220 million loan to somehow try and get into shape a centralised entity to be able to get some efficiencies of economies of scale. It just can’t be done. But in the commercial world, would any bank have lent $200 million to undertake a centralisation and then find out halfway through it that they needed another $1 billion dollars to make it happen? If anything shows the incompetence of this Government, that certainly does.

This Labour Government wonders why the public has fallen out of love with them. Well, I can tell you that any business owner, any farmer, any household budget holder understands that they have had to go through and do what this Government has not done in their Budget: trim their costs. This Government is incapable of doing that. They are addicted to spending, they have been incompetent in pulling this Budget together, and that is why the public will not stand for it any longer. They will not see our country being taken any further down this debt track than this Government has already done. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Just for those aligning their speeches, this is speech number 13. Anae Neru Leavasa.

Fa‘afetai lava lau afioga le Fofoga Fetalai. Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to take a call as the MP for Takānini on the Imprest Supply (Second for 2023/24) Bill and the Appropriation (2023/24 Estimates) Bill.

This Budget 2023 is about delivering for all New Zealanders. It’s about delivering for communities like Takānini and communities across Aotearoa. When we look at the issues that are at hand for our Kiwis, number one: we want to support them through the cost of living crisis. It is about delivering the services that New Zealanders rely on and also looking at recovery and resilience for those that were hit hard from Cyclone Gabrielle, the Auckland floods, but also in the future, of any environmental factors happening again. It’s also about being fiscally sustainable as well.

When I look at the cost of living support that this Government has already had, let’s just lay down the context of what we’re facing: the high inflation is seen globally but also here in Aotearoa. It is putting pressure on our Kiwi households everywhere. This Government has already delivered significant support through the cost of living payments, the fuel prices that were low during that time period when we supported also the public transport half price, and the increases to Working for Families, the superannuation, and many more.

When I look at the policy such as extending the 20 hours of early childhood education (ECE) to our two-year-olds, this is going to benefit many of our communities; our whānau. Recently I visited the BestStart Kauri Flats in Takānini, which is one of our ECEs, and met up with the centre manager Aman and the staff. We were celebrating Matariki last month and to meet our whānau coming through that live in Takānini, and seeing them there, seeing our parents celebrating Matariki, but also to discuss what matters to them—this policy would definitely help our younger folk and our kids and whānau. This will help support parents who want to choose to go back to work. This will help give them that time as well. So, again, I want to acknowledge our BestStart Kauri Flats ECE in Takānini. But under the National-ACT Government, if they were to come in place, gone—“gone-burger”! That is what is at risk, and this is one of those policies that we still need, to help support our whānau.

One of the biggest ones that I love is the scrapping of the prescription co-payments. As a medical doctor that’s worked over a decade and a half in South Auckland—Māngere, Manurewa, Takānini and everywhere in between—having that $5 co-payment is huge. Yes, the other side will say “Well, it’s only $5.”, but when we see our communities in South Auckland, many of the clinics that I’ve worked in, we’ve seen whānau who have not one or two medicines—they’re on many more, and it all adds up. This is just one of those avenues where we can take that priority and reduce that barrier for many of our whānau.

One of the things that I’ve had when many of my patients come through, once we prescribe something, and there’ll be a list, they will actually say, “Doctor, name for me the top two medicines on that list, because I can’t afford the other three or four.” It is so hard to see when we’re trying to treat our people with chronic issues and trying to improve their health and wellbeing, and then having to choose which are the best two. We don’t prescribe things just for fun. We’re trying to help our whānau get over their medical conditions. There’s times when me and my colleagues have had to go and get medicine out of the medical clinic cabinet because we know our whānau cannot go next door to get a prescription.

There’s those travel barriers as well. We’ve had many of our whānau say, “Can you send it to this pharmacy that gives free prescriptions?” Because, back in that time, only a few were getting them free. That removes that barrier. They can go next door, don’t have the cost of fuel, don’t have time wasted to get their medicines. This would definitely help in that regard.

I acknowledge that when we’re looking at policies—and I’m all about health and wellbeing; follow the whare tapa whā model—we look at the fonofale model. I just want to acknowledge that we do have the pioneer of the fonofale model up in the gallery, afioga ia Fuimaono Dr Karl PulotuEndemann. Thank you so much for the work that you do in our community. Thank you.

I acknowledge that this policy as well will help communities such as Wainuiōmata, the Mana community, and I just want to acknowledge again the former Minister Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban. Thank you for the work also that you do. I don’t want to say “you” all the time, Mr Speaker, because I know that’s saying it to you. But there are many communities that would benefit from this one policy. I acknowledge we have the Māngere-Ōtāhuhu local board chair here: lau afioga a Tauanu‘u Nanai Bakulich. The work that he does in seeing this policy working in that community will make huge inroads that a place like Māngere 275 represents.

