Mackey Moana: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: General Debate[Sitting date: 18 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18626. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour):That member Michael Woodhouse is a Minister in the Government but his mouth so often works for the Opposition.I want to talk about something that actually matters. I want to talk about jobs because we are being told that we have a rock star economy. We have a rock star economy. As David Parker pointed out it is lucky we are having an early election because all the indicators are that it is downhill from here.So who has benefited in this rock star economy that we are seeing so far? I think the questions New Zealanders are going to be asking themselves are: “Do I feel better off?” and “Have I got my fair share of this rock star economy recovery?” and overwhelmingly the answer is no. Yes there have been some people who have done very very well out of this current Government but for the average Kiwi family they are struggling to stand still and too many are going backwards. That is the reality of a so-called recovery under the National Government and it is only going to go downhill from here.If we put Christchurch aside because we all accept that Christchurch is a special case I sometimes feel as though this Government thinks that New Zealand ends at the Bombay Hills and that the rest of us do not really matter. It has been a long time since I have heard the words “regional economic development” coming out of the mouth of a National Government Minister. I am not surprised that it took an election year for regional economic development to suddenly be paid lip-service to by this National Government.When we were in Government we had a Minister for regional development. We prioritised it. As members will know much of the wealth in this country comes from the provinces of New Zealand. If they are in trouble we are in trouble. We recognised that 9 years of a National Government in the 1990s had put our regional economies and regional communities at risk and so we did something about it. We invested in rural and provincial economies.Hon Anne Tolley: Does this member read the regional development stats?MOANA MACKEY: Regional economies Mrs Tolley. Well she would not know anything about that. If Mrs Tolley thinks that things are going great on the East Coast and in the Eastern Bay of Plenty then I suspect that shows how arrogant and out of touch she is.What have we had in Gisborne? In Gisborne we used to have a rail line. There was a washout on that rail line and instead when you put this in the context of the billions and billions of dollars being spent on roads of national significance around Auckland all we asked for was less than $4 million to fix the rail line from Gisborne to Napier. Everyone wanted it—everyone except Mrs Tolley. Everyone wanted that rail line reopened and the National Government said no. It said to the Gisborne community: “No. We don’t care that you are the most isolated district in the country. We don’t care that you’ve had enormous success at getting traffic back on that rail line. We say no we won’t fix it but here you go. Have $14 billion more for roads of national significance up around Auckland.”In the Labour Party we think that is not fair. We think that regional New Zealand deserves the same kind of attention that Auckland gets and it is important that Auckland gets attention—it is our only international city; I absolutely support that—but the rest of us matter as well.So in lieu of our rail line the National Government said: “Instead of a rail line you can have an economic development potential report.” So we got this report. It cost $200000—$200000—to tell us what we already knew. It would have been better to give that $200000 to our council to actually do some good with in terms of economic development instead of having the Government tell us—and this was great—“The East Coast suffers from a perception of deprivation.” No we do not. We suffer from deprivation. That is the whole point. It is not a perception; it is a reality and this Government is doing nothing about it. Inequality is getting worse. The gap between the haves and have-nots is widening and unfortunately we have far too many have-nots on the East Coast and in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.So basically we knew what the report would say. It would say that if you do not want jobs in the oil and gas industry stop whingeing about being unemployed. That is essentially what it said. Any jobs that come from that industry would be very welcome on the East Coast provided the environmental protections are there. I think that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s recent report showed that there are big gaps in that but the chances of us finding something commercial are very small.Do you know what? We in the provinces think we deserve a plan B. We deserve a plan B in case plan A which is the only plan the Government has does not come to fruition and it is more likely that it will not than it will. So where is the plan B for the provinces? Where is the plan for those communities that make up the backbone of this country? It is not there.A Labour Government would play an active role in regional economic development. We funded forestry roading in Gisborne last time we were in Government. That is the kind of thing we would look to do again. We would work with the provinces rather than working against them as this Government does every day.