Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak on this Estimates debate. The Budget is a major milestone in the parliamentary calendar as it is indeed in businesses' and families' budgets: it's a big moment where we assess what we have in the kitty and what we're going to allocate our funding to. Unfortunately this Budget came with a backdrop of very high inflation and a cost of living crisis. We've had good news just recently with the inflation rate coming in under expectation at 3.3 percent and while our tradable inflation is down significantly non-tradable inflation is pretty sticky. That's been a problem internationally actually but we are a long way behind the countries we tend to measure ourselves against who are doing far better than we are.I would like to note and remember that what drove this I suppose is really important and that is I think well highlighted in the Auditor-General's report on making infrastructure investment decisions quickly which highlighted how money was shovelled out the door during the response to COVID. Now COVID absolutely needed a response—I don't think anyone disagrees with that—but that money going out the door in the way it did and not looking for value for money actually drove inflation much higher than it needed to be. And on that it was ironic and very disappointing that the Funding for Lending Programme—which was a programme put in place by the Reserve Bank to allow trading banks access to funding to lend to the market and homes and businesses at a lower rate than they would otherwise have done. Good programme; great idea in that time to sort of kick things along. However the Reserve Bank chose to keep that programme running while they lifted the official cash rate (OCR) to curb inflation. So we had two policies running completely counter to one another and so the inflation and the rate that we suffered and why we are behind those countries we measure ourselves against is due to two causes. One there was too much wasteful spending money thrown out the door that didn't need to be: the large-scale asset purchase programme which was the printing of money by the Reserve Bank and this Funding for Lending Programme continuing while the OCR was going up. Those two things cancelled one another out—if the OCR rise in fact did cancel it out at all; it may not have. When we've asked the Reserve Bank governor why he continued to do that rather than to shut it off as most logical people would do he said he had a moral obligation to the banks. Well what about his moral obligation to the taxpayer? Because when you're paying your mortgage rate every month just spare a moment to take a thought about the Reserve Bank Governor actually having a moral obligation to the banks which in his view was higher than the moral obligation to the taxpayer. I think that's wrong and we're all paying the price for that.However the good news is we've got tax relief coming out next week and so people are getting much-needed tax relief. Fiscal drag has been a huge drag on the average worker where the increase in inflation has driven their effective tax rate rates up higher as they go into higher tax brackets. In fact a full-time worker now pays 5 percent more than they did 10 years ago which is a huge amount of extra tax and that wasteful spending is a really good place where the Minister of Finance and Cabinet members went through an exercise of finding savings. They found 240 savings initiatives and have driven down the expenditure in Government departments.Now we have been criticised for that but I've been out and about amongst my constituents as I'm sure other members have during the recess and I can tell you that businesses are driving costs down themselves and having to let staff go because they are under pressure. That's what you do when you take undertake responsible budgeting and that is what our Government has done.But I want to go on to a bit more about wasteful spending and particularly those in some of the Government departments. I'm sure you will be aware of the debacle that has been the Cook Strait ferries. And I should actually qualify that because that's not fair. That's not fair because there is a private operator in Bluebridge which is a very efficient shipping service across Cook Strait and they don't rely on any funding from the taxpayer. But we have just seen debacle after debacle from KiwiRail and I'll take you back to the Kaitaki incident where it broke down in Cook Strait with 900 passengers on board. We very nearly had a major maritime disaster and why? Because there was not enough investment in maintenance on that vehicle. The part that failed was overdue for replacement by months. That's not acceptable. And while we had the Aratere run aground recently—and we'll find out in due course what happened to that after that investigation is completed—there has been the claim that the ships are too old and that's what the problem is and that the funding for the iReX project being refused by the Government has caused that. That's not true. That is absolutely not true because even if it had gone ahead those ships—the new ones—wouldn't have been delivered until 2026 and they wouldn't have been able to berth and operate because that landside work wouldn't have been completed. So they had no bearing on that whatsoever. That is just out-and-out poor management. I would point out the average age of those KiwiRail ships is between 26 and 29 years old and we've just retired the Hercules which was 60 years old. So it's completely untrue that those ships are too old and not fit for purpose. Yes they need replacing but that is not the issue. If maintained well they should be operational and safe. Added to that we found that the harbour master is now reviewing whether Tory Channel is actually safe for those ships to use. All the ferries may well be forced to go in and out through Queen Charlotte Sound or perhaps have one way going through Tory Channel and the other leg of the journey out through Queen Charlotte Sound; that's to be determined. But we know that the large ships that were proposed certainly would not have qualified to go through that channel very easily. They would have had to prove that they could do it and there was quite a lot of doubt about that.Back to the cost of living. I was in the southern part of my electorate in North Canterbury last week and there's a significant drought continuing there. I was speaking to one of the high country farmers this morning and they still haven't had rain there. There's a significant lack of snow in the back country which is something we all should be concerned about because that feeds into the hydro lakes and we already know that just recently Meridian Energy has asked Tiwai Point to reduce their electricity take because of the lower lake levels. So that drought is ongoing and is really imposing a lot of cost and worry on the farmers in that part of my electorate.I want to finish by saying as the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee I'm really looking forward to the banking inquiry which we will embark on shortly. I think that's going to be really welcomed by New Zealanders. We will be looking into the primary production side of it as well—rural lending. It will be something that will tie in nicely with the final draft of the Commerce Commission's market study which will be released soon. I'm looking forward to that because it's something we need to get on top of. I think the initiatives with the Customer and Product Data Bill that is going to come to the House very shortly will also tie in nicely to make that a more competitive sector. Thank you.