Address in Reply

I’d like to thank the Minister for sharing his CV with us today and also reminding us who the Prime Minister currently is, because if anyone had been sitting in this House this week, they may have been under the mistaken impression that it was David Seymour. So I’d like to thank Simeon Brown for reminding us.

When I go to events around my electorate and we have our local issues board, what is coming up time and time again is a sense of buyer’s remorse from my constituents. Now, look, we’ve all done it. We’ve all gone to a shop. We’ve seen a little gadget, maybe advertised on TV and on billboards and on social media—because there’s lots of investment money in that—and we’ve got home, opened the box, and tried to put this gadget together. It’s got three different bits to it, they don’t fit, three different sets of instructions that don’t really fit, and it’s all quite bizarre. And we think why did we get this gadget, and we have a bit of remorse. Well, that’s what I’m talking about here today, with this Government.

This Government has got old thinking. It’s taking us back into the 1980s. When you ring up with this gadget, you can ring—sorry, not you, Mr Speaker. When one rings up and says, “Look, I don’t know how these instructions work.”, goes to the company, to the main part of the thing, and says, “Can you tell us what’s going on?”—oh no, “We’ve got to send you off to the manufacturer of the other two small parts.” That’s exactly what we see happening here with this so-called Speech from the Throne, where there is supposed to be collective responsibility. But every time we try to hold this Government to account, the responsibility is aggregated to the leaders or the Ministers in the smaller parties. That is absolutely no way to run a country.

Matt Doocey was actually right, yesterday, when he said that voters voted for change, but they did not vote for this change. And what’s worse is that people are telling us it seems as if this Government is not in it for all New Zealanders. It seems they’re in it for their mates. I mean, how else do we reconcile the repeal of the smoke-free legislation? How else do we reconcile the fact that the health Minister takes this incredibly important health issue and delegates it to a Minister in a minor party? How embarrassing is it for her that she has denied seeking advice on tax cuts for tobacco companies, and then today we hear different accounts from the Minister? We hear defensiveness from the Deputy Prime Minister and strange points of order and a whole lot of, may I say it, smoke and mirrors around this particular issue. I really question what is going on and I would urge the public to watch this space, because I think we’re seeing a very big story brewing here.

What about Mark Mitchell, the Minister of Police? Was he caught out making broken promises or did he make a mistake? We’ve heard various explanations today, and viewers will need to look at question time to work out what is going on. He either broke a promise or he is clearly not on top of the numbers in his portfolio. Or perhaps there’s a third option, which is that he doesn’t know what’s going on, because he clearly wasn’t aware of the meeting that was alluded to by my colleague Ginny Andersen. Whatever is going on, it is shambolic, it is chaotic, and it does not create a sense of surety or confidence for people. This is why my constituents are saying they have buyer’s remorse.

Now, what about the tax cuts? We were told the tax cuts for the rich would be neutral, that they would be cost-neutral. We were told that they wouldn’t mean cuts to public services, that there would be no cuts to health or education, and that the tax cuts would be limited to Government departments and not arm’s-length public-funded organisations. This was all based on spurious claims about fiscal cliffs and about poor financial management. Well, let’s look at the facts. There was no detail pre-election on how these tax cuts would be costed. There was no detail in the pre-Christmas mini-Budget. Instead, we got a 10-page press release full of slogans but no answers to those questions, those really important questions of how we are going to fund tax cuts.

Then we heard an announcement in recent days that inflation has dropped from 7.2 percent to 4.7 percent. That is absolutely in line with the projections that we saw when I was a chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee last year, thanks to the great work of our then finance Minister Grant Robertson and the trajectory down to stable and low inflation. It is disingenuous for this finance Minister, this new one, to claim that it is their work that’s doing it. But more importantly, the drop in inflation has been made without significant public cuts. Therefore, there was no need to do that, despite the claims from the right wing and their rhetoric that inflation was a result of big public spending by the previous Government.

Let’s look at the gambling funds that were supposed to pay for these tax cuts. They, basically, didn’t really exist. What about the overseas buyers tax? Well, that was going to be in contravention of really important international treaties that New Zealand has signed up to. Surely, the Government would have looked at that information prior to making those promises? Or did they know that they couldn’t deliver it? Did they plan to deliver public cuts all along?

Well, Nicola Willis is desperately now trying to find ways to get money for her tax cuts because she put her ministerial job on the line for it. She sold it as annual reductions in back-office expenditure of 6.5 percent, and there were only going to be 24 agencies, 24 specific agencies listed on a Treasury website. What do we have now? Suddenly all departments, including arm’s-length departments, dozens and dozens of agencies. And the 6.5 percent—oops! It’s suddenly grown to 7.5 percent for some of them. Now, that translates to millions and millions of dollars more of cuts.

But what’s worse is it’s not just about the money. It is about the sneaky, insidious way that the goal posts have been changed, and no doubt we will see a lot of that in this term of Government. You can be assured, Mr Speaker, that the Opposition is very aware of this and we will have our eyes on the goal posts, because it’s one thing to measure, but it’s another thing to make sure that the goal posts don’t move. It is deeply concerning to see the hallmarks of this type of behaviour already coming through when there is just a sneaky, insidious change to these really important cuts to public spending. Government departments are already looking at slashing numbers.

Now, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has introduced a voluntary redundancy programme. I’m not sure that’s a good idea. In my experience at the British Council, voluntary redundancy often results in some of the most experienced people leaving the organisation and lots and lots of money in redundancy payments. So I’m not sure that’s the answer. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have staff and if you don’t have services, what are you left with? Basically, privatisation. It is my view that this is an insidious and sneaky Government agenda to privatise some of our most important services.

Let’s look at the evidence. When it comes to infrastructure projects like the $1.6 billion Dunedin Hospital, the media has been asking Shane Reti about whether he is planning to fund that publicly. He will not give an assurance. The same goes for Whangārei. The same goes for Nelson. My message to Dr Reti is—he knows it ends up more expensive for the users. But my message to him is: we do not want to be tenants in our own hospitals.

And by the way, is he going to pay for the constituents in my electorate who have now found out that National has no plans—no immediate plans and no future plans at this point—to introduce a PET scanner to the hospital? Labour had a plan. Currently, my constituents pay about $4,500 to go up to Christchurch, plus accommodation, plus transport, to be able to access the same services that people in Christchurch get for free. Now, that’s just not fair, and it is not fair to use my constituents as collateral for his inability to be able to deliver on the things he promised in a press release from the National Party on 7 July and gave assurances for to my constituents, along with the Prime Minister.

“What else is the Treasury looking to slash?”, one might ask. What’s going to happen to fees-free? Perhaps they’ll get slashed. I don’t know. Perhaps we should be asking some questions about that.

This buyer’s remorse also goes to the different messaging, the different instructions we’re getting. We’ve seen that today at question time. We have seen political narratives this year hijacked by ACT, hijacked by the Treaty principles bill—why don’t we just call them the “Hijacked Party”, because they are 8 percent of the vote and they are hijacking 80 percent of the Government’s airtime.

So, once again, I’d just like thank Simeon Brown for giving us his bio earlier. That’s very helpful. Also for reminding us that Christopher Luxon is in fact the Prime Minister, not David Seymour. At the end of the day, as Grant Robertson said, it is his responsibility, it’s his Government, it’s his circus, and they are his clowns.

Debate interrupted.