English Bill: Appropriation (2015/16 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: Appropriation (2015/16 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate[Sitting date: 18 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5851. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): I move That the Appropriation (2015/16 Estimates) Bill be now read a third time and the Imprest Supply (Second for 2015/16) Bill be now read a second time. This third reading brings to an end the debate on Budget 2015. I want to take this opportunity to remind the House that the fundamental job of the Budget is to raise taxes and distribute the expenditure—that is it is focused primarily on the business of the Government. I want to acknowledge all those public servants who apply themselves with dedication and professionalism every day. There has been something of a trend in recent years to acknowledge our front-line public servants and also those who work for other organisations funded by the Government and I want to do that today because we rely on their efforts to meet the needs not only of New Zealand’s most vulnerable citizens but also of every New Zealander often in their time of greatest need.I also want to acknowledge the back-office public servants because putting together a better kind of Budget that focuses on having more impact on the lives of New Zealanders is proving to be an intensive exercise—resource intensive intellectually intensive and challenging. Over the last few years many public servants have provided a great deal of professional support for the Government’s objective of doing more for less—that is putting together a Budget that has new spending at levels that are lower even now than at any time since the late 1990s and yet year on year the Government along with the Public Service is producing more services and better services even though the finances have been tight.This Budget which we are debating today is the second one to show some signs of the impact of the Government taking a broader view of how to support individual New Zealanders to succeed. At the heart of this Budget was of course the hardship package—the first increase in benefit levels for families beyond the Consumers Price Index for 43 years. [Interruption] And I am not surprised that Labour did not like it. In fact as I recall the record of this House will show that the Labour Party voted against the first increasein 43 years over and above inflationfor New Zealand’s hardest-up families.Alongside that increase in this Budget we are also starting to see the impact of the Government’s social investment approach. There has been a lot of discussion in the Public Service—less in the public—about what this amounts to but it has got some pretty simple principles and they will certainly be features of the next Budget of the John Key - led National Government. Probably as its first principle it has a focus on the customer. I use that word deliberately because it makes people feel uncomfortable but actually we should treat every single New Zealander who is in need no matter how difficult or challenging their life is as someone who is capable of being hopeful about their future capable of following their own aspirations from wherever they start and capable of exercising preferences about how we offer support to them.I know that it has been profoundly motivating for Ministers public servants and politicians to see some of the analysis that shows what happens for children in New Zealand—the 1 percent of them—who are born into the most vulnerable and challenging households where we know that we will spend up to $1 million in today’s dollars during the lifetime of that child. Of course that leads to the obvious question: what are we doing now spending so much money that is not making much difference? How could we do better to change the pretty predictable life course for that young New Zealander or other groups? There are 50000 New Zealanders who basically have bad backs or mental health problems and whose average length of stay on benefits is 20 years. Can you imagine that: being on New Zealand’s lowest income and having musculoskeletal problems or carrying the burden of mental illness. Historically what we have done is send them to the doctor give them a certificate that says that they cannot do anything and then send them home and that is it.The lazy welfare State—that is what it has done and we do not think that that is good enough. So our Ministers have devised a whole new way of bringing up the information about those 20 years and of giving us the tools to enable us to decide what can be done with a 23-year-old with significant depression—Tim Macindoe: Give them hope.Hon BILL ENGLISH: —give them hope—so that they do not find themselves on an invalid’s benefit until they turn 65 when they go on to New Zealand superannuation because we believe that that is not good enough for those New Zealanders. So that is what we are seeing the first signs of in this Budget and that is what the next Budget will certainly focus on.This is all happening in the context of a softening economy but the good news for those who do depend on the Government Budget for their welfare is this: we have an adaptable resilient economy that will enable the Government to sustain the income support and the programmes that get them through day to day and week to week because in the broader economy New Zealanders are adapting quickly to events like the sharp drop in dairy prices. They are not sitting around like the Opposition with their head in their hands crying “Panic—where’s the Government?”; they are out there on the dairy farms in the mud in the toughest part of the year getting on with changing what they do where they can change it and working out how to get through one or two tough years because they have long-term confidence. That is where Labour members failed the test. At the first sign of a softening in the economy did they show long-term confidence in the New Zealand economy and the New Zealanders who make it work? No they said “Crisis.” they said “Panic.” and they said “Where’s the Government?”. Well no one else in New Zealand is doing that; they are getting on with the job.The Labour Party used to be a sensible middle-of-the-road party as exemplified apparently by Stuart Nash. He is meant to be the sensible centre but he is out there marching against free trade. I never thought that I would see the day when I would see the sensible centre of the Labour Party marching against free trade because if there is one thing that we used to all agree was at the core of New Zealand’s prospects in the world as a small trading economy it was free trade. And now the right wing of the Labour Party is against it. In some respects I should not be surprised. It withdrew from the bipartisan consensus on the Reserve Bank legislation. The Reserve Bank legislation is gone free trade is gone and fiscal discipline will certainly go under Grant Robertson the spokesman for student unions from the 1980s. In case Labour is not aware he is still doing it like he was then. He is still doing it except that students used to be against plagiarism. That was a fundamental principle of university life: do not plagiarise other people’s ideas. Well I just wish that the Labour Party would plagiarise ours because then New Zealanders would think that they could support the Labour Party but instead the Labour Party is getting increasingly dragged to the left opposing free trade opposing the Reserve Bank legislation and oddly enough also opposing increases in benefits for New Zealanders—increases in the benefit level.I have asked the question before and Labour has not answered it: if it opposes increases in benefits what is the Labour Party for? Increasingly what it is for is rent-a-crowd for the Greens.