Budget Debate

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I move, That all of the words after “That” be replaced with “this House has no confidence in the Government because it has chosen to pay for its Budget by cutting the wages of future working women.”

Nicola Willis’ pre-Budget spin got it half right—this was a scramble without the lollies. A Budget that has scrambled the Government’s finances, tried a whole lot of smoke and mirrors to hide where their cuts are being made, to try and confuse New Zealanders with the idea that they’ll be better off when, for a lot of Kiwi families, this Budget is nothing but bad news.

This is the Budget that will be remembered as the Budget that left women out. This is the Budget that said to working Kiwi women, they are worth less—in fact, nearly $3 billion a year less—a Budget that says that women are worth less than tax breaks for landlords, a Budget that says women are worth less than tax breaks for tobacco companies, a Budget that says women are worth less than tax breaks for multinational corporations like Google and Facebook, a Budget that says women are worth less than subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

There’s one thing this Government have shown they’re very adept at mining, and that is the pits of division. It says everything about this Government’s twisted priorities that they’re saying to working Kiwi women that they are worth less than men doing work of comparable value. Midwives, Plunket nurses, those who help new mums and babies are worth less to this Government. The care workers who look after our elderly are worth less to this Government. The hospice nurses who support New Zealanders in their final days are worth less to this Government. The teacher-aides who support some of our most vulnerable children are worth less to this Government. The librarians, the technicians, the support workers who keep our front-line services operating are worth less to this Government. All of them are being told loud and clear that they have to settle for less pay than men so that this Government can balance its books after a series of bad choices they have made.

Never in the history of this country have women been told: “Work harder and get less.”, and yet that is what this Government are saying. The country that was first to allow women the vote has nothing to be proud of today when it comes to advancing the cause of women. This is a Budget that exposes how Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon see hard-working and often low-paid Kiwi women and where the savings from devaluing women’s work are being celebrated by people like David Seymour.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: How’s about Marsden Point?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: And Winston Peters, who has a lot to say at the moment, paragon of virtue, he’s going to uphold the standards of Parliament, must have had his head in his hands when Nicola Willis described this as the “no BS Budget”. What he didn’t realise is that BS wasn’t actually about a swear word, because when she was talking about “no BS”, what she was being clear is the Budget had no bold solutions. The Budget had no bread and shelter for vulnerable New Zealanders. The Budget had no back-paid settlements for women who have been fighting to have fair pay for far too long, and it had no better society. What it does have is big subsidies—big subsidies for oil and gas, among others. This Government has no vision, beyond enriching those who are already doing well, whilst dividing working New Zealanders in an attempt to distract them from the damage that they’re doing to their lives and livelihoods.

This Budget isn’t only about cuts to women’s pay, though, because, for the second year in a row, that much promised cost of living relief the National Party banged on about during the election campaign is proving to be elusive. Remember the $250 a fortnight that families with children were promised by Christopher Luxon during the election campaign? The Government cannot find one single family—not one single family—that’s got the $250 a fortnight that they were promised repeatedly by the Government during the election campaign. The party that pumps itself up on its own economic grandiose has exponentially failed on its flagship promise of cost of living relief for Kiwi families.

But this gets worse, because Nicola Willis talked about the changes to Working for Families in her Budget speech. What she didn’t mention is that for 61,000 New Zealand families, their Working for Families is being cut. They’re going to be $43 a fortnight, on average, worse off because of this Government. I didn’t hear anyone on the election campaign trail when speaking for National say that tens of thousands of families were going to be made financially worse off by this Government, and yet that is exactly what today does. For those who are supposedly better off, what do they get? Less than a block of butter a week extra. If they save it up over two weeks, they might be able to buy a block of butter. That’s what they’re getting, whilst 61,000 families are actually having the level of financial support they get cut by this Government.

Best Start payments are being cut for many families. It might not mean much to the members opposite, but for many of those families it’s a box of nappies or a tin of formula, or potentially both, a week that they are now missing out on. In the meantime, those families see their rents continuing to go up, while their landlords get tax cuts. They’re seeing their insurance continuing to go up, partly driven by increasing rates by Government. They’re seeing their rates being driven up by the actions of this Government. Their power prices are going up, in part because the Government’s decided to increase its contribution to power prices across the country. They’re seeing the cost of registering their car going up. The Government made that decision. They’re seeing road-user charges going up—all costs being imposed under National, while cost of living support for things like public transport and so on has been cut by this Government.

This is a Government that has made bad choices that make life worse for a lot of working New Zealanders. We’ve just heard from Nicola Willis that it’s all because she had no other choices—that there was no room to move and that there was no money. All Governments have choices. Nicola Willis would have had more choices had she not increased borrowing by $12 billion in the last year because she didn’t make her numbers add up. The position that this Government and Nicola Willis have put us in is down to their bad choices. They are choosing austerity and cuts. And austerity is exactly what it is. It failed in the United Kingdom and it will fail here. It will leave New Zealand a poorer country and it says to the next generation of New Zealanders, who are already giving up in record numbers, that they may as well leave the country because there is no hope here. This Government are practically offering them a plane ticket and saying that there is no future for them here and they may as well give up and leave.

It is this Government that has chosen women to pay for the unaffordable decisions that they have taken. It’s time they accepted responsibility for their own decisions and stopped blaming everyone else. They should stop blaming unions, nurses, teachers, care and support workers, hospice workers, Plunket nurses, midwives, because these are all choices this Government have made.

What have those choices led to for New Zealanders? Rising unemployment, record numbers leaving to go overseas, more people living on the streets in cars and under bridges, more children going hungry, women being paid less. These are their decisions and their choices, and they have made bad ones.

More people living in cars is nothing to celebrate, and yet this Government has celebrated this year, in this Budget, the amount of money they’ve cut from emergency accommodation. Cutting funding for emergency accommodation and celebrating how much you’ve saved while our agencies that work with our most vulnerable who are living on the streets say they simply cannot keep up with demand, because the numbers of people rough sleeping are growing so fast that they can’t support them, is nothing to celebrate. It says everything about how wrong this Government’s priorities are that they think that booting people out of emergency accommodation and on to the streets is something to be proud of. It’s not something to be proud of; it’s something to be ashamed of.

I recently said that there would be three things that we were looking for in this year’s Budget. The first is that it properly funds our front-line public services. Under this Budget, front-line services, like health, continue to go backwards. Last year, we said the money that they’d put into health wouldn’t keep the lights on, or barely kept the lights on. This year, the lights are flickering and starting to fail. The health system simply isn’t getting the funding that it needs to continue to serve New Zealanders.

Hon Shane Jones: Boring.

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The second thing we were looking for from this—I know Shane Jones thinks the health system is boring, but for New Zealanders that rely on it, it’s pretty damn important—year’s Budget was credible answers to how the Government’s actually going to fund all the promises that it’s been making, and that shouldn’t be at the expense of working New Zealand women. So we were looking, for example, for how they’re going to fund the billions of dollars’ worth of new roads that they promised, the billions of dollars of hospitals and school upgrades—all those things they go round the country talking about, the huge pipeline of work that’s coming. We were looking for an explanation for how that’s going to be funded. Shane Jones is waving it around. He might like to have a look at the level of Government capital investment in that Budget document that he’s waving around that shows that the amount being invested in all those things has been cut from $65 billion to $51 billion. The Government that talks a big game on infrastructure is actually cutting the amount of money that’s being spent on those things.

The final thing that we were looking for was a plan to invest in our collective future as a country, and there is no greater example of how this Government doesn’t have one than the changes they have made to KiwiSaver. Working New Zealanders out there saving hard for their retirement will be shocked to learn that this Government has raided their retirement savings to pay for its Budget—not the first time the National Party has done that. KiwiSaver, proudly set up by Labour, halved by the last National Government, is being halved again by this National Government. If there is one message New Zealanders have had loud and clear from this National Party, it’s that they cannot be trusted when it comes to the national treasure that is our KiwiSaver scheme.

So let’s look at what the $2.5 billion of cuts to KiwiSaver mean for working New Zealanders. An 18-year-old New Zealander, as of this year’s Budget, is now going to be $66,000 worse off in their retirement. Let’s be clear on that: for an 18-year-old just starting out, signing up to KiwiSaver, getting into the workforce for the first time, they have just seen $66,000 taken from their KiwiSaver balance on retirement.

Let’s talk about someone who’s 30. Someone who’s 30 is going to get $30,000 less in their retirement because of the cuts to KiwiSaver made in this year’s Budget—dressing that up by saying, “Oh, you can save more of your own money.”, to compensate for the fact that the Government’s just cut KiwiSaver isn’t going to wash. I support greater retirement savings, but I don’t support the Government cutting investment in KiwiSaver and cutting the future retirement savings nest egg of all working New Zealanders, which it has done in this year’s Budget.

They call this the “growth Budget”. What’s growing? We’ve seen growth in homelessness, growth in unemployment, growth in food prices, growth in people using food banks, growth in the number of people living on the streets, growth in the number of kids living below the poverty line, growth in the number of people giving up and leaving New Zealand, growth in the gender pay gap, and growth in environmental degradation. They are offering growth, but it is growth in all the wrong places, and despite all of their rhetoric, this year’s Budget actually borrows more.

All Budgets are about choices, and we would make different choices. Governments should serve the people. They should provide hope for the future, they should have a plan for the future, and this Government is doing neither. When Kiwis are out of work and desperate for work, there is very little hope for them in this year’s Budget. When far too many Kiwis are without a home, there’s no hope for them in this year’s Budget. When Kiwis are struggling to get the healthcare they need when they need it, there’s no hope for them in this year’s Budget.

