Imprest Supply (Second for 2024/25) Bill

I move, That the Appropriation (2024/25 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2024/25) Bill be now read a second time.

There are two bills here for the House’s consideration, and I’ve taken the time ahead of this speech to consider how I communicate to the Parliament what these two pieces of legislation separately do. They are very important pieces of legislation because in New Zealand’s public finance system, Estimates bills, imprest supply bills, and Supplementary Estimates bills work together to ensure the Government, when it spends money, does so lawfully and with the authority of Parliament. That is, they ensure that Government can incur expenses and capital expenditure at any time during the year with the authority of Parliament, because it is not the executive that determines whether or not it can spend taxpayers’ money; it is the executive with Parliament’s support that is able to make those judgments.

The Estimates bill is the centre of that network of legislation. Of course, that’s the bill we call the “Budget”, which was announced in May—wasn’t that a great day?—and that is a very important piece of legislation. It is the way that Parliament approves the Government’s Budget and the changes that this year were very sorely needed to appropriations to get New Zealand back on track, to reduce the taxes that New Zealand working people needed to pay, to ensure that we got spending under control, that we took pressure off inflation, and set a path back to surplus, lower debt, and stronger economic growth.

As I say, the Budget, however, was delivered in May, and that is before the beginning of the next financial year, which doesn’t kick off until June. We’re now almost three months into the 2024-25 financial year, but the Budget has not yet passed. So then what happens in the interim in terms of the authority for the Government to spend money? To bridge the gap between the Budget bill passing and the time in the last three months, the House has an imprest supply bill. The House passed the first one on 25 June, and that bill provided financial authority in the interim for the Government to incur expenses and capital expenditure for the first three months of the financial year. That means that we can spend money before the Estimates bill has got to its third reading.

That first imprest supply bill has now done its job, and today the House considers the second imprest bill for 2024-25. This bill seeks interim parliamentary authority for expenditure decisions made or to be made by the Government through to the end of the financial year that are additional to the amounts in the Estimates bill. So what sorts of things are those? It provides for any operating or capital spending decisions which are things like pre-commitments against future Budget allowances and expenditure from the between Budget contingency, but, most importantly, it covers fiscally neutral adjustments from one appropriation through to another and is sufficient to cover any extra expenditure that may occur before the passing of the Budget. Put simply, it is the safety net of the public finance system to ensure that spending occurs lawfully. Today, in addition to that second imprest supply bill, we are dealing with the third reading of the 2024 Budget. Today marks the day that this Government’s first Budget becomes law, so I want to run through some of the highlights of our Budget for the House.

For the first time in 14 years, New Zealanders got to keep more of their own money through this Government’s tax relief. Households with children are directly better off by an average of $78 a fortnight; hard cash in their bank accounts, opposed by every member of the Opposition, who would have said that those households did not deserve that money. That tax relief was fully funded through savings and some revenue-raising measures such as a tax on online casinos, and, contrary to the reckons of some members, it did not add to debt and it did not create inflationary pressures. The best evidence of that, colleagues, is that since the passing of the Budget, not only have we seen inflation decline rapidly and be forecast to be back in band but we’ve also seen the Reserve Bank reduce interest rates a full year earlier than had been forecast, in recognition of the reduced inflationary pressures in our economy. Next time “Chicken Little” over the way says that the sky is falling and things are going to cause inflation, just remember what we said at Budget time, which was that our tax package would not put pressure on inflation. It did not. Inflation has come down, interest rates are coming down faster, and New Zealanders are better off in three ways. First, they have tax relief; second, inflation is lower; and, third, interest rates are lower, too.

Actually, the thing that’s very interesting, I think, about our Budget is that, yes, we were very careful about the way that we funded tax relief. We saw that it was overdue and we saw that working people were having to give away more and more of their hard-earned income in tax, but we also recognised that we needed to keep investing in more effective public services, and I think that a little-known fact is that two-thirds of the new spending in our Budget goes to three key areas: health, education, and law and order. Those are the three areas that our Government was elected to focus on and that we are funding as matters of priority.

There are other targeted areas of investment, including transport, defence, disability services, and others, but in order to sustain those investments we have taken a very responsible course, which is that we have recognised the unsustainable spending trajectory that the last Government left us on and we have chosen to carefully reprioritise money to New Zealanders’ highest priorities. This Budget delivers $23 billion of reprioritisation over the next four years so that we can make the sorely needed investments in more front-line police officers, in more funding for our health system, and in ensuring that our schools can deploy structured literacy.

That savings programme is significant. I had my office do some calculations to see what would have happened if we’d stuck to the spending plans of the last Government, and what that analysis shows is that New Zealand’s Government finances wouldn’t have got back into balance until 2030-31. That is how long the structural deficit would have been maintained. We had no choice but to rein things in, and in this Budget, we have taken very deliberate steps to do that, meaning that we can forecast the books coming back into balance and a surplus in 2027-28.

The reason that that matters, members, is because that is what will allow us to start paying down the significant burden of debt left to us by the last Government—a significant burden of debt that had been driven by an 80 percent increase in annual spending. The question that New Zealanders always ask me is this: where did all the money go? I think that New Zealanders might have some sympathy for increased spending if they’d seen increased results, but what we saw in health was growing waiting lists, we saw growing problems in education and we saw declining rates of achievement, and we saw soaring rates of violent crime.

The point I am making is a simple one: our Budget is not just about saying that we’re spending more money and issuing some press releases with big dollars on them; it’s about being careful and targeted and accountable for where money goes. The money that we spend is matched with targets with fair reporting on quarterly, and we take very seriously our duty to be good custodians of public money.

Before I finish my remarks about this Budget, let me be clear: New Zealand still faces many challenges. We are seeing green shoots in our economy. After a sustained cost of living crisis, inflation is coming down, food price increases are coming down, interest rates are coming down, and that’s reviving confidence in many parts of the economy.

We know it’s still tough for many New Zealanders, and that is why we are so focused on what we can do in this House to grow our economy faster. That is why we are focused on a programme of regulatory reform, on ensuring fast-track consenting, on delivering smarter infrastructure, on reforming our science and innovation systems, on lifting educational standards, and on ensuring more overseas investment and more overseas trade, because, together, those things will mean that there is more growth in our economy, we can have more prosperous families and communities, and future Budgets will make better choices for future generations. I am proud to commend these bills to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Last year, the National Party and their coalition partners went into the election campaign with so many promises for New Zealand. They promised to fix the health system. They promised to fix the infrastructure problems that we’re facing as a country. They promised they were going to fix the economy. They were going to fix the education system. And all we have heard from them since the time they got elected is blame for everything that they haven’t been able to fix in the near-year that they have been in power. Every political party that goes into Government has choices to make. They make sure they are clear of what their priorities are, and the priorities of that Government have disappointed New Zealanders.

Nothing that New Zealanders were promised would be fixed has been fixed. In fact, we are going backwards. I could look at so many areas and, in fact, thinking about this speech, I didn’t even know where I should start. I thought I’d start with what is probably indicative of the priorities of that side of the House versus this side, and that’s even just the first 100 days. In our first 100 days, when we got into Government, we put $5.5 billion into a Families Package that was focused on reducing poverty, that was focused on supporting the lowest to middle income households in New Zealand. That meant a winter energy payment. That meant a Best Start payment. That meant doing something and investing in parental leave. That meant investing in Working For Families.

What did we see in their first 100 days? We saw them taking money off the poorest New Zealanders, reversing a change we had made to index benefits to wage growth instead of to inflation, because that would see it go up faster. What we saw in the first 100 days of that side of the House was them reversing that change. Now, that change was something that the Children’s Commissioner at the time had said would be one of the biggest things that we could do to address child poverty in this country. That side of the House decided to deprioritise addressing child poverty in this country. They decided to take around $500 million, $600 million off the poorest New Zealanders to help them pay for their tax cuts.

Then we see and hear that they were given advice that it would take about $3 billion a year if they were going to seriously address child poverty in this country. They decided, no, they wouldn’t do that. Instead, they would give $2.9 billion to landlords. Now, where do their priorities lay? Clearly in the wrong place. Who needed that money? Was it landlords or was it children living in poverty? It was children living in poverty. And families continue to struggle. I’m not going to listen to the Minister of Finance in this House try and make out that she’s made life better for New Zealanders, because she hasn’t made life better for New Zealanders. They are continuing to struggle. Yes, I acknowledge interest rates have come down a little bit, inflation has come down a little bit. That was already anticipated; had already been forecast whilst we were in Government. It’s not like that side of the House has done anything to actually assist with those things happening. In fact, I wonder whether or not it’s going slower, in some instances.

She talks about the fact that inflation has come down; it hasn’t come down for non-tradables. Everyone’s feeling the pinch with their energy bills. Households are feeling the expense of their energy bills. In fact, we’ve heard in recent weeks and months that, actually, businesses are feeling the bite with their increased energy bills and that is having an impact on exports. The Minister wants to take some responsibility or all responsibility for anything that might be going slightly OK, but she doesn’t want to take responsibility for everything that is going backwards, even though it is, clearly, under her watch.

They have made a mess. They came in with the intention, in so many instances, with so many sectors, just to turn things upside down: repeal all the changes that Labour had made to the health system, repeal the changes to the tertiary education; repeal, repeal, repeal with no plan—no plan to actually make it better for New Zealanders. And then what we end up with is just a huge gap and everyone standing there with uncertainty, wondering what on earth is going on in every sector that you can imagine.

On top of that, there were other changes and repeals that they made that have had a huge impact on New Zealanders: deciding to take free prescriptions off Kiwis, something that even the chemists across the country had said would make a huge difference. Here they are back to that situation that they had before, when Kiwis had to pay for their prescriptions with packages lined up at the back of their shop because no one has gone into those chemists—well, lots of people haven’t gone into those chemists to pick up those prescriptions. So stingy too: you know, they talk about wanting to give landlords a tax break of $2.9 billion, and then you have them diminishing the lunches in schools programme, wanting to take the option of healthy meals away from the poorest kids in New Zealand whilst taking that money and giving it to landlords.

We’re not going to stand here and say that we can support the Budget and the priorities of that Government, because, to be quite frank, they are taking New Zealand backwards in so many regards. I’ve already talked about child poverty, but I want to touch on housing as well. We put a massive investment into public housing. I think it was the most houses that had been built in the public housing space since the 1970s, and we needed it. We needed it so badly and we still need it, and yet we see in that Government’s Budget that $435 million has been cut from the Kāinga Ora house-build programme, over $1 billion from the maintenance fund, as if people in Kāinga Ora or public housing don’t need their houses to be maintained. We’ve seen reduced funding not only for public housing but also for youth transitional housing. They deny or seem to ignore that there is an issue with respect to youth homelessness. We’ve seen $40 million cut from Māori housing developments, and, to be honest, it’s not a surprise given their overall backward agenda for Māori.

