Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): It is certainly true that if you go looking in the Budget in the supplementary estimates and in the Imprest Supply bill you are not going to find anything that gives a vision or a picture of what the Government is going to do. So the Minister of Finance is definitely right on that score.Before I come to some of the specific issues in the supplementary estimates it is interesting that the Minister of Finance chose to use this speech to talk at some length about the Government's so-called social investment approach.Chris Bishop: This is new. You're engaged upon it. Good on you.GRANT ROBERTSON: Have you engaged on it Mr Bishop? In fact more engagement on it would be better. At its heart at its core some of the rhetoric of the social investment approach—who could disagree with the idea that we need early intervention and we need to get into problems before they start. We need to invest in people and the lives that they live to make sure that they can achieve their potential and do not end up in a situation where they are not achieving what they want where they are not contributing to society or to the economy in the way that they are capable of and where society misses out and they miss out as well. We all agree on that.Mr English says that that is what we want to do and we are going to do that by using big data and we are going to use that by looking at our programmes and measuring them properly and we will be able to see what the results are. I do not think he should start talking about recidivism too quickly as his example of that because that is not going too well.But let us pick off one where the Government actually has set a target and it thinks it has achieved it. That is the pass rate for National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 2. The target is 85 percent—85 percent of school-leavers having a pass rate for NCEA level 2. The Government is going to be able to point at the statistics and say it is nearly there or it is there. But there is a fundamental problem with this which is the fundamental problem with this approach that the Minister is putting forward. Getting NCEA level 2 is like going to the supermarket and you have got to fill up your trolley and when it is full you will have NCEA level 2. You can go around the supermarket and you can fill up your trolley completely with toothbrushes so it is totally full. You have filled your trolley; you have got NCEA level 2. But when you get home you cannot bake a cake. That is the problem with the Government's public sector targets. It is all very well to say everyone is going to get NCEA level 2 but if that is just reaching that target and not worrying about the quality of it not worrying about what people are actually learning just making it—just making it to the target—then that is not good Public Service spending.What we know in terms of NCEA level 2 just to take that as the example is that yes they are getting that level of pass rates but then the Tertiary Education Commission has a report that says that school-leavers many of them are functionally illiterate and innumerate. That is the result of focusing so much on this target rather than on the quality of what is being achieved.Then the other problem with the social investment approach is that it is all very well to track the results to see whether what is happening is working or not but what is the answer? What is the answer? Has this got anything to do with what policies will actually work? No. The Government is not interested in listening to the community about what those policies are. It thinks it knows best it thinks it knows who the support from the Government should go to and it simply sets itself up as the arbiter of what is good and what is not and what works and what does not. It is words it is rhetoric and it is artificial targets. It is not real policy development. Unfortunately for the Minister of Finance although there might be some great principles behind it the actual social investment approach itself is all smoke and mirrors. It is a mirage not unlike the Government's Budget.But returning to the question of the supplementary estimates that we are debating today as the Minister of Finance indicated this is a regular part of the Budget process and one that all Governments go through as they tidy up the accounts from the financial year as it is about to end. So what sort of a scorecard can we give the Government as it ends its financial year needing to make one or two extra payments? One of the things we can look at is what this year's Budget told us is what matters for achieving higher material living standards" and that is per capita GDP.Dr David Clark: Oh you're stealing my speech.GRANT ROBERTSON: Well no; we will just be working in unison here. Come up with something new Dr Clark.What we know from the latest figures is that gross national income per person was zero. In the term that we are talking about the supplementary estimates for today gross national income per person was zero—flat—and GDP per capita was just inches above that to 0.05 percent. So we have seen the economy grow and Mr English talked about that in his speech. We have seen the economy grow. GDP has grown up around 2.5 to 3 percent—fantastic stuff. Good work. Guess what? There are a whole lot more people in New Zealand. There are a whole lot more people in New Zealand and although it might look like the economy is growing per person it is not.That is why when we are out talking to New Zealanders and they hear these numbers about growth in the economy they think: "Why am I not experiencing that? Why is my community not experiencing that?". We go to the electorate of my colleague Meka Whaitiri up in Gisborne. You go up there and they say: "There's no jobs here." There is 10 percent unemployment up in Gisborne. The employment confidence survey came out the other day. The Gisborne and Hawke's Bay region had come down and with due respect to both of my colleagues from that area it is actually driven out of the Gisborne area. So people in that community are not saying: "Fantastic. We've got growth." They are the people who know. They are experiencing the flat per person growth.We are not going anywhere. Realistically for the Government as it looks ahead in the next 2 financial years this continues. It continues because the population grows but nothing is actually happening in terms of the Government's policy agenda to match that in terms of what we are doing in the country. So what we see and this was highlighted by the Westpac economists when they were reviewing this year's Budget is that none of the growth forecasts out into the future come as a result of a policy change or an action of the Government. They are just projections. They are just projections about the fact that more people are going to show up. They are not actually about establishing a sustainable economy—one that grows decent jobs one that provides reasons for New Zealanders both to stay here and to come back from overseas. On that scorecard the Government is struggling.The two other parts of the scorecard for this financial year that these Estimates come from where the Government is struggling are around unemployment. Grand promises were made at the election in 2014 of unemployment coming down towards 4 percent. Actually it is not. It is up over 5 percent and is forecast to go up a little bit more. There are 144000 real people without work. These are people who want to work—people who could be contributing to New Zealand in that meaningful way who are not. So the Government has failed on that part of the scorecard for the 2015-16 year. The Government also made big promises about the lift in wages—the amount that wages would go up. Well wages have not grown in that way as 46 percent of New Zealanders did not experience a wage increase in the year that we are covering under these Estimates.The share of wealth that working people have has declined over the year. It has declined over a succession of years. It means that people are working harder but they are not seeing the return on that and today did that not hit home with Statistics New Zealand releasing the latest wealth data which says that the top 10 percent of New Zealand earners have 60 percent of the wealth? It is getting worse. It was about 55 percent or slightly under that when National took office and now it has gone up to 60 percent. The bottom 40 percent hold 3 percent of the wealth.I am proud that when Labour was last in Government we stopped inequality growing and we started to reduce it through programmes like Working for Families interest-free student loans 20 hours' free early childhood education—good things that were the building blocks—Hon Bill English: Didn't help with inequality.GRANT ROBERTSON: You kept every one of them. You kept every single one of them. This is the Minister of Finance who likes to criticise the last Labour Government. He did not ditch a single one of those promises. He has ridden off the back of Michael Cullen's success as a Minister of Finance and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Now there is no Christchurch rebuild to rely on Bill. It is all about population growth and none of it is about a Government that actually has a plan for a sustainable economy.Inequality is growing under this Government. Fairness is going out the window. The Kiwi concept of a fair go—that wherever you were born you could get ahead and you could succeed—has gone under this Government. Inequality grows because this Government is on the side of the very very few at the top; not most New Zealanders who are working hard. The supplementary estimates here do nothing to change the view on this side of the House of what the priorities of this Government should be. There is not a single reference in them to additional initiatives for housing and not a single reference in them for how they are really going to lift productivity. All it is is a record of the Government's failure to work things out in Christchurch and the massive gaps in our health expenditure. That is actually what the Estimates are about.This is another representation of a failed Government that works only for the very few at the top and not for most New Zealanders."