Our priorities are very clear: jobs, health, homes. This Government’s not delivering on any of those things. They’re making it harder to get a job, and they’re making sure that for those who do have one, it doesn’t pay as well, and that’s particularly the case for hard-working Kiwi women. They’re not funding the healthcare New Zealanders deserve, and they’re making it harder to buy a home. Look at the fine print in this year’s Budget and, after cutting first-home buyer grants last year, you’ll see the Government have once again made it even harder for first-home buyers, not just by their cuts to KiwiSaver but by further cuts, hidden in the fine print, to the other support that’s available to first-home buyers. We’ll get to that in due course.

Jobs, health, and homes should’ve been the priority for this year’s Budget, and they simply weren’t. This is a Government that is delivering cuts, that is delivering austerity, and it’s a Government with no vision for the future. The smoke and mirrors in this Budget—for example, extending prescriptions; a good thing—won’t make up for the fact that the prescriptions they’re extending are for those who can afford to pay for them. For those who lost their free prescriptions, it offers no additional hope whatsoever. The emergency care clinics they’re offering are the very definition of the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, because they can’t find people to staff them. Where are they going to find the doctors and the nurses, particularly given they’ve told the nurses that they’re worth less? But that’s what this year’s Budget has done.

Instead of investing in homes for people—and this is a Government that has cut investment in people’s homes—they are making it harder for people to access the support they need. Instead of supporting people into work, jobs have been slashed. More jobs will be slashed as a result of this year’s Budget. Make no bones about it: this is a Government that is making the wrong choices.

So I look forward to seeing all those one-term National Party backbenchers up the back there going back to their electorates and telling the hard-working Kiwi families who have just found their Best Start payments have been cut, that their Working for Families has been cut, that their KiwiSaver’s been cut, and that they’re not getting the $250 a fortnight the National Party promised them—I look forward to seeing them going around the country and trying to tell New Zealanders why they should be grateful for that. I look forward to them going and telling the half of the population in their electorates who are women why they think they don’t deserve to be paid fairly, because that is the very clear line in the sand that this year’s Budget makes for Kiwi women.

New Zealanders saving for retirement will get less. Families will never see the $250 a fortnight that the National Party promised them, families are having their Working for Families cut, families are having their Best Start payments cut, and families are having their KiwiSaver retirement nest eggs cut. At a time when we have seen record numbers of people leaving the country under this Government because they are giving up hope, this Government is offering them nothing of the sort. That problem will only get worse under a Government that is offering nothing more than austerity, cuts, division, and divisive politics. New Zealanders deserve better from their Government. It isn’t what they’re being offered today.

Well, hasn’t it been a shambolic year for the Labour Party—hasn’t it? I have to say: has there ever been a Leader of the Opposition with less substance than Chris Hipkins? What you get is a lot of carping, what you get is a lot of points of order, and you get a lot of wishy-washy, don’t you? It’s a lot of wishy-washy, because beneath it all they have no policies—zero policies—and they have no plan. Of course, the worst thing of all is the constant flip-flopping from the man that I call “Mr Bojandals”—“Mr Bojandals”—because you have to ask the question: does the Labour Party have a single position on anything, a consistent position on anything? Let’s just look at the last few weeks, because here’s a pretty basic question if you want to be in Government, and the question is quite simply: how much debt is the Labour Party prepared to take on? It turns out the answer depends on who you actually ask; that’s the problem.

If you ask Barbara Edmonds, you sort of get a sensible sort of response or idea. Yep, she wants to tax more. Yep, she’s going to spend more. Yep, she’s going to borrow more. But she’s promising to keep debt around 50 percent of GDP, and she’s promising to get to a surplus within four years. That’s pretty basic stuff, really. Actually, big-spending Grant Robertson would have even signed up for that stuff. But I’m telling you, if you ask Chris Hipkins, you get a completely different answer, because, within days of Barbara promising that she would meet that debt cap, within days of her promising to deliver the surplus in the four years, he actually goes on radio, throws her under the bus, and then doesn’t stick to that commitment. Instead, what we get from Chris Hipkins is that we have to have a “mature conversation”—a “mature conversation”—about Government debt. What that really means is that he wants a lot more debt. We know that to be true because, the last time they were in Government, they added $120 billion extra in debt, and we have nothing to show for it except economic pain and economic suffering.

Now, the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori, they may have two leaders each, but under the Labour Party—under Chris Hipkins and Barbara Edmonds—we are seeing, for the first time in political history, a party with two different Budgets. We’re going to have two debt targets, we’re going to have two surplus targets, we’re going to have two plans for spending more, borrowing more, and taxing more, and we have two MPs that are totally unqualified to run the economy. I just would ask you all to close your eyes and reflect and think and imagine a nightmare scenario, which is Chris Hipkins, Chlöe Swarbrick, Marama Davidson, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, and Rawiri Waititi, sitting round a table, discussing how they’ll run the economy. Well, I have to say: these people can’t run a bath—they cannot run a bath—let alone run an economy.

But the flip-flopping doesn’t stop here, because if we just take pay equity—let’s talk about that up front; let’s be really honest about it—Labour’s regime was unworkable, it was broken, it was unaffordable. We’ve made the sensible changes, and, yes, we’ve saved $12 billion in doing so. But here’s a really basic question: what is the Labour Party’s position on pay equity? What is it? We, first of all, heard Chris Hipkins say he’s going to roll it all back—roll back the changes—whatever the cost may be, without knowing what the cost actually is. Despite having been in Government for six years, you’d think they’d actually know this stuff, but they didn’t. Then guess what happened! The next day, “Mr Bojandals” showed up and the U-turn was away; that’s what happened. Now he’s saying he may not roll it all back, because it’s a little bit complicated and it’s a little bit too hard; that’s where we are.

There are two more flip-flops about to come, because the unions and Fleur Fitzsimons are going to hit him, and he’s going to change his position, and then Barbara will internalise the actual depth of the number and then, before you know it, actually, he’ll be back in the old position again. But the flip-flopping doesn’t stop there, because last week, we saw the Green Party roll out their plan for $88 billion in new taxes, $44 billion in more debt, and it is a dangerous plan. It is absolute madness and insanity—

Ingrid Leary: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I note that the member didn’t refer to my colleague as Barbara Edmonds, and I thought that was something that this House has ruled on this week that we should be doing: using both names.

SPEAKER: Thank you. Good point.

Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: So they add $88 billion worth of new taxes. They add $44 billion worth of new debt. But you’ve got to admire the Green Party, at least they have a plan. At least they have the courage to have a plan. Labour don’t. The question I’ve got to say is: when he got the chance, did you actually hear Chris Hipkins rule any of it out?

Hon Members: No.

Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: No. Did he actually rule out the wealth tax?

Hon Members: No.

Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Did he rule out the inheritance tax?

Hon Members: No.

Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Did he rule out the trust tax? Did he take that off the table?

Hon Members: No.

Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: No. And could he rule out an income tax rate that sees, on average, nurses being worse off under a Labour-Green Budget? No, he didn’t do that either. As far as Chris Hipkins is concerned, everything’s off the table or on the table. I’ve just got to tell you—here’s my prediction—I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: he is going to come out, flip-flop, and actually desperately try and rule it all out—the Greens’ plan—and then you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to launch a broken tax plan of his own very, very shortly. You watch this space.

But of course it has been a year of flip-flopping for the Labour Party, and we, on this side of the House, had that feeling it was coming this year. We could tell because, on day one, he showed up in his jandals, you know, and then it just got worse, because the flip-flops have come thick and fast. He’s flipped and flopped on public-private partnerships. They flip-flopped on the gang patch ban. They flip-flopped on charter schools. They flip-flopped on the mobile phone ban. I’m telling you, all this despite the fact that Labour have literally zero policies and no plan. You know, they have nothing to explain, and they cannot explain it. It’s unbelievable. It’s quite something.

Of course, when Chris Hipkins actually launches Labour’s plans to smash Kiwis with a capital gains tax, which I guarantee will happen by the end of the year, that will be the biggest flip-flop of them all. And why? Because, within three years, we’ve had four different positions on capital gains tax from the Labour Party. First and foremost, they were very much against it. Secondly, they set up poor David Parker and Grant Robertson to discuss the merits of a wealth tax versus a capital gains tax. Then “Mr Bojandals” shows up and makes a captain’s call and says it’s all off—it’s all been ruled out—and I guarantee you, by the end of this year, he’s going to show up here, launch a capital gains tax, and say, “That’s the solution to all of our economic woes.” Watch this space.

I’ll just say, at the end of the day, we know what economic policies we get from the Labour Party, the Green Party, and Te Pāti Māori. We know what those three policies are going to be: one, they are going to tax more, guaranteed—guaranteed; secondly, they will have more wasteful spending, guaranteed—absolutely guaranteed; and thirdly, they’re going to have a lot more—a hell of a lot more—debt, guaranteed. I can tell you that’s what the policies actually are.

But enough about the Labour Party, because I have to say this has been another year and another outstanding Budget from the great Nicola Willis. I’ve got to tell you: how lucky is New Zealand and how lucky are we to have someone as hard working, tenacious, determined, smart to deliver yet again, another amazing Budget? For a second year in a row, she’s knocked it completely out of the park. Thank you, Nicola Willis.

Now, Budget 2025 is a responsible Budget, and it is focused on growth, and it is focused on helping Kiwis get ahead. It’s a Budget that supports the cost of living, it’s a Budget that makes significant investments in the front-line services that Kiwis rely upon, it’s a Budget that, despite a very difficult international backdrop, charts a responsible pathway back to a surplus, and it’s a Budget about growth that is ambitious for New Zealand. Here are the numbers: Treasury’s latest forecasts show that, under this Budget, inflation remains in the band, interest rates will remain low, economic growth is going to average 2.7 percent over the period. We’ve got, most importantly, wages growing faster than inflation, and that helps working Kiwis every single year of this Budget. We will generate 240,000 new jobs in the period of this Budget.

