Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I heard Grant Robertson and I thought that Grant Robertson had one shot one opportunity to make sure this Budget did not go down in history as the brain drain Budget. What he had to do was give relief from the cost of living crisis light at the end of the tunnel and hope to those people who get their money from doing something called working. Unfortunately he did no such thing. What Grant Robertson basically said was I will continue to satisfy my insatiable appetite for Government spending I'm going to put on welfare kind of for three months at the end of the year and I'm going to extend your cheap train fares for another couple of months." That's it—that's it. There's no hope or light at the end of the tunnel for New Zealanders with get up and go more and more of whom you can understand after today's effort will be thinking "Maybe it's time I got up and left." because this Government and increasingly—while this Government's in control—this country does not give hope and opportunity or light at the end of the tunnel in the cost of living crisis to people getting squeezed from every angle.What's interesting is the Minister of Finance Grant Robertson called this securing the future. Do you know what's interesting? It's that that's not even original. In fact he copied it from the Saskatchewan Party's 2007 election campaign and the difference is that the Sask. Party got elected that year. They cut taxes and they stopped the province of Saskatchewan's brain drain. They saw the stubble-jumper province grow in population for the first time in decades. Well there's no such relief in this Budget. This Budget won't be remembered for securing the future unless it's Australia's future. This Budget will be known as the brain drain Budget because all those people who rely on working see no hope in it; in fact there's no hope in this Budget from Labour unless you act like a no-hoper. This is the culture of victimhood that the Labour Party imbues through our whole country. That is why people will leave. That is why we need a Government and a Budget that are prepared to make things better and give people hope that it's worth staying in this country.We've heard a lot about a cost of living crisis and the squeezed middle but what does that actually mean? Well it could mean a family with one earner who is at the average wage for a full-time worker—about $70000—and another earner who works part-time and earns $30000. Together that couple earns $100000 and they pay $18290 in income tax and that's not including GST. If they're renting and they pay the median rent then their rent's gone up $70 a week or $3640 a year in just the last two years. If they own a home and they have say a half-million-dollar mortgage—which would be nice my fellow Aucklanders would say—then they'll be paying $12500 more in mortgage interest than they were two years ago. If they used to spend $300 a week on the weekly shop then it's gone up $20 in the last year. It's hard to believe but that's 6.4 percent inflation in food costs in the last year. It's gone up 40 bucks a week on the weekly shop just in the last four years. If they are really bad people—meaning that they use a car to get around—then they have found that the cost of filling up has gone up by around $1700 a year if they each have a car and put in 50 litres a fortnight.Those people are paying more tax than ever because remember the GST? Well if inflation is a thief in their wallet then the Government is a silent partner because every time the prices go up because of inflation "Greedy Grabby Grant" is there for an extra 15 percent which he calls GST and the squeezed middle call the rising cost of everything squeezing them from every angle. What hope has Labour given them in this Budget? Has Labour given them a sign or even just a little flicker of light at the end of that cost of living crisis tunnel? No they have not. In fact I was very interested to read some of the numbers in the back of the big Budget documents and what I found in those numbers was gravely concerning because you see Treasury makes a forecast for the future of this country's economic and fiscal outlook and they make that forecast every six months—someone called Ruth was responsible for that happening—and the thing is that the forecasts we have for New Zealand's future today released at 2 p.m. this afternoon are vastly worse than the same forecasts Treasury made in December. In December they said that inflation was going to peak. They said that by next year inflation will only be 3.1 percent. Well they're now saying that next year's inflation is going to be 5.2 percent. So if people thought that there's a light at the end of the tunnel for this cost of living crisis well when "Grabby Grant" satisfies his insatiable attitude for spending taxpayers' money what happens is that it drives inflation and that's why even Treasury is forecasting that inflation is going to increase more than we have ever forecast. It's going to be 5.2 percent next year. We're not even halfway through this cost of living crisis.The funny thing is that when I said this was going to be a brain drain