Prebble Richard: General Debate 
Prebble Richard: General Debate 
[Volume:624;Page:19246] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf on the ACT party to speak in this afternoon’s debate and to say as kindly as I can to Mr Maharey that he is mistaken—it is not his job as a Minister of the Crown to keep the Opposition honest or to be a book reviewer. What we would actually like him to do is be a good Minister for Social Development and Employment. I hate to draw it to his attention but at a time of record employment the numbers of able-bodied adults on the unemployment benefit are going up. I would like to have heard a contribution from him as to what the Government intends to do about it but I suspect we will be waiting a long time for that. 
I would like to talk about a matter that I think is of great concern to our Parliament. This Parliament is actually a better Parliament than we often give ourselves credit for and one of the best things we have done is to reach a bipartisan agreement that we will have better government if we have transparent accounting. 
I first became a Minister in the 1984 Government when we discovered that Sir Robert Muldoon had been able to use cash accounting to hide the fact that the Government was in a terrible financial state. That was a great shock not just to the incoming Government but also to his former Cabinet Ministers who had no idea of what had been going on. We then said publicly that we should improve the accounts. The Labour Government I am afraid then got into a bit of trouble and in 1990 David Caygill produced a set of accounts in which he claimed that there was a surplus. In fact it turned out later that there was not because he had sold a forest and he put it down as income and he had not accounted for the fact that in double accounting he should have allowed for the fact that he had actually sold the forest. He did worse than that of course. He then discovered that the BNZ was in trouble and he kept that fact secret not just from the country and the caucus but also from his Cabinet colleagues. 
The Labour Party felt a bit ashamed about that and when Ruth Richardson came along and said we should have the Fiscal Responsibility Act it was voted for by all members in this House. I think that is part of the reason—not all; the Government can take other credit—that the Government’s accounts are better. It is because they are more accurate. But no longer. Dr Cullen is now cooking the books. He has gone back to cash accounting. 
One would think that the media would ignore such nonsense as the claim that capital items such as new buildings—new hospitals—should be deducted and do not actually count towards a surplus. We actually have—and the Government ought to be proud of it—a surplus of over $5.5 billion yet it is trying to tell us that the surplus is lower. That is a load of nonsense. Does it matter? It does actually because the Government has now put a cash line in. It first went in 18 months ago on the bottom of the accounts then it was at the middle and then it was at the top. But worse than that Treasury is now putting out press statements as if the net cash surplus is a meaningful statement. It is not. I say to Mr John Whitehead who is the head of Treasury that he is now acting more like he did when he was the Treasury adviser to the Labour Party in Opposition than as the head of one of our most important departments. 
It is a matter of great concern that when the last lot of accounts came out the press gallery did not report the fact that there was a record surplus but instead reported that meaningless statement. And I say it is meaningless because if the Government is prepared to deduct assets from cash—and if the “Cullen fund” is not an asset why are we saving it? It is deducting that. It is deducting student loans yet Government members get up in this House and point out accurately that the vast majority of students are repaying their loans so they must be an asset. 
Most people would think that hospital buildings are an asset yet according to the net cash basis the Government would have us believe that none of this expenditure is in fact assets and that the expenditure on a hospital is the same as the expenditure on the unemployment benefit. What a load of nonsense! I say to the House that Dr Cullen and Treasury should be ashamed of themselves. I think it is a great pity that we have moved away from a bipartisan agreement that gave New Zealand the best accounts in the world.