Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you very much. It was interesting to hear from the previous speaker Duncan Webb that this Government had turned the ship of State around; unfortunately it's turned it in the wrong direction—very much in the wrong direction. We've seen the transition that this Government talks about—the great transition that we're going through. Unfortunately it's turning into being a transition from a wealthy prosperous and dynamic economy to one that has fallen off the pace from rich to poor. So the story that we've seen in the last year—when we came into Government Treasury was predicting just before the election in its pre-election special that we'd be growing at nearly 4 percent in 2018; and what did it turn out? It was closer to 2 percent a very substantial drop in the growth of our economy. How does that translate to people's lives? Well it creates fewer opportunities for New Zealanders to get ahead to be able to look after themselves and their family to be able to engage in productive and satisfying work and have a range of opportunities and it weakens our ability to provide world-class public services as well if our economy continues to slow down. So that's the result of the economic policies that this Government has carried out.Now we've also seen today that our interest rate level has been cut to 1.5 percent—the lowest in a very long time and at extremely low levels that you would normally associate with a serious recession; and how do we explain that? Well the Reserve Bank Governor has talked about ongoing low business sentiment tight profit margins and competition for resources—those have been some of the reasons. So the Government will spend all of their time saying: Oh oh it's not our fault; it's the rest of the world—that's the reason why New Zealand's growth has dropped and why we have to have these really low interest rates." Well that's only very much part of the story. They don't take any responsibility for their own actions and the actions of this Government in slowing down the economy. Yes there is some slow-down internationally but not universally so. Certainly the United States is going gangbusters it's grown over 3 percent and it's rising; the Australians haven't reduced their interest rates because they see their economy stabilising; China of course is still growing at over 6 percent. The other thing that's not mentioned quite so often is that New Zealand's terms of trade the prices that we're getting for our exports are at incredibly high levels in terms of the history of this country. So this is a time when the New Zealand economy should be booming and going gangbusters but instead we're slowing and that is because of all the additional costs that this Government has added and because of the gross uncertainty that it has brought into the economy over the past 18 months—the most dramatic of course has been 18 months of indecision around the capital gains tax. So why on earth would anybody in the last 18 months have made a major investment in their business? Remember that it's investment that leads to jobs and growth and opportunity—why would anybody make a major investment if they didn't know whether they'd have to pay a capital gains tax of 33 percent on that investment? That uncertainty kept hands in pockets for a long period of time and I'm just very grateful that the Government decided to backtrack on that original policy; and so at least we have removed that one element of uncertainty. But there is so much more: when you look at industrial relations when you look at overseas investment and when you look at all the additional costs that they've added into the housing sector. The gross manner in which they made the decision for the oil and gas which has left so many other industries wondering whether they'll be next to be sacrificed for preparations for the Prime Minister's next major global international conference where she wants to virtue signal around the world without doing any analysis about the cost of those decisions.Treasury of course which we're talking about here in the financial review is responsible for our economic policy. As I said earlier in this debate there is no discernible clear economic policy that's been outlined by the Government. We remember in August last year the Prime Minister stood up in front of a business crowd and announced her business partnership agenda which was going to be a clear articulation of the economic policy of this Government. She listed a whole bunch of things. There were three main things one of which was the capital gains tax which has subsequently been abandoned and the Provincial Growth Fund which has now lost a lot of credibility given the way that it's been handled by its Minister Shane Jones. She announced all that stuff and then we never heard of it again—never heard of it again. So it's been announced it was the Prime Minister's major announcement in August last year—never referred to again. So it's little wonder there's so much confusion."