Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. We heard from the Prime Minister—new Prime Minister—in his first press conference that when he was asked the impertinent question about having cancelled the Radio New Zealand - TVNZ merger how much the Government had spent on it he said Oh I don't want to look backwards." I have news for the Prime Minister: I'm sorry that's not how it works. When you're in an election year a Government is accountable for what it has achieved or what it hasn't achieved and people want to know what has happened with the extra $1 billion a week that this Government has been spending since 2017. That's right: an extra $50 billion a year has been spent by this Government above what the previous National Government did an extra billion dollars a week. So there's a very perfectly legitimate question that New Zealanders have: what have we got for it? How have our lives been improved by that extra billion dollars a week? How have our lives been improved by the 14000-odd extra civil servants and by the $1.7 billion on consultants that this Government has been spending?Then we look and see well how are things better? Well we've got 7 percent inflation and most New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living. Then if we look at the education sector for example we say well we've got extra billions of dollars going into education. How's that working out? The previous speaker Grant Robertson spoke of the free lunches at schools. One of the main arguments for that was to make sure that the kids came to school so they had lunch at school and yet truancy rates have got worse and worse and worse under this Government. So we've got fewer than half of the kids regularly attending. We had the Prime Minister "Mr Fix-It"—Mr Hipkins—and the Minister of Finance for five years so the kids don't go to school. It's not very reassuring for us. And then the standards of actually learning what they learn at school whether they can read or write have gone backwards as well. So that hasn't been a good investment in terms of focusing the public sector and the schools on what they really need to do which is ensure that the kids are at school and that they measure some progress.If we look at health—what about health? We've got extra billions going into health and what have we got there? We've got a very large bureaucracy led by a man who up until a week ago was clearly very focused on one issue which was co-governance and not much else because we had much longer waiting times in our prisons. So with all the extra money you go along—are you going to get your emergency situation dealt with quicker under all these extra resources under this Government? No you have to wait many more hours in the emergency department on average in order to get seen. So that hasn't improved things.If we look at housing they said they were going to create 100000 new houses under KiwiBuild which was Jacinda Ardern's greatest flop. What's happened there? Well they've got more and more young families and people living in emergency housing week after week month after month and even year after year. We've got more than 4000 young children being raised in emergency motel housing and the Minister of Housing has no real solution. Part of the reason is that they've put up the cost of housing so significantly and had a war on landlords which has seen people retreat from renting out their houses—it's not compulsory to rent out your houses. That's added to the pressure on the housing the housing's added to the pressure on education and the housing and education combined have added to the pressure on youth crime—and I'll come to that later.What about transport? We've spent extra billions of dollars and so the Minister of Transport stands up and says "Well we've spent so much more on road maintenance." and yet the roads are worse than they've ever been. So what's going on? Why are there so many potholes if we've spent all this extra money—50 percent increase on road maintenance? Well one of the main problems is that so much of the money is spent on road management and cones that very little is spent on actually fixing the roads. That's something that the Minister might look at. But we've seen this incredible increase in spending and we have not seen a single new significant roading project started. They've finished two of the National Party's one coming north out of Wellington and through the Waikato which have been transformational for those areas.They still haven't opened the one north of Auckland after five years; they're still fluffing round and that's one of the great kind of scandals of the day. What on earth has happened? It's been finished for up to a year and yet it's still not opened; they're still fluffing around. They used to call that the "Holiday Highway"; I remember the Labour Party referring to the "Holiday Highway". If you think of what's happened in Northland what is the most important thing you can do? It's actually to enable people to reconnect with the rest of the country. This Government hasn't continued has been very slow with that motorway project and stopped the next leg of going around the Brynderwyns and yet we still have some people suggesting we should move the port up to Whangārei—I wonder how that would work if you have no road and the trains are knocked out.So the basic investment in infrastructure hasn't been happening. Instead the money has gone into the endless little road bumps all around Auckland and reducing the speed limit to 30. If that's the limit of this Government's ambition that in a time of life when cars have never been safer we have to crawl around at 30 kilometres in our city and go over road bumps—that's where all the money's going and actually investing in road maintenance and helping get people to where they want to go quickly and efficiently is way down the bottom. So billions of dollars extra are being spent worse outcomes in health worse outcomes in education and nothing to see for it in transport apart from a promise of a slow tram going down Dominion Road one day.Then if we come to justice what do we see? Well the only real justice target that this Government has is the 30 percent reduction in prison population irrespective of what the level of crime is in our community which is a bizarre target. We've seen actually a 33 percent increase in violent crime and yet the prison population continues to fall because this Government is soft on crime. It's also soft on the causes of crime. They've managed to double it—soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime—because they haven't dealt with truancy they haven't dealt with emergency housing they haven't dealt with any of the things that drive crime in the long term.So they've been soft on the causes of crime and then when it comes to crime itself the only thing they've done in that area is to repeal the three-strikes legislation. Why? It's because they've looked at the situation they've looked at the increase in violent crime they've looked at the 500 percent increase in ram raids the sense of disorder on our streets and they've come to the conclusion that the one thing we need to do is reduce prison sentences for our worst repeat offenders and do away with three strikes. What a bizarre outcome.Hon Member: A joke—it's a joke.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Total joke. So that's where they're at. They spent most of last year focused on that important issue of hate speech legislation which in December the Minister stood up in the House and introduced and said "This is great this is important this is a priority for us." and then about four weeks later they withdrew it. So that was a lot of consultants' work no doubt focused on that this year. They still have on the books reducing the voting age to 16. So that's where their priorities are in justice on those things rather than reducing violent crime dealing with the long delays in courts and doing something effective about youth crime.So what's National doing? Everybody wants to have higher wages of course. Higher incomes should be the focus of all Governments. This Government's conclusion is that the way to achieve that is to legislate for higher incomes through minimum wages and all sorts of fair pay agreements and all sorts of things like that. Secondly it's about reducing immigration starving off immigration so there's a shortage of workers and wages go up. Unfortunately they're only short-term solutions. If you want to have sustainably higher incomes you actually have to have more productive businesses; there's no other way around it and there's nowhere in this PM's statement about improving productivity.That's what the National Party will do: we'll be focused on the things that actually improve the productivity of New Zealand which is a better-skilled workforce; it's improving in quality infrastructure that helps people move their goods to markets; it's about increasing the flow of investment because it's actually investment that drives improvements in productivity. Then we've got to fight inflation because inflation is digging into New Zealand families' pockets. That's why on the weekend Christopher Luxon announced the Family Boost which will help young families with young kids by putting $75 extra into their budgets—over $3000 a year if they're in the right category. We in the National Party under Chris Luxon are absolutely focused on helping New Zealand families fight inflation. It's why we'll have the Reserve Bank focused on its knitting which is fighting inflation. We won't waste so much money as the Government has so that's not fuelling the fire. We'll be removing the roadblocks such as shortage of workers and we'll be actually doing the things that matter when it comes finally to law and order: focusing on reducing violent crime keeping communities safe and actually doing something about the increase in youth crime and offering new solutions like particularly that small group of repeat offenders sending them off to a military academy getting their lives sorted out getting them turned around so that we can live in safety in our communities.So the Prime Minister mightn't want to look back but he needs to and he needs to justify what has this Government achieved in five years—and I can't think of very much."