Budget even I didn't guess that Treasury would update its forecast to show that there'll be less people in New Zealand. Treasury is now assuming that 15000 more people are going to leave than they had assumed in December. Even Treasury is predicting a brain drain and why wouldn't they? Well because their forecast for our net debt just as a Government is now $15 billion higher than it was only six months ago. This is just the change of forecast in six months. It's now going to peak at $15 billion and that's because we're spending more. The thing is they're now forecasting that we're going to be in deficit until 2025 instead of 2024. One of the effects of that borrowing is that interest rates are also rising and we're going to spend an extra $1.7 billion a year on interest on Government debt than they thought we would in December. Even in just six months of forecasting Treasury now thinks our outlooks are worse. We're going to have more debt more interest on the debt more inflation and a longer cost of living crisis. So if people were looking for hope from this Government not only has the Government failed to take the bull by the horns and make things better; they have also witnessed this situation deteriorating because of their spending.This Budget could have been so much better. In fact the ACT Party is one of two parties in this Parliament that has produced a fully costed Budget for New Zealand this year. There's the Labour Party with Grant Robertson and there's the ACT Party and I would say to you that this one would give a much better future for New Zealand where people want to stay because the risk is we become a place that's nice to visit but not so nice to live especially if you need lifesaving drugs—and we'll get to that too.First and foremost this Budget needed to kill inflation dead before we get inflation expectations built in and we go on a wage-price spiral leading to stagflation. That is now unfortunately a very real prospect. It's not often I agree with Adrian Orr but Adrian Orr the Reserve Bank Governor says that monetary policy needs friends and what does he mean by that? What Adrian Orr means by that is that if Grant Robertson doesn't stop spending in the way he has then someone else is going to have to reel in expenditure for the country to stop inflation and do you know who that will be? It'll be Adrian Orr and do you know what tool he's got? He's got the official cash rate and do you know what that does? It puts up your mortgage so that people have less money to spend and he'll stop inflation that way. So either Grant brings in Government spending or Adrian brings in household spending and it's the second one because Grant can't stop spending so it's going to hurt.Some people might think "Well it's a lucky thing I rent. I'm not going to be faced with rising mortgage rates." Well I'm sorry to say that you just have to ask yourself who pays a landlord's mortgage if not the tenant? This spending will lead to higher interest rates higher mortgage rates and higher rents. It is inflationary for everybody. The second thing that it needed to do was give relief to all those families we've talked about that are battling away and wondering why they bother. There needs to be light at the end of that tunnel so that if you strive and do the right thing for yourself and your family you're not going to be fodder for Labour fuelling its hand-out culture. The third thing it needed to do was secure the future—that was in my speech before Grant took it up—in order that we can have sustainable fiscal settings. That's why we need to be honest with ourselves about the age of superannuation: 65-year-olds are not decrepit and we can afford to save $16 billion of taxpayer money by gradually respectfully increasing the age of national superannuation to 67 over 12 years while allowing people to get their KiwiSaver at 65 if they would still like to. That's the kind of boldness and honesty this country needs right now; not just more spending and delusion.Finally and by far most importantly what we needed to do in this Budget was to actually imbue a culture of striving and success. Here's how we would do that in our alternative budget. You know Michael Cullen who was the Minister of Finance a long time ago and I acknowledge his recent passing—may he rest in peace. Michael Cullen had two tax rates when he became finance Minister: 19.5 percent and 33 percent—that was it. It was that simple. He also had a low-income rebate giving relief only to those who really needed it. Since then successive Labour and National Governments have made our tax system more complex less effective and less efficient. Now we have six tax rates: five personal income tax rates—10.5 17.5 30 33 and 39 percent—and a company and trust tax rate of 28 percent. The funny thing is that we say to our kids "If you want to get ahead study hard work hard save and invest carefully you'll be rewarded." and then in the tax code we say "We've got six different tax rates so that for any level of effort we'll be there to take a little bit more off you." Talk about mixed messages—a labyrinth of punishment in a Byzantine tax code.Then some people say "Oh