For the hard-working Kiwis trying to get ahead, these forecasts—I tell you—are good news and they reinforce that New Zealand is turning the economic corner incredibly well. Inflation is down, interest rates are down, growth is back, we grew 0.7 percent in the last quarter, and in regional New Zealand, when you get out there, exports are taking off, dairy’s doing incredibly well, and our tourists are flocking back to New Zealand. We want a lot more of it. We want a lot more growth in this coalition Government.

I want everybody to know whether you are a farmer, a grower, a tourism operator, a manufacturer, a small-business owner, or an exporter that we want to say thank you to you. We want to say thank you for what you do. I hope you know that we back you 100 percent and we will do whatever it takes for you to be able to win—whether that’s fast track or whether it’s Resource Management Act reform, whether it’s keeping agriculture out of the emissions trading scheme, building new roads, signing fresh trade deals, or attracting more investment from offshore, we are utterly, utterly obsessed with economic growth, on making your life easier so that New Zealand can be an outstanding place to do business.

Now, this brings me back to this year’s Budget, because our Government’s top priority is economic growth and it’s at the heart of what we’re doing in this Budget. The centrepiece of that focus is Investment Boost. That is a critical next step in our plan to lift economic productivity. From today, if you are a tradie, a farmer, a manufacturer, a small-business owner, or another hard-working Kiwi actually wanting to invest in the future of the New Zealand economy, we’re making it a little bit easier for you to grow your business—I’ll keep it real simple—because Investment Boost means cheaper tractors. It means cheaper utes. It means cheaper plant and equipment for manufacturers and winemakers and tourism operators and start-ups. It means fostering the investment New Zealand businesses need to lift productivity, to increase wages, to boost exports, and to get even more competitive on the global stage. It means making New Zealand a much more attractive destination for overseas investment. It means, most importantly, backing Kiwis to work smarter, not harder, as a result—higher wages, more jobs, and a chance for every New Zealander to get on top of the cost of living.

You see, that’s the difference between this Government and National and Labour. That is the big difference. We back small businesses to invest and to create jobs and to lift wages. Meanwhile, Labour’s gearing up to actually smash them and punish them with the capital gains tax as they stop them from just getting on and doing what they do, which is to grow. But National backs growth and—I’m telling you—Labour wants to tax it. It’s that simple.

Now, of course, it doesn’t stop there, because in Budget 2025 we’re making major investments in infrastructure; in Invest New Zealand; in growing tourism; in accelerating our science, innovation and technology sector; backing our film industry; and our early stage tech companies. It’s all part of our plan to go for economic growth to create jobs and lift wages. Why? So that Kiwis can actually get ahead. That’s what we’re here to do.

In this Budget, though, we have also got some very targeted support for those dealing with the cost of living. We’ve had years of economic mismanagement and vandalism from the Labour Government and that left a massive financial toll on families up and down this country. We all know the history. The history was pretty simple: lots of wasteful spending drove up inflation, drove up interest rates, led to a massive blowout in debt, and took a massive toll on families up and down around the country. Kiwis paid the price for their economic incompetence. That’s what happened here. Since day one, all of this Government has been focused on cleaning up their mess, and now we’re starting to see those results.

The exciting thing for working New Zealanders is that under this Government, the Government of the workers and the low and middle income New Zealanders, their wages after inflation have gone up—listen to this—$1,100 in the short time that we’ve been in Government. Under the last three years of a Labour Government, it went up a measly $80 average after inflation wages, right? That comes on top of the first tax relief, which we delivered in the last Budget for low and middle income, working New Zealanders. The shame of it is Labour, the Greens, Te Pāti Māori, and the unions didn’t support getting more money into the back pockets of working New Zealanders.

Now, we know that there is a lot more for us to do, which is why in this year’s Budget we are taking action to support those dealing with the cost of living in a targeted way. You’ve seen it with the changes to Working for Families payments, which means that 142,000 families across this country will receive, on average, an increase of about $14 per fortnight. We have 66,000 SuperGold card holders who are going to receive a rates rebate, ensuring that older New Zealanders living on a fixed income can navigate the cost of living in a much better way. I have to say to everyone listening, if you’re receiving New Zealand super, your payments are going to continue to rise under this Government. In fact, they have already risen $130 for a couple per fortnight since we came to power 18 months ago. We’re also extending the prescription lengths from three to 12 months. Of course, what that means for a lot of Kiwis is that removes a lot of time, a lot of hassle, and a lot of expense. Importantly, what it’s doing is it’s freeing up GP appointments so that those that need to see a doctor can get in and actually get that appointment as well.

Now, this Budget isn’t just about economic growth; as I said it’s about cost of living, but it’s also about investments in the front-line services. I’ll just say to you, look at the investments that we’re putting into health: $164 million to fund more urgent care and more after-hours care for Kiwis so they can see a doctor when they need to. We’re rolling that out across the country. We’re talking about new 24-hour urgent care services in Whangārei, in Tauranga, in Palmerston North, in Dunedin, in Counties Manukau. That means new urgent care services in the Hutt, in Timaru, and in Invercargill. It means extended after-hours services in Dargaville, Hokianga, Kaitāia, Gisborne, Hāwera, Tauranga, Te Kūiti, Taupō, Tokoroa, Whakatāne, Dannevirke, Levin, Masterton, Wairoa, Alexandra, Ashburton, Golden Bay, Gore, and Oamaru.

We have targeted support for more than 70 rural and remote communities, including extending after hours, 24/7 on call, in-person support, and improved access to diagnostics and medicines. All up, 98 percent of Kiwis will be able to receive in-person urgent care within an hour’s drive of their home. I’m telling you, that will make a real difference to many, many thousands of New Zealanders. Of course, we’re funding more health infrastructure—another $1 billion going in to make sure that we can actually redevelop Nelson Hospital, make sure that we can deliver a new emergency department for Wellington Hospital. That is a brilliant, brilliant healthcare package put together by a fantastic world-class Minister of Health: Simeon Brown.

The good news is it’s not just about health, because we all know in this House that we cannot have a strong economy if our kids haven’t mastered the basics, and our businesses can’t access the skills that they need to grow. The good news is in this Budget, thanks to our brilliant Minister of Education, Erica Stanford, we have some major investments coming into education. Every child in New Zealand deserves an outstanding start to life. We want them to have the very best opportunity and all the potential to succeed and to realise their potential. That’s why we campaigned for an hour a day of maths and reading and writing. That’s why we implemented a mobile phone ban. That’s why we’re actually rolling out structured literacy and structured mathematics so that we teach our kids the basics well and they get a chance at accessing higher-paying jobs.

But parents also need to know that if their child needs extra help, they have a real chance at getting the support that they need. In this Budget, we’re going further than ever before: the most significant and most comprehensive investment in learning support in a generation. Having spoken to many of the parents, I’m proud to say that the investments that we are making will be able to deliver 900,000 hours in additional teacher-aide time by 2028. We also have fresh opportunities for speech-language therapy and educational psychology. We’re also building new classrooms, too. There’s $514 million set aside for 300 new classrooms and new and expanded schools, and there’s $90 million set aside for 25 new learning support special classrooms and also improvements to those schools for students with additional needs as well. We have done that after watching Labour fail our kids year after year. We watched our children fall further and further behind against the rest of the world, and our Government’s determined to turn that all around, because every child deserves to master the basics and every child deserves their shot at their version of the Kiwi Dream, whatever that may be.

Well, I have to say this is another excellent Budget from Nicola Willis. It really is. Just like every family around the country, we have had to make tough choices about what we spend our money on. Against the challenging international backdrop, it’s a responsible Budget and it gets the basics right. It is a Budget focused on unleashing economic growth, creating jobs, increasing wages so that Kiwis can get ahead. It’s a Budget that’s providing targeted cost of living support as well. It’s a Budget that makes fresh investments in front-line services, like health and education, and it’s a Budget that actually keeps the country on a pathway back to surplus so that we can keep a lid on the debt and keep New Zealand well positioned for a rainy day.

We know on this side that it’s only through a strong economy that we can deal with the cost of living, that we can support Kiwis to get ahead, and we can make sure that we can afford the world-class public services that New Zealanders expect and deserve. So let me say, in closing, Budget 2025 is another excellent step in that direction and all part of getting New Zealand back on track. Thank you.

Isn’t it telling that in the Prime Minister’s speech he spent the majority of his time talking about our Green Budget and not his own. Budgets make Governments put their money where their mouth is. They show how a small group of elected people who win power by convincing enough people to vote for them will gather and spend our country’s collective resources. It shows you who they think is worth protecting, and who they think deserves to suffer. It shows you what they think hard choices are: whether they think it’s harder to tax the rich or to allow children to live in poverty, whether they think it’s harder to protect nature or hand over our forests and our oceans to fossil fuel lobbyists, whether they think it’s harder to feed the poor or to arm up for somebody else’s war.

Today, the Government has shown us that it thinks it’s harder to get the rich to pay their fair share than to look after regular people and the planet that we all share. For them, the path of least resistance is the suffering of regular New Zealanders. Just look at the cruel and callous decisions to punch down on young people who need income support. Just look at their cuts to Best Start. Tens of thousands of families will miss out because this Government has decided that supporting babies who don’t meet their necessary threshold for investment—they are supposedly saving $200 million by denying money to our tiniest New Zealanders. Coincidentally, they could find $200 million for new offshore gasfields. Let me spell that out: in a climate and inequality crisis, the Government is taking money away from whānau with a new baby at home and setting it on fire by ploughing it into new fossil fuel exploration.

