Brownlee Gerry: Budget Debate 
Brownlee Gerry: Budget Debate 
[Volume:608;Page:6005] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (NZ National—Ilam) 
: 
 When there is a Budget that says nothing and does nothing we get a Minister who says little and certainly does nothing about standing up to defend it. That is what we have just heard from the Hon Judith Tizard one of the junior Ministers of this Labour Government. When I say one of the junior Ministers I say that expressly because there are very few people on the Government side of the House who are not junior Ministers. Labour has 52 members of Parliament and only five of them are genuine back-benchers. That is how Helen Clark clings to power; that is how she manages to stay as the queen bee in the Labour Party. She simply gives everyone in her caucus a bit of a job that gives them a little extra status and a lot more salary. That is Labour’s recipe for staying in Government. I tell members that it will not work for long because the cracks will soon show in a caucus that is traditionally as factionalised as the Labour caucus. 
I notice the new Minister the Hon. David Cunliffe sitting across on the Government side of the House. 
Brian Connell 
: Where is he? 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: He has been here for 3 years. I would like to congratulate him on his appointment but something inside me will not let that happen. When ministerial appointments are given out like confetti as Helen Clark gives them out then their value and their contribution to New Zealand are significantly downplayed. 
Hon Roger Sowry 
: At least it wasn’t on merit. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: My colleague makes a very good point. At least the Prime Minister was bold enough to say that in appointing people to the ministry she was not doing it on a merit basis. 
That was a very very strong leadership statement from Helen Clark a leader who in the last 24 hours has gone into hiding. She is a leader who has just disappeared off the radar screen in the last 24 hours. Every day we receive Ministers’ diaries so we know where they are and what they are doing. Quite a few of them—four or five maybe—are doing good hard work for New Zealand each day. 
Simon Power 
: Name one. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: I ask the member not to challenge me. The Prime Minister has just disappeared today. I am worried that a sort of Bermuda triangle effect is starting to appear in the Beehive. We know that earlier in the day another Minister was on his way to the House to answer questions and he disappeared as well. At 10 past 2 he was on his way to the House and by 3 o’clock he had gone; he had disappeared. That all points to a Government that came into the House last week touting a Budget with a massive surplus of some $6 billion if the superannuation contribution is thrown in—taxed out of the pockets of hard-working New Zealanders—told everybody how good it was and then as soon as the going got tough disappeared. 
As soon as the going gets tough Helen Clark gets going. She has disappeared and is unable to answer the questions about why the US trade secretary Bob Zoellick has said today that there are a few problems in the way of New Zealand getting a free-trade agreement with the United States. We know that the big problem is Helen Clark. We know that her attitude to the United States and to the Western World is the problem. New Zealanders will continue to pay dearly for this country’s inability—or more importantly the Labour Party’s inability—to secure a free-trade agreement with the United States. 
New Zealanders standing here today man woman and child are when measured by our per capita wealth at least $200 a week worse off than our counterparts across the Tasman in Australia. That is an extraordinary figure. 
Brian Connell 
: How much? 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: At least $200 a week. In a city like the one I live in that is a couple of hundred million dollars a week that New Zealanders are worse off by than the Australians are. That is why we have trouble funding everything we want to in education and in the health services. It is why we cannot get a single road built in the South Island by this Government for the next 10 years and it is also why elderly New Zealanders have to huddle in those sorts of big sack blankets they buy from the Warehouse in order to try to stay warm this winter during the power crisis. People cannot even have a warm shower and what is worse they cannot even have a quiet tipple with a bit of sherry without the Government having taxed the “zeets” out of that as well. 
Why have we had a bland document like this Budget last week touting how wonderful everything is suggesting that New Zealand is in great shape and that the Government is very capable and can do whatever it wants when outside the Budget process we have had two major tax announcements on either side of the Budget? First there was the alcohol tax and then earlier this week the announcement of the $200 million so-called reserve capacity electricity tax. New Zealand is being asked to fork out $200 million a year so that we can have some reserve generating capacity for electric power over and above the ordinary capacity. 
I have a simple question because as many people will tell the House I am a fairly simple fellow. New Zealand needs 150 megawatts of new electricity generation every year just to keep up with increasing activity in our economy—increasing population and more activity that requires electrical energy by way of new technologies and other such matters. We need about another 150 megawatts a year for that. The Minister came into the House on the day that he announced this big tax and said that under existing conditions and pricing structures and under the whole regime that we have in place at the moment the generating companies are about to invest in 850 megawatts of new generation that will be available to us by 2005. But he then said he would still have to tax us $200 million to have a bit of extra capacity. The question is this: where does the ordinary increase in electricity generation that he talked about stop and the new stuff start? 
I would have thought that if we have electricity generation capacity the best thing to do would be to run the lot—reasonably where we can—and to produce the greatest amount of electricity in order to drive the price down. Yet this Minister has said no we are to have an upward price path for electricity and the Government will ensure that by taxing us to make it happen. When that extra capacity is needed the Government will charge us even higher prices. That was in the Minister’s press release and in all his public relations stuff around that release. That is no solution at all. I wonder whether the strange logic that says one can make New Zealanders more secure by taxing them harder came from the new “Ministry for Innovative Thinking” headed by the Hon David Cunliffe. At the moment the Minister shows no innovation in the energy policy. 
The most irritating thing is that we now have Helen Clark when she is available—and conscious of what she is doing—going to various radio stations and small newspapers around the countryside and saying the Government did know that there would be difficulty this year because of the dry conditions but it did not like to frighten the horses too early. Would it not have been so much better if the Government had acknowledged last January when it was plain and clear that we would have a bad winter that we should start to save a little electricity at that stage? It is much easier for older people particularly those living on their own to save electricity during the long summer nights when there is a lot more warmth. No we have a mean-minded Prime Minister who simply said the Government would just hang people out there and when things became really tough it would put the boot in and tax people so as to make them pay more and as well as the tax it would then tell them to turn the electricity off anyway. 
This Government does not have any idea of how to progress things for this country. Its members previously spent all their years in Opposition mired in the philosophies of the 1970s because Labour was trying to escape the 1980s. Then having sort of put in place one or two very minor things in the last couple of years the Government has suddenly started to feel the wheels fall off the bus. When the Government reached its most desperate position what did it do? It promoted David Cunliffe. That is the worst thing that could have happened to this country.