Collins JudithHon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Revenue): Thanks for the opportunity to speak to the Prime Minister's excellent statement to Parliament. Can I say how lovely it is that the Labour Party and New Zealand First love me now. I never knew they loved me and I understand that after they have finished asking John Tamihere to re-join Labour they are going to ask me to join Labour. Despite having been brought up Labour I was never silly enough to actually join it. I think they are going to ask me to because they now love me. They love me because they are always wanting to talk about the new numbers announced by the Prime Minister on police—the police numbers. Yes it is true; I worked for 6 months negotiating and all these sorts of things that you do in getting it right and I am very happy to see this followed through by the Hon Paula Bennett as Minister of Police and Deputy Prime Minister.Of course I am also interested to see that Mr Greg O'Connor wants to stand against my good friend Peter Dunne in Ōhāriu in some sort of very dirty deal with the Greens. Just because I am wearing my lovely green jacket today does not mean to say I have come over to the Greens. But anyway I thought that was interesting because I well remember Mr Greg O'Connor when I was Minister of Police just before Christmas some time saying to me that burglaries do not matter. I do not know if that is the new Labour Party official view but I recall him telling me that as I had made some very public statements about burglaries—Tim Macindoe: Why did he say that?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: —and the police actually attending them and therefore hopefully solving them. It is very hard to solve burglaries Mr Macindoe if you do not attend or even get the evidence. Mr O'Connor told me that. So I am really looking forward to the Hon Peter Dunne asking some questions around that because I think that is something that the public needs to know. Do burglaries matter or not? Well actually they do. I do not believe for a moment that Stuart Nash the Labour spokesman on police thinks that burglaries do not matter because I think he believes that they do.Sue Moroney: Under a cash-strap. You know when they're cash-strapped by the Government. Hon JUDITH COLLINS: In fact apparently they do not matter. So I think Ms Moroney thinks they do not matter but I certainly think they do. Anyway I want to talk about some of my portfolios and some of the stuff we are going to do this year so let us look at tax. I think tax is a very interesting field and I also understand that I got a lot of sympathy for having the revenue portfolio. Well I love revenue. I love tax. I am one of the few people who actually get excited about tax policy and the implementation of it.Fletcher Tabuteau: You and Mr Bayly.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Me and Mr Bayly? Well of course. Mr Bayly is a very sensible person. Actually tax is so important because it pays for all the money that we get to dish out—Denis O'Rourke: Not all of it.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: —and hand out. It is what is paid other than of course the levies on petrol. What it really does is it actually means that we can give additional income support to people who need that support. We can pay for education. We can pay for hospitals. If the tax system does not work well then we will not be able to do that. So it is really important that it does. In the tax area we are actually going to deal with some loopholes and some of the actions that have been around some of the multinational companies and also some New Zealand - based companies where some actions would be I think very much classed as tax avoidance but are not strictly illegal at the moment but I hope soon will be. I will make some announcements about that very soon.Could I also talk a little bit about energy and resources. This is a great area. Petroleum is fantastic—and I just want the Greens to all get up on their hind legs and tell me that it is not. But most of us are wearing it by the way—well women are anyway mostly. That is because all of the synthetic fabrics that we wear come out of oil—petroleum. Oil has been our No. 1 export to Australia for about 20 years; it even surpassed people I have to say. These days it still is and people in New Zealand do not know that. We have 17 recognised oilfields and we are using one. The oil prices have been rising so there are going to be some more announcements about opportunities there as well.Before people get too upset that this is all happening these dreadful things I suggest that they not be hypocritical about these issues because actually most of us use oil products every day. In fact most of us use them most of the time.Denis O'Rourke: So what?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well plastic for instance. Let us have a look at some of the materials that are made out of it: polyester acrylic nylon rayon acetate and spandex—so all you men in your Lycra who insist on biking on your bikes in front of me driving my vehicle you are wearing oil—latex Orlon Kevlar. This is just some of them. There are also all sorts of other things made out of them like your sunglasses your reading glasses my contact lenses—all these things are made out of—guess what—oil. So before people get all worried about various things around oil and synthetic products—actually that is how we live these days. Our mobile phones—made out of oil.So I actually think we need to be very sensible about the opportunities available in New Zealand. We are an extremely wealthy country when it comes to our resources and our energy. I mean look at energy: 84 percent of our energy that we use in terms of our electricity is from renewables. We are a very unusual and very lucky country. That has been brought about by the hydro dams of the 1960s and 1970s the big projects. That is something that you would not be able to do today by the way under the current Resource Management Act and I am very much in favour of the reforms that the Hon Nick Smith wants to put through.And actually when you look at roading for instance roading is an area where we are very much committed to doing better particularly around the use of the road-user charges and around the National Land Transport Fund and I am really pleased that we have got more action happening there as well. Roading is one of the big issues of my electorate and the big issue is really around the Southern Motorway and the lack of resilience around that. So I am really pleased that we got $282 million a couple of Budgets back to get that widened and it is already ongoing. Hopefully one side of it will be opened up this year.But when we look as well at the ethnic communities another of my portfolios—very important to us. Labour does not care about ethnic communities. It lost interest and it lost the interest of many ethnic communities when it decided that it did not like people who had funny surnames. How bad is that? So I am very very happy to have the assistance of Melissa Lee MP parliamentary private secretary and also Dr Jian Yang MP parliamentary private secretary in this area. We cover an awful lot of events—a huge amount—and we have just had a month of Chinese New Year. I have to say that about two people from the Labour Party turned up one to get his name acknowledged and then he left—but I should not be picking on Mr Grant Robertson like that and I do apologise for being so uncharitable.But actually we are very much committed to these communities as well as part of New Zealand. One of the reasons for that is that we are a country of immigrants. We have all come here or our families have come here whether it was 1000 years ago 200 years ago or actually last year. We cannot put up the drawbridge and say: Oh yeah we don't want anyone new coming in." We used to lose 40000 people a year to Australia. Under this Government that stopped. We are actually getting more Australians coming here and actually that is OK. We should not be mean about that because they are seeing that we are such a fabulous country to live in and a really good Government to work under.And actually that is what is raising the population—that and the fact that we are in fact a place where people want to come and to migrate to and be part of. We are very fortunate in New Zealand. We do not have to put up fences we do not have to put up borders—we have got ocean. But it is not the only thing that we have. We also have a very decent system of immigration a points system. We look at family reunification and we actually—Denis O'Rourke: Far too many.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: And it is all right for Mr O'Reilly to say: "Far too many." What I would say to Mr O'Reilly is: actually where did he come from? Where did he come from? He might say Christchurch and I would say it is not actually a country. But actually everybody came from somewhere.I am very proud to be part of a Government that acknowledges that New Zealand was not born and created and finished on one day. We actually are a country that is evolving. We are a country that is changing and normally for the best. And I would like to say that it would be great to see the Labour Party come back to that point of view rather than to go down those nasty nasty little attacks on people based on their surnames. I know that under Stuart Nash it would never have done that because he would have thought back to his grandfather who would never have done that either."