Last week, the Greens showed the country what we would do if we were making these decisions. We showed people that we could reduce the cost of living, increase our quality of life, and rapidly reduce climate-changing emissions. We were straight up that doing so means fixing the tax system, and sensible borrowing to build a resilient economy. We chose common-sense decisions for our common good. We chose everybody seeing their GP for free. We chose every child in this country getting high-quality early childhood education that they need for a good life, free and publicly provided like every other year of schooling. We chose to fix Working for Families with a fair approach that lifts every single family out of poverty instead of a punitive abatement that pits the worst off and the slightly better off against each other.

Now, the Government, well they looked at the problem of high, effective marginal tax rates, which they know is a diabolical trap for whānau, and decided to make it worse. We, however, chose well-resourced public transport, reducing stress and congestion and climate-changing emissions; trains in and between our cities to connect whānau and friends and opportunities and fun, and, God forbid, to connect our country. We chose to put the wellbeing of everybody over the profits of a few, but this Government today chose to slash almost everything that we care about to protect those profits of a few.

So much for no BS, eh? This is the “trickle-down Budget”. This is the “no ambition Budget”. This is the “child poverty is actually all good Budget”. This is the “dismantle the country and hope to sell it for parts to international investment funds Budget”. This is the “ask the lowest-paid working women in this country to pay the cost of your unequal economy Budget”. This is the “let them eat cake Budget”. This is the “BS Budget”, because the Government is taking New Zealanders for chumps.

This Government is asking New Zealanders to believe that this is as high as we could possibly aim. They want people to believe that they should be scared of each other. They want people to believe that there’s not enough to go around. They want people to believe that what it takes to survive is relentlessly and exhaustingly competing and hustling and hoarding. They want people to believe that if you don’t, someone else will come and take it, that working harder, longer, for less, is somehow the only way to survive, but that one day you too could knuckle down and buy an over-leveraged property and owe a whole heap of money to the bank, and that your highest aspiration could be to buy a couple of homes and to rent them out to people so that you could charge an arm and a leg for the privilege of not freezing on the street. They want you to believe that our time is only valuable if it turns a profit, that our worth is only outputs and key performance indicators, that our native taonga, our whenua, our wildlife, they only matter once they have been sold.

This Government knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Everything in their world is only as worthwhile as its ability to generate a surplus. The Government wants New Zealanders to believe that this country does not have enough, that New Zealanders aren’t enough, and that we all need to settle for far less than what we deserve. We in the Greens know that that is simply not true. Our country now is wealthier than it has ever been, but, for some strange reason, half a million New Zealanders are using food banks every week. We rank rock-bottom in OECD countries for children’s wellbeing. The Government is fast tracking the destruction of native wildlife to line the pockets of fossil fuel executives.

Don’t hate the player; hate the game, eh? Well, clearly, we hate the game. The majority of people who play this game every single year, where fewer and fewer people win, and more and more people lose, well, I believe they hate the game too. But the rules of this game were made up, and they can be remade. The rules of this game were made up by the people in this House roughly 40 years ago by a string of radical finance Ministers who wanted to justify their dogmatic belief and the need to shrink the size of the State and rewrite the terms of our social contract. While the Government of today fixates on these outdated, self-imposed targets in this made-up game, it ignores the stuff that is really, really real.

Because what is an economy really? It’s just you and me, our planet, the stuff we make, and the relationships between all of those things. It’s the plumber turning up to work on a cold winter’s morning; the nurse clocking in. It is our land, our water, our natural ecosystems. It is our infrastructure which supports all of those rich resources. It is the experience, it is the skills, it’s the creativity held by each and every New Zealander.

Without nature, there is no economy. A river poisoned by mining doesn’t care about your race back to surplus. The children who currently are sleeping in bus shelters and under bridges because the Government has made it harder to access emergency housing and wrap-around support do not care about the debt-to-GDP ratio. The native species that the Government is deciding to push into extinction with the race to extract and exploit cannot be brought back to life when we grow this made-up pie. But, oh yeah, let’s not forget that they’ve also cut Predator Free.

There is an indigenous people’s proverb which goes something like: “Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish has been caught, the last stream poisoned, will we realise that we cannot eat money.” This Government has lost sight of how these fiscal measures are means and metrics, not goals unto themselves. They are ways to do things, not the things that we do for their own sake.

It should be blindingly obvious that when the real world is falling apart around your ears, anyone who wants to declare themselves as a leader should be focused on fixing the real things that actually matter. But what this Government is telling us is “Computer says no”. Instead of daring to imagine a new computer programme, instead of questioning whether that system needs updating, this Government has decided it’s the people who are wrong, not their tired, failed, exhausted old script.

But it does not have to be this way. The Greens believe in the power, the creativity, and the people of this country. We know that by working together, we can achieve things that not one of us could possibly achieve alone. We know that our nation isn’t 5 million random, isolated, alienated individuals all doing our own thing. We are New Zealanders because we share this country, and our futures are inextricably intertwined. In order for us to move forward, to really, truly, properly move forward, we cannot leave anyone behind.

The Greens are not solely interested in fiscal management but in real-world economic management. We know that a surplus ultimately means nothing on paper if your people can’t afford to eat. We know that pushing more capital into this economy doesn’t mean that much if New Zealanders are slaves to it, instead of the owners of it. We know that for all of the big speeches from this Government on “Going For Growth”, their merciless cuts mean that all they are growing is homelessness, poverty, inequality, climate-changing emissions, the pockets of the rich, and the young people currently leaving this country in droves.

A different world is possible. We can look after each other, and we can care for our planet. Who’s telling us that we can’t? Oh! It’s the people who are currently making a heck of a lot of money and holding a lot of power in the rules of the game as it currently runs. Of course change terrifies them. That’s why they have spent decades building up thinktanks and talkback radio hosts and political parties who will tell everyone that “This is just the way that things are.” They will conveniently leave out the fact that the way things are right now is pretty bloody recent phenomena. In the 1930s and 1940s, after some of the worst atrocities that we have seen in the world, our country decided to create public healthcare, public education, and public housing, and we paid for it with higher taxes on those who had profited handsomely during a time of hardship for many. We have done it before, and we can do it again.

But then, just before I was born, politicians in this place who went on to found the most radical, right-wing party in here, decided to shred all of that and sell off the things that we all owned. They changed the rules as to what the Government could account for and why. A few people made a lot of money, and regular people have been left fighting for crumbs. Those same very people who have made a lot of money hoovering up the things that we all used to own together and then selling those services like electricity back to regular New Zealanders for eye-watering costs—those people are now bankrolling some of those same parties which tell regular people that “This is just the way things are. Don’t think about it too hard.” The rules of this game are designed so that regular people blame themselves instead of seeing this game for what it is.

The Government is not a household. The Minister of Finance talks about maxed-out credit cards, but that is not how it actually works when you are managing a country’s economy. The Government should not and does not have to penny-pinch while it is fixing the roof that is leaking. We can and we should build things and invest in our future together. What we need to do, we have that to do it ourselves.

Of course we need to be careful and we need to be thoughtful about how we do it. You can’t just throw money at things if you haven’t built the real-world capacity to actually build those things. Funnily enough, this Government’s Budget simultaneously cuts funding from the things that we hold dear, but also undermines and guts our real-world economic capacity. Real responsibility means taking care of more than just a balance sheet. Growing our economic capacity means investing in energy infrastructure, in stable jobs, and in transport.

Now, the Government will tell us all that we just have to wait. We have to wait until the economy grows, wait until the books are balanced, wait to care for people—as though those things are luxuries and not necessities. But while we wait, this Government shifts more and more of the burden on to everyday people through toll roads, new fees, rising costs. They are making New Zealanders pay more while they are doing less. They do this in the name of shrinking public debt, which they know will increase private debt.

In a country with some of the highest levels of household debt in the OECD, this straight-up does not make any economic sense. It’s not common sense, because none of this is common sense. It is common sense to ensure that everyone in this country has a safe, warm, dry home to live in. It is common sense to ensure that everyone can get their teeth fixed when they need it. It is common sense for us to look after the planet that we all rely on for our survival. It is common sense for us to invest in ourselves, to collectively plan for a future that is based on New Zealanders’ know-how and creativity, not simply to satisfy some spreadsheets on a banker’s computer screen in New York City.

Even the Minister of Finance herself admitted the other day—and I quote—“not all spending is a cost. Some spending is investment that provides a social and financial return over the longer-term.” Well, Minister, Government spending is not a zero-sum game, because the Government is not a household, and investment is not just a cost, yet successive Governments have been fixated on reducing the fiscal deficit and, in doing so, they have neglected the world around them and the growing deficits that aren’t represented on our books: the billions in neglected infrastructure, the huge social deficit, and the climate liabilities.

Successive Governments have chosen to be bound by these self-imposed debt targets—this old-school accounting, not real-world economics. The models which generate these numbers—well, they tell us when debt might be dangerous, but they don’t tend to tell us when the risks of under-investment are genuinely dangerous. How long can our country sustain decades of chronic under-investment? We need to be willing in this place to have a grown-up conversation about the opportunity cost of not investing in our future. That is a real social investment approach.

But by refusing to do so, and by crafting ideologically driven targets, the Minister of Finance is showing us that she’s the real radical in this room. Her fixation on reducing debt beyond levels recommended by Treasury—which necessitates these pages and pages of investment cuts—put us all on an incredibly, incredibly dangerous path. The Minister of Finance’s self-imposed fiscal rules and expenditure, gunning for historic lows, will, according to Treasury itself, change—and I quote—“the fundamental role of Government in New Zealand”. I don’t believe that this is the radicalism that New Zealanders voted for.