That’s the other point I wanted to raise. It has been so disgusting and difficult to watch the divisive agenda from that side of the House when it comes to the Treaty of Waitangi, with regards to the treatment of Māori in general, with regards to respect for te reo Māori. When they stood in the House last week wearing their badges, an acknowledgment of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, I sat here shaking my head thinking, “How can you possibly stand up in this House and act like you are supporters of anything Māori?” I did say a few weeks ago, which seemed to hurt them, that they don’t seem to want Māori to do well in this country at all, and, in fact, would choose to turn different groups of New Zealanders against tangata whenua as a way to achieve whatever their political agenda is. It is a divide and rule agenda, and it is so familiar. It is not unpredictable. It is what they have done before, but it has been done worse through this Budget and under that Government than ever before.

On top of all of the Budget implications, we have things like the Treaty principles bill. We have Ministers on that side of the House unashamedly trying to wipe te reo Māori out of legislation, even out of correspondence that they send to other people. They have made choices and I’m really fearful for what their choices will continue to be. They are taking New Zealanders backwards and New Zealanders know this. There’s a real disappointment out there from the general public. They are not comfortable with the policy agenda, the narrative, or anything that is coming out of the Government’s mouths.

Finally, I want to end on how difficult this Budget must have been to pull together, given the absolute chaos they are experiencing with their coalition. One person says something; another leader comes out in the media opposing what has been said by the other political party. It is an absolute shambles. Luxon has no control. How could he possibly control David Seymour and Winston Peters, particularly when they don’t even like each other? You’ve got three political parties that can’t make a decision on anything, including ferries—but we won’t have enough time to go there. They are stagnating and it’s causing New Zealand to stagnate. It’s causing New Zealand not only to stagnate but causing us to go backwards. Their cuts are going too far and too fast. They are hurting New Zealanders. New Zealanders are feeling it. This is not what they voted for, and we will not be supporting this bill.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I know that this is, effectively, a Budget debate, but I did want to contextualise this within it being Mental Health Awareness Week. And I think that that’s really important in the context of a report that was tabled in this Parliament a few years ago now, called He Ara Oranga, tabled in, I believe, 2019. What that report detailed is reflective of a bunch of the contemporary research internationally. It, effectively, says that all of us have genetics which we’ve inherited from our parents and our grandparents before them, which can potentially predispose us towards more or less manifestation of mental ill health, but it is, effectively, the environment that we are in, the opportunities that we have access to, the socio-economic determinants that turn those things up or down a notch, that can be what are called the aggravating or mitigating factors.

This is particularly relevant as we debate a Budget, and this Government’s intentions with its public policy that flow from it, in the context of what I would say are really critical suicide prevention interventions that we could make as a country. So frequently we talk about it in terms of crisis support, but if we really drill down into it and what “prevention” actually means, then let’s talk about the fact that good, stable incomes are suicide prevention. Let’s talk about the fact that stable, secure, and affordable housing is suicide prevention. Let’s talk about the fact that people’s ability to belong and feel affirmed in their identity and exist within their community is suicide prevention.

Which is why it is utterly galling to be debating, effectively, the contents of this Government’s Budget in the context of this Government having come into power with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon foreshadowing at the end of last year that they were going to have to make some of what he called “hard choices”. We saw those reflected in even just their miniBudget before Christmas, where we saw that they were knowingly deciding to push tens of thousands more children into poverty in order to make a number of the cuts that they did. We saw that flow through into the Budget at the beginning or middle of this year. The hard choice that this Government is talking about are knowingly increasing our emissions and knowingly increasing inequality and child poverty in order to fund their tax cuts, which their own advice says will disproportionately benefit the wealthiest that already exists within this country.

Many before have said—and I’m sure will continue to persist in saying—that Budgets are values documents. What are the values of this Government as we can see reflected in this Budget? My old man raised me to believe not just what people say but to look at what they do. When we look at what this Government does—just for some numbers, given that we are going through this Budget—this Government has set targets for child poverty. They tried to do it quietly—which would mean an additional 24,000 children living in material hardship by 2027-28. They are spending $3 billion per annum—that is over $12 billion over four years on their trickle-down tax cuts. They are spending $216 million on tobacco tax cuts that seemingly nobody except the tobacco industry and New Zealand First asked for. They’re cutting over 6,200 jobs in the Public Service, yet what you hear from their rhetoric in the public domain—cruel and unusual and micromanaging rhetoric—is that the reason that the Wellington City centre is dying is because public servants are allowed to work from home. They’ve also cut $120 million from Oranga Tamariki’s contracted services, which includes 25 percent of Family Start funding, which will mean a loss of around 100 social worker jobs. They’ve also cut 332 front-line Oranga Tamariki contracted services, and we’ve seen that reflected in how one of the Ministers doesn’t seem to be across her brief in correcting answers earlier today.

We’ve also seen that this Government has chosen to double the price of public transport. For some more figures: they have slashed funding for better bus driver conditions by $47 million. They’ve also decided to spend a billion dollars to advance roads of what they call national significance. They have decided to cut $617 million over four years from the Ministry for the Environment; from the Department of Conservation, they’re cutting $45 million over four years; from Jobs for Nature, $55 million; from the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, $17 million; from Māori Development, they’ve cut $154 million in the 2024-25 Budget. And in health, they are also making astronomical, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cuts.

Now, I don’t think that you have to be a rocket scientist to look around at the infrastructure in this country, whether it be transport, whether it be our hospitals, whether it be our schools, whether it be housing, to get a really clear picture that things simply aren’t not working. One of the things that I will agree with this Government and its members on is that these things did not happen overnight, but one thing that I would point out to them is that, by virtue of the likes of the figures that I have just gone through, they are actively making the decision to make these problems worse. It is the case that we have had decades of successive Governments choose to under-invest in our collective infrastructure, which has made all of us more the poorer for it, but different decisions can be made.

This is where I think all of us in this House, regardless of whichever side we sit on, actually have to be honest with ourselves. If we want to do something meaningful about even just that infrastructural deficit, which is estimated to be approximately $100 billion for the last 30 years, and $100 billion looking forward over the next 30, we are going to have to pay for that infrastructure. The question for all of us is: how do we want to go about doing that? Well, we could do that through debt. Obviously, this Government is also taking on more debt, although the Minister of Finance is saying she’s not doing that to pay for her tax cuts. We could decide to fix our tax system, which is demonstrably one of the most unfair in the entire world. Or we could choose to privatise that infrastructure and, effectively, take a user-pays type of approach, which appears to be what this Government is on the trajectory of: selling off our country to the highest bidder.

These conversations and these reflections are happening on the backdrop of the data and evidence from the likes of the IRD High-Wealth Individuals Research Project Report, which was tabled in this Parliament just last year. What that report told us—

James Meager: What’s the co-leader’s salary?

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —is that the top 311 households in this country hold more wealth combined, James Meager, than the bottom 2.5 million New Zealanders. That report also extolled that the reason for that is not an accident but a consequence of a tax system that intentionally is designed to see those at the top pay an effective tax rate less than half of that of the average New Zealander. I find that galling. Yet what we saw as one of the first moves from this Government in their mini-Budget, and alongside their rash of policies that they put through the shredder in their first 100 days, was actually to remove that requirement for IRD to do that reporting on the inequity of our tax system—nothing to see here! Don’t worry about it! It’s not unfair; it’s not unequal—we just won’t report on it!

Therein lies some of the many ironies and contradictions from this Government: the fact that, in their very own coalition agreement, they have a commitment to make policy decisions based on what they call “data and evidence”; meanwhile, they are intentionally cutting the jobs and not filling vacancies that would provide them with the data and evidence to make those decisions in the first place. Then, when they are handed that data and evidence, they choose to entirely ignore it, to neglect it, or to sideline it.

I’ve just heard from the Minister of Finance that her goal with these budgetary decisions is, you know, just to get us back to the good old place of economic growth. That, again, is where I think that we as parliamentarians need to look in the mirror. What is it when we’re talking about this thing called the economy? The economy is simply all of us and the things that we create and the planet that we live on and the rules that we put in place to govern those relationships. What the Greens would say is that, right now, the way that we are choosing to put those rules in place, and those systems of governance, do not reflect an economy that supports people and the planet but in fact the opposite—it actively exploits them. You see that—you see that—when you get out there and you talk to New Zealanders outside of these wood-panelled walls and you hear about the utter exhaustion.

This Government likes to talk a lot about hard-working New Zealanders and the debts that’s owed to them. Well, the debt that is owed genuinely to those hard-working New Zealanders is to meaningfully fulfil the social contract and ensure that we are meaningfully and properly investing in the infrastructure that fundamentally all of us rely on. It doesn’t have to be this way. Different decisions can be made. We can have an economy that supports people and the planet, we can have a fair tax system, and we can fix our infrastructure.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to start off with the voices of some of the people that I’ve heard from up and down New Zealand this winter, and I can tell you that they are doing it tough. You wouldn’t normally hear that from a Government. Usually, people on the Government side tell you it’s all fabulous and there’s nothing to worry about, but I can tell you that people out there are doing it tough.

I think what people are experiencing when they balance their GST late at night for their small business or when they gather around the kitchen table and look at when their mortgage rates have increased or may still increase coming off lower rates from two years ago—people sit there and they say, “Far out. I think things are tougher for us than is widely acknowledged in the public media or in public debate.” That is where we’re starting from: people just trying to get by. I think it’s actually time that we get a bit of realism and acknowledge that, but I also feel able to acknowledge it because I am confident that, while it is difficult, we have a Government that is prepared to confront the truth and actually make changes to solve the problem.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that we’ve had a Government that spent too much money for too few results. When a Government takes money—especially money that’s borrowed overseas—and pumps it into the domestic economy without producing extra goods, you’ve got more money and the same amount of stuff to buy, and that means prices rise, and that’s called inflation. None of this is complicated. Some people make it out to be more complicated than it is—we just heard someone like that, actually—but it is too much money chasing too few goods. That is what this Government has inherited. It’s also inherited the high interest rates that are punishing households, punishing small businesses trying to keep their working capital, and we have to do something about it.

Actually, what we have to do is very simple. We need a Government that’s prepared to tighten its belt, just the way that people and families and firms and farms have been forced to tighten their belt in the last three years, nearly, of a cost of living crisis. You will see in this Budget document a whole lot of measures to reduce what the Government spends and get more value out of it for everyday New Zealanders, so that, once again, Kiwis can fly, economically speaking.

