Yang Jian: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeYang Jian: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 01 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11572. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr JIAN YANG (National): This is a Budget with confidence. This is a Budget with a strong sense of responsibility. It is a Budget with confidence simply because New Zealand is one of the fastest-growing economies in the OECD—a top performer. Let us look at the growth rates in the past few years since 2008 when we experienced the global financial crisis. In 2009 after the financial crisis we did experience a decline of 2 percent but since then the economy has been growing. In 2010 we had a growth rate of 1.7 percent in the following year—2011—we had a growth rate of 2 percent and in 2012 we had a growth rate of 3 percent.This is a sharp contrast with some other OECD economies. For example in the United Kingdom the growth rate was only 0.3 percent in the European eurozone it was minus 0.9 percent in Japan it was 0.4 percent in Canada it was 1.1 percent and in the USA it was 1.6 percent. So our growth rate has been much better than many other OECD countries and for the forecast in the next 4 years we are predicting about 2.8 percent on average. This is our economy. That is why we feel confident that we will be able to continue to do well.This is also a Budget with a strong sense of responsibility simply because although we believe that we are doing well we want to continue to manage our finance responsibly. That is why we have returned to surplus but we are going to continue to increase our surplus and we will pay our debt to make sure that our debt will continue to decline in the coming years. We will spend money where we think we need to spend it.Health is one area we believe is very important to our public services. Each year since 2008 we have increased our spending in health—about $500 million each year. For that reason we are able to have today over 6000 more doctors and nurses and also 99 percent of under-13s are now able to have access to free doctors every day day and night. This is a very very outstanding public system. Based on what we have achieved and also a very high record of spending this year we have another $2.2 billion for health which will take our total health spending for next year to $16.1 billion which is another record. This is what we are trying to do to further improve our public services.Education is another area where we have been trying to invest more. We have a hard-working Minister of Education a very strong leadership and we have achieved a lot. Look at this: 96.6 percent of preschool children are now going to early childhood education which has increased from 93.6 percent in 2008 and 84.4 percent of 18-year-olds are now achieving National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2 which again is a substantial increase from 68 percent in 2008. We have record spending of $11 billion for education. In addition to that we are going to spend $1.44 billion more for education. We are going to build nine new schools—480 new classrooms.To finish my speech I will quote an OECD comment in 2015 that says: “Inflation and inflation expectations are well anchored … Strong fiscal monetary policy frameworks and a healthy financial sector have yielded macroeconomic stability underpinning growth. Employment is high … business investment is robust and households and firms are optimistic.” This comment still applies. Thanks.