Cunliffe David: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Cunliffe David: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:12673] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 It has been an interesting time in New Zealand politics. We are 18 months through this Government’s term in office and New Zealanders are entitled to know what it is about. As Labour MPs have been going out around the community lately knocking on doors and visiting businesses the message they have been getting from one end of the country to the other has been exactly the same: National has no plan for this economy. National has no plan to protect Kiwi jobs no plan to lift incomes and no plan to make New Zealand a fairer or better place. It is 18 months into its term and it has no plan and that was after 9 long years in Opposition waiting for its chance. 
Do members know what Mr Key said in a 2008 speech? He promised there would be a fresh start for New Zealanders. He was going to be unrelenting in his quest to lift our economic growth rate and wages—how wonderful! New Zealanders to be fair thought they would give him a chance. Labour had had three terms so they thought they would give the friendly Mr Key a chance to prove what he was made of and they gave him a chance. They gave this Government a chance and from one end of New Zealand to the other they are asking the same question. They are asking why they gave National a chance because they have nothing to show for it. New Zealand communities are suffering. They suffered through the recession they are yet to feel a recovery and they are asking what this Government’s idea is for lifting wages and protecting jobs. 
Here is the pattern: National kicks the tyres on a daft idea that suits its mates but is not good for ordinary New Zealanders and when Kiwis wake up to that it back-pedals. It is not just the cycleway that the Government back-pedalled on; it back-pedalled on mining national parks. Now it is attacking workers’ rights and if we wait a bit longer it will back-pedal on that because working New Zealanders will rise up and say no they are not having that. The rolling maul of daft ideas has gone from bad to worse. Government members have rolled over themselves. Here is the list starting with the Job Summit. 
The Council of Trade Unions was more than fair to the Government. The Council of Trade Unions went along in good faith to the Job Summit. The union movement fronted up and said this Government had come in and said it wanted to help with jobs so it took the Government at its word. Not only was it the case that all that the Council of Trade Unions got was a cycleway to nowhere—which the Minister of Finance had said he would not fund this year the next year or the year after but was forced to—which has created only 70 jobs in the year since it received funding but also this week the head of the Council of Trade Unions wrote to the Prime Minister and said any dialogue was off because the Prime Minister had broken his word to protect jobs. The Council of Trade Unions said the Prime Minister was attacking jobs wage rates and working conditions and his plan to fire at will for 90 days and to force low-income workers to sell off their holidays is a giant step change backwards. The Council of Trade Unions which has been more than fair to this Government said it has had enough. 
If we are to be fair to this Government then it is fair to take the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister at their word. The Government says the New Zealand economy needs to be rebalanced it says there has been no growth in the tradables sector for a few years and it says we are too much in debt to foreign interests. OK let us take it at its word and ask the fair question that New Zealanders are asking: well what would a real plan to address those problems look like? We can ask what a coherent plan to address those problems would look like. Well if we are not exporting enough we need to export more. What do exporters say their problems are? Their No. 1 problem is the exchange rate. How do we solve that? We solve it through monetary policy reform. Who has had the real ideas? It is Labour. Where is the Government? It has its head in the sand pretending that it has “the best monetary policy in the whole world”. But the rest of the world has moved away from the archaic framework that that Government still defends. National members are the last of the new right—the last conservatives who are still standing. The rest of the world learnt from the global financial crisis but Bill English did not. 
The second thing to ask if we believe that our tradables sector is suffering and we need to lift exports is what we should do. Presumably we should open the markets—that is bipartisan—and then we should help New Zealand businesses to get into them. The last thing we should do is to cut Vote Economic Development and we will get on to that matter in this debate. We should work in partnership with New Zealand business boosting our Kiwi expat programme boosting our gateway programme partnering with Kiwi exporters providing export credit finance and getting into foreign markets. But this Government is doing less and less of that as the ideology of the new right for shrinking the size of the Government prevails. Government members are turning less and less into inventors more and more away from ideas and more and more towards a failed ideology which is all that they have to fall back on. 
We can take the Government’s second analysis of the problem which is that we do not have enough capital. It is right on that; we do not have enough capital. The effects of that are apparent everywhere. In the weekend papers Rod Oram was absolutely spot on. The failure of nerve means that we cannot export. The  
New Zealand Herald  
had the headline “The deal drought”. Why is it that Kiwi companies cannot succeed? It is because they cannot get capital. Banks are not lending to farmers. When Federated Farmers beat a path to Labour’s door we know that we have a problem. Federated Farmers have come to us to complain about the Government for goodness’ sake! They complained that farmers cannot get capital from the banking system because these guys in the Government are so ideological that their only answer to the need to raise capital is to sell off the remaining assets that we have. 
This Government thinks we should sell off our remaining assets. It does not matter whether those assets are the Crafar farms Synlait—a promising dairy company that is now 51 percent owned by China—or NZ Farming Systems Uruguay. I wonder whether any Ministers in this Government have just bought shares in that company that they might not have disclosed. I wonder whether any Ministers have capitalised on the difficulties that face NZ Farming Systems Uruguay and have just geared up their own pocketbooks at the expense of an emerging New Zealand exporter because I hear that they have. Why are we are selling NZ Farming Systems Uruguay to a foreign multinational? It is because we cannot fund it for ourselves. 
I ask how we will provide Kiwi jobs and a First World income when there is no plan to provide the capital the skills and the technology that New Zealand businesses need in order to thrive. It is not very complicated. It is not very complicated to get a real plan for jobs that systematically attacks the constraints in our economy. Capital skills and technology mean jobs growth and exports and that is what this Government is not providing leadership on. What do we have? We have a cycleway to nowhere mining on conservation land and an attack on the rights of workers. That is no substitute for a real plan for jobs and growth.