Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): This Budget is a tale of missed opportunity. The Government can say that the economy is growing at the high-level indicators by around 3 percent and that is absolutely true. But what Mr Joyce knows and what the Government knows is that on a per person basis the economy is growing less than 1 percent a year and that is the reality that this Government has to face.Brett Hudson: If you measure GDP worked on a Sunday afternoon.GRANT ROBERTSON: Once upon a time—in fact not that long ago in the 2016 version of this legislation that we are debating today in 2017—the Prime Minister said that the most important indicator for living standards in New Zealand was GDP per capita. So it is all very well for Brett Hudson to yell across the House and say that that is not right but actually it is what Bill English said and GDP per capita still sits below 1 percent. What that means is that two-thirds of the growth in our economy measured as it is by GDP is actually coming from the fact that there are more people in New Zealand at the moment. The reality of that also comes through in terms of our productivity. The lost opportunity in this Budget is that the Government could have come forward with a series of initiatives to address the productivity problem New Zealand has. It is a long-running issue and I am not putting the blame for it at the feet of any individual Government but right now in New Zealand today one of the things we could be doing to be a better country is focus on what lies behind that poor productivity.In the last year output per hour per worker has dropped by 1.3 percent in New Zealand; across the Tasman it has gone up. So the gap in terms of what we are producing is growing between New Zealand and Australia and it is that productivity that drives higher wages. So when the Government sits there and cannot quite explain it—Bill English called it a puzzle as to why wages were not growing well. Well the puzzle can be solved quite easily: we need a higher-value economy and we need more productive jobs. But a Government that relies for its economic strategy on population growth and people selling houses to one another is not going to get those high-paying jobs and is not going to get the productivity that we need. When we go looking in this Budget for the initiatives that are going to move the economy in this direction they are sadly lacking.Then we look at what the issues are that the Government thinks it is addressing here. Mr Joyce in his speech just now said to us that infrastructure was the big deal for them. Well on this side of the House we are not going to give the Government credit for waking up at the end of 9 years in office and saying it needs to put some money into infrastructure. The deficit has grown under National's watch. It is the underfunding that has caused this be that in housing or be that in transport. That is why we are in the position we are in now. For the Government to wake from its slumber a couple of months before the election and say it is going to put some money into infrastructure rings hollow and that sits right throughout this Budget.Of course the Minister can say there is a record amount of money going into health but per person looking at the type of population we have got now this Budget once again falls short on health. Cumulatively over the last 6 years the National Government has underfunded health by more than $2 billion and every day in this Parliament we see the end result of underfunding health as this Budget does. Every day that we hear stories of people missing out on treatment of hospitals being grossly underfunded of nurses working back-to-back shifts of doctors speaking out about the fact that they cannot provide the care that they need to—that is a direct result of that underfunding.The same applies to education because once again simply saying that you have put more money in does not assure New Zealanders of a quality education. It does not assure New Zealand parents that they will not be asked again and again for more and more in school donations because bottom line per person the funding is not keeping up in education either. It is the responsibility of the Government to deliver a Budget to this House that meets the needs the basic needs of New Zealanders and this Budget is a missed opportunity in that regard.The Minister of Finance reacted to some interjections from this side of the House about some of the OECD statistics he was raising. Well here is one for the Minister if he thinks the OECD is an independent referee: it has told New Zealand that we have the worst homelessness in the world—the worst homelessness in the world. If you go looking in this Budget to try to find the real solutions to that—the building of more houses the understanding that Housing New Zealand should actually be a proper State housing provider—you will not find them.When I look at this Budget I say that it is a missed opportunity. What should have been in this Budget—what would have been in this Budget if it had been delivered by a Labour-led Government—would be a massive investment in the basics of a decent life. To start with that means housing—a roof over the head of every New Zealander and warm dry and safe housing. Billions of dollars should be spent in this Budget on the construction of affordable homes for first-home buyers. The market is broken. It is not working. It is not delivering the basic things that New Zealanders would expect of a housing market so it is time for the Government to step up with a massive State-run building programme. We call it KiwiBuild; I do not mind what the Government calls it but it should be doing it in this Budget and it is not.Yet again we see health failing to get the money that it should so the commitment from the Labour Party remains that it will over the next 4 years add $8 billion extra into the health budget. We are not going to sit around and wait until election time to decide that mental health is important; we are going to get on straight away with getting school-based health services and better community mental health services and then doing that review of the mental health system. We are going to get on straight away to having a national cancer centre and a proper strategy that means it does not matter where you live—you will get the same basic access to healthcare.In the education sector—there is another missed opportunity here to get us back to quality early childhood education to get us back to schools where parents are not being asked more and more. We have said to New Zealanders that the deal is this: if a school says it will not ask for donations it will get $150 per pupil extra from us. This should be a free education system. We do not want to see financial barriers placed in front of people achieving their potential. Every single member of this House knows that it is education that will unlock the potential of New Zealanders that will allow our young people to achieve their dreams and we must not place a single barrier in front of them. But this Budget lacks any vision when it comes to education. It is tied up in the knots of ideology of charter schools when in fact we can actually deliver a world-class education to every New Zealand child with the schools that we have in New Zealand if we fund them and resource them properly.This Budget does not speak to what I believe is one of major challenges facing New Zealand today and that is the issue of lifting children out of poverty. I heard the Minister; I saw the Minister's Family Incomes Package. Of the seven parts of the Government's Family Incomes Package let us start with parts one and two which we on this side of the House can agree with. Yes we need to lift the accommodation supplement. It is a deeply flawed instrument but right now in the middle of a housing crisis we have to acknowledge that people need more support. We cannot have people paying 50 percent of their income on rent. You are in housing stress if you are paying more than 30 percent of your income on rent and we are seeing far too many New Zealanders in that state. We need to get in there and review that accommodation supplement but right now we will accept it.We need to lift Working for Families. We actually need to go back and undo what National did when it changed the abatement rates for Working for Families and cut families out of that scheme. But yes we will accept that we need to lift Working for Families and we want to do a bit more.But the other five-sevenths of that families package is a poorly targeted tax-cuts system that delivers to members of this House $1000 a year that we do not need. I am proud to stand for a families package that says that every family earning $62000 or less will be better off under Labour's package. That is because we are taking that money that is going to high-income earners—the $400 million that is going to the top 10 percent—and we are saying that that money can be better spent: focused on delivering to those families focused on people who have children and have costs for children. I am proud of our Best Start policy because it recognises that every family when it comes to having children has increased costs.This Budget is a tired Budget from a tired Government. The National Government is out of ideas it is out of touch and on 24 September it will be out of the Government.