English Bill: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10490. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): It is good to hear occasionally from Stuart Nash who I think is the remaining member of the Labour right wing—well he says he is when he is in Napier; he probably says something different down here. I think that discussion reflects the wishful thinking of the Labour Opposition. Those members wished when they were reviewing the finances here that they could say the National-led Government is a nasty cutting uncaring Government. They wished that they could say the regions are struggling and getting nowhere. They are saying it and they wish it was the case but I detected even from that remaining member of the Labour right wing—with due respect to Trevor Mallard who is starting to look like he is a member of the Labour right wing although he did not used to be. Relatively speaking without moving anywhere he is starting to look really quite conservative.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!Hon BILL ENGLISH: Now I have lost my train of thought. But none of those things are correct because very little of what the member for Napier said—in fact none of it—was correct. Although some of the regions are under some pressure—I can think of Southland my own spiritual home where GDP in the year to March 2015 dropped by 10 percent because of the slowdown in dairy conversions and the drop in the dairy prices—most regions are actually doing pretty well because of the increasing diversification of the New Zealand economy.In this year to 2015 the Government invested substantially more amounts of money into the kind of innovation and research that does not replace the entrepreneurialism of our companies but supports it which I think is one of the differences between the Government and the Opposition parties. The fundamental driver of the kind of growth that we would like to see is people taking risks with their own money and succeeding because of their skills and reinvesting the profits that arise from that success whereas the Opposition parties look through this kind of document and what they want to see is politicians—whom they regard as smarter than the people who run our businesses—making decisions in detail about where the economy should go what risks should be taken and what risks should not be taken.The kind of investment that the Government has made through here in innovation and research and development does not always show a direct flow through to profitability but it has certainly created an environment where—building on work done by the previous Labour Government to be fair—New Zealand businesses are now much more orientated towards spending a bit of money on research and development enhancing their productivity and in the long run therefore producing more jobs.There have been some issues raised—actually there is another member Mr Phil Twyfordwho is starting to look like the right wing of the Labour Party although he entered it on the left because Damien O’Connor needs some company. By “right wing” I just mean vaguely logical. That is all I mean—vaguely logical. Vaguely logical.Phil Twyford: Is this you being nice Bill?Hon BILL ENGLISH: It is good to see that he is paying some attention to that.Some questions have been raised about per capita income. That is a legitimate measure of progress and like other measures of the economy it fluctuates. More recently because of the surge in migration which is at a many-decades high and a relatively slower-growing national income largely influenced by the drop in dairy prices the per capita measure has dropped back a bit. I do not think there is any doubt about that. Of course as migration flattens off and comes back—which it certainly will; it is just a matter of when that happens—and dairy prices pick up again all other things being equal per capita incomes will tend to rise. Across the developed world of low growth low inflation and low interest rates it is a significant challenge to have consistently increasing per capita incomes but the outlook for New Zealand in that respect is pretty positive.