To give you a bit of context of how we got there: this year, the Government will spend $138 billion. Now, if we were to go back to the pre-COVID era—it will be interesting to see if anyone on the other side knows how much money the Government spent in 2017. Does anyone remember that before they got into Government? Anyone on the other side? No? So $76 billion was how much the Government spent in the 2017 year; $80 billion in 2018—arguably, the last Budget of the previous Labour Government. The question is how much do we spend now? It’s $138 billion. That’s $62 billion extra spending. When I hear people on the other side carrying on like this is some sort of massive slash and burn, and “How will we have civilisation? It’s going to affect people’s mental health because there’s just no spending.”, my answer is: $138 billion—$62 billion more than was spent in the 2017 year. Those are the basic facts.

What this Government is doing is making sure that we’re getting value for money, instead of throwing money at every problem, because our country tried that. We borrowed $100 billion overseas. We pumped inflation into the economy. We forced up interest rates, hurting and harming every family in this country, every small business, people that can’t make ends meet. And the Opposition have the temerity to say, “Oh, people are leaving for Australia.” Well, yes, they are. The Opposition might have some recollections of what actions are causing that. It’s the pressure on people that are feeling it tough. That is why, as a Government, we are unapologetically across the board saying to Government departments, “You’ve got to make cuts.” You’ve had years where you’ve had, basically, an 80 percent increase over six or seven years in the amount of money you’ve spent; now we’re asking you to pull back by 6 or 7 percent. It’s nowhere near as dramatic as it’s made out to be, but it’s absolutely necessary.

What do these reductions in expenditure allow us to do? Well, it means we’re going to have fewer public servants. People say, “It’s terrible. The Government’s firing everyone.” Let’s get a reality check. From 2017 to 2023, this country went from having a core Public Service of 47,000 people up to 62,000. It increased by just over a third, the number of people working in the Public Service. Now, we’re reducing that by about 6,000—by just over 10 percent—having gone up a third in the last six years. The population of New Zealand didn’t go up that much. We are doing relatively modest reductions, but those reductions allow us to get back to surplus by 2027, which is what this Budget promises to do, and I hope it’ll end up being earlier. It also allows us to take less of people’s money.

You know, I heard the most amazing thing from Chlöe Swarbrick, who said that we’re spending money on tax cuts. Now, only the Green Party could talk about spending money on tax cuts, because the way the Government gets money is it taxes it off the people. You can’t spend money by not taxing; you need to tax to get the money in the first place. But they seem to be in favour—as they were in Government—of spending money you don’t have. That’s how we got into this mess.

When we talk about tax relief, what we’re really saying is we’re going to take $2.9 billion less out of the pockets of landlords. People say, “Oh, that’s a tax cut for landlords.” Really? Well, it’s funny because when these guys were campaigning on taking GST off fresh fruit and vegetables—

Chlöe Swarbrick: That wasn’t us.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: —it wasn’t a tax cut for—Chlöe Swarbrick says, “That wasn’t us.” It’s all about Chlöe. I was talking about the Labour Party. But, anyway, that wasn’t a tax cut for supermarkets, that wasn’t a tax cut for fresh fruit and vegetable growers; that was a tax cut for consumers. Well, you know what the funny thing is? When we stopped taxing the act of renting a property from one person to another, that’s a tax cut for tenants. You’ve seen it because the Opposition said, “Oh, rents won’t go down.” Rents have flatlined since we made these tax cuts in April. People are actually getting some relief—people who rent under this Government—because we stopped the tax on people renting their home to another New Zealander. We’ve actually brought back that mortgage interest deductibility, and people out there in business know it’s ACT that did it. I’m very proud to stand here as the leader of ACT, as an Associate Minister of Finance.

Then there’s all those people who’ve paid more and more of their hard-earned money every year into the Treasury to get diminishing returns and more inflation, and we’re giving them tax relief. We’re letting people keep more of their own money because, at the end of the day, it’s a bloody tough time for New Zealand firms, for New Zealand farmers, and for New Zealand families.

Finally, we have a Government that is prepared to tighten its belt, but also to do something much more important, and that is to popularise a belief that this country’s prosperity and happiness is based on. It’s the simple belief that what happens in your life is not predetermined by something that happened in 1840 or even 1940; it’s not predetermined by the colour of your skin or the nature of your ancestor or how you were born. I represent an electorate where we have literal Holocaust survivors who are some of the happiest, most prosperous, high-achieving people I know.

We believe that, in this society, you can make a difference in your own life. We believe in high-quality public services, in good education, in good infrastructure, and in good regulations that make it easy for the next generation to build a home, to borrow money, to start a business, to develop a farm, even to do mining, because we believe that this is a society where you can make a difference in your own life. That is a stark difference from what the Opposition believes, because if you listen for long enough, apart from a huge amount of repetition, what you hear from the Greens, Labour, and Te Pāti Māori is that your problems in life are caused by someone else’s success, and “If only you vote for us, we will take their success away and give it to you.” That is a recipe for poverty—not just for people doing it tough now; a recipe for poverty for the whole country.

That’s why I’m proud to stand here for the ACT Party and for this Government that is bringing down a Budget that says that we believe again, yes, that New Zealanders can make a difference in their own lives and it’s our job to create the conditions where they can do it. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Mr Speaker, it’s—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): I take it you’re taking the 10-minute call?

Hon MARK PATTERSON: I am taking a 10-minute call with your duress or acquiescence. Hopefully it’s not too much duress.

It is my pleasure to take a call in this appropriations debate in regard to the New Zealand First lens on this. As the Hon David Seymour just outlined in his previous contribution, we came into Government about this time last year, inheriting a hell of a mess. Government expenses had gone up 80 percent, and there was a total lack of delivery. We had literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent on three waters without a single pipe going into the ground, the same with the light rail, and the same with the walking bridge over Auckland harbour. There was so much waste, and the Budget seems such a long time ago.

This has been a long and winding road, getting to this part of the process, but we have had our sleeves rolled up, and we are at work—no more so than one of our core funding principles that we campaigned on as a party, took into coalition negotiations, and had high alignment with our coalition partners, and that is in law and order. The 500 extra police that my colleague down here—the Hon Casey Costello—will be delivering over the next couple of years is part of the Budget, obviously, but it’s more than that; it’s an absolute signal that we are serious about getting our streets back. Some of the stories that we’ve been hearing and the experiences that are being reflected to us all the time show a sense of lawlessness that had got out of hand under a soft-on-crime Labour Government. And aren’t we going after the gangs? We are just not going to put up with that any more. The police and the citizens of New Zealand will have control of the streets, not the gangs.

We have delivered appropriations that allow us to deliver on another campaign promise, which my colleague here, Tanya Unkovich, spoke so passionately about the other day: the COVID inquiry, the second tranche of the COVID inquiry with the expanded terms of reference. Those forgotten New Zealanders will not have their stories and their experience swept under the carpet. We will have that discussion as a nation.

We’ve ended the bracket creep that had got into the Treaty of Waitangi issues—the veto rights that had crept through in just about every piece of legislation. It is need, not race, and, yes, we must respect the Treaty and the Treaty settlements, but they were getting expanded to the point where it had become extremely divisive in our communities.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): We’ve had about four minutes of context, but it would be good to actually go to the Budget.

Hon MARK PATTERSON: OK, Mr Speaker. And, of course, with my rural communities lens on, I would like to—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): The good speaker’s context back to the Budget.

Hon MARK PATTERSON: Yes, we are back to the Budget because I’m going to look at the Budget within my rural communities portfolio and Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), and we have made some savings in MPI. As part of the overall Budget package, we have had a 9 percent reduction in the Budget for MPI, but we have a laser focus on the things that actually matter—things like biosecurity and food safety, the very things that our businesses, our rural businesses, our farmers, and our industry really want MPI to be focused on, not a lot of the fluffy stuff that had been creeping in.

I can tell you now, well, things are dire, and the Hon David Seymour did touch on it. Things are really, really tough out there at the moment, but I can tell you that the cavalry is coming, and the cavalry is coming from the same place that it always comes from in New Zealand. It’s coming from rural New Zealand—rural and regional New Zealand. The kiwifruit price is up, the milk price is up, the beef price is sitting at record levels, and, even in my own sphere of influence, the wool price is actually the highest-performing commodity, I say modestly, but it is coming off such a low base. But we are going to address that. We will be investing in initiatives around that through this Budget, but that is where we generate our income in New Zealand. That is where we deliver our services from the income, that 80 percent of export income. This will help deliver on our commitment to double exports within the next 10 years.

It’s broader than that, of course, too. There’s a regulatory reform that goes with that. We must see that in context. We have taken a lot of the red tape and compliance away from our farmers to get them back on the farm. They are the best, most efficient farmers and growers in the world, bar none, and we are setting them free. We trust our farmers. We know that they’re doing a good job out there. We know that they’re improving their environmental outcomes, and we are backing them.

Of course, the key thing from a New Zealand First perspective—our big signature policy and win within the coalition Government that is delivered within this Budget—is the $1.2 billion Regional Infrastructure Fund. We believe, in New Zealand First—and we’ve convinced our erstwhile colleagues over here—that the Government does have a role to play in regional development. We can co-invest, de-risk, and enable key regional infrastructure to unleash the potential that is out there in our provinces—the wharves, the airports, the renewable energy projects, the water storage, and irrigation. It is those fundamental key pieces of infrastructure that we can help fund, co-invest, to help unlock the enormous potential—the enormous potential—that sits out there in regional New Zealand.

Of course, Mr Speaker, for the context that you asked for before, none of this can be seen in isolation. It is not just the $1.2 billion that’s in the in the Regional Infrastructure Fund; it is, again, about the regulations and the fast-track consenting bill that is going through the House at the moment. We had become a country with so much potential where it was impossible to get anything done. Even Ngāi Tahu could not get an aquaculture farm in their rohe. When you’re at that point in the cycle, you know that it is broken.

We will unleash literally billions of dollars of projects over the next couple of years through this consenting process—many of them that had given up or would never have started, because they could not see a way to the finish line. This will be transformational for our regions and for our country. No other thing that we do in this term of Parliament will have such impact as that piece of legislation. And when that list comes out, where you see the scale of the investment that is queued up, waiting to be here, in mining and aquaculture and housing and renewable energy, there is an absolute conga line of projects that will unleash massive potential.

New Zealand has an incredibly bright future ahead of it. We just need a Government that understands what the key drivers are, where to invest, how to strategically invest, how to get the regulatory settings right, and how to take the country with us. We’re not pitting against each other; we’re actually working together on this—business, iwi, regional council, local council, and Government. And, where necessary, we will look for outside and foreign investment if we need to accelerate beyond what our internal capacity might be, because we absolutely cannot afford to stand still. We cannot afford to be in the morass that we were in. We’ve been going sideways for two years, but I can see the future because I have seen this list of projects. I had been out in the regions and been talking to all these stakeholders in our regional growth summits and the like. There is so much potential in regional and rural New Zealand, and I could not be more excited as to what the future looks like for us.