When I look at free public transport for our kids, Takānini has a young population and I know many communities have a similar demographic in age; just over a third of the population are under 25. So when we look at just public transport itself, the free public transport for our under-13s and half price for those under 25, over a third in my community in Takānini will benefit from this policy. So, again, it is looking at different levers to improve the health and wellbeing of our people, lower the cost, and therefore supporting our communities as well.

When we look at the KiwiSaver contributions for paid parental leave, I know many whānau and I know my wife went on paid parental leave recently for our baby as well and she’s now one year old. I look across, again, to our young whānau across the House—across Aotearoa—and this policy is helping support their whānaus as well in giving those contributions while mum or dad is on paid parental leave.

When we look at cheaper energy bills for our whānaus—and I love that we’re expanding the Warmer Kiwi Homes programmes because again, warm, dry homes, supporting our whānau from the home itself is whānau and our housing is one of the foundations of improving the health and wellbeing of our people. Too many times I’ve seen come through the clinic people who have respiratory conditions, people have skin conditions, the kids are suffering, when we have chronic conditions that we’re trying to manage, but then we obviously get those acute things happen at home because it’s too cold, it’s too damp, and therefore affecting their health. Warming their homes and providing this policy would definitely support our whānau that go through similar things.

When things happen, when it comes to environmental issues happening across Aotearoa, we want to make sure that we’re supporting them. So when we saw the cyclone happen, Cyclone Gabrielle, and also the Auckland floods, I want to acknowledge that the first South Auckland civil defence centre was set up in my rohe of Takānini, Randwick Park, Manu Tukutuku, and I want to acknowledge the MPs that came across, to come and support.

Hon Marama Davidson: They’re awesome.

Dr ANAE NERU LEAVASA: Yes, very awesome and, again, I want to acknowledge my colleague across the House as well, who was there—in pretty much her home town—as well. That sort of support and seeing what happened in Cyclone Gabrielle on the East Coast, we want to make sure that there is investment into those areas to deal with the here and now, but also help to improve the resilience for what the future may hold. Also, looking at protecting communities, we look at the $100 million fund to help councils invest in the future flood resilience as well.

The Pacific caucus had the opportunity to meet the PikPok gaming operators in Wellington. This is where that policy of providing a 20 percent rebate for video game developers was warmly welcomed by them. I just want to highlight that Tyrone McAuley, the owner of PikPok, is a Samoan, So big ups to our Samoans and Pacific who are making headway in different sectors. But Tyrone said we need more Māori Pacific in the sector of games as well and game developing, and so forth. It’s a growing industry. It’s providing high-paying jobs. There’s many things you can do in the industry itself, so, again, I want to acknowledge Tyrone and the crew that we met—Lance, the chief financial officer—and their contribution to the sector being the pioneers in leading the way in Aotearoa new Zealand and I’m just happy that it’s a Pacific Islander who’s one of the co-owners.

When we look at additional public housing, the 3,000 additional public housing places, when we look at the different policies such as supporting Kiwis into work and the health polices, there’s so much that I could say but it’s all at risk if the National-ACT Government comes into place and does a moonwalk and takes us backwards in this place. Fa'afetai, Mr Speaker.

This is a five-minute split call—Toni Severin.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Much appreciated for your guidance on that. It’s a pleasure to stand on the appropriations and this imprest bill to oppose it. Now, just before in the House, we were informed that this is the fifth Wellbeing Budget this Labour Government has presented. My question is: how many people out in New Zealand listening to this will feel that it has been a wellbeing Budget? We’re in a cost of living crisis and people are feeling it in their pockets every day they go to fill up their vehicles at the service station, and when they go and buy their groceries. Most people are really struggling today and this Government is saying that this Budget is bread and butter and wellbeing. I don’t think so.

Most people that I speak to in the community are struggling too hard to just do these things. Now, the biggest thing they say is, “OK, we have electric cars. Most of us don’t mind too much about electric cars or hybrid cars, but we still need roads to drive them.” So who’s going to pay for these roads? That comes back at the moment to those that have got petrol or diesel. Is that fair? No. So there you go. Is that wellbeing and feeling that people are being listened to?

What results has this Government shown for this large amount of spending that they have put here? Do we have more kids going to school every day? No. Do we have a better education system? No. Do we have a better health system? No. I’m talking to family in Invercargill and they are talking about possibly losing their hospital because they can’t get staff there. I understand that not everybody wants to move down to the deep South, but there are lovely, friendly people down there, and we’d love people there.