that's all fine. Just adjust the tax brackets for inflation." Well ACT says that we need to put the values of aspiration that other parties say they believe in into our tax system to make it fairer simpler and more competitive. ACT's tax policy shows how we could get to just two rates: a top rate of 28 percent and a bottom rate of 17.5 percent and that would allow us to do two things. First of all we'd be able to stop inflation because we would be cutting expenditure by $6.8 billion but second of all it means that people right throughout the income structure would get significant tax rates. You take the example of somebody earning $70000—maybe a nurse somewhere in the middle of their income stream of their career earning $70000. They would keep $2309 extra under ACT's tax policy to make up for the cost of living increases that they've dealt with under the first five years of "Hard Labour Government".But there's other things that we'd do. Do you know that this country is one of the hardest places in the world for foreigners to send money? It's true. Myanmar Saudi Arabia China—those are the three countries that the OECD says make it harder to invest in as a foreigner. We wonder why it is that Israelis and Estonians—people that used to be much poorer than us—get twice as much investment per worker as we do and we wonder why it is that those countries like the Czech Republic Slovenia and Lithuania are overtaking us. Well it's partly because we just don't get investment capital. The ACT Party says it's time for New Zealand to be open for business and say that we're going to be the easiest place to invest if you are a member of the OECD. If you're a democratic country then New Zealand is open for business for you because we actually want our friends around the world to bring their skills and their money and their ideas to enrich our country. We don't want to be a xenophobic backwater conducting some sort of bizarre bicultural experiment. We want to be globally connected citizens with the best that the world has to offer. Here's the next thing we'd do. Do you know that this Government owns about $16 billion worth of State-owned enterprises (SOEs) like New Zealand Post like KiwiRail like Kiwibank like AsureQuality. Some of them are or have the potential to be good businesses. Now the evidence is crystal clear that when the Government sold half of Genesis half of Meridian and half of all of the energy companies in fact their performance improved so much that the Government actually got a bigger dividend from owning 51 percent of them than it did from owning 100 percent. The ACT Party says that we would partially privatise more SOEs in order that we can raise their productivity and—Hon Member: Same old ACT—same old same old. DAVID SEYMOUR: —reduce New Zealand's debt by $8 billion. I just ask people on the other side of the House: if you've got a policy that works that keeps New Zealand control of the businesses and that raises productivity and pays down debt why would somebody be against that other than pure ideology? Is this something we can afford not to do or are we too rich already? We had a big opportunity today for a Government to stand up and overcome its ideological opposition to cutting taxes and then we had the opportunity to give people relief from the cost of living crisis. We had the opportunity to reduce wasteful and inflationary expenditure. That would have all been good but we had the opportunity to do even more: to invest to actually secure the future. ACT's Budget would have invested strategically in three areas. We would have taken $250 million for principals to pay their best teachers more because our teachers are the biggest determinant of where New Zealand is going to be in 30 years' time of all the Government employees. We'd not only give them tax cuts of between $2000 and $3000 each; we'd also give a teaching excellence reward fund to pay the best ones more. Our geopolitical situation has changed since Helen Clark said that we lived in a benign strategic environment. The ACT Party would invest in defence up to 2 percent of GDP in order that we can go to the Australians and say we want Anzac back. We want an independent but interoperable Anzac defence force in the South Pacific because—let's be honest—our neighbourhood has changed. Finally we would share $1.2 billion per year with councils so they can afford to build infrastructure but only if they say yes to building more houses for the next generation. That is smart strategic investment in ACT's alternative Budget to genuinely secure the future and give light at the end of the tunnel so all those people—all those young people in particular—who are asking after this Budget this bluff and bluster from Grant Robertson "Is there really a reason for me to stay here? Is there light at the end of the tunnel from the cost of living crisis? Is there a strategy to get ahead of former communist countries that are now richer than us?" Well ACT's gives hope to those people that next year things will change. We'll take our Budget seriously and New Zealand will have a bright future after all. But Labour's Budget today—that ain't it. Thank you Mr Speaker."