English Bill: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: General Debate[Sitting date: 22 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5200. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. There is no doubt that the last few weeks have been a test of whether the Labour Party has any confidence in the New Zealand economy and in New Zealanders and no one will be surprised to know that it has failed that test. It cannot be better summed up than in its contradictory attitudes to the dairy industry. We have been lectured for years that New Zealand is too dependent on the dairy industry because it has been so successful. Now we are finding out that if there is one thing that is worse apparently in the Labour Party’s world than a successful dairy industry it is an unsuccessful one. So it was wrong when the prices were too high and now it is wrong when the prices are too low. That I think sums up the shallowness of particularly the Opposition finance spokesman Grant Robertson which is such that when the dairy industry is going well that is bad and when the dairy industry is going badly that is bad.Actually if you want diversification then—if you want to be a bit cynical about it—there is no doubt that low prices in one industry encourage people to go and invest in another one. That is how diversification actually happens in an open capitalist economy. But of course I made the mistake of thinking the Labour Party believes in an open capitalist economy but clearly it does not. If we were to follow the advice of the Labour Party we would open the paper and see that the Global Dairy Trade milk powder auction price was down and we would order up another industry—one that had high prices this week instead of low prices. Well you might be able to do that in a student union which is where he learnt his economics but actually in the global open economy you cannot do that.We have confidence in the New Zealand economy the dairy industry and New Zealanders’ resilience. Yes dairy prices are low. That will have an impact on the broader economy and on the Government’s revenue but not quite as big an impact as most people might assume simply because in the broader economy the New Zealand dairy industry is significant—it has been successful—but it is less than 6 percent of the total output of the New Zealand economy. In any case it is a resilient industry. It has been through downturns before. It has been through some very high prices of course too which most farmers handled sensibly by reducing debt and improving the quality of the operation of their farms. That is how most New Zealanders understand it. They know that there are economic cycles. It is just the Labour Party that does not understand that.So we are on track for sustainable moderate growth. The balanced picture of the New Zealand economy will tell you that yes the dairy industry is under pressure but others are not under pressure. In fact others are quite successful particularly in light of the fact that the automatic stabilisers that go with lower commodity prices are operating—they are operating. The New Zealand dollar was NZ88c against the United States dollar just 3 or 4 months ago. Today it is NZ65c and that means that exporters who are selling in United States dollars which most of them do are getting significantly bigger New Zealand dollar margins on their products and that will encourage investment. That is a much stronger signal for diversification for growth and for more employment than anything that the Labour Opposition finance spokesman might cook up in his office.So alongside those price signals the Government is pursuing a programme under the excellent leadership of the Hon Steven Joyce that is working with a whole range of industries more of which are becoming more successful as the months go by and as they start to see the pay-off from Government investment in research and development Government support and investment in their skills pipelines and the Government’s assistance for them in overseas markets. So we are seeing a range of industries growing reasonably strongly and no doubt the Minister will want to talk about that.The other features of the economy that are underpinning growth are for instance strong migration. I know that is unpopular in the Labour Party. The Labour Party is the party that supports—