Goff Phil: General Debate 
Goff Phil: General Debate 
[Volume:655;Page:4830] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I should be flattered that the National research unit is working full-time finding out what I said 25 years ago in Parliament when the members on the opposite benches were mere novices. Unfortunately most of them are still in that category. I am particularly flattered to be quoted by Maurice Williamson. Maurice Williamson has the hat trick: he is the only National Minister who has been sacked by three different National leaders. It is much safer for Maurice Williamson to quote of words of wisdom that I spoke as a callow 28-year-old in Parliament 25 years ago than it is to quote any people on the same side of the House as him. 
I want now to address in a more serious fashion what I think is the most critical issue facing New Zealand at the moment. We are 7 months into this National Government and each week 1200 New Zealand men and women are joining the dole queues—1200. We know that for every person who joins the dole queue another three people are losing their jobs so 3000 people a week are likely to be losing their jobs in this country. Those people are losing their livelihood. They are breadwinners who can no longer support their families. Schoolkids are leaving school without hope and without a job. Twenty percent of our teenagers are on the job market at the moment unable to find work in New Zealand. What worries New Zealanders is that there is no plan and there are no ideas to address this situation. That is why the Prime Minister spent the entire question time quoting me from 25 years ago rather than come up with a single idea himself. 
He made a statement yesterday that he was going to come out with a plan and some fresh ideas. After 7 months in Government he will have a plan and some fresh ideas. Well we had the Job Summit. Do members remember the Prime Minister’s words? It was going to be a “do-fest” not a talkfest. But all we got was rhetoric. There were three big ideas. There have been no jobs from the credit provision facility that was going to create thousands of jobs and save firms. There have been no jobs from cycleways which Treasury told the Prime Minister was an inefficient way of creating jobs. And the Government got so desperate that last week it came up with the claim that 32 new jobs have been created under the 9-day working fortnight—32 jobs. Do members know what is tragic about that? It represents about 10 percent of the jobs that have been lost in any one day each and every day that National has been in office. Yet all National can do is come into this House and through the Prime Minister claim that 32 jobs have been saved by the 9-day working fortnight. Well with 60000 New Zealanders likely to be thrown out of their jobs in the next year that simply is not good enough. 
We are not asking for a miracle solution. We are not saying that we can be exempt from the impact of international recession. But we are saying that it is incumbent on a Government to set priorities. The priority here and now is to stop those tens of thousands of New Zealanders from losing their jobs. But all we have seen from the Government are steps that take us in the opposite direction. The December tax legislation gave a third of the income tax cuts to the top 3 percent of income earners—the very people who would save the money because they would not need to spend it. The economy would not be stimulated nor a single job created by a third of those tax cuts going to the income-earning elite of this country. The Prime Minister can twist and distort things all he likes but that is the fact of that stimulus package. It was not a stimulus package; the Government could have used that money to save tens of thousands of jobs. 
What is it doing about the one in five teenagers who is out of work? The Government has cut Enterprising Communities the scheme that everybody agreed was doing something in practical terms to help our school leavers and to give them a fair go. We found in the Budget papers today that $12 million over 3 years has been cut out of Career Services. The Government would rather 32000 young people rot on unemployment queues than spend that money trying to help them find jobs. Then there is the matter of training. We know that it takes 4 years to train an apprentice but do we have a countercyclical policy to help employers take on apprentices? No.