If balancing the books is only to be done by throwing working people under the bus, then the books need to be rewritten. If meeting your targets mean that the productive sectors of our economy shrink, while the paper values of the wealthy increase, then we need to rethink those targets. The question before us isn’t whether we can afford to care for each other; it’s whether we choose to. This Budget is a mirror, and it reflects the Government’s values. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. We can do so much better, and the Greens have shown this country precisely how.

Before I call the member, I just want to make it clear that the question is that the amendment be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. You know, you can always tell when a politician’s speechwriter doesn’t like her very much, and that was certainly one of those circumstances.

Hon Members: She wrote it herself.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Someone said that she wrote it herself—well, that’s not very nice.

I rise on behalf of ACT in support of this Budget, and I want to start with some simple truths about every Government Budget. When a Government spends, it takes from the firms, the farms, and the families that make up our great country. Every dollar that the Government spends cannot be spent by a family paying their groceries or their energy bill or renovating their house, it can’t be invested by a business trying to create new jobs, and it can’t be spent by a farmer trying to buy a new tractor. Nobody else can spend that dollar, because the Government has it.

But it’s not just that simple power to tax. The Government has a diabolical power: time travel. It can actually take money now, put it into the fiscal TARDIS, and send it into the future as debt one day landing on taxpayers who might just be starting on their ABCs this afternoon, or maybe, with the help of the Government’s new maths assistance, their “one, two, threes”. Every Government has an obligation to stop the fiscal TARDIS for the sake of future generations. Every Government, like this one, must have a path to return to surplus and start paying debt down.

Another fact is that this Budget isn’t the one that the ACT Party alone would bring. If you’ve read ACT’s alternative budgets in past years, you’ll know that this Government is spending in this Budget more than we would. But I can tell you something else: it is also spending much less than a Budget without ACT, and I’m proud of the role that ACT has played, working with our partners in the National Party and New Zealand First, to bring together this coalition Budget. I’m proud of the role that we’ve played in questioning spending, finding the savings, and, collectively together, saving billions of dollars—about $4.9 billion a year—for the taxpayer.

Another great feature of this Budget was those authors. You see, it wasn’t written by the postmodern unicorn-chasers of the Opposition benches, like the ones we just heard. This Budget, among other things, signals another year of stable Government for New Zealand.

The Greens—well, they’ve, helpfully, shown us their alternative budget. They would increase annual Government spending by $22 billion a year, and, with that, they promised that they would end poverty. I read the Greens’ alternative budget and it got me wondering if anything like this has ever happened before. Well, something very similar has happened. The last time the Greens were in Government, they increased annual Government spending by $52 billion a year. Now, here’s the thing: they can’t have it both ways. Either $52 billion of extra spending was enough to fix all our problems, or $22 billion will not be enough to fix all our problems. You see, the Greens are intellectually bankrupt, and if they were over here in Government instead of there in Opposition, the Government would be fiscally bankrupt, as well.

But their bankruptcy does not end there. They’re also morally bankrupt, because societies succeed when we push each other up and don’t pull each other down, and the core message of the Greens, when you listen to all those thundering cliches and shop-worn phrases—in fact, I don’t think Chlöe Swarbrick uses an expression unless it’s so well road-tested that it’s lost any semblance of traction. But if you listen to it all, what you hear is a simple message to her supporters: “Your problems are caused by someone else’s success, and if we were in power we would pull them down. The solution to your problem is to take from someone else.” That is the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the Opposition’s proposition.

Now, there are two other parties in Opposition. Te Pāti Māori probably don’t know what a Budget is or that it was on today, so we needn’t worry about them. They show up to Parliament for TikTok, not for the good of all New Zealanders—and ain’t that the truth?

Then there is the Labour Party. Their whole electoral strategy is kind of the opposite of the Kama Sutra—they don’t have a position on anything. It’s dangerous to have a party desperate for power that won’t tell you its policies. An Opposition of unicorn-chasers, TikTok wannabes, and dodgers should never be allowed near your money.

ACT supporters, on the other hand—our Ministers, our members of Parliament, and our allies in Government—are proud to stand behind a Budget that is saving to invest and is boosting the productive capacity of New Zealanders. We have a simple set of values that just happen to work the world over. Any Government is only a group of people, and so is the rest of the population.

I ask those who say that the Government can solve all your problems: if a group of people ensnared in the policy, politics, and bureaucracy of Government can solve your problems, imagine what human beings could do if they were free to do it for themselves without the politics and bureaucracy—and that’s why the Government that governs best is the Government that governs less. That’s why any Government’s goal should be unleashing the creative powers of a free society that are in all of us. The goal should be freedom under the law so that each of us can make a difference in our own lives and in the lives of those that they care about. The alternative—the politicians and their grand Government schemes—cannot make New Zealanders flourish, because nobody can be forced to flourish. A country can only flourish, on the other hand, when each of us is free to be ourselves and succeed on our own terms.

I believe that those values are reflected in this Budget. This Budget reduces the share of the nation’s economic pie that is taken by Government, and while ACT would never have its fingers in the pie, our fingerprints are all over it. You see, inflation is currently at 2.5 percent. The population grew by 0.9 percent, or about 47,000, in the last year, and that means that our population plus inflation is almost 3.5 percent. If the Government’s Budget had grown by 3.5 percent, it would have grown by $5 billion, and the question is: does this Budget increase spending by $5 billion? No, it does not; it increases by a fraction of that. It increases by only $1.3 billion, and that is the saving. That is where we are growing our spending by less than the rest of the economy and saving New Zealanders money so that there’s more for those firms and those farms and those families that make up this great country to consume.

Now, that may be true, but it’s not the whole story, because, too often, Budgets are said to be all about who gets what. Actually, Budgets are about values and about ensuring that there is a reward for flourishing, for taking action, and making the most of your time on earth.

That’s why it’s so important that under this Budget, if a business invests in new plant and equipment, they can write off 20 percent of the value and pay no tax right now. If you’re a farmer buying new milking machines because you want to increase your output and export to the world, if you’re a start-up investing in lab equipment to test the science of your product, if you’re a restaurant upgrading a commercial kitchen to serve more people better and faster, or if you’re a logistics company investing in better-enterprise resource management to get stuff to the right place faster, it’s not up to any politician to tell people how this policy should be used. It’s up to the creative people of New Zealand, and whatever they’re trying to do, the 20 percent capital asset deduction will reduce the tax drag on investing in order to increase productivity and wages.

The Treasury forecasts that by the time those young Kiwis learning their ABCs I mentioned enter the workforce, wages will be 1.5 percent higher than they would otherwise be, thanks to this policy alone. This Budget doesn’t just hose money at what’s politically popular; it sets the foundations for growth and it benefits those New Zealanders who may not be able to vote yet but who will look back and thank today’s Government for this policy, if they care to do so.

Paying less tax certainly matters. If people can keep and reinvest more of what they make, it actually starts a virtuous circle turning. That investment that leads to productivity, leads to higher wages and higher profits. Those profits can be reinvested, leading to more productivity, and those higher wages empower workers to become investors and owners themselves. Productivity rises more, and all the Government needs to do to allow this virtuous circle to turn is less. I’m proud to be part of a Government that is doing just that, where it counts.

When the Budget debate adjourns, we’ll see the Regulatory Standards Bill debated and sent on its way to become law, and though I said at the start that the Government’s goal should be unleashing the creative powers of a free society, paying less tax is half of the equation to human flourishing, but that’s just about the Government taking less of your property in tax in the first place. The Government must also restrain itself from restricting how you use the property you have left, and for far too long, politicians have come into this House and trampled New Zealanders’ rights to use and exchange their own property.

They do it for political reasons. They ban people from using buildings in order to show they care about to earthquakes, even if no lives will be saved and the cost will be billions. They ban oil and gas exploration to show that they care about the planet, even if the practical outcome is to our burning more coal. They give every Tom, Dick, and Hōne the right to object to your building a house in order to show that they care about the planet, but the truth is that there’s a whole generation who find that there’s not enough habitat for humanity in our country.

Democracy demands that politicians be held accountable for bad lawmaking, and that’s what the Regulatory Standards Bill will facilitate. It will require lawmakers to publicly declare what problem their law seeks to solve, it will require them to show the effects on people’s liberties and their property rights, and it will require them to weigh the costs and benefits of a law and publicly state who pays the costs and reaps the benefits. That sort of transparency and accountability will not actually stop bad lawmakers—Parliament will remain sovereign—but what it will do is help voters identify and punish the bad lawmakers when they vote, and, over time, we’ll see a change of incentives in our politics and a change in our country.

Justifiable, necessary regulations will remain but others won’t. The builder who takes longer to get consent than actually build the thing will spend more time building homes for the next generation and less time being frustrated with the council. The educator who only wanted to open up young minds will have more time to do that and less time being afraid of the Ministry of Education. The lawyer conveyancing property will spend more time articulating their clients’ interests and less time checking their identity, again and again and again. The church organising an Anzac Day parade will spend more time preparing to honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and less time talking to the council about more frickin’ cones. That is the world of empowerment, with less red tape and regulation, that this Budget and the Regulatory Standards Bill herald.

But the Government is also investing in things that matter, and what matters more than anything is to be safe in our bodies from thugs abroad and thugs at home. That’s why a half-billion-dollar boost in defence and foreign affairs is necessary in a changing world. ACT long campaigned, one alternative budget after another, to spend 2 percent of GDP on defence, and that is what our Minister of Defence, Judith Collins, will be spending in her ninth term in Parliament in the early 2030s. It is a form of insurance, defence. You hope you never use it, but the chances are higher than ever that we might have to.

Big countries talk about peace through strength. A better option for a small country like New Zealand is peace through alliances, and this Budget allows New Zealanders to take seriously our ancient Anzac bind. It allows us to be part of a network of like-minded democratic societies committed to defending our freedoms in an uncertain world.