So not for us, the doom and gloom—yes, it is tough now. The cavalry is coming. New Zealand First are here. We’ve got our shoulder to the wheel, and we look forward to driving towards next year’s appropriation when I’m sure the tax take will be starting to be go through the roof, because we’re going to be seeing those dividends. Thank you.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. E tū ana ahau ki te tuku i ngā kōrero a Te Pāti Māori, ki te whakatairanga i ētahi whakaaro hei whakaarotanga, hei wānangatanga mā tērā taha, mō te tahua Pūtea mō te tau 2023.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. I stand to offer the comments of the Māori Party, to put forward some thoughts for the consideration and deliberation of that side, regarding the Budget for the year 2023.]

Budget 2024-25 we view as being the Budget of funding the 100-day plan of the Government, and what was laid out in the 100-day plan of the Government was one of the most brutal and despicable attacks on te iwi Māori that this country has ever had to witness, plain and simple. Those aren’t my words.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Whose are they?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Ah, you can go and have a look. The Budget provides the oil and the grease and the wheels for the 100-day plan to roll out. It’s a 100-day plan for no investment in Māori development—no investment in Māori development. If someone would like to show me where it is, knock yourself out. The only thing made available in the executive summary of the Budget describing or considering Māori development was the cuts and cost savings measures made in Māori development.

All of the things that were rolled out in the 100-day plan get funded; “for Māori, by Māori” initiatives across the board get defunded. That’s got to be of some concern to this side of the House, who pride themselves on numbers and figures and being economic wizards. If you look at the demographics of our country, you see you’re heading us into a dark corner, and the reason I say that is because 30 percent of tomorrow’s young people—these people are all alive today, by the way—are young Māori. If you can’t get societal settings right to support 30 percent of the future of your country, your labour workforce ain’t got a show. I’ll leave you with that to think about for a little while.

It’s also the Budget of assimilation, where the tangata whenua of Aotearoa, the principal constitution partner in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is told, “Nah, nah, your rights in Te Tiriti o Waitangi don’t matter. Just jump in the back of the queue. You’ll do all right. We’ve built a system that services you well, as evidenced by a whole lot of—”. There’s no history that tells us that, and your Budget funds it. The Budget of assimilation—that’s what I referred to it as on The Hui debate—because Māori, yet again, instead of being recognised for Māori success, Māori delivery, “for Māori, by Māori, to Māori”. The great success—the great social investment success—that Whānau Ora is is being defunded. During the election, I talked about the need to ramp up Whānau Ora to the tune of billions of dollars, and here we are, as a result of the Tahua Pūtea of 2024, watching Whānau Ora funding being thrown out like a lolly scramble to any provider. Well done. We know what the cost of that is, we know what the cost of that will be, and the cost of it will be more pressure on your health system, more pressure on your social system, more pressure on every system funded by this Budget.

The Budget was $180 billion this year; “for Māori, by Māori” delivery got 0.3 percent of it. That’s $538 million of targeted “for Māori, by Māori, to Māori” delivery—0.3 percent. For a population in this country who constitute 20 percent of all the living beings in Aotearoa—20 percent. You know what the census said about that? They said, “Well, it’s about 19.7 percent, but we only managed to count about 80 to 85 percent of the Māori people.” That tells you that it’s more than a million, and that doesn’t count the Māori who live in Australia. Māori are at least 20 percent of this country, we struggle to get 1 percent of the Budget, and you try and tell us that you have all the solutions—ridiculous, ridiculous—while you defund and depower Māori solutions that have been providing you all of your good stories, whilst you ramp up tough on crime. “Tough on crime”—it was a great slogan; got you—well, it didn’t get National enough votes to get across the line by yourself.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: A few more than the Māori Party.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, yes, good on you!

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): Just not so much of the “you”—you’re addressing the Chair, please.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, OK, sorry, sorry. They—them. Ka pai. So, you know, there you go. That’s the state—

Tom Rutherford: Bring back the laptop!

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Yeah, I decided to leave the laptop out this time, buddy. I see all the other Ministers seem to be reading their notes, so I’m sort of wondering, well, is it no reading of anything or is it just no laptop out the front? I guess we’ll hear soon enough. But that’s all good. So kia haere tonu ahau, kia haere tonu ahau, e whā miniti e toe ana. [So I will continue, I will continue, there are four minutes left.]

There was $538 million, or 0.3 percent of the country’s yearly Budget, afforded to Māori for Māori, by Māori solutions when it’s those very solutions that have produced the greatest return—social return—on investment that this House has ever seen, and you, instead of giving that money to Whānau Ora, open it up for anyone. Well done—ka pai!

I just heard a statement by this fellow over here saying that we want a future that’s not predetermined by what happened in 1840. Well, what happened in 1840 is that this House was given the right and, indeed, the dignity of self-governance—self-governance—

Cameron Luxton: The House didn’t exist then.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: The House didn’t exist then—that’s right. Good on you; you know a little bit.

Tough on crime, knowledge-rich education economy that sees Māori education afforded 1 percent of the education budget. This is the same education system of kōhanga reo, kura kaupapa Māori, wharekura, kura ā-iwi, and wānanga that has outperformed this country’s central delivery of education for Māori for more than 30 years. How much evidence do you need?

Hon Barbara Edmonds: How much do they give?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: 1 percent. How much evidence do you need before you start putting the money in the places where it matters? It seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence we produce, it will all be ignored.

It’s also the Budget of wasted money—like $4 million to prop up a bill no one is going to support. The Treaty principles bill; $4 million is what it’s going to cost. Why don’t we hear you talking about that? Why don’t we hear you talking about that? You don’t want to talk about that. A complete waste of money. Seven urgent hearings of the Waitangi Tribunal, all funded by the Government—a complete waste of money. Yep, complete waste of money. They were all triggered by you—the te reo Māori claim.

Dana Kirkpatrick: You?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): Mr Ferris, you can just try better. Just don’t use that word “you”. You’re not addressing the opposition; you’re addressing the Chair. Refer to them as “they” or—

Hon David Parker: “The Government”.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): —“the Government”.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Tēnā koe. The Government—the Government. They were all instigated by the Government: the te reo Māori claim, the Te Aka Whai Ora claim, the section 7AA urgent claim, the kura kaupapa Māori urgent claim, the Marine and Coastal Area urgent claim, the Māori wards urgent claim, the Treaty principles bill urgent claim. I’d estimate they’d cost at least a couple of million dollars—wasted money. But never mind; they seem to like wasting money. And so here we are.

You’ve got an education approach by a Government—well, the majority of them are set on standardised education, and a little pocket want, bespoke education, wasting $53 million. Tobacco got $216 million, and that’s a disgrace of a waste of money. Three billion dollars to landlords—disgrace of a waste of money. And here we are. The kōhanga reo was talked about as some shining light of your contribution to te iwi Māori—$12 million to kōhanga reo over four years. There are 460 of them; they get $6,500 each. So kia kaha, kia māia, kia manawanui.

I think of a statement that Robin Hapi made to me once. He said, “The trouble with Governments is that they can’t handle the fact that equitable outcomes require inequitable inputs.” So think about that. We do not commend this legislation to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker; thank you for the opportunity. It’s a great pleasure to speak on this Budget, and I’ll try and get it back on track.

Times are tough out there, there’s no doubt about that. Households and businesses are going through their expenditure line by line to ensure that they meet their outgoings and get food on the table. That’s what the Minister of Finance did for the Government in this Budget; she went through line by line and she required her Ministers who were making ministerial Budget bids to go through their departments expenditure line by line to ensure that we get value for money out of that expenditure. I think that’s a commendable attitude and it’s something we shouldn’t really take for granted because households and businesses do it every week, practically, and particularly when times are tough. They found 240 savings initiatives, which, actually, the finance Minister said before was $23 billion of reprioritisation, or savings and revenue. I think that’s a phenomenal achievement—and that was done without impacting front-line services.

I’ll come back to that later, but what has driven us into the position that we’re in is wasteful spending.

Helen White: You cancelled ferries—on a text.

STUART SMITH: Wasteful spending—actually, I’m going to come to the ferries in a minute—and just not keeping an eye on costs. Also, I think the Reserve Bank had quite a part to play in this, and their—I keep saying this in the House, I’m going to keep bringing it up—continuing the Funding for Lending Programme while raising the official cash rate actually prolonged inflation and had a real material cost on New Zealanders, which we are paying the price for now.

Hon David Parker: Yeah, we agree with that.

STUART SMITH: So here’s—well, thank you for that. I think that was a shameful thing to have happen, and I’ve raised this several times. Actually, we asked in select committee about that and the governor said that that was factually incorrect and he’d provide the evidence, and we wrote to him and he wasn’t able to do that—which we all knew he wouldn’t be able to, but anyway, that’s enough said on that.

I actually went to two meetings over the weekend about the ferries, and it was run by a group called “Trains are the Future” or “The Future is Rail” or something like that—in fact, they’ve had about three different name changes over time. It was interesting; I thought I might have been, you know, an endangered species at those meetings, but, actually, the first meeting was quite good and we got across a lot of things. A lot of it was just a bit of a moan session about what the Government’s doing, what we’ve done in the Budget, all that sort of thing.

Then I went to Picton, and that was a great meeting there. Actually, the rail union was there, or one of the unions anyway, and several people involved in the rail industry—as you’d expect—and the ferry industry, because they work on the ferries. It was a great meeting, fantastic meeting. And, of course, people were saying, “Why did you cancel the iReX project?” I said, “Well, actually, we didn’t cancel the iReX project. The finance Minister said there wasn’t any more money for it.” Then—Mr Speaker, I think you’ll really be interested in this—a train driver got up and he spoke, and he’s quite well known in Picton, in Marlborough. He said, “Look, don’t get me wrong, I love rail; I like rail. I’d love the iReX project to have gone ahead, but the reality is it costs money and that money comes from us—we would have to pay for it.”

He said, “We just have to be realistic about that.” And then he says to them—because a lot of people there were loving rail—“And you all say you like rail and you want it to go, and yet you protest about trains taking coal from Westport to Lyttelton, which pays the bills for New Zealand. And we’ve got to get realistic in New Zealand about what we’re doing and how we earn our way in the world.” I thought that was absolutely right on the money. It turned the whole mood in that room, about that, in that meeting, I thought. I’d been saying those things during that meeting, of course, wasn’t really being listened to by most of them, but that certainly turned it around. I take my hat off to him, because, actually, he knows what he’s talking about.

When I talked to him later, he said, “Oh, it’s not my wisdom; it’s the wisdom of the people,”—because I said it was very wise, what he’d said—and he said, “It’s just what I picked up from other people and I know what’s going on.” I thought, well, at least you were big enough to stand up and say that. And I thought, I really respect him for that.

Wasteful spending has got us to where we are, and that project was about cost controls getting completely out of control. What we have done through these 240 savings initiatives is to get some actual direction about what we want to achieve and how we’re going to go about achieving it, rather than just saying, “Your Government department had X amount of dollars, let’s give you that, plus inflation. And if you’ve got any new initiatives, OK, we want to give you some more money.” That’s how spending gets blown out, and that’s what happened under the previous Government.

