O'Connor Damien: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 27 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:4063. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): That speech from Melissa Lee epitomised the attitude of the National Government to this country and its management of it. Those members think: “Because I did it everyone else should be able to do it too.” and they overlook the reality for many New Zealanders that many are born into certain circumstances and are in circumstances beyond their control.This was a Budget of broken promises and lost opportunities. We have to name the broken promises because this Government has been given the privilege of being trusted by the majority of the people of New Zealand for three elections and time after time it has broken the promises. Those people who have enough time to stop and think are starting to realise that you cannot carry on breaking promises and being trusted by the people.John Key said: “We will be in surplus.” He said: “There will be no new taxes.” He said: “The $1000 for KiwiSaver will remain as it is now.” This is quoting word for word from the Prime Minister. It is an absolute insult to then turn round in a Budget and to slap on new taxes to not get back into surplus for some pathetic reason the Government members have put up—mainly that they have reduced taxes drastically at the top end of town—and to then take from young Kiwis the $1000 incentive. Those members know full well about financial incentives because do you know what they did? They left in the Budget the incentives for their corporate mates. They left the incentives there through the Primary Growth Partnership to ensure that they would commit to research and development and to developing their businesses but they were not prepared to do it for the young New Zealanders who wanted to take up KiwiSaver.There are two particular areas of my portfolio interest: one is mining and the other is dairying. In fact this Government came into power saying that those two industries would take us into a new world. “Mine the national parks and we will all be wealthy.” those members said and they quickly realised that that was a pretty dumb move to make not only because New Zealanders want to protect their national parks but in fact because if they had looked through the history of mining and looked at what is happening on the West Coast today they would have seen that it is a very cyclical industry. In my region where I am a staunch advocate for that industry for us to rely on that for our future is both naive and stupid—ask the Australians. Mining does have a future but we cannot base our economy on that alone.Dairying on the other hand has a more sustainable future and I have been a passionate advocate of that as well. But in the absence of an economic plan from the National Government all of those industries are under threat and the lost opportunity in this Budget was to give any indication of where this country is heading. There was no indication at all and no idea of where we should be in the future. That was the lost opportunity. Can I go back to dairying. The reality is that the industry faces not just one but two or possibly three seasons of low payout and that leaves our country stumbling to put it politely because the National Government has no idea of what else we should be doing. Even within the primary sector I ask the Government: “Where is your help for strategic planning for the meat industry? Where is your help for strategic planning in the wool sector or forestry or indeed fishing?”.It has taken a hands-off approach—well not quite. It has got the Primary Growth Partnership funding which is corporate welfare—welfare. What those members have done is committed $300 million of taxpayers’ money and paid it over to their mates—to their mates—to carry on for the most part business as usual for something that the Office of the Auditor-General could not identify. It could not identify additionality. It could not identify in the six programmes it studied any real additional benefit for the New Zealand economy because the National Government just likes paying out to its mates.The dairy industry was one of the recipients of that money. The industry is in a bit of a dilemma at the moment. It does not know whether to keep the cost of production high and hope for a rise in payout or to wind back production and try to remain sustainable and viable into the future. The reason is that the dairy industry—our No. 1 industry—has no strategic plan and no strategic vision.The big company the one we still own is Fonterra—the one that John Key would like to see floated on the stock market. I am sure that his mate Mark Weldon when he tries to slide his way into Parliament will sit alongside the Prime Minister and ensure that Fonterra sits on the stock market so that the traders and all the mates over there can clip the ticket and sell it off—sell it off to foreigners. Take a previous example: the Hon Ruth Richardson runs around the country now. She sold off Synlait. She has been a director on that company for a long time. Now it is completely in the hands of foreigners.Hon Jo Goodhew: All her own work.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Oh and the member over there says that that is OK. Read Statistics New Zealand’s report about the growing deficit the increasing deficit because of the leakage from having foreign ownership in our economy. That is a strategic issue: who should own New Zealand and who should own New Zealand’s future? Fonterra our No. 1 company must be kept in New Zealand hands but this Government and the Prime Minister would love to see it sold off.Can I go back to the primary sector as a whole. We need a primary sector council a high-level body that will look at each and every sector and work with them to develop a strategic plan for the future. The Riddet Institute identified this need years ago. The National Government continues to ignore the reality that we need strategic planning and we need leadership to know where we are heading across all the primary sectors. We need leaders—not just people appointed to bodies but people who are prepared to show leadership in the sector. It is not occurring and we are going round in circles with our fingers crossed in the hope that commodity prices will lift.We need structures that can deliver on those strategic plans. Labour offers an alternative approach in the primary sector area one where leadership will be delivered where necessary and where support will be delivered for those strategic plans and visions. This Budget ignored that reality and missed the opportunity to show leadership.I am going to talk about not a rock star economy but what is a rock-bottom economy for too many New Zealanders—not the 250000 children in poverty but the people who run around and care for our elderly in the country. If you are a doctor or a nurse and you care you get a reasonable salary. But if you are a support worker in this country you get paid $14.75 an hour to go around and look after the parents of the likes of you Mr Assistant Speaker and me who are living in rural areas. It is an insulting wage to care for our elderly which is a measure in my view of the failure of the National Government to do what is right.Those people who are getting $14.75 an hour get a massive $1.08 per hour for their travel. I have met one of these support workers. She is a wonderful woman who travels between 600 and 800 kilometres every fortnight and she gets the grand total of $1.08 times 32 hours. That is the insulting payment she gets for travel.Up and down this country in rural New Zealand we have people being paid a pittance to care for people who without that care would be absolutely destitute and would be incapable of cooking and caring for themselves and that is the environment that every one of those MPs over there is overseeing and endorsing. It is an outrage that must be addressed.The Government’s policy of caring for people in their homes seems wonderful until you start to pick it apart. The Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector Jo Goodhew should be right at the forefront of addressing that issue which insults those people and insults the elderly people in our country—