We also need security from thugs at home. Some Government spending, I’ve got to say, just sells itself, and there are few things that are better value than locking up criminals. Nearly half a billion dollars for locking up more crooks sounds expensive, but if you think crims are expensive in jail, imagine them out on the streets, robbing, raping, and murdering. Locking them up is the best money we’ll ever spend.

The Government is investing also in the ultimate resource of human creativity. Better education, including another $140 million on school attendance, will help ensure that we transfer skills from one generation to the next and have fewer lives going off the rails, and when children get to school, the learning support and the maths help will be there. I want to paint a picture. Just imagine how our society could be today if that maths help was available when Grant Robertson was at school: the Budget would be much, much easier—if only.

Parents who save and sacrifice to get their children a better future at a private school pay taxes like anyone else, their children deserve an education like anyone else, and yet they pay more GST on their school fees than they get back in Government subsidy. After 15 years of neglect, we are finally increasing that subsidy and tying it to the actual number of parents who choose private schools, rather than simply capping it and watching their fees slowly reduce.

All of these policies are possible only because we’re being prepared to live within our means. In those reckless, hungry years under the previous Government, when any problem could be solved by throwing some more of other people’s money at it—or so we were told—I think we had a different approach in this country that had to stop. In fact, if Labour sold T-shirts, they’d probably say, “I voted Labour and all I got was $100 billion worth of debt.” That’s all we got, and for those who blame COVID, the splurge went on far longer than that.

This Government has to do what those firms and farms and families had to do in the hungry years of Labour: if we want to spend more, we need to save somewhere else. It makes no sense for Government to borrow money your children will need to pay back, with interest, and then put it in your KiwiSaver so you can invest in shares. I’m sorry, and I know people like free money, but it’s not free: your kids will pay it back, and it makes no sense. It’s just good, basic financial management.

I said that Brooke van Velden saved the taxpayer billions in the Budget for the Government. Today, it’s been revealed the savings of the pay equity changes are $12.8 billion over four years. But I also said something else: I said that she left a fairer, more affordable, and more sustainable pay equity scheme.

Camilla Belich: Totally wrong.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: That is true. What she’s done is she’s ensured that if you want to take a pay equity claim, you’ve got to prove sex-based discrimination. The whole point of it in the beginning, I would have thought, Camilla Belich—and, yes, Brooke van Velden also said that we need to put the emphasis on growing wages back on to the actions that economists tell us grow wages.

I heard people say after the changes that they’d been “working on pay equity cases for years”. I’ve got a news flash for them: that’s not work; that’s litigation. It doesn’t make the boat go faster. The fact that people thought that taking a pay equity claim was work tells us everything we need to know about why it needed to change: the way the left think and the way the union movement think. There are not only fiscal savings from pay equity changes but there’s a proud declaration that this country, or no other country, will get wealthy by arguing with itself. We get wealthier from investment, innovation, and genuine hard work, such as what this Government and this Budget promotes.

Of course, there are many other savings. The $18.4 million reduction in Radio New Zealand funding should help focus the organisation on high-quality news reporting in the way many of its competitors have been forced to do in a challenging industry.

The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority has always been silly. People know energy is expensive and that it’s good to save it. There’s no need for a Government department to do that and, over four years, we’re going to save $56 million there.

We’re ending the mad experiments of Kāhui Ako—or communities of learning—which were actually “communities of teachers taking time off”. That will save $375.5 million, and good on Erica Stanford for removing what Hekia Parata started.

Crazy research grants for so-called climate resilience for Māori—whatever that really is—and bilingual towns and cities funding is all getting cut to save taxpayers’ money. People who work hard in the real world, treating others well, taking each person as they find them—those people have, in this Budget, some relief and are being taken seriously.

There are so many savings, I’m going to run out of time. But what I will say is that I’m proud to be on this team, with these parties, bringing down this this Budget. With the savings that ACT has produced, with the sense of hope that we get when people are able to make a difference in their own lives, this little country can keep the promise to all those who have come to its shores for a brighter future. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Kiwis, I am holding Māui-1 crude oil from 1969 because this Budget is the real oil, with $200 million dedicated to accelerate, de-risk, enable your nation—our country, fellow MPs—to take a cornerstone in recovering a foundation industry destroyed by the last regime. With your blessings, Mr Speaker, I’d like to take the lid off and invite the Green Party to sniff it. I daren’t do the same thing to my whanaungas in the Māori Party—they’ll claim ownership of it.

The Green Party is likely to say “We can match it with wind.”, but we don’t want your mung bean, pronoun version of wind. We are here to turn around the fortunes of our country and our nation, and that depends on affordable energy and secure energy. It is a problem that has been inherited after the worst decision made in the history of our nation, delivered by Jacinda, supported by Megan, and, sadly, acquiesced by the good Matua. But to remind me of my ills, I’m wearing a light-blue suit today, and to remind Labour what they could’ve had, I’ve got a red tie.

I would say to Labour that I need to give you speed-dial relationship advice, and my advice to Mr Hipkins is you’re going to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince. I doubt that they will be able to find anyone worthy of a partner, because his speech today was an obituary. It was an epitaph. The ideas that they formerly associated with of the proud men and women who were on the farm, digging the coal, digging the gold, doing the mahi—they have been overwhelmed by marginal, frivolous, irrelevant beliefs.

Who will they find to uphold their Government—the Māori Party? Send a search party. The Green Party? Never—that Budget was a toxic diet of destructiveness for New Zealanders.

There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to become wealthy. The Green Party stood against that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with teaching our children to stand up and, by the sweat of thy brow, look after yourselves, and of all the people they purport to represent in strugglers’ gully, don’t lecture us about school lunches. Wake up early and make your kids a lunch yourself. When they’re not at school, who’s feeding them? And if they’re not being fed, you don’t deserve the munificence of the State.

Our social welfare Minister has laid down the law. If you’re 17, 18, 19, or 20 and you’re not willing to stand up and join the ranks of your fellow New Zealanders, prepare to own your own life. Prepare to find a solution to your own problems. We are no longer going to pay you to stay on the couch or be on meth.

That’s the appetite that Kiwis have, because we’ve inherited not only a set of fiscal problems; we have a cultural problem in our country where far too many Kiwis believe it is the State’s obligation—and their right to demand it—that we meet the cost of their lifestyles. No, it is not—if you do not change in Kaikohe your lifestyle, the cops are coming to get you, and if they take you to court, we’ll build another prison for you.

I’m sick to death, as a leading Māori identity in this Parliament, of not seeing a quality of leadership from either iwi or hapū to not only eradicate the gangs but to get the old type of leadership that defined the Māori community: wake up early, look after your children, look after yourselves with a balance of faith, and no more hakas of victimhood. Don’t tell this House that the reason the haka exists here is because of victim ideology of colonisation. There are lots of people of my descent in this House who are proud to own the traditions and obligations and duties of being a parliamentarian, which is why we are giving our speeches on the Budget today.

Let’s think about security. We need a deeper ethic of service, obligation, and duty, and let’s give our Minister of Defence a hearty round of applause. After many years of deprecating and marginalising the tradition of service and the role of the military, she has brought that back to a position of elevated status. We need to celebrate these institutions, which this Budget builds on.

But security is not only about men and women in uniform; it’s about having fiscal resilience, and fiscal resilience does require us to continually manage debt in such a way that it expands the private sector whilst confining the public sector as to what it should be doing. There will be more cuts, and then the question should be asked: what exactly should the State be doing? If we cannot generate the surplus—if we cannot continually deliver budgetary surplus—then we have to address what should the State be doing, because the State over the last three to five years has expanded into various spheres of our economic life, where it no longer belongs.

That takes us to the regulatory reform. That’s why we are repealing the excesses of the Resource Management Act, that’s why we will be fixing up the Wildlife Act, and that’s why my leader, Winston Peters, in negotiating with the National Party, brought forward the fast-track legislation.

It is pitiful. I come from the Tai Tokerau—Northland. Three projects. Number one, a potential marina in a very benighted area of the Bay of Islands, where P has gone mad amongst local people. Number two, taking sand out of a virtual Sahara desert—i.e., the coast of Northland, on the East Coast. Number three, the development of a dry dock facility. What do I hear from the North? These are the voices that this Government cannot tolerate—stopping, halting, confusing, undermining. If we do not have projects that are permitted and accelerated which generate jobs and increase our productivity, where will our wealth come from?

The wealth, I say to Mr Hipkins, does not come from doing each other’s dirty washing; the wealth comes from using our natural resources, mining our natural resources, utilising our fisheries resource, and boosting the footprint of our farming—and stop intimidating Kiwis who are willing to invest. This is a pro-investment Budget, through our depreciation. Stop scaremongering that New Zealand can no longer grow its food-generative capacity, its food-productive capacity, because of climate change. We were given in the Paris accord, as a food-producing nation, the option of not including food-related emissions. That’s what the law says at the UN, and stand by when we move forward to the next election, associated with the party that we belong to—you’ll hear much more about that.

I want to focus on a number of the other initiatives that really are important to us as Kiwis. At the pith of this Budget is a challenge and a question for Kiwis: if we cannot afford the current size of the State, then are we willing to make the hard trade-offs? Mining gas and oil is a hard trade-off. Do you want the lights on? Don’t seek to convince Kiwis you’re going to keep the lights on by more sunlight and more wind. We, whether we like it or not, because of the wretched decision of destroying the gas industry four or five years ago, are the only Western nation that I know of that is transitioning to coal—the damaging outcome of decisions made without contemplating their consequences.