Now, the other thing is around health. Everybody talks about doctors and nurses—what about the laboratory scientists that helped us through COVID, and how well have they been treated through this Budget? No, they are going on strike again. Now, that’s very unusual for that to happen. So where are they being looked after in this Budget around health? All we see is more and more spending with very little improvements on anything.

Now ACT put out a fully costed alternative budget, and we found that there was up to spending—was it 61 percent over the last five years? Now if I could do that in small business, gee, I would be very happy. But no, when you’re in small business, or a ma and pa, you tighten your belts when you need to. You look at where you can save some money. But this Government doesn’t seem to be wanting to do that.

There is so many more bureaucrats—and I call them bureaucrats because they’re working in Wellington. To me, the public servants are your doctors, your nurses, your teachers, the people on the ground that we need to look after more. But we are not looking. We have got far too many people here in Wellington that also are being hired against the private sector. In the private sector, the small businesses can’t keep up with the wages that this public sector is offering them as well.

So this is it. What are we getting for this Budget really, the average person? That is very little. We have not got any improvements in any of our key education, health—even corrections: crime is up under this Government. You wanted to reduce crime but it hasn’t; you put less prisoners out. Now this is just going to inflate more and more because the more crime we get, the more people are going to be struggling, especially those small businesses that have to pay for this. This Government hasn’t given too much to most people.

Now, we also said that if you earn $70,000 in this alternative budget, we say we can give you a tax cut without affecting the front-line services. Now, this Government over here, Labour, will scaremonger everybody, but we can afford to do it; you’ve just got to watch where you are spending it because you’re just throwing money around to people that don’t. We oppose this.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. If there is time, I would like to stand as the Green Party MP on these bills and support them, but we would not stop here. The Greens know that there are further levers that we can pull to make sure that we step up to the scale of the climate and inequality challenges that are facing all of us—every single one of us—here in Aotearoa.

A lot of the debate today in this House on these bills has been focused on the cost of living. We have been clear that it is not actually just a cost of living crisis; this is an inequality crisis. When we talk about who pays, there are people who are not going to the supermarket and who are having to use a calculator to make sure they stay within their budgets. There are people who are not having to worry about paying the mortgage or the rent and the power bill and the kai bill. There are people who are firmly secure and stable and have got more than they need to live a good life. Our economic and tax system has to change if we have any chance of raising the revenue that we absolutely need now, but especially now into the future.

The Greens support the $5 prescription fee being waived. I was in the Manurewa Southmall Pharmacy just last week hearing directly from chemists themselves, making it really clear that they’re having more pick-up because of the removal of the $5 barrier, which is a lot for far too many people. That’s a lot. They are actually having more of the prescriptions picked up because of that, so we celebrate that.

I know that it is important that in this bill it includes the work to start reducing energy bills for families. Right now, families are having to choose to not turn their heaters on because it is too expensive to cover that plus the rent, plus the kai, and goodness knows whatever else comes up. We support all of these moves. There is also the transport being less expensive.

We support all of what is in here as good, important moves and changes, but we can’t tinker around the edges. The Greens would go far further to making sure everyone has access to a minimum income no matter what, whether they are out of work or studying, for example. We can actually increase the tax on wealth for those with more than enough and redistribute that back to, for example, 3.7 million New Zealanders who would benefit from the sorts of proposals that the Greens have been putting up right from the very start, where everyone earning under $125,000 would actually benefit, and where those who can most afford it—without diminishing much of the quality of their lives at all—can actually help the Government raise the revenue that we need.

We have to massively scale up our public, affordable, and community and Māori and Pacific housing. We can do that because it is a political choice not to. We have to end poverty, not just see less of it. Our Greens proposals would actually end whānau and child poverty. If people are concerned about crime and community safety, ending poverty and making sure people have warm, affordable, healthy homes would go most of the way to seeing intergenerational change.

It is a political decision to not put those plans into place where we’ve got what we need. We have what we need to actually make those changes; we should just do them. I’m proud that the Green Party is continuing to build support, because we are putting up the actual, achievable policies that could actually ensure that we are meeting the climate challenges, meeting the challenge of growing inequality.

Over the past few years, we have seen, around the world, the wealthiest—top not even 1 percent; even less than that—building ridiculous, immoral wealth. No need for the build-up of that immoral wealth for such a few—literally a few, in the context of the world. Here in New Zealand, it is exactly the same. There is no need for that. We can redistribute that so that we can help Aotearoa. Kia ora.

