Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Mr Chair thank you. I appreciate getting the call on this. I wish to direct the attention of the committee to page 123 of the reports of the select committees—Michael Wood: I don't think they know where that is.Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: I don't think they do know where it is or if they've actually read it. They can't have read it because they have clearly not taken on board this critical sentence: The BEFU states that the fiscal outlook is 'strong' over its forecast period." The fiscal outlook is strong—remember that word "strong". In terms of fiscal outlook people say "What's this word 'fiscal'? What does it mean?" Roughly it talks about the cash flow of the Government. Roughly it talks about the tax revenue of the Government—what's coming in. And we know if you just read a little bit further that there'll be $9.9 billion growth in source deductions—that's deductions from wages and salaries. There's going to be $5.7 billion extra in GST revenue there's going to be $3.5 billion extra in corporate tax. But we haven't changed the tax rates. Where that is coming from is from growth in the economy. It is from the salary and wages of New Zealanders going up. It is from turnover in goods and services going up. That is why GST goes up. It is from business profits going up. That is why we are getting those increases in tax revenue—because this is a strong and growing economy with GDP forecast to grow at 3 percent over the forecast period. So the doom and gloom coming from the negative Opposition benches is just a put-on. When you read what's actually in the reports we are doing well we are tending this economy well we are in a strong financial position. Now the previous speaker Jacqui Dean raised the point that this money doesn't come out of nowhere. It is in fact taxpayers' money. I put it that in fact on this side of the House we are using that money as responsibly as we can. We are doing our best to be prudent and to use the money that comes to us from taxpayers to grow the economy and to strengthen New Zealand. So what are we doing? Well amongst other things we are paying down debt and in fact over time we will get debt reduced to 20 percent of GDP. Now the Opposition spokesperson for finance has some quibble about nominal debt but any competent finance spokesperson would know that the standard figure that we use for measuring Government debt is not nominal debt but debt as a percentage of GDP. It is an extraordinary thing for her to do to focus on nominal debt. Surely she should focus on the standard figure that standard economists use—that is debt as a percentage of GDP and we will have it paid down to 20 percent of GDP. Now that is low by international standards it is low by standards in the OECD and we've had calls coming into us—people saying "You should borrow more." But we are a responsible Government. We know that New Zealand is a small country that we are exposed to more risks than larger countries and larger economies are that we must be prudent to ensure that as happened the last time when a financial crisis hit we could actually withstand it. And it is thanks to the prudence of Michael Cullen that we were able to withstand the global financial crisis.And let's talk about some of the other sorts of risks that we can face. If you look at page 125 of this report you'll see that this Government has had the prudence to set aside money to deal with Mycoplasma bovis sensibly carefully devoting resources to it. That's exactly the kind of prudent management we need to engage in with taxpayers' money. You will see that we have made provisions for pay increases for nurses and teachers because for nine long years of the National Government they were starved. Now we won't be able to fix that up in one hit but this Government is making prudent accommodations—gardening the economy to ensure that we can pay our critical workers a decent wage. We are committed to doing that.So what you see on this side of the House is a Government that is taking its responsibility seriously a Government that cares about all New Zealanders a Government that is devoting its resources to investigating some of the critical issues like child poverty devoting money to try to fix some of those problems. We will not talk this down in negative doom and gloom. We look at our strong financial position and we believe we can do it."