That is why the $200 million that I’ve announced today is needed to derisk—and it’s sad that I should say this, because we’re not Venezuela. We’re New Zealanders, proud of our heritage and capable of bringing a number eight wire mentality to solve our problems, but too many foreign direct investors no longer have confidence in our country. Why? Because they look back and see how one decision could destroy a whole industry. But when they see the Government as a fellow shareholder, a fellow investor with a cornerstone right, they know that it’s is going to be a very bad Government and permanently scarred Government, or, indeed, a Government that disappears for ever, that willingly destroys that investment.

It’s extraordinary that you and I, fellow MPs, are reduced to encouraging people to come to New Zealand because of their fear of our worthiness, our integrity, and our reliability, but we should not overlook the fact that so much of the resources of the country were developed in a co-investment model. Now, we ought always to be very, very vigilant that we do not use in a reckless, profligate fashion our cheque book. But the story of our nation has been co-investment, and we, through this decision, are going to make sure: number one, that the lights stay on; number two, that energy is affordable; and, number three, that energy is secure, and if it comes to pass that fossil fuels are required in the short to medium or even in the long term, that is the price that we have to pay to ensure that we do not believe falsely in how quickly alternative technologies can develop in order for us to make the journey in terms of carbon emissions, because we cannot destroy our economy through that journey.

That is why I’m intensely proud to belabour the fact in respect of this $200 million, and I know it will be attacked. But you may not know that next Thursday, the Green Party travellers are going to have a protest outside the ANZ Bank. They have decided that banks should no longer fund coal, minerals, and gas. These unelected fellow travellers of the Green Party, possessed of some false creed—

Francisco Hernandez: It’s called capitalism—it’s called markets.

Hon SHANE JONES: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to be there the day before, and I will be there with my megaphone because the banks of New Zealand need to know that you don’t have the moral authority to de-bank farming. You don’t have the moral authority to destroy regional New Zealand, and the Green Party and their fellow travellers—under no circumstances whatsoever should we permit or should we encourage that destructiveness, because of their conceit and the false superiority that they bring to these debates.

Now, let me talk about a topic near and dear to my leader, who, by the way, said to me “Have you finished your discussions with Nicola Willis?”, at about a quarter past one. “I have.” “Oh, very good. You’re giving the speech. Well, you like to challenge yourself and give speeches without notes, Shane. Let’s see how good you really are.”

The one thing he said was “Please talk about rail.” Now, I know what attracts adverse and toxic reactions to certain lost souls, but, folks, rail will continue to occupy a place of position. But we need to put the executive of KiwiRail on notice: if the Crown, on behalf of the taxpayers, is continually going to throw dough, we must see results, and if we’re not seeing results, don’t just blame the workers. We’re putting a new board in place, and that board will have the acid on them to ensure that that executive leadership team delivers; if not, consequences will most certainly flow.

Let me now talk about some of the environmental changes that are adverted to in our Budget, not the least of which is the money that’s put aside to meet the costs of the new Resource Management Act (RMA) system. The new RMA system, folks, is based on property rights. It’s based on expanding the liberty of asset owners to enjoy not only the fruits of their labour but the fruits of holding certain rights of ownership, and not having too many nosy parkers—not having too many people who are not directly affected by decisions—hampering the ability of local communities and local businesses to thrive. That is going to take some millions of dollars to introduce, but in the period of time that that final product is introduced, we’re making other changes. We are going to ensure that aquaculture, mining, quarrying, and water utilisation are not held captive and not squandered as people march off to the court, never to get a result within a decent period of time. Those are the practical challenges, and those are the practical responses that this Budget is funding.

The other thing that needs to be borne in mind through this Budget is that when we do find opportunities, let’s invite foreign direct investment to come into our country. Let’s ensure that the test is one where Kiwis, our quality of life, and our values are uppermost in the minds of the officials as those decisions are made, and stop blaming foreign direct investment in the mining sector for things that may have gone wrong and stop stigmatising such a sector when, every day, my opponents come using technology totally reliant on mining—a level of hypocrisy we see that in an ideological sense beggars belief. Foreign direct investment is a key pillar and an important input to the future of our nation, providing it’s on the basis that it enriches, enhances, and expands the independence and productivity of Kiwis.

The whole concept of investment has been supported through our depreciation announcements today. If you want to expedite productivity and if you want to find solutions of a scientific, technological nature for climate change challenges, depreciation is a tremendous input. We know we’ve virtually reached peak tree position. Granted, planting trees is a key contribution to our climate change journey, but my colleagues on this side of the House realise that land must also produce food. So to the vegetable growers, please rest assured that the Ministers on this side of the House are going to ensure that you’re not taxed and you’re not regulated out of existence. We want more food produced in our own country, including an expansion of dairy, by relying on science and technology and cleverer utilisation of water resources.

Of course, I’ve had a rather charmed position in this Budget because my leader negotiated the $1.2 billion at the point of the Government’s consummation. But money that’s allocated via the Regional Infrastructure Fund will continue to support the underlying principles of our Budget, and—to remind Kiwis—what are they? Growth, common-sense outcomes, security, and a sense of responsibility that you are both the author and the inheritor, but—most importantly—you are responsible for what happens in your life.

That is why I’ve got no tolerance for the haka of victimhood. That is why my leader and I see a very bright future when politicians stand up and reclaim from the woke tribe the ability to use our own oil and our own gas to keep the lights on, and this [Holds up the bottle of oil] genuinely—as is the Budget—is the real oil.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. E ara ake nei au ki te whakapuaki whakaaro ki te iwi Māori, ngā mea noho ki te kāinga.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to express some thoughts to the Māori people, those that are at home.]

If we look back in this country’s history, there’s never been a Budget that delivered what Māori needed, not in the light of the Māori history in this country, nor in the light of the Māori future in this country. No Budget has ever taken into account the Māori-Crown relationship. No Budget has ever recognised the contribution that Māori will make to the future of this country and to invest in the 1 million-plus Māori of today—yes, e te iwi, the 1 million-plus Māori of today.

The census told us that the Māori population was just under a million, but they also told us that they only managed to count around 85 percent of us, with this meaning that the 15 percent of Māori who are out there somewhere would naturally take us above 1 million—the 1 million Māori in Aotearoa today. So we are at least 20 percent of the country’s population.

This is important. Don’t ever let anyone downplay that number, because in a democracy, the numbers count, as does proportionality. So if we consider the Budget being discussed today, $180 billion of your money, e te whānau, and we consider proportionality, it stands that 20 percent of the population who are Māori should expect to see an investment of 20 percent of that $180 billion made in their name. That’s $36 billion, e te whānau—$36 billion. Don’t forget that figure.

Remember, the numbers count and the numbers can also hold those in Government to account. So $36 billion, that’s what we should be looking for in this Budget—$36 billion of Māori and Te Tiriti accountability from the Government. If we look a little closer at the demographics, at our young Māori under the age of 27, they are one in every third person in the country. You see, we are a young people. Of the 1 million Māori, 70 percent, or 700,000, are under 40 years of age, and 50 percent, or 500,000 of the 1 million Māori, are under the age of 25.

You see, we have a strong future in this country—the numbers tell us so—yet no Government has had the courage to deliberately and intentionally invest in us. Will today be that day? Well, I highly doubt it, but let’s not worry about today.

I accept that, for many, it’s hard to make sense of the tensions that exist in the Māori-Crown relationship. I also accept that it’s not entirely their fault. They were never taught that history. It was purposefully obscured beneath colonial myth, with one clear intention: to erase any trace of the Māori people and to exonerate the colonial settlers.

Right up until 1860, Māori remained dominant in economic endeavour and development in Aotearoa. Māori were busy organising, developing, and expanding our own economic future. Māori imported the first plough in 1820, quickly adapted to new breeds of animals and crops, and steadily moved to import technologies such as the flax and flour mills, whilst simultaneously continuing to export those raw materials, and all of this was before the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

By the time the colonial settlers arrived in 1840, Māori had already shifted to large-scale agriculture and horticulture, and were capable of feeding tens of thousands of people. As it follows, as the settler population ballooned, that’s exactly what they did as he tohu o te manaakitanga [a mark of hospitality]. You see, the farming backbone of the New Zealand economy was established in the 1800s by te iwi Māori, and if this conversation has peaked your interest in some way, then I suggest you go and take a look at any iwi Treaty settlement account and it will have a record of that iwi’s historical production capacity and value.

Now, lastly on this topic, the 20 years following the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi between 1840 and 1860 is a period known as the golden era of Māori enterprise, and up until that time, Māori retained complete economic independence and, indeed, economic dominance in Aotearoa. All of this economic development was enabled and underpinned by the retention of our land and natural resources and it also positioned Māori to lead the economic development of the new, emerging country of New Zealand, but our tīpuna could never have foreseen how the next 40 years would play out.

As the military invasion of Aotearoa commenced in 1860 at Waitara in Taranaki, Māori would be besieged by two decades of war, theft, destruction, displacement, and imprisonment by military and legislative force. This invasion would ultimately wrench all of that economic development, its capital, its equity, and its potential out of Māori control and transfer it to Pākehā control, and the lion’s share of that work was executed between the years of 1860 and 1885. The following 15 years would be characterised by a deep, deep post-invasion depression for Māori, and by the turn of the 1900s, we would be deemed a dying race, with a population less than 40,000—āe rā, e te iwi [that’s right, people], less than 40,000.

So the fact that we are here and we are more than a million today is cause for celebration. But although we have endured, we have never recovered economically. The land and the resources that once underpinned our economic independence and the future is now in the hands of the Government, corporations—both domestic and international—and the private citizens of this country. Although this House would rather that we forget these events and lock them away in the colonial history, there are even more glaring examples in our contemporary history, none more glaring that the example of the disproportionate post-war economic advantaging of the Pākehā and the economic disadvantaging of Māori—actions that would systematise and entrench the economic imbalance and would set the socio-economic scene for the next 100 years.

