Stewart Barbara: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Stewart Barbara: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
[Sitting date: 02 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1877. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
: 
 On behalf of New Zealand First I rise to speak to the Budget Policy Statement. No one can believe this Budget Policy Statement. Remember the Budget last year—170000 new jobs in 4 years? What a con! This Budget is not about creating wealth for New Zealanders. It is not even about new jobs or trading our way into a better future. In reality this Budget is about the market overseas banks currency traders speculators financiers and National’s rich mates buying up our assets.  
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a totally different result. This Government is doing exactly the same as it did over 20 years ago—the same recipe. What a mess. This Government is driven by ideology and stupidity masquerading as competence. It worships the market—whatever that is. Yet it is the same financial market that caused all the problems in the first place. The Prime Minister knows this. He was very close to the people who helped manufacture this crisis by their shonky financial dealings in the United States.  
John Hayes 
: And Winnie’s not shonky? 
BARBARA STEWART 
: Shonky—yes it is. There are some people who think it belongs to them and they have the divine right to get obscenely rich at the expense of everyone else. Almost anyone with some knowledge of economics knows that when Governments cut spending during a recession they reduce economic activity. That makes things much much worse. It happened in the 1930s—last century—with devastating consequences. It was relieved in New Zealand only when one courageous politician and some smart advisers devalued the currency. They knew that New Zealand had only one opportunity: to export its way out of trouble. That was our last chance. And it worked.  
The only way that we will ever restore our country to its rightful place as Godzone will be to rebalance the economy through smart exporting. That means that the Government has to help exporters not the speculators and the foreign banks. The IMF says that the New Zealand dollar is up to 20 percent overvalued. Even the Governor of the Reserve Bank who is besotted with inflation says the high dollar is getting in the way of our recovery. Can none of these people see that they are actually making things much worse?  
And what about National’s commitment to senior citizens? We know as Nick Smith said that power prices are soaring in the lead-up to the privatisation of our rivers and our dams. Domestic consumers are getting flogged with high power prices and they are actually subsidising the commercial and the industrial users. New Zealand First asked the Government for a small discount for senior citizens. We did all of the research. We did the costings. We even prepared the legislation. Yet not one Cabinet Minister would talk to us. Neither would the Prime Minister. They did not want to know. I know that the previous speaker Nick Smith might be interested and so might Mr Hayes. We hope so. This is basically not good enough. The Government cannot treat these people this way. They have made a contribution and paid for all these State assets that our Government is now pimping right around the world. Sell it once and it is gone.  
This is not a Government of the many. It is a Government of the greedy few and they are intent on selling the rest of us down the river. The Budget Policy Statement actually reinforces that view. In 2008 John Key promised the country a brighter future but the reality is that things are not getting any better. In fact they have gotten worse. The economy grew by a measly 0.3 percent in the last quarter. We have got tens of thousands of young people out of work. We have got 83000 young people who are actually unemployed. We have got more than 23000 Kiwi kids who are living below the poverty line. That is not a good statistic. 
In the meantime the current account deficit has worsened on National’s watch. Foreign debt is soaring and thanks to an over-inflated dollar our export industry is being crippled. What the Minister of Finance has not told you is that the provisional tax take is way way down. It works like this: people who pay a high level of provisional tax are finding out that their incomes are actually dropping. So instead of paying more provisional tax they are actually claiming refunds. 
Hon Member 
: So? 
BARBARA STEWART 
: That is not the way it should be. The very idea that the Government’s books are going to be balanced in 2014-15 is a pipedream. Even this Budget Policy Statement says that it will be a stretch. But despite all of this the Government should not be fixated on balancing the books. It should be fixated on stimulating the economy creating jobs and giving exporters a really good base to launch from.  
New Zealand is not the basket case of Europe. We have resources. We have skills. Basically we are a very resourceful people. We can trade our way out of this mess if we reward the people instead of punishing them all the time. Governments are actually supposed to be for people.  
There is great concern about child poverty in New Zealand. How does this Government respond? It holds an inquiry. Everybody knows that child poverty is family poverty and family poverty is actually caused by unemployment. Unemployment is actually the greatest evil that is facing New Zealand and it is time that National actually did something about it.  
We are exporting more and more young people—more and more of our citizens. We educate them we ensure that they have free health care up to the age of 6 we look after them in every way we can and then we export them when they can actually put something back into the economy. To my way of thinking that is not smart economic management in any way.  
We had people in this country who built up this great country. They would actually be horrified to know that their descendants are flogging off the assets built up by generations of hard-working people. They were always very wary of slick salesmen and never did they ever contemplate the thought that the country would actually be run by these people. We in New Zealand First say to the Prime Minister that he should admit his mistakes and start running the country for everybody not the privileged few. We want economic growth we want jobs and we want an export-led economic plan to make this great country the country that it once was.