Newman Muriel: Budget Debate 
Newman Muriel: Budget Debate 
[Volume:626;Page:20846] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I would like to recommend to the previous speaker that he takes his pills. He seemed to be getting very very het up. I would like to start by saying that I fully support the motion by the leader of ACT Rodney Hide that this House has no confidence in the Labour minority Government which has provided no vision or ambition for New Zealand no 10-year plan to make New Zealand a freer more prosperous and proud nation and no policy to drop the excessive tax burden on hard-working New Zealanders. That really does sum it up. When we look at the Labour Budget in election year 2005 we see that it really is a wasted opportunity. Where is the ambition for New Zealand? Where is the vision? Where is there any plan at all? The reality is that this country is being run by a pack of hopeless Labour politicians who probably could not run a proper booze-up in a brewery. That is the reality and the Budget simply confirms that stance. 
The Budget shows that after New Zealand has had the best economic conditions in a decade its growth will drop to an average of 2.9 percent over the next 4 years. We all know that in order to raise our standard of living we need to be growing at over 4 percent but this Government has managed to mismanage the economy to such an extent that this country will start to sink further and further down in terms of our standard of living. Our trading partners average growth of 3.4 percent and other countries around the world are managing to go forward. Why is New Zealand going backwards? Well I am sorry but the finger has to be pointed at the Government. It sets the policy it sets the tax rate and it sets the spending promises. The Government is directing this country and it is doing that badly. We are slipping behind other countries and the legacy that Labour will leave when it is defeated at the next election is one of wasted opportunity. Labour took a great little country and has run it down. 
The reason why Labour does not know how to run this country properly is that it is anti-business. It has not figured out that small business is the engine room of any economy. Small business creates the jobs and it creates the growth. Labour during the 6 years it has been in power has essentially killed off enterprise and killed off the dynamic growth plans and ambitions that small business had through things like the destruction of labour market flexibility. It is too hard to employ people now because if things do not work out the employer cannot get rid of the employee. The Government has introduced stealth taxes—some 33 during the period it has been in power—which have added enormous costs to doing business. A tax like the petrol tax is spreading costs right through the whole economy. Of course in the Budget Mr Cullen signalled that we are going to have a carbon tax which will add to our costs as well. There are silly regulations at which small business just throws up its hands in horror and basically asks what is coming next—and it hesitates even to think about that. 
John Tamihere did the country an enormous favour when he explained to us that the four forces running this country are the forces in the Labour Cabinet made up of feminists Maori unionists and gays—people who are looking at those agendas. Now those terms are not my terms; they are John Tamihere’s terms. He was a Minister who sat around the Cabinet table and he said essentially that the feminists who are anti-business and anti-men want to get women out of the home and into the workplace. It is quite a good idea to get more people into the workplace but why did the feminists not pick on the welfare recipients? If they are serious about getting people back into the workplace to fill the shortage gap then something like 200000 able-bodied New Zealanders who are on the dole or on the domestic purposes benefit could be helped to move back into the workforce over time. Instead of picking on those people the feminists have happened to pick on mums at home who are trying to bring up their children. 
Mr Tamihere talked about Maori and he said that the privilege being introduced by the Labour Party was at every level. There are now elite groups in communities throughout New Zealand who are running the country but ordinary Maori do not like that. Ordinary people who are working for a living do not like elitism and they do not like to see privilege. Many Maori on benefits see no benefit from Labour’s policies at all. John Tamihere talked about unions and about how they had a strong agenda. I predict here that if Labour does happen to fluke it and win the next election then compulsory unionism is around the corner. That will be for workplaces up and down New Zealand and the small business sector should take heed of that and be very worried. I can tell members that if compulsory unionism is brought in at a time when the country is struggling to keep up with its trading partners any competitive advantage that we might have had will be destroyed. 
The average working family with its own household budget would have done better than Labour did in the Budget. The first thing families do is to cut out waste. If we had a look to see whether Labour was cutting out waste in this Budget we would see that the answer was no. Labour has grown the size of the bureaucracy in this country many-fold. It is an absolute disgrace that for every dollar of health spending the large majority of it—probably almost the whole lot—goes on bureaucracy instead of patient care. If we look at every dollar that goes into the education system and ask how much is actually helping our kids to do better again we see that that sum is only a small proportion of every dollar put in there while the rest is wasted. If we looked at all the stupid politically correct programmes that this Government has introduced at every level of governance in this country we would simply shake our heads in horror. That is without even talking about things like the dog laws which will mean that when Mrs Brown’s chihuahua from down the road has five puppies they will all have to be microchipped—as they are clearly a danger to humanity. I ask: what level of madness will this Government stop at? It seems to know no bounds at all. 
In Australia the Labour Party brought in tax cuts in its Budget. It also brought in welfare reform and I think that many people were hoping that Labour would do the same in New Zealand. Well it has not. It has brought in an insulting tax cut that will be worth 67c a week in 3 years’ time and I say that New Zealanders deserve better than that. That is why the ACT party will be going to the election proposing major tax cuts to give a tax rate of 15c in the dollar for anyone earning up to $38000 and of 25c in the dollar for anyone earning over that. That proposal is affordable. It will help to drive growth in this country and the propaganda put out by Labour that the country cannot afford it is total rubbish. We can afford it out of the $7.4 billion surplus that this Government this greedy Government has collected from hard-working families. For the first time polls are now showing that the majority of New Zealand workers want to be given a tax cut. That is what this Government should have delivered in this Budget. In Australia for the last 3 years the Government has delivered tax cuts because it was overtaxing Australians. This Government is overtaxing New Zealanders way above anything that Aussie was doing but instead of giving money back in tax cuts it is pocketing it to use the money for its own stupid schemes. Any talk about tax cuts being inflationary is complete and utter rubbish. The things that are inflationary in this country are things like petrol tax increases carbon tax increases and local body rates increases all of which are things driven by this Government. 
This Budget is a disgrace. Workers in New Zealand deserve to have a tax cut.