McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to take a speaking spot in opposition to the third reading of the Appropriation (2019/20 Estimates) Bill. I know it's disappointing I'm opposing it but none the less I am. I thought the most interesting factor I've heard this afternoon was that you know you've got trouble with the Government when Minister Jones makes one of the more plausible speeches of the day—particularly for the first five minutes until he started veering off the point. But it is a privilege to speak in a debate like this.I want to spend some time today speaking about the manner in which many of the so-called structural changes to our economy this Government is looking at introducing are in fact impacting on the very people they're setting out to assist. I think that's one of the shames—it is a shame—of the activities of the last Budget and also of some of the legislation that's been introduced to the House in the meantime.Some of the things I'm talking about with respect to that are things like the ring-fencing of losses on rental properties which effectively have penalised the very people that drive the New Zealand economy—the tradies: those people who work hard and save a little bit of money and invest in a rental property for their retirement or for whatever reason they invest in it only to find they're now unable to write off their tax against those properties consequently either having to force the rentals up—and we've seen rentals rise by $50-odd a week in the time of this Government. That's a pretty significant lift in rentals. So that's the first thing that's happened as a result of this. The other thing we're going to see is those people who have historically invested in this put their investment elsewhere—not necessarily in the productive sector and that's where the investment needs to go whatever the productive sector might look like at the time.The other thing I want to talk about is the proposed introduction of taxes and tax relief on vehicles—again an area that hugely affects the poorer and less well-off part of our community. Those people that live in rural and provincial New Zealand who have to drive to work every day they don't have the kind of income or the opportunity to invest in an electric vehicle. They probably never will have. This in my view is tax relief effectively for the rich; not tax relief or assistance for those people who struggle in life. Again this action has impacted significantly on the tradies the service sector of our economy and the people that do the work out the back that make the money that drives New Zealand and the Government's opportunity to do what they want with the tax they take.Petrol tax as well impacts explicitly on those people who have to drive cars whether they like it or not. We heard the Minister Julie Anne Genter just a short time ago going on and on about public transport. Well most parts of rural provincial New Zealand have no access to public transport and probably never will have. That is the challenge we face in New Zealand because not only do they have no access to public transport but that's the very part of New Zealand that produces the income that drives the Government's opportunity to do stuff—and I'll get on to that a little bit later as well. But these people have to drive their kids to school they have to drive daily to work and they will never be able to afford most of them to drive an electric vehicle. Those are the challenges that we face as the result of the activities of this Government. New Zealand's job creation has slowed significantly in the last two years and I think that one could ironically consider that to be fortunate when you think that we no longer have people to work in many parts of our productive sector and that's created by a shortage of people to do that work. So our immigration settings have been not necessarily right; they haven't necessarily helped us to drive this part of our economy. But none the less it's hugely important for both agriculture and many other sectors in our economy particularly the construction industry and the tourism industry that we have enough people to do the work in those areas. I want to speak a little bit about that—again related to rural New Zealand and provincial New Zealand—and that's the standard of our education and our provincial or rural secondary schools. That's not caused by the lack of very good people trying to do that trying to provide that education; it's caused by the fact that those schools are challenged by numbers. Unless we find a way of enabling those kids to participate in sport—because they struggle to participate in sport because frankly they can't afford to get there and when you live in a place like Taumarunui it's quite likely you've got to travel to Hamilton for sport. Very few people are going to be able to do that. They don't even have enough kids in these schools to provide a full rugby team or a sporting team in many of these areas. That's a huge challenge for them. They also struggle because of the size of them to provide the opportunity for those kids that every larger secondary school in New Zealand can provide. We need to find ways around that and that's one of the reasons that some of our young people face real challenges getting into work and I think progressing in life. When you think of the fact that we've put $2.6 billion in the last 18 months into the fees-free scheme which provides primarily for those people who either could have afforded to put themselves through those courses already or who have had access to an appropriate education that's given them the opportunity to get on and make their way in life that's $2.6 billion which could have been spent in an area of our society I guess that would have enabled a whole lot more people to acquire the skills that would enable them to commence that type of education let alone get into it. So that's a challenge I think that we've got in rural and provincial New Zealand which is not being addressed by this Government and has not been addressed by the spend and the Wellbeing—I suppose—Budget that's been put in place to get us to this point. I heard the finance Minister say today that they've stepped up. Well unfortunately in a lot of areas there's been no planning behind the step and I think that's a shame because some of the initiatives that we are looking at as a country right now—and I speak about the climate change amendment bill I speak about the water planning papers that have been put out—they're all very well but the work hasn't been done behind them and when the work's not done behind them that creates fear which creates anxiety which creates opposition. It's no doubt that that opposition is going to grow when people effectively fear for their future. We're seeing this not only in the primary sector; we're seeing it—well the fishing industry is part of the primary sector. We're certainly seeing it in the fishing industry where fishing families who've been involved in the business for almost hundreds of years are seeing a very bleak future in front of them. So some of the things we're doing are being done for the right reasons but in absolutely the wrong way and we're seeing initiatives rushed at us at a rate that we can no longer keep up with. I guess getting back to the climate change bill I think the climate change amendment bill and the commission it sets up is an absolutely appropriate way of going about things. The problem is the Government's then rushed a whole lot of targets into there which are subjective—they've got no reason for putting them in there—and that again has created a whole lot of opposition to a piece of legislation that would have been very good without those targets in it but certainly has made or created a rash of uncertainty particularly in our primary productive sector. Yesterday we saw Forest & Bird Fish & Game and Greenpeace release a report which is clearly misleading. It talks about the 3 percent of GDP that the dairy sector puts into New Zealand. It talks about the 3 percent of people that work in agriculture in New Zealand. It does not make any mention of the thousands and thousands of people who work in the service sector behind it who live work and are educated in rural New Zealand. It doesn't talk about the 50-odd percent of our cash receipts that come into New Zealand from those sectors. It's a grossly misleading report and that is one of the challenges I think we are putting on to our productive sector in New Zealand which is creating uncertainty which creates opposition and that's unfortunate because some of the things that I said that are being done are actually being done for the right reasons. The last issue I want to talk briefly about is the tree issue and I accept that a lot of the things we've done around trees and the policies that are in place around trees are probably useful for New Zealand but surely the ability to be able to write off your pollution by planting a tree is completely ridiculous. I think that this is a challenge that we haven't addressed in New Zealand in a manner we should have done and we need to do a lot of work on it. We need to do it quickly because the tree-planting programme is setting a future for us that in 20 years we may well regret significantly. I think we need to give this a lot more consideration and it needs urgent consideration because the activities that are going on at present are running the risk of—and I'm not saying they are because I think that there's such a lot of work that hasn't been done in this area as with many other things this Government have not done. They haven't done the work on the potential ramifications of the actions that are taking place as a result of the policy that's been introduced. So there's a lot more work that needs to be done on that and I think we have in the National Party a policy of the right tree in the right place basically and I think a little bit of work on the legislation and the policy around the tree-planting thing will create an opportunity for that to happen rather than trees just being planted randomly across the country. Thank you Mr Speaker.