We’ve had a significant issue this year with our energy prices, and that’s driven up costs and that is going to have ongoing effects. There’s a really interesting article in Energy News on a report from Analytica, which is an energy thought paper and research paper. It said they were going in on a report on the cost of what are, essentially, blackouts that we’ve been having through this winter because of the price of power. We’re not seeing the lights go out, because those blackouts are happening in businesses. They’ve said industrial production is a proxy for energy demand, such as when industry production is lost, energy demand follows—absolutely true.

I have a graph here, which they had in that article, and I’m sure you can see here: the black line way below the coloured lines—that’s how much energy production or consumption has gone down; that equals lost GDP. In fact, they’ve estimated in this paper that it’s around $300 million in total from a loss of energy demand from those large companies. That’s going to be significant. That’s not to mention the big impact that it has, which is going to be in confidence for companies to invest in New Zealand. We have a serious problem—that oil and gas ban that the previous Government put on had a chilling effect on our sovereign risk profile and it made it very difficult for companies who invest in New Zealand to raise money overseas. If we want to get our economy back on track, we need to do that.

I really was very concerned in the whole Budget process where we were with debt, and I know we’ve got a relentless focus to try and drive that down as quickly as possible, but there’s been a lot of talk about, you know, we’ve made cuts. I’d like to point out that there’s been a funding boost of $16.68 billion going into health. That’s not a cut; that’s an increase—a $16.68 billion increase going into health. And $2.93 billion going into education—that’s going to make a difference. But, actually, I think the biggest difference is going to be made by the structure of literacy and the one hour of reading, writing, and maths per day. That will really turn the dial, in my view, quite quickly. Actually, that’s an investment in our human capital. We will not have much of an economy if we don’t have an educated workforce. It’s incumbent on us to give our children as much opportunity as they can, the best start in life possible, and that means a good education.

Finally, a $2.92 billion increase in law and order—that impacts on us all. Doesn’t matter how much money you got in your household if you’re frightened to go out on the street because of violent crime. We need to get on top of that as quickly as possible. Dealing with the gangs the way that has been done, I really tip my hat to the police, they’ve done a fantastic job there. Getting rid of the Comancheros is a big step forward. Gangs are a cancer in our society and they need to be treated like one and they need to feel the full force of the law as quickly as possible. It gives me great pleasure to commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’ve been able to spend about an hour in the House just listening to the different Budget speeches that have been made by members in the Government and members on this side of the House, and I’ve been listening intently because I’ve been wanting to hear how much they’re going to keep reeling out those sorts of key lines that they have around wasteful spending, etc., etc. I thought that, actually, as the first part of my speech in this debate, I’m going to address those concerns around wasteful spending, because it’s quite clear that this Government doesn’t even look at its own Government agencies’ websites.

The Minister of Finance asked earlier “Where did all the money go?”, because that’s what she’s hearing—“Where did all the money go?” Well, on her own agency’s website, the Treasury website, it actually has a list of where all that money went, because under the Public Finance Act, it has to be transparent as to where all that money went. I think the reference that she’s talking about, because of the debt that had to be borrowed, she’s totally erased from her memory, and perhaps from the memories of members on that side of the House, what happened from 2020 to 2022. Basically, the whole world stopped because of a pandemic that happened. Our Government at the time had to make decisions to save people’s lives and people’s jobs, and the decision to spend that money is all transparent on the Treasury website.

I want to be able to just basically go through so that the members on the other side know where exactly that money went, and they might be surprised where that money went. For the Business Support Subsidy, $17 billion went towards that. The COVID Resurgence Support Payment: $3 billion. The COVID health response: $2.7 billion. The cash-flow loan scheme for small businesses: $2.2 billion. The vaccine strategy: $1.7 billion. The isolation and quarantine management: $1.5 billion. The COVID-19 support payment: $1.3 billion. Infrastructure projects: $2.5 billion.

Now, this is where it’s interesting, because when we were in Government, we thought we needed to be able to spend that money in order to keep people in work and connected to their jobs. At the time, we were getting projections that a population the size of Palmerston North was going to be unemployed. Now, if you’re a Minister of Finance, I ask the MP for Palmerston North, would you just let the population of Palmerston North be unemployed?

Tangi Utikere: Absolutely not.

Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: Exactly! You would not let a population the size of Palmerston North become unemployed, and those were the projections that were given from officials to Ministers at the time, which is why they spent $17 billion on the Business Support Subsidy, which included the wage subsidy.

Hon David Parker: Which National supported.

Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: Which National did support at the time, and, actually, if I recall correctly as well, Mr Parker, I also remember them saying, “You need to give more money.” I’m pretty sure that other people in the House also heard that.

We wanted to make sure that people stayed connected to their employers. We wanted to make sure that we helped businesses who were losing revenue because of the lockdowns, because they were trying to keep people safe. We ensured that there were support packages there at the time. The Small Business Cashflow Scheme was there to help with some of those capital costs.

We saved 20,000 people’s lives because of those decisions. That money was not a waste of money when it comes down to the lives of people, unless you perhaps ask the Hon Brooke van Velden. She might say that maybe we put too much money on the lives of people, and I’ve heard that on Q+A, where the Minister said that maybe we’d put too much on the cost of a person’s life. Well, we disagree on this side of the House, which is why I wanted to respond to those members on the other side of the House talking about “Where did that money go—that wasteful spending!” That’s where that money went, and it’s on the Treasury website.

The other interesting thing about the $2.5 billion that was set aside for infrastructure projects was that around $1.2 billion of it was spent on the Jobs for Nature work. Well, in New Plymouth, for example, Yarrow Stadium—that got some money. There was housing in Flaxmere, the Kāinga Ora infrastructure for the Northcote development, the Tāmaki development, the Roskill South development, and also Taranaki. Well, guess where those members of Parliament are now! Money went into those housing and infrastructure projects in order for us to build homes for people to have places to go and stay. In Gisborne, the Kiwa Pools was paid for by COVID recovery money, as was the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui. These are all projects which are in electorates of members of the Government, and it’s all transparent on the Treasury website.

I suggest to members of the Government that when they’re asking what happened to this “wasteful spending”, go to your local pool, go to your local library, and go check out some of those new housing projects which are now being done. There was also the Clutha Community Hub and, of course, my favourite, which is the 26 fire stations that were renewed right across the country.

Hon David Parker: All of which employed people.

Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: All of which employed people—kept people safe. You know, the member Stuart Smith, who has just sat down—he joined me in cutting the ribbon for the opening of the Kaikōura station.

Every time that members on the Government benches say, “wasteful spending”, I’d tell them to go and have a look at where that money was spent, because I sure as hell am seeing a number of those members at those ribbon-cutting ceremonies right now—Tauranga. There was also some work down in Sumner. Now going back to—

Cameron Luxton: Yeah, ask them how they enjoyed stage one of Cameron Road redevelopment.

Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: I’ll send that member the link to the Treasury website for what happened in the Bay of Plenty area.

Going back to the Budget now and having addressed the question of “Where did that money go?”, I have spent a lot of time up and down the country speaking to businesses and speaking to financial support providers. We have financial support providers, in a cost of living crisis, that are having their funding cut. On the Kāpiti Coast, the Kapiti Family Budget Service has been around for 40 years—40 years. I was only three when they were first established—yes, I’m giving away my age. For 40 years, they have been open, but they will now have to shut because this Government has reduced the funding to public services, which then flows on to all these non-governmental organisations who are helping our people, and who are helping our most vulnerable people. We have a budgeting service up in South Auckland—I think it’s called Vaiola—and they have been shut because this Government has cut the funding to the Ministry of Social Development, which would therefore go to these budgeting services.

These budgeting service cuts aren’t what this Government say is just bureaucrats in Wellington—even then, they’re telling them to come back into work. Well, do you know what? The Minister of Finance said that she’d rather see more high-vis vests than lanyards. So what is it: you want less public servants and you’re going to sack 6,000 jobs from the Public Service, but then you’re going to expect them to come back in? Well, do you know what? In a cost of living crisis, when those public servants come in, it’s going to be difficult for them to spend money at the local café. I do want to acknowledge those public servants who have lost their jobs, because right throughout the COVID pandemic, right throughout the last couple of years, they have been trying and working really hard to keep the lights on for the rest of New Zealand, which is how we’ve managed to get that $2.5 billion of infrastructure spend out to the regions, right throughout the rest of the country. It wasn’t just here in Wellington.

One of the interesting things that I’ve also heard members on the other side of the House talk about is around the spending cuts that they’ve done. There’s $1.5 billion which has been saved. Well, $500 million of it was actually the savings programme that the Hon Grant Robertson started—$500 million. This side of the House recognised that we also had to tighten our belts to join the rest of New Zealand, and to join businesses and households that were tightening their belts. We did it in such a way that to ensure that public services wouldn’t be cut to the bone, but what we’re seeing now is that the tax cuts and the Public Service cuts are two hard, too fast, and it’s Kiwis on the ground who are missing out as a result of this.

When I go up and down the country and I talk to people about their tax cuts, I can talk to a pensioner who says, “Well, I’m only getting $2.15. That doesn’t really give me much, given my rates have gone up by 17 percent.”—or 21 percent or 10 percent. How does $2.15 help them with their rates increase, given this Government stopped the three waters programme that would have helped councils spread out the cost of that water infrastructure by moving them into an entity? Now, these poor pensioners, who are on fixed incomes, will have to wait until councils—which have up to a year—put together these new water reforms, basically, to see how they can spread that cost in the rates out.

There is so much I could talk about in relation to this Budget, but there have been so many speeches from the other side of the House that have not been transparent and not been fruitful in the sense that they don’t even look on their own agencies’ websites to see where money has been spent. This Budget has been all about choices. We are seeing the result of these choices, with Kiwis right across the country doing it even harder because of this Government.

I rise to support these two bills and our Budget because, on this side of the House, we are all about fiscal discipline and care. I would just like to reference the wasteful spending that the member the Hon Barbara Edmonds, who just sat down, spoke about. She said, “Why—why—are we talking about all this wasteful spending?” Well, I’ll throw a few figures out there: $1.2 billion on three waters, never saw the light of day; millions of dollars spent on light rail projects, never saw a metre of track laid; millions of dollars on cycleways across the harbour bridge, never saw a cycleway created. That’s just some of the wasteful spending.

Well, this Budget brings back discipline and care and fiscal discipline—now there’s a word—and a commitment to strengthening our economy, restoring law and order, and ensuring we have better infrastructure for the future, and actually getting things built as well as ensuring that we have better public services, health, and education. As a result of the fiscal discipline that we have seen in this Budget, we are starting to see some green shoots. We’re starting to see interest rates coming down, inflation coming down, but it is still really tough for hard-working New Zealanders out there to pay the grocery bills, to pay the petrol bills, to pay the electricity, and to pay their mortgage at the moment. That is why this Budget ensured that we provided tax relief for hard-working New Zealanders after 14 years. It is time that hard-working New Zealanders can keep more of what they earn.

