Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Leader—Green): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It's a pleasure to get to rise and to debate the Supplementary Estimates 2017-18. I just wanted to pick up on some of the comments that the previous speaker the Hon Paul Goldsmith was making. There's a debatable point I think about the nature of business confidence surveys and how they affect the economy. I think it's entirely legitimate to say that you know it's a well-run survey it asks people their opinion and it's therefore a statement of what people think. The issue that we've had with using business confidence surveys as some kind of barometer for economic performance as opposed to actual economic performance as a measure of economic performance is that business confidence surveys tend to be high when there is a National Government and tend to be low when there is a Labour-led Government regardless of what's actually going on in the economy. So absolutely there's no relationship to what's going on in the economy. The last time business confidence surveys were this low was when Sir Michael Cullen was running 10 years of surpluses making massive investments in things like the Superannuation Fund getting debt down to zero—all of the things that the National Party thinks are absolutely terrific all of those actual things that actually take place in the economy that National are so so keen on. Business confidence was really low during that period of time. It bore no relationship to the actual economy which is why now every time they bring out one of these business confidence surveys to say Business confidence hasn't been this low since the last time Labour was in Government."—well Labour happened to be running an incredibly strong economy during that period of time.So it's all very good to pull out somebody's opinion but it doesn't actually match the reality of what's going on in the economy. I just wanted to start by picking up on that point because it is nonsensical. They do keep trotting it out all of the time because it's the only piece of data that they've got to grasp hold of even though it doesn't bear any resemblance to actual reality.I just wanted to pull some highlights about some of the things that are in the Appropriation (2017/18 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. As Grant Robertson said when he opened this debate because there has been a change of Government which does have different priorities to the old Government there have been a number of significant things that have changed that have shown up in this Estimates bill. From the Green Party's perspective in our confidence and supply agreement with the Government we've classified three areas—that is the sustainable economy a fair society and a healthy environment. This appropriations bill brings out a number of things in line with that confidence and supply agreement and I'll just pick three each in each of those three categories.The first is in relation to the sustainable economy. As someone who was an Opposition spokesperson for a long time I kept banging on about the need to invest in the long term and in the health and well-being of our economy over multiple decades particularly when we have a demographic bubble in front of us. I remember having a real go at the National Government at the time for completely focusing only on the short term and ignoring the long term when they refused even when things started to recover post - global financial crisis and post-earthquake to start reinvesting in the Superannuation Fund. So one of the things I am most proud of in this Government is that in this Supplementary Estimates we have restarted payments to the Superannuation Fund.One of the things that I keep hearing now Opposition members saying is "You shouldn't borrow to invest. Who borrows to invest? Why would you borrow to put money into the Superannuation Fund? You know it doesn't make any sense." Well let me tell you who borrows to invest: everyone with a mortgage everybody who buys a house every single business that ever borrowed money to be able to build plant and to get extra trucks on the road or whatever it is that they do for a business. Every single business borrows to invest. Every homeowner borrows to—that's who borrows to invest. So if you have to do a little bit of that in order to make sure you've got long-term income for this country then I'm down with that particularly at a time when you've got historically low interest rates.Now having said that we're actually not because the other thing that we're doing is we're continuing to bring down net debt as a portion of GDP. The thing that the National Party finds sort of hardest to get their heads around is the idea that you actually can walk and chew gum at the same time. You actually can invest in the long term as well as pay down your debt as well as invest in social services right? This is former members of that previous Government who insisted that the only reality that you can possibly have is not to invest in the future to not just cut debt but also cut spending as a portion of GDP like that was somehow going to make sure that we had a long-term future and I think it did anything but.The second thing that I'm particularly delighted about in the domain of the sustainable economy in this bill is the shift in transport spending. We've gone from a situation where literally 350 kilometres of gold-plated motorways in urban areas won out over every other mode of transport won out over regional roads and road safety; won out over ensuring that there was any kind of rail freight or passenger rail; and won out over mass transit in our most congested cities—in particular in Auckland which suffers from $1.6 billion a year of lost productivity due to congestion charges. Finally—finally—we have a Government that is prepared to make the investment decisions to rebalance the transport portfolio to decongest our cities and to make sure that our regions have got the kinds of local roads that they need to move people and freight around the country. I think that is the second thing that I'm most proud of in this in relation to the economy.The third thing—and one that's very I think dear to the hearts of every New Zealander—is actually to start to solve the housing crisis. It is interesting to me that the now National Opposition uses the phrase "housing crisis" now that they're in Opposition because there wasn't a crisis when they were in Government apparently but now that they're in Opposition there is. So they've finally woken up to the reality of the situation that there is a housing crisis if not woken up to the reality that they're now in Opposition.There's been a lot made of KiwiBuild and other parts of the housing portfolio. One thing that I just want to focus on from this bill is putting some funding into setting up a rental warrant of fitness for homes because I don't think anybody previously in the debate has mentioned this yet. I think it is absolutely fantastic that finally—finally—in order to rent a house you have to guarantee that it won't kill the resident. That's pretty remarkable right? That's not actually a huge standard. It's been standard for a long time for many decades that if you want to rent someone a car that car has to be roadworthy. It has to be able to survive an accident and has to not kill its driver or its passengers but the same has not been true of our homes and we have had tens of thousands of unnecessary winter deaths and tens of thousands of kids in hospital with entirely preventable respiratory diseases as a result of really shoddy rental homes. So finally we've made a tough call and this appropriations bill actually makes it possible for us to finally put in place some minimum standards around our rental properties. So for that I'm tremendously proud of this Government.So it is I think a great pleasure for us to support the Supplementary Estimates bill and I commend it to the House."