It’s a pleasure to take a call in support of what is a bill about the appropriation of money. Now, money is a very real thing and there is only a limited amount of it, and there are always hard choices to be made. What I have around me is a team of people that I am incredibly proud of because I know that they come from every walk of life in this country, and they are truly grounded—they are grounded people. I’d just like to mention my Pacific Island colleagues because I am particularly impressed with the crowd today and its regard—it’s here to respect one of our wonderful Ministers, and he comes from the Pacific Island community. Our caucus is rejuvenating the Pacific Island community in its rank. It has some wonderful Ministers, and they also come from a variety of backgrounds.

If I want to talk about medicine and the state of our health service, I can go to Dr Anae and we can have a talk about that. He is working and has seen a lot of things happen. He has seen the terrible reality of a postcode lottery. I worked in employment law for 25 years and I remember going in to negotiate on behalf of a group of workers in Middlemore Hospital. I was told at that point that Middlemore Hospital was not given the same funding for people who were coming in to that hospital. They were given less money in Middlemore than they were given in other hospitals in Auckland. Now, that’s absolutely ridiculous. What we are doing now is we’re replacing a system where it had been that the poorest people in our country were being given less money than everyone else when they had the highest needs, because there is a direct relationship between poverty and health outcomes.

There are also dots being joined, and you can see it in this Budget, because the dots that are being joined are the ones between health and housing and poverty. Now, the reality is we had far too much chronic illness in this country and it was a result of the fact that our houses were not warm and dry; our rentals were not secure. People were living in places they never should have been with children; that was going on. And you know what? They were then going off to a hospital which had mould in its walls—mould in its walls. We were not paying our nurses enough. That was what we inherited, and we inherited it at a precarious time. We inherited it when we had a situation where we were going to face a pandemic. We were just building up those services when that pandemic struck.

While I have heard a lot of whinging from the Opposition, I remind them that they were not clear about closing the borders because, again, they weren’t grounded. They weren’t from the class of people who would be most affected, and they did not want to close those borders, then they did want to close those borders, then they did not want to close those borders, then they did want to close those borders. They were driven by a lack of groundedness. This Government knew exactly what its priorities were: the priorities were people—they were people’s health. As a result, I am proud of what was accomplished, but there is work to be done.

There is a lot of work to be done to make sure that our health service is robust, that it serves our people. There is work to be done in terms of making sure that our houses are still warm and dry and there are enough of them to put people in. There is work to be done by a Government that’s not afraid to lead in this area; that’s not afraid to make hard choices. I respect my colleagues in the Green Party, but sometimes I struggle with the fact they continually have the advantage of being able to promise things that are not priced. The hard choices are being made in the ranks of the Labour Party. We have to make choices, and those priorities have to actually respect our people and the value of our people. They have to get wages up in this country; they have to keep innovation going.

So in this Budget, you will see a multitude of wonderful things. There are a multitude of different things—and you’ve heard my colleagues list some of those things—and there’s an abundance of them. That’s because there are so many things that need to be done in this country. It is absolutely critical—critical—that we get a chance to do that.

Now, I want to contrast that with what I have been hearing, because I want to bust one myth before I sit down, and this is this ridiculous situation over tax cuts. Because let’s just talk about those tax cuts as an alternative for a minute. They are being dangled in front of New Zealanders, but they are not being explained. Let’s remember that this would be an alliance—if there was a change in Government—between the ACT Party and the National Party. Now, let’s just take a quick look at the alternative that they are promising us. They are promising us an alternative whereby, even by their stats, people on $180,000 get over $1,000 worth of extra benefit in their tax break that year. Do you know how much somebody on a minimum wage gets? They get something like, I think, $2 a week—$2 a week. That’s what we’re dealing with. We don’t value people if we’re giving the top bracket that doesn’t need it that kind of money and we’re giving people on minimum wage so little.

What would ACT do? ACT would have frozen the minimum wage for three years. I’ve been sitting here for three years and every time that the Labour Party has suggested that we will increase the minimum wage, we have been told “Not now—not now.” Well, I heard that all my life—I saw that all my life. As an employment lawyer, I saw people hold those wages back. I saw what it did to people’s families. I had a case at one point which was actually in Terisa Ngobi’s area, it was in Levin. It was in a meat works where people were actually paying the workers less and less because they were paying them piece rates. So what they would do is they’d just add another job to the piece rate and they ended up being on less than the minimum wage. That was the kind of sleepy approach we had because we did not prioritise people; we did not actually prioritise getting wages up in this country and paying people in a dignified way.