We also introduced, in this Budget, the FamilyBoost package, which enables families to get up to $150 a fortnight. Registrations for this just opened last week, and families will be able to get up to $975 on 1 October. Now, this is big for families because childcare can be a really difficult decision for working families. FamilyBoost provides that much-needed relief for parents making those really tough decisions—you know, when you have a baby, deciding whether it’s worth it to go back to work; should I or shouldn’t I? Well, this FamilyBoost just makes that decision a whole lot easier because it is providing some relief to those hard-working families. On this side of the House, we are respecting those tough situations—making the childcare bill easier. FamilyBoost payments start in seven days and families can claim up to $975 every three months for early childhood education costs. This is significant for many low and middle income - earning families who are struggling. Our Government is finally taking action to bring down inflation, bring down interest rates, and strengthen our economy.

Budget 2024 is all about cost savings as well—$7.5 billion of savings as we restored discipline to public spending. We delivered on our commitment to put more funding into the front line; in the hospitals and in our classrooms—where it matters the most—and with our police out on the beat. We’re reducing the ballooning bureaucracy and ensuring it’s easier to get stuff done, get stuff built in this country, and redirecting that focus to the regions, to provincial New Zealand, where we have a lot of hard-working New Zealanders out there. We’re restoring confidence and business confidence for our primary industries—being aspirational once again for those food-producing regions like Hawke’s Bay. Of course, we’ve got this very ambitious target of doubling the value of our exports in the next 10 years. We’re reducing the red tape and the regulation that’s been strangling our primary industries for so long.

As the local Tukituki MP, I just thought I’d give a few examples of some of the amazing exporters who I have been visiting lately. They are giving some fantastic feedback because they feel like they’ve been championed once again, they feel like there’s—it’s aspirational for these exporters that are providing thousands and thousands of jobs and so much potential for our economy. Just as an example, Pan Pac Forest Products Ltd the other day, they are exporting timber and pulp to the world; Melita Honey, exporting our liquid gold mānuka honey; and Rockit Apple; and T&G apple producers in the fruit bowl of New Zealand in Tukituki, Hastings; and Silver Fern Farms and Ovation, two of our biggest employers in the Tukituki region, showcasing our red meat sector and employing thousands of people in Hawke’s Bay; and Askerne Winery, producing some of the best wines in the world in Tukituki. These are just some of the businesses that I visited and met the teams of, seeing the potential that we have in Hawke’s Bay as a food-producing region. Taxing more and spending more is not the way to get this country ahead. It’s not about dividing the pie; it is about growing the pie. That is why we are focused on growing this economy and driving productivity, because that’s what’s going to get the wheels moving in our economy and that what this Budget 2024 is all about.

A big part of the Budget is infrastructure. Our Government is investing massively in infrastructure because we’ve had a major infrastructure deficit over the past six years and major under-investment in our roads and our bridges and our infrastructure and our water storage—all the great things that are actually going to get our economy moving again. We’re investing $68 billion in infrastructure over the next five years and this is a record investment in infrastructure. When we talk about infrastructure, we aren’t just visualising light rail projects and cycleways across the harbour bridge; we’re actually about shovels and hard hats and getting the job done—results and outcomes and actually getting stuff built. That’s why we’ve got the Fast-track Approvals Bill in there at the moment, because this is what’s going to get stuff built. At the moment, it takes eight years to consent a wind farm and two years to build it—it’s senseless. We actually need to get going and get moving. If you look around the rest of the world, we’re lagging behind, so we need to get out there and build the roads.

That’s why we’ve got these 17 roads of national significance. It’s actually wonderful to see the four-lane expressway in Hawke’s Bay as one of the priority projects that is going to get going in the next three years, because that’s what’s going to drive productivity in the regions. Just an example of that—that’s getting our wine to the port, getting our apples to the port, getting our meat to the port and off to the markets at the optimum time so that we can get the premium added value for it. This is what drives productivity and this is what is going to grow our economy, and that’s why we’re so committed to infrastructure. But it’s not just building infrastructure; it’s maintaining infrastructure.

I’ll say, one of the biggest gripes that I’d have during the campaign would be people complaining about those pesky potholes and those road cones and the traffic management. There was just so much money spent on traffic management and road cones and people just couldn’t see the sense in that. That’s why we’re reining that back. We’re investing in maintaining our roads. We’re investing in those pesky potholes. I was just actually at a retirement village yesterday and they were complaining about the previous pesky potholes as well because it was damaging their cars as they were driving around. So they were very, very welcoming, obviously, of our investment in Budget 2024 into those pesky potholes.

In terms of Hawke’s Bay, I was really happy to see a large focus and investment in the Budget into rebuilding Hawke’s Bay in terms of our infrastructure and our roading. Of course, we have gone through Cyclone Gabrielle, so it’s important that we get our regions back up on their feet, back up running again, and back into production. A huge investment in law and order—of course, in Hawke’s Bay, we have a very big gang problem. To ensure that we have safer communities, we need to see investment in law and order and restoring law and order. Education, of course, is a big one, and we’ve got a lot of money going into education. Of course, two-thirds of the new spend in the Budget is to education and health. These are really important things. This is what’s going to get our country back on track.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Much better things are possible, and New Zealanders deserve much better from a Government and from a Budget than what we’ve got in this Budget.

The reality is this is completely out of touch with the major issues that New Zealanders and all of us in the world are going to be facing over the next decade or two. We have a very limited amount of time to make progress on radically reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, transitioning to a much more sustainable economy and way of living, and protecting nature and biodiversity, because we simply cannot afford to continue to trash the environment and still live good lives. This Government presents everything as a trade-off—like, we can grow the economy at the expense of people and the environment. And it’s just not true, because the economy is a subset of the environment. The economy is a subset of human activities, and there is no thriving economy on a planet that has constant climate chaos that’s caused by fossil fuels.

I want to say the Green Party is very, very clear that there is no trade-off. A Budget that New Zealanders deserve is one that lifts children out of poverty, that invests in our people, and that invests in infrastructure that will actually make a difference to how people and goods move around, and that’s not this Budget at all.

Now, the Government has the classic talking points from the failed economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s. It’s just the neoliberal playbook—run down public services, blame public servants, then say the Government’s not capable of solving our collective problems. Government is the level at which we can solve our collective problems, when we have a proper approach to it. We’ve had decades of under-investment in public services, it’s true. All of the problems that we’re facing right now as a society are not things that were created overnight. It started—particularly child poverty—in the early 1990s, and the under-investment in infrastructure and the lack of maintenance pretty much can be traced back to decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s. We can do so much better.

I just want to briefly speak to what actually is happening in this Budget and the deficit that we’re going to see, the deficit in terms of our people. The Government has completely walked away from child poverty reduction targets, because they would have needed to invest, in this Budget, more money in order to lift those children out of poverty. Now, that is what solves many of the challenges that they’re talking about solving in the short term, with crime and punishment, or it would take pressure off our hospitals, for example, to have fewer kids living in poverty. That is actually, probably, how you would grow a sustainable economy: investing in our kids early on. They’ve chosen instead to spend money on tax cuts that predominantly benefit those who own the most. Three billion dollars per annum, $12 billion over four years, is the advice on how much it would cost to meet the target of halving child poverty by 2028, and that’s certainly something that a responsible Government would prioritise, because that is what’s most important: the wellbeing of our people.

Instead, they’ve chosen to spend a similar amount on tax cuts for landlords. The “tax relief” is really a bit of a joke. I mean, the lowest-income people don’t benefit from that at all, and the majority of the cost of that tax relief is going to the highest-income people. That was in the regulatory impact statement, which, of course, Government members haven’t looked at. It was very clear in the regulatory impact statement that the vast majority of the tax cut benefits were going to the highest 40 percent of income earners, and some of the lowest-income earners actually did not receive any tax cut at all.

The trade-off is that we are going to have more people in poverty, we’re going to have more people queuing up at emergency departments. Every day in the papers, we see healthcare workers saying how overworked they are and under-resourced they are. That’s how we know that when they claim they’ve put more money into the front line—well, it certainly isn’t enough to meet the demand that’s out there. And they’re walking away from investments in social housing, which could make a really big difference. Not only are we not going to build the public housing that we need over the next decade, because a huge amount of construction has been stopped, but that has flow-on effects to the economy.

I note that the Government members are talking about how interest rates are coming down. Yeah, that’s because they crashed the economy, and they’ll blame it on the previous Government because that’s part of the neoliberal playbook. It’s very, very clear that Government decisions to cancel investment in schools, in public housing, and to lay off 6,000 public sector workers are all having massive flow-on impacts in the economy, which is why we now have negative GDP, and that is why interest rates are able to come down slightly. I hear them all laughing, but, look, I think, unfortunately, while the members opposite are really masters of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, when we actually go out and look at what the experts are saying, there’s no question that Government decisions are directly related to the situation of unemployment growing. Unemployment is growing, and that is why—not to mention the construction sector has completely stopped, practically, and they’re not carrying on with public housing build, which is what we need in a time of recession and while construction activity is slowing.

This whole idea that somehow this pain is a necessary part of achieving a stronger economy that will deliver for people and the environment is just completely backwards. It is completely backwards. I just want to mention as well, because part of the Budget is the “tax relief”, New Zealand is already a country in which the very wealthiest people and the highest-income earners pay significantly lower tax than what we would see in the high-income, developed countries that we would aspire to be like.

Max Rashbrooke recently published research, under Victoria University, that demonstrated that someone earning $330,000 a year in New Zealand is paying about $45,000 in tax. If they lived in one of 10 other countries that we might compare ourselves to—including Canada, Australia, the UK, and five European countries—they would be paying significantly higher rates of tax. In Spain, that person would be paying an additional $41,000 in tax; in Australia, $50,000 in additional tax; in Denmark, $98,000 in additional tax. And in all of those countries, they have inheritance taxes or capital gains taxes, which means that wealth doesn’t concentrate in the smallest group of people over time. If we actually look at the evidence and not just the talking points handed to the Government by Crosby Textor, or whoever it is they listen to, the reality is that a more fair and equitable tax system is something that leads to a more successful, inclusive, and productive economy and enables those higher rates of investment in public services and infrastructure.

