English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4194. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 Well there was another visit from one of the aliens from “Planet Labour” David Clark. Funnily enough a lot of them look the same. Just a couple of points that were raised on the way through. Apparently low-income New Zealanders cannot afford—and this may be right—to buy $1000 worth of shares in Mighty River Power but according to Labour they can afford compulsory superannuation contributions. So can those members explain that to us? We have heard all this ranting about how those people cannot afford $1000 once in their life for $1000 worth of shares but they can afford what Labour euphemistically calls universal KiwiSaver which means compelling people on the minimum wage to make savings every week for the rest of their lives. Apparently they can afford that. So I look forward to the explanation of how those two bits fit together. 
Listening to the Labour Party lecture about the current account deficit is unbelievable. I recall the campaign in 1999 when a finance spokesman from the same city who looks a bit similar to this one campaigned on getting rid of the current account deficit. At the time it was 4 percent. Then Labour had 9 years of the great moderation—the best economic conditions apparently that the globe had seen in a generation—and at the end of it not only did Labour not get rid of the current account deficit but it was double what it was when Labour started. 
Mark Mitchell 
: Double? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Double. First mortgage interest rates were 10 percent there was 5 percent inflation and we had a doubled current account deficit. And today we are hearing in this debate about the estimates the same kind of hocus-pocus of some magic mix of research and development incentives and something else that apparently will fix all this. The Government’s plan is a consistent plan and if we stick to it—which this Government certainly will—then we are going to see New Zealand less vulnerable. It will be less vulnerable over time but it is a huge challenge not only because of the multigenerational build-up of that external indebtedness but also because we are now in a world where dealing with it is going to be a bit more difficult. 
One of the speakers talked about the greatest losses over the Crown Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme. Let us just run through a quick list of the mess that the wasteful hopeless last Labour Government left. There were multibillion-dollar losses in ACC because it cranked up entitlements and cut and tried to hold levies—multibillion-dollar losses. The Housing New Zealand Corporation has $5 billion worth of houses in poor condition in the wrong place that cannot really be used to help serious housing need—$5 billion. It is not a theory. That is paid for by the PAYE of people who voted Labour believing it knew what it was doing—$5 billion of PAYE invested in housing that cannot be used properly to help the people Labour says it stuck up for. Student loans—$1 billion worth of write-offs because when we became the Government no one was in charge of student loans. No one in that whole Government was in charge of a $10 billion asset and I had to sign off write-offs of hundreds of millions of dollars because of negligence and lolly scrambles being the outstanding characteristics of the previous wasteful Labour Government. 
Then today in the House Labour was criticising us over welfare reform. It was another one of its lazy thoughtless spokespeople who do not do any work and contribute nothing even in the area where Labour is meant to be the experts: welfare policy. Labour members are a generation behind in their thinking if they are thinking at all. These estimates include hundreds of millions of dollars invested to get on top of long-term welfare dependency—dependency on which labour parties rely because that is what feeds the government system from which they draw their personnel and their ideology. We believe we must change long-term welfare dependency and these estimates show the best ideas in a generation to get on with that.