Brown Peter: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Brown Peter: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:623;Page:18190] 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I move  
That all the words after “this House has no confidence” be omitted and substituted with the following words: “in the Labour-led Government because it continues to promote policies which keep New Zealanders at the lowest level of per capita earnings in the OECD which fail to promote export growth and fail to meet the targets set out in the Labour Party’s 2002 election manifesto and because it continues to offer no competitive future for the people of New Zealand especially the youth of New Zealand. 
 I shall concentrate most of my speech on what the Government did not say and did not address. First although the Prime Minister indicated that a good deal more money than is allocated at present would go into health I say it will not be enough to keep pace with the health demands of this country. In the long term it will not be enough to keep pace with a population that is ageing with the modern technology that is coming on board and with the modern drugs that this country needs now. There needs to be a significant increase in the health budget. Even if the sum of money that is being proposed which I think will be about 6 percent of GDP is added to with private health insurance the amount will still be less than 8 percent of GDP. Additionally the Government should be targeting the bureaucracy in the health system and skimming that back somewhat. What did the Prime Minister say? She made out that everything is nice and rosy. I can say to the honourable members on the Government benches that things are far from rosy when it comes to health expenditure. If we do not do something now we will need to do a good deal more in the future. 
From listening to the Prime Minister I thought she made it sound as though many people who at an earlier time could not get a job are now employed and as before everything is rosy. That again is far from the truth. The minimum wage in this country is far too low. 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: We have increased it by 39 percent in 5 years. It’s quite good. 
PETER BROWN 
: The Minister tells us that there has been an increase. I can say to members that at $9—or at $9.50 an hour is it; it went up just at Christmas time—the minimum wage is not enough. Electricity prices in the last 2 years have gone up by 40 percent. Petrol has gone up by goodness knows what percentage and will go up even more come April or shortly after April. National says that Australians earn a lot more than New Zealanders but National would not do anything about the minimum wage. It did not support the minimum wage going up. National would not support penal rates for people who work on a statutory holiday and it did not support the provision for 4 weeks’ annual holiday. National does support that now but it did not at the time of the legislation going through the House. I say that this Government has lost sight of its core support base—that is the working people of New Zealand. By “working people” I mean low-paid employees the people who work with their hands and hearts and who are the backbone of this country. I know that my good colleague from United Future will correct me if I do not acknowledge this but I am also talking about employers in small businesses as being working people. 
The Prime Minister did not say anything about the energy crisis we face in this country. We are desperately in need of more power coming on board on a regular basis. We are getting it bit by bit but it is not enough. Electricity should be available to all who need it at the flick of a switch and we should be generating it from all forms of fuel. By that I mean hydro gas wind and solar generation the use of fuel-cell technology and of course generation from coal. This country sits on billions of tonnes of coal yet coal generates only something like 5 or 6 percent of our electricity. We sit on billions of tonnes and export millions of tonnes of coal but we will not use coal to generate electricity for our own well-being. I know there are problems with the environment in relation to coal but if it is being used elsewhere in the world while we are waiting for the new technology to come on board then we should be using it here to a better degree than we are at the moment. 
An energy policy should guarantee security of supply. The Electricity Commission goes some way towards ensuring that. An energy policy should encourage further investment in the electricity industry in order to produce more and more electricity on an annual basis. The Government has shown little initiative—I have to give it credit for showing a little initiative—along those lines but it is not enough to ensure that we will have further investment in the industry in any meaningful way. We should ensure that electricity is produced and supplied at a fair and reasonable price. The people of this country need to have a decent sound energy policy. We have been mucking around for far too many years now and as I stated earlier we have seen 40 percent price hikes over the last 2 years. That figure is taken across the country; in some areas it is a good deal higher that that. 
The Prime Minister did not mention in any meaningful way the problems we face with regard to our roading. She touched on the subject of infrastructure expenditure but she did not actually get to the core of the problem. She stated that land transport has been underfunded for years and that is about as far as she really got in addressing the problem. Her statement is true. Government after Government has failed to inject the right amount of capital into land transport and particularly into public transport and roading. Land transport over recent history—and I am going back several years now; far more than I can remember—has been funded under a “pay as you go” – type regime. New Zealand First says that that is not good enough. Nobody would run a business like that. Roading in this country is valued at about $27 or $28 billion and nobody would run a business with that sort of asset on a “pay as you go” basis. We should be borrowing in order to pay for future infrastructure development in areas like roading and those sorts of things. The expenditure is intergenerational. I see that the Hon Harry Duynhoven—the man who should be Minister of Transport—is sort of nodding his head. He knows that the economic gains to be made from having a properly structured roading network right throughout the country would be huge. We know from the Allen report that if we borrowed the money injected it and got on with doing the job not only would we repay the money and the interest on it but we would gain economically very very rapidly. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: So where are we going to get all the workers from to do that? 
PETER BROWN 
: The honourable member makes a good point; it is a point that must be considered. We need people who are able to do that work. Right now we cannot get more skilled people than we already have so we will probably—and this is a sad testimony on previous policies—have to bring in people as immigrants to work as prison officers and construction workers. New Zealand First has always said that if we need people we should bring them in. We have also always said that if we do not need people we do not want them to be here. They should come here for a job. The number of people who are skilled to drive machinery on roading projects is probably getting to a low ebb but—[ 
Interruption 
] I cannot answer both members at the same time so maybe they should talk to me privately and I will give them all the answers. 
One further problem we have is that we are now getting rid of the frigate  
Canterbury 
 which is a training vessel for officers in the Navy. 
Is there to be a replacement for the role of that frigate? I would like to know the answer to that.