Speaking to the transport part of the Budget, because we’ve had the National Land Transport Programme—which is the transport Budget for the next three years—published, I really want to call attention to page 35 of the National Land Transport Programme. I’ve printed out a larger graph here just to show how absolutely delusional the Government’s claims are about their investment in infrastructure, OK, because this is the next 10 years of transport expenditure according to the intentions of the Government. Now, just in the next three years, nearly half of the funding is not coming from road-user charges, OK? Nearly half of it is coming from Crown funding. That means it’s coming at the expense of hospitals and schools and all the other investment that we would expect the Government to make. The Government is actively taking money away from schools and hospitals to put into a few highways, and they are not shovel ready. I hate to inform the member who was speaking before me, Catherine Wedd: they’re years and years—and, in some cases, decades—away from actual construction starting.

Half of the funding over the next three years is already coming from taxpayers or loans—a $3 billion loan over the next three years. Then look at the expenditure intentions on the yellow line—expenditure versus revenue—it’s completely irresponsible. Anyone who claims that National or the coalition Government is fiscally disciplined has not looked at this graph, because here’s the New Zealand Transport Agency telling you right there how completely delusional their plans are, because there’s no plan to pay for these highways and they’re already taking on billions of dollars in debt just in the next three years. It’s completely irresponsible. It’s not going to deliver the outcomes we want—certainly not in climate. A much better future is possible, but we have to vote out this Government.

I rise to support the Appropriation (2024/25 Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2024/25) Bill.

Now, what are we voting for? The Budget Statement delivered in May this year outlined the principal components of our Budget, which we have heard from many of our speakers before me. This year’s Budget is particularly noteworthy to me and to many of the constituents that I’ve talked to because, for the first time in 14 years, Kiwis—hard-working, day-to-day Kiwis—are actually getting some of their hard-earned money through the Government’s tax relief measures.

Members on this side of the House campaigned on, in the 2023 general election, turning the ship around for New Zealand and getting things back on track. We also campaigned on bringing down the cost of living for day-to-day New Zealanders. We campaigned on restoring law and order. We campaigned on improving public services. We also campaigned on improving education and to stop failing our children. We also campaigned on improving healthcare for Kiwis so they can access world-class healthcare. But guess what! People voted for the campaign. People voted for this Government because people needed some help and needed the growth and the hope, going into the future. So here we are debating this Budget and debating our Estimates that we announced on 30 May 2024.

I take this opportunity to quickly thank all of our Ministers, and the Government officials involved, in going through the Budget line by line, cutting out the wasteful spending and putting priorities back into the front line rather than spending on the bloated bureaucracy behind the scenes. What we are seeing is that this Budget is designed for everyday New Zealanders—the hard-working New Zealanders who are managing their pockets, they are tightening their belts as hard as they can for their families. That’s what they expect from the Government as well, and that’s exactly what the National-led Government has done for our day-to-day Kiwis.

Now, I will go through a few major components of this Budget that I particularly support, because I hear them the most and I have received the most questions from the communities that I go to. One of them is actually the tax relief, including FamilyBoost, which I will show an example of very, very soon. One of them relates to the Mental Health Awareness Week that we are celebrating this week in New Zealand. And one of them also relates partly to the New Zealand Chinese Language Week that we’re also celebrating this week.

If I can first start with the mental health budget that we have put in. Now, I’m going to read through very, very quickly some lines from the press releases already announced this year by New Zealand’s very first mental health Minister, the Hon Matt Doocey. Earlier this year, he announced the implementation of a new mental health and addiction peer support service in hospital emergency departments. Then he announced again that Budget 2024 will provide $24 million over four years to contract the I Am Hope Foundation to provide young people aged between five and 25 with free mental health counselling services. He also announced—a very busy Minister for the people in New Zealand—the first round of the Government’s $10 million Mental Health and Addiction Community Sector Innovation Fund set to open for the people of New Zealand. Then he also—

Ryan Hamilton: More!

NANCY LU: Oh, there is so much more. He is such a busy, busy Minister. This is exactly why I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to this. This week, we are celebrating New Zealand’s Mental Health Awareness Week. This is when we need to shine the spotlight on to people who really need it. This includes the youth; this includes the working class; this includes many, many, many of the people in New Zealand who needed the help and needed the Government to really understand where help is coming from, who can provide the help, working with community providers who really understand the help and understand their people. I am very proud to be supporting New Zealand’s very first mental health Minister, the Hon Matt Doocey through his work—his very, very busy work schedule this year, working so hard to deliver for New Zealanders and actually putting budget, putting some value into the money that he fought hard for, for the people in New Zealand who need it.

Also this week in New Zealand, we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the New Zealand Chinese Language Week. There is a reason why I wanted to highlight this particularly: one, obviously, because I’m Chinese ethnic; I’m a very proud Chinese Kiwi. And with that, I will say 中文周快乐, 中文周快樂, and I thank everyone in New Zealand, including members opposite, who tried to learn a little bit about the Chinese language and try to encourage people to also understand a little bit about the different culture. This is the beauty of our country. We are one of the most multicultural countries and societies on earth. I’m very proud because I felt so welcomed when I moved to New Zealand when I was a little girl, and I do hope that by us celebrating the different cultures and languages in New Zealand, it makes everyone feel welcome too.

There is a reason why I wanted to mention Chinese language week, and it’s not just about Chinese in New Zealand; it’s actually about the ethnic communities in New Zealand, because “New Zealand is”—and this is from the Ministry for Ethnic Communities—“a superdiverse country. It has the fourth highest proportion of overseas-born residents among the …. OECD [countries]. Auckland has been ranked as the fourth most ethnically diverse city in the world. Ethnic communities made up 37% of Auckland’s population in 2018”. And, with the latest 2023 census, this may go up. “Ethnic diversity can be an enabler linked to better long-term economic performance, and improved productivity and innovation.”

The reason why I have to bring up such good work from the ethnic communities in New Zealand is precisely because of the vast contributions that we all contribute to New Zealand’s culture, to our economy, to the productivity, to the future generation of New Zealand, and also to human capital. Now, this is where I have to say a huge thankyou and congratulations to our Minister for Ethnic Communities, our Hon Melissa Lee, for the very first inaugural Ethnic Xchange Symposium to take place in October, and this is organised by the Minister for Ethnic Communities. This landmark event will serve as a platform to boost innovation, trade, and investment across New Zealand’s increasingly diverse economic landscape, because a report done in 2021 by the Waitakere Ethnic Board reviewed that ethnic communities contributed a significant $64 billion to New Zealand’s GDP—underscoring their economic impact. This is why I wanted to just say a huge thankyou to the Minister for Ethnic Communities, the Hon Melissa Lee, for highlighting the importance of ethnic communities in New Zealand for their contribution in culture, but also in our economy.

This is why I am a huge supporter of our Budget, because we’re putting money where we can create value. This is where the previous speakers before me on this side of the House were talking about growing the pie. Let’s work together across communities: rural, urban, ethnic—work together so we can grow the pie for the benefit of everyone in New Zealand.

Now, in my very limited remaining time, I want to talk about one of the most asked questions that I have received from the communities that I talked to, which is the FamilyBoost. It’s part of the support package that our Minister of Finance, the Hon Nicola Willis, has fought so hard for. She campaigned on it. All of our members on this side of the House campaigned on it, and she delivered it for the people in New Zealand. And, look, like a former member before me—Catherine Wedd—has said, FamilyBoost applications started last week. I posted about it. I talked to people around me about it. I know so many friends at my age—we have young children, and I know they’ve been waiting for this. They have the invoices ready because they can start applying for the reimbursement on 1 October for the last three months: July, August, and September. Then they came to me and they were like, “But how? Applications, anything through the Government are always so slow, but how do I do it?”

I actually have screenshots from someone who I helped: logging on to IRD, setting up who they are. “Do you have a child?” Put in “Yes.” “Are they going to early childhood education (ECE)?” Say, “Yes.” “Who is the ECE?” Put in the details. Put in that person or that family member, that parent. Put in the bank account details. Last step: confirm that you have put in all the correct and complete information—done, within two minutes. If this is not helpful for day-to-day Kiwis, then I don’t know what is.

What I do want to say in my last remaining 30 seconds, particularly to a family that I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the House, to a Pakuranga couple who have two very young children going through ECE, Yali and Isaac. I want you to remember that members on this side of the House will be voting proudly to support the passing of this bill, but members opposite will be voting it down because they don’t care about you enough. I want to say I am so proud to support this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in support of the Appropriation (2024/25 Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply Bill. I do want to start off by just reflecting on where we are as a country. It has been a tough winter, and families out there and businesses have been hurting. It has been hard, and I do want to acknowledge that. I was actually just down South in Southland, in Gore, earlier last week. Obviously, we’ve had some really tough weather conditions, actually, down South, which have moved up through the country, and it has hit our farmers hard—you know, stock losses, damaged crops in the horticultural sector. I do know that farmers and other people in rural New Zealand are doing it tough.

It’s not just rural New Zealand. If you talk to some of the people in the retail and hospitality industries—I know the woes of Wellington have been well traversed in the last few weeks, but it is actually tough. Kiwis aren’t spending money. They are finding it hard to have enough money to pay their mortgage, their bills, their electricity, and so, again, I want to acknowledge that the retail and hospitality sectors, the trade sectors, are all doing it tough. Even in Auckland, it’s quiet on a Saturday night. I was lucky enough to be in Auckland this weekend. I was attending the finals of the Smokefree Rockquest—and a big shout-out to Top Shelf from Manurewa High School, who actually won the award—but, you know, I was at the SkyCity Theatre, it was a wonderful night, but I got in my taxi after the event and I said to the taxi driver, “How are things?” He said, “It’s very, very quiet.” He said, “Auckland is dead. People are not out spending.” And so I do want to acknowledge that.

I really want to talk about this Budget and why it’s important. Again, I know my colleague the Hon David Seymour talked about some of the structural issues in Government spending—that we are now spending $68 billion more. It’s not that we are not spending enough as a country; it’s that we’re not spending enough on the right things. I think this Budget really is a demonstration of how this Government, which ACT is proud to be a member of, is doing things differently. Again, I’ve been talking to people over the weekend, and I said, “Well, actually, this is the first true coalition Government, with three parties in Cabinet trying to do things differently. We all bring different ideas to the table, which I think is great. There’s a role for all of the parties.”

What ACT is trying to do is actually bring some policies for some long-term solutions, some really long-term things. Again, I think that is very much reflected in this Budget. There has been some talk about our initiatives that are reflected in this Budget around crime. I want to thank our coalition partners for embracing some of our ideas. We’ve embraced some of theirs, and we are actually getting tough on crime. There was actually extra money for prison. ACT supported that. We’re not always against Government spending, but it’s spending on things that actually are going to make Kiwis safer. You know, we’ve got our gangs legislation, three strikes, sentencing—there’s a raft of measures which, again, we’re putting through and are reflected in this Budget’s priority around law and order.