By 1950, Pākehā returned servicemen had received around a million acres—just short of a million acres—of farmland. They’d been given it free of charge for their service in World War I and World War II. They would then be given low- and no-interest loans to build their family homes on those farms, they would be given grants to stock and equip those farms, and they would be given perpetual subsidies to underwrite the new family farming economy of the new New Zealand, lovingly known still as the backbone of the country’s economy. By the end of this privileging, they had received almost a million acres of farmable land and had been advanced more than £28 million in grants and low or no-interest loans. This, naturally, positioned them well to exploit new opportunities in the emerging new modern society.

Their Māori counterparts, however, would not do so well. Māori returned servicemen, despite the promises of inclusion, would be excluded from all of these initiatives. They would be told to return to their iwi and to their rural homes, and seek support there. They would be excluded from the post-war PTSD rehabilitation programmes, excluding them from receiving the returned serviceman pension, and they were even excluded from the RSA. This was not the promise of equal citizenship that they’d signed up to; this was the reality of second-class citizenship in their own land, and as the engine of the new, young New Zealand wound itself up, Māori found themselves firmly fixed at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, with no economic leverage.

It’s truly a shame that the Governments of the 1940s and 1950s couldn’t bring themselves to make good on their promises that they made to Māori to honour and support the commitment made by Māori by participating in those wars in good faith for the promise of equal citizenship, and for enduring the ravages of colonisation through the 1800s. Indeed, as I consider the long list of anti-Māori, anti-working class actions this Government has taken in only 18 months, it feels as though we have been taken straight back to the 1940s.

You know, this was the Crown’s opportunity to begin to restore its own mana, to act in the same good faith towards its Tiriti partner, and begin the journey towards Tiriti justice for all to make a small amends for the devastation they had inflicted on the Māori people. Sadly, this was not to be. Instead, they doubled down and they tripled down. They began to engineer social and economic conditions that would entrap Māori in intergenerational poverty to for ever serve as the blue-collar workers in the new little piece of Britain in the South Pacific.

This is the story and the nature of economic privilege in Aotearoa: a privilege afforded to Pākehā and a privilege stolen from Māori—not from one generation of Māori, but from every generation of Māori. And now, as we return to this year, to sit here and listen to those who have been economically privileged as to how they intend to spend the $180 billion of the country’s money derived from its core assets—stolen assets—with all of its history, yes, tensions do indeed rise and, yes, in this term of Government, those tensions have indeed boiled over. But it’s for good reason, no doubt, because despite all we have learnt, despite all we have discovered together, and despite all we have jointly agreed to, not one Budget in this country’s history has ever had the courage to properly address the disproportionate distribution of economic privilege in this country and the everlasting inequities and burden suffered by te iwi Māori as a consequence. The last Budget returned us to the 1940s, and this Budget, no doubt, will return us to the 1800s.

But let me get back to talking about the marvellous 1 million out there that are Māori and about the future. Māori are an undeniable part of the future of this country. In our young people under the age of 27, we are one in three of the population—one in three—and we reproduce at a higher rate than anyone else, and so we are, in fact, a numerical inevitability.

SPEAKER: Skiting!

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Those young Māori of the future, all of whom are alive and kicking today, I might add, for the sake of the wellbeing of the country’s future economy, must be well supported today, and, sadly, they are not. We’re currently 20 percent of the population, steadily moving towards being 30 percent, yet when it comes to the distribution of Budget funds, Māori are lucky to receive 1 percent. In a democracy, this seems absurd, and if I consider the future economic requirements of a stable country, I could easily call this economic sabotage—failing to invest now for the needs of tomorrow.

Young Māori will comprise 30 percent of the future workforce of this country. In many industries, this is already the case. A critical factor of the productivity of the future workforce and economy is how highly trained and skilled, or not, those young Māori are when they arrive in those workplaces, and given that under the current settings, young Māori have amongst the lowest education and training achievement rates in mainstream delivery, this clearly demonstrates that the need for greater investment and autonomy is now. Indeed, if this Government is truly committed to a brighter economic future for the whole country, then you must invest in Māori today.

Unfortunately, this aspirational view is far from the lived reality for Māori today. The reality for Māori today is no investment. The reality for Māori today is abolishing, it is cuts, it is gutting, it is disestablishment—the list goes on and on and on—and on a more serious note, and a note of concern, the attitude is one of “Your language doesn’t count, your culture doesn’t count—you don’t count.”

Engari kaua rā tātou e māharahara, e te iwi Māori. Kaua rā tātou e māharahara.

[But let us not worry, Māori people. Let us not worry.]

We count, all right. The more than a million Māori—we count, all right. We count more than people in this House like to admit. Māori—

Hon David Seymour: Most of us don’t support you.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: To the 200,000 Māori out there who took up a pen and voted for us, tēnā koutou.

E te iwi Māori, we count in the future of this country. These young Māori need support, not more policing and profiling. These young Māori need support, not Ministers that ignore court rulings. These young Māori need support, not justice reforms that willingly increase the overrepresentation of Māori in the justice system, filling up prisons. They need billions invested into educational facilities that help them succeed as Māori, not billions invested into mega-prisons, as the current Government would have us follow and believe. They need billions invested into helping them secure a home for their whānau, not a billion-dollar gutting of Kāinga Ora whilst homelessness increases to 53 percent.

They need social supports that help them succeed in life, to raise healthy, strong families, whānau, and tamariki that is tailored to their needs, not the disestablishment of Te Pūtahitanga, of Whānau Ora—the dismantling of one of the most successful Māori social investment programmes of any Government in the history of this country, and the last line of defence for those that fall through the cracks of poverty into homelessness. This is not what young Māori need.

Young Māori of today need investment in their future. Young Māori need training and education that meets their needs, not one-size-fits-all delivery. This has failed them for 150 years, so why would you persist? They need supported opportunities into employment to succeed in life, not record high unemployment, record high rents, or a record high cost of living. They need and deserve a $36 billion investment.

What young Māori need is a Government courageous enough to reconcile, with complete truth, accountability, and honour, its Māori-Crown relationship and the rightful place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Aotearoa in 2025. They deserve a Government bold enough to invest in their future for the good of the whole country, they deserve a Government compassionate enough to recognise its own shortcomings and to adjust the direction accordingly, and they deserve a Government bold enough to invest in them for the value proposition that they present to the future of the nation. To all of those baby boomers out there, I would encourage you to vote for these young Māori, for they will uphold your retirement.

This is what young Māori need, this is what all Māori need, and this is what the nation needs, as we debate and consider the future of our collective kāinga, of Aotearoa New Zealand, the place where every person has the right to call it home because Te Tiriti o Waitangi affords them that right—that right, that safety, that kāinga. I hope we all have the courage to challenge ourselves to think of the needs of others before the needs of ourselves, to think of the needs of those who are yet to be born instead of the needs of those who have so much already, and the needs of those who stand in the truth of the collective history of our country, not the imaginary history of our country. I implore us all to draw on this courage and to take up the challenge to think of the needs of others and to consider the future that our tamariki and mokopuna will inherit.

Nō reira kei ngā wā kāinga, whakatārewahia ake nei te mihi o te ngākau. Tēnei mātou te tū wātea nei i roto i tēnei Whare me ōna karawhiutanga katoa. Kāore mātou mō te hoki waewae tutuki. Kāore mātou mō te whakarongo ki ngā pahupahu a tēnā taha, a tēnā taha; ngā oati, ngā kī taurangi e mea nei ka manaakitia tātou i roto i ngā tau katoa.

Tirohia te huarahi o muri; whakaarohia te huarahi o mua. Ko tātou te kotahi miriona Māori o te motu. E tū, e ara, kōkiritia ō tātou whānau ki te pōtitanga ā tērā tau. Tukuna tēnei hunga kia hoki atu ki te puna o mahara, ki te puna o whakaaro, āta matapaki ake ai me pēhea tā rātou whakaratarata i te iwi kia hau mai ki te kakara, ki te kawa rānei o tā rātou e kōrero nei.

Tāku e tū nei ki te iwi Māori, e kore tātou e heke. E kore te kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea e ngaro. E kore tātou e hoki mā te waewae tutuki. E kore e ākina e te hau, e te karawhiu marangai rānei o te moana. Ka tū ātea ko te iwi Māori, he toka tū moana.

He toka tū moana nō runga i te whenua, nō ō tātou mātua tīpuna. Tēnei hunga i tāwharautia ki te rau aroha o te Tiriti o Waitangi, i tahuri mai ki te ngau tuarā me te kōhuru i ō tātou tīpuna.

E tū, e ara, maranga mai rā e te iwi Māori.

Kei te Pīka, tēnā rā koe.

[And so to those at home, suspend the greetings of the heart. We hereby stand free within this House and all of its abuses. We are not going to give up lightly. We are not about to listen to the mutterings of each side, the oaths and promises that state that we will all be looked after, year after year.

Look to the path behind; consider the path ahead. We are the 1 million Māori of the nation. Stand up, rise up, take our families to the voting stations next year. Send these people back to the source of memory, the source of thought to carefully examine how they might gain the confidence of the people so that they come into the sphere of their fragrance or the odour of what they are talking about.

What I would say, who stands here before the iwi Māori, we will not decline. The seed that was sown from Rangiātea will not be lost. We will not give up lightly. We will not be assaulted by the wind, or the lashing rain of the ocean. The Māori people will stand free, a rock unconquered by the sea.

A rock from upon land, from our ancestors, undefeated by the ocean. These people who were sheltered by the compassion of the Treaty of Waitangi, who then turned to bite our ancestors in the back, and murder them.

Stand up, arise, rise up, Māori people.

Mr Speaker, thank you.]

I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Debate interrupted.