So I’m going to finish by just talking for a second about these fair pay agreements, because it’s a big word and people aren’t used to it and they don’t know. Those fair pay agreements are about basic minimums and never going below them. They’re about making sure that if one employer is paying an amount of money that is fair, they’re not undercut by somebody doing what I just described happened in Levin. That isn’t going to happen because there’ll be a floor—there’ll just be a minimum. Doesn’t mean you can’t pay more; doesn’t mean you can’t do different terms and conditions, but you can’t pay less than your friend down the road who’s trying to do the decent thing and pay New Zealanders a decent wage. That is an incredibly important thing.

Now, I have got a minute and a half and I’d like to just for a minute turn to my friend—this is Emily Henderson, and she is about to give her valedictory. I’d just like to say, first of all, it’s been an utter pleasure working with you. I have been so lucky to have Emily’s counsel at times, but I also wanted to talk about her work, because I started this speech talking about how grounded this team is. Emily made a valuable contribution to this team. She was a family lawyer before she came here. Now, my ex-husband was a family lawyer and I know it’s a really tough gig. It’s actually quite tough living with a family lawyer, Emily. It’s hard because the work’s traumatic because people doing family law see some of the most strained families in our country. I know that she’s contributed a massive amount to the work that we’re doing in this area. We are working on issues like family violence. We are working on victim support. We are working on things like litigation abuse. And we’re able to do that because we have people in our team like Emily who’ve been feeding us real, grounded information.

So if this country wants to look at this Budget, they will find a mine of information and care that has taken place where a limited amount of money can go. And yes, we haven’t got everything we want in this Budget. We’ve got a lot more work to come, and we want to be able to get on and do it, and we want to make the priorities New Zealanders—make sure that they get food on their tables and have warm, healthy environments and are free from violence. That’s the work only a Labour Government can do. Kia ora koutou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Now, I think it’s important that we just take a moment to reflect on what this debate is about. This debate is about the Government’s Budget and their plans to—purportedly—deliver better outcomes for New Zealanders. We heard the last speaker, Helen White, talk about how the priority is people. That sounds great, and, actually, that reflects the last 5½ years under this Government—it sounds good but does not deliver. That, quite frankly, is where Kiwis are being let down time and time again.

“It’s about people”, we hear. There are more people now in emergency accommodation than there were when this Government came to power. There are more people now living in their cars than there were when this Government came to power. There are more people suffering as victims of crime than there were when this Government came to power. There are poorer health outcomes. There are poor educational outcomes. Across the board, people are suffering after six years of failure from this Government. Now, this latest Budget does nothing to relieve that pressure for everyday Kiwis that are going about their jobs, trying to make the best of their situation and trying to make a better future for themselves and their families. They are being let down by a Government that has great intentions but simply cannot deliver meaningful improvements for New Zealanders.

We have a Government spending 80 percent more now than when they came into office—80 percent more. That would be OK if we were seeing an 80 percent increased outcome across health, education, law and order—name your priority area. Yet, across the board, we are not seeing those improved outcomes. That is one of the biggest failures of this Government: they are splashing the cash and not delivering tangible gains. Time and again, what we are seeing is a total confusion between the inputs versus the outputs. The assumption from this Government is that if we spend more—and we’ve seen net debt rise from $5.4 billion to a staggering $73 billion under this Government, an increase of 1,250 percent, but where are the outcomes? We simply are not seeing improvements for Kiwis as a result of this Government’s focus.

Now, I commend them on that side of the House because they have good intentions; without a doubt, they’ve come to this place to try and deliver better outcomes for Kiwis. But after six years of suffering, it is simply not credible that they are delivering improvements for New Zealanders.

Now, when I talk to my constituents in the mighty Waikato, what I hear consistently is that they are frustrated that it costs them more at the supermarket, the kids aren’t learning what they should be at school, their parents can’t get into hospital when they need it, and the local dairy keeps getting robbed. On those basic measures, we have, after six years, seen poorer outcomes now than we had when Labour came into power. Kiwis have had enough. They want change, and we are seeing that time and time again with the conversations we are having around the country and the focus we are seeing shifting in the public polls as well.

The Government have demonstrated they do not have a plan to deliver a credible improvement to the economy. We are suffering continuously, and Kiwis have had enough. Those good intentions that I mentioned are admirable—absolutely we should have good intentions, and I commend them for that, but good intentions are nothing without good outcomes. We simply are not seeing that. Again, I reflect on those key areas: health, education, law and order, and the economy, areas that impact Kiwis in their everyday lives. Kiwis that are trying to make the most of it, whether they be business owners—whether they be farmers, in my building and construction portfolio, for example—across the board, time and time again, we are hearing the frustration from the difficulty of getting things done.

Sorry to interrupt the member, but it’s come time for the valedictory statements.

Debate interrupted.