The other one which I think is important is in this Budget, obviously, there’s money for the new Ministry for Regulation. What that is actually trying to do is free up business from the burden of Government, and actually make our society more productive and allow business to employ people, export goods, get overseas incomes for this country. Again, this is something that’s being put in place for the long term. Minister Seymour is going to have two jobs, really—to do reviews of sectors like early childhood education. You know, what is the burden we’re putting on that sector; how can we make it easier? He’s got other sectors he wants to look at—and then, excitingly, actually saying, for every new law and regulation that this place puts forward, we’re actually going to have a proper regulatory impact assessment. We will look at the pros and cons and actually ask whether it is the right thing to do, and there’ll be a pushback against Ministers. There’s money for that in this Budget.

Likewise, education—and later today, in this House, we’ll again be debating charter schools; again, money set aside in this Budget. Why are we doing that? Because education standards in New Zealand are appalling. We are falling behind the rest of the world. Along with charter schools, there’s obviously a number of other initiatives around reading, writing, and arithmetic that we’re very happy to support. This is putting in place the building blocks for actually making this country better, for actually allowing our young people to reach their full potential, and actually setting this country up for success.

The other one I want to talk about is Resource Management Act (RMA) reform. Again, Minister Bishop and Under-Secretary Court made a major announcement last week. But why are we doing this? Because we’ve actually got to set up this country for success; we can’t stop projects. If I reflect back to my home town of Invercargill, there’s a consortium there wanting to build a state of the art data centre to actually do AI calculations, but you can imagine the hurdles they have to jump through at the moment to get the land re-zoned, and all of the permits and consents. This should be a no-brainer for a country like this. We’ve got a high-tech industry wanting to come and set up in New Zealand; let’s make it faster. The RMA reforms, which are supported by this Budget, are something that is actually going to help set this country up for the future.

The other one I want to talk about is health, which is dear to my heart. Again, it was this Government, it was this side of the House, that made a record investment in Pharmac. And why did we do that? Because New Zealanders were missing out on vital medicines. We’d fallen behind our cousins in Australia, the UK, and Canada. We were actually years and years—in some cases, decades—behind getting treatments that other countries had. What Minister Seymour and his Cabinet colleagues did was say, “Well, this is actually a sensible investment.” Pharmac exemplifies how we want this Government to work: actually make solid analysis about where you want to invest your money and actually show an outcome. And, look, Pharmac’s been doing that for years and years and years. It does very rigorous cost assessments. It actually looks at what a dollar spent on a medicine will deliver. We’re actually going to open that up and say, “Well, hopefully they can deliver other benefits to our society and to Government.”, but they are a very rigorous organisation.

That discipline—if we take that to other areas of Government spending, that is how this Government wants to operate. We on this side of the House should be incredibly proud of the money we’ve put into Pharmac. That is going to save the lives of thousands and thousands of New Zealanders every year, and is actually going to deliver hope. I think that’s a really great achievement.

I heard some quite disturbing comments when I was listening to some of the debate this afternoon. Again, you know, it has been reflected that we’re spending $68 billion more than we were in 2017, and I heard the deputy leader of the Labour Party saying we had no plan—well, actually, quite the opposite. The previous Government had no plan. They spent billions and billions of dollars but didn’t ask for any outcomes, didn’t measure anything, didn’t build anything, didn’t actually put in place projects that were going to set this country up for the future. I totally reject that and I think that we are operating in a different way and we have looked for savings in this Budget so we can prioritise things that are going to make a difference for today, tomorrow, and the future.

I also heard Julie Anne Genter saying that we crashed the economy. Well, that is just not true. We did not do that. In fact, the quickest way to crash the economy would be a capital gains tax and a wealth tax; that would absolutely decimate New Zealand and, in fact, stop investment. We’ve just got to stop debates on crazy policies like that.

The last thing I just want to reflect on is the tax relief that this Budget has delivered. While it might be modest—and, again, it is well known that ACT would go further in delivering tax relief and letting Kiwis keep more of their money—it is important, because this is the first time in many, many, many, many years—

Miles Anderson: How many?

TODD STEPHENSON: —17—that New Zealanders have received tax relief. I want to acknowledge that at least we are on the right path, and I hope in the next Budget we can talk about how we can deliver even more tax relief, and maybe deal with some of the issues we have around different tax brackets and rates. The family tax boost, which was talked about by the last speaker, is another great example of how we’re actually trying to help the back pockets of Kiwis.

So I’m very pleased to be supporting these two bills on behalf of ACT, and I look forward to many more fruitful discussions on this side of the House about how we can responsibly spend Kiwis’ money to get results for New Zealand. Thank you.

你好, Mr Speaker. I watched the initial speech in this debate, from the Minister of Finance, who asserted that she had not borrowed for tax cuts. I just want to remind the other side of the House of the actual numbers. There were tax cuts of about $10 billion in the Budget; there was borrowing of $12 billion. The borrowing in this Budget will drive Government debt up to 43.5 percent of GDP.

Now, borrowing is something that responsible Governments do in a responsible way. That’s fine. It’s not the borrowing per se; it’s just asserting that there was no borrowing for tax cuts—it actually happened. And it’s interesting—that word, “cuts”—they’re avoiding it. What we’re doing now is it’s called a “reprioritisation”, because what’s actually happened is a shuffling around of the money. That is a Government that gives with one hand and then takes, takes, takes with the other, shuffling the costs on to the least well-off people in our country—small changes to taxes, but then cuts elsewhere, which have had a dramatic impact on families.

We’re seeing the queues for GPs because there are not enough GPs funded by our health system. We’re seeing school lunches being run down and not provided to the families who need them. We have seen the ending of free prescriptions. And if there was one thing that we were told would make a difference in healthcare, it was ensuring that people could afford their medication. Cut—gone. It’s the muddling around with the climate commitments and walking back from them. It’s raiding the Climate Emergency Response Fund to pay for other activities, like the changes to the tax thresholds. That Government tried to give, but in reality it was take, take, take.

In some of the areas that I am responsible for in terms of being Opposition spokesperson, it’s had a real business. One of the takes: $500 million out of science funding—$500 million gone from the science budget. Now, that has a really fundamental effect on New Zealand. It has a fundamental effect on building up the knowledge we need to be able to live in this country, from some of the basic science research like mapping flood zones, like monitoring the climate. It has a dramatic effect on our people capability within the science system.

If we look to what people who work in the system say, they talk about the National Science Challenges which are now no longer there. Here’s something from Grant Rennie, who’s chair of the New Zealand Public Service Association’s National Science Committee, “The National Science Challenges are the home of our biggest and most important mission-led research. Without replacement research funding, most of this research will stop or at best put progress back years. Without the National Science Challenge funding scientists will lose their jobs, and because the whole science system is under significant financial pressure from these changes there will be no other employment available. It will mean nationally important capability will be lost from the system.” Take, take, take—that’s all they do.

Here’s another one, “Science jobs are never lost based on inefficient working or for poor performance, they are lost because an area has not been funded, therefore losing the ‘best and brightest’ for no other reason than their funding cycle ended”. And here’s the one that’s really impacting on the science community, from a CRI scientist, “Almost every person who has made amazing contributions through science points to someone who inspired them that science was doing something worth doing. We have reached a point where the community cannot recommend a career in science.” That is what that Government has done to our science community.

If we look at what’s happened in tertiary education, another area where there are funding changes, the Apprenticeship Boost went from being funded for two years down to one. Now, that was something that helped businesses and helped our young people to get training and get a job. They’ve taken that money away. There’s an interesting one in the way that they’ve shifted the fee structure around for tertiary students. Now, there was a fee boost—of Government funding to fees—of 2.5 percent, much less than the rate of inflation, much less even than the current rate of inflation, but they lifted the cap which institutions could charge fees to students; they lifted that cap by 6 percent. In other words, the funding was shifted from Government to individual students. Shuffling the money around and taking from people—that’s what this Budget did.

Then, sitting in the Budget documents, sitting right there, is a huge blank space for the cost of the Te Pūkenga transition, disestablishment, and transition. That’s an astonishing thing to have in there, a blank space for the disestablishment of an institution that was beginning to work, and for the disestablishment in a way that goes against what was recommended to the Minister by her own specialist task force and by her own advisers. If we’re talking about wasteful spending, it’s that great blank in the tertiary education budget. That’s an appalling thing to do in a Budget from a Government that says it is responsible about spending. It has written a blank cheque to satisfy the ego of one Minister.

Then I want to talk about the revenue picture. Now, in the revenue budget, money has been allocated to tax cheats. That’s a fair enough thing to do, but I want to look at the bigger picture. Now, the revenue strategy has to be set out in each year’s annual Budget, and it signifies how the Government plans to run its revenue strategy. This year’s revenue strategy begins by saying, “A good tax system is one that: finances public expenditure in a fair and efficient way”. Of course those words “fair and efficient” are important, and they speak to all of us—but we have different views about what they constitute.

I want to look at the first part of that sentence, “A good tax system is one that: finances public expenditure”. Sitting in the briefing to the incoming Minister this year, there is a challenge for the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Revenue, an ongoing challenge, and I’m going to point the members over that side to page 11 of the slide pack which the Treasury prepared. In it, there is a paragraph that says, “The net result of these movements in expenses and revenue and after stripping out large “one-off” expenditures and adjusting for the economic cycle, is that the government is currently running a structural OBEGAL deficit of around 2% of GDP.”

Over time, Government is simply not collecting enough revenue to fund the things that New Zealanders want—to fund health, to fund education, to fund welfare, to fund infrastructure—because there is a certain level of spending we simply cannot do without. There is a challenge for that Government. They’ve gone cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, but all that has resulted in is costs being forced on to individuals and forced on to people who can afford it the least. Their challenge is to restructure the revenue system, yet they have rejected doing that. That is sitting right here in these Budget documents.

There is just one further challenge for that Government. We hear the phrase all the time, we have to “grow the pie”. In order to do the things we want to do, we should “grow the pie”. I’ve been hearing that phrase for 40 years, and somehow the pie hasn’t grown enough—it simply hasn’t grown enough to ensure that we get the health system we need; it hasn’t grown enough to do simple things like lunches and schools. Time to stop saying “grow the pie”, and focus on the real challenge. That’s why cutting science expenditure is so frustrating. If we are going to meet our country’s productivity challenge, science is one of the critical ways to do it. That’s why the lack of funding into tertiary education is so frustrating, because if we want to meet this country’s productivity challenge, one of the ways to do it is by ensuring that about 80 percent of people have a tertiary degree or diploma. We actually need to fund those systems.

Here’s something for the Government to understand: you cannot cut your way to growth. Growth requires investment—growth requires investment in science and in tertiary education, and it requires investment in all of us.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The member’s time has expired. All this talk about pies has reminded me that, members, it’s time for me to leave the Chair; it’s dinner break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6.02 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Good evening, all. We’re on the third reading of the Appropriation (2024/25 Estimates) Bill and the second reading of the Imprest Supply (Second for 2024/25) Bill.

Debate interrupted.