Joyce Steven: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeJoyce Steven: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 28 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15554. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): Well it must be election year.Hon Maurice Williamson: Really?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Yes apparently it must be. Labour and the Greens have already rocked up with nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars a year of spending ideas and it is not even the end of January. It must be election year. As reliable as at any other time in this House the Greens and Labour together want to spend your money before you have even made it which is remarkably similar to how they have spent their lives historically. Once again we have not even managed to get to surplus yet and they are casting around trying to spend billions of dollars. Why do I say billions? Because it is three-quarters of a billion and we are not even at the end of January in an election year yet.David Bennett: They’re going to find oil.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: It is like the global financial crisis—well no they are not not with the Greens. There will not be any oil. There will not be any milk for that matter either. It is like the global financial crisis never happened. Labour’s last big spending splurges were between 2005 and 2008. It dramatically increased the deficit. Remember the decade of deficits it left because the music was never going to stop? It dramatically increased interest costs for New Zealanders and it put the New Zealand economy into a premature recession and it is like that never happened.That is the trouble with this Opposition and Bill English touched on that. There is this wilful denial to learn anything at all from its period in Opposition a wilful denial to actually learn a single thing. I actually think that it is quite conceited. It was thrown out once in 2008 but also in 2011 it was rejected again and it comes back with the same old policies in 2014 looking for the same old smack-round Labour has not learnt a single thing in Opposition.Mr Cunliffe actually adds another dimension to it because he is a bit tricky. He is a bit tricky our friend Mr Cunliffe and the journalists are working it out. Last week Mr Cunliffe was there saying: “Oh look I have just saved $1.5 billion a year so I am off to spend it all everybody. It is all wonderful. So I have cancelled these policies. I now have a cheque that I can write out for $1.5 billion a year.” And some of the scribes gleefully reported that that was indeed the case—that clever Mr Cunliffe had saved us $1.5 billion a year and he would now go off and spend it.Except it was never there—except it was never in the country’s accounts. There was nothing about GST off fruit and vegetables going out in Treasury projections for the next 4 years. There was absolutely nothing about the tax-free threshold. But Mr Cunliffe by cancelling something that never previously existed has suddenly foundhimself $1.5 billion a year. And now he says: “Oh but that is to do with last election’s costings of our economic plan.” Well we know how that ended. Those costings in 2011 sunk Phil Goff when he could not show us the money in 2011. Whose projections were they? David Cunliffe’s projections. So Mr Cunliffe is back except this time he is knee-capping himself. He should have thought that through.The reality is that he has no idea how this “Bad Start” package is going to work. And I say “Bad Start” package because you could not get a worse start to an election year than an Opposition leader who firstly trips himself up over the way that his package is going to work—and I understand he is still doing that as we speak; the package is being redesigned minute by minute—but who also has no answer to the question about how he is going to pay for it. That is the trickiness of Mr Cunliffe because he is basically saying: “Everybody you can have everything that is being done now and yes probably some of the Green Party stuff as well—including that nice bit that it did yesterday—and you can have the $600 million and it will all be sweet.” So says the Leader of the Opposition. Well he is wrong. It is not sweet. It was not sweet in 2008 after 9 years of progressively worse policies that were about spending more money than the country had made and it is not sweet to go back to it today. The real answer to lifting Kiwi incomes is attracting investment that boosts jobs. And that is what this National Government is doing.That is another thing—Mr Cunliffe is Rip Van Winkle on the economy as well. He has gone to sleep in 2008 and turned up with the same arguments for business growth in 2014. He says that we should not be exporting lamb carcasses overseas. We do not—98 percent of New Zealand’s lamb carcasses are processed in this country. Wake up Mr Cunliffe. Life has moved on. He says that we should innovate. We do innovate. We are spending $566 million over 4 years to innovative New Zealand companies and New Zealand’s information and communications high-tech and medium high - tech manufacturing industry is growing up like that and is about to get to the point where it is already nearly half of our dairy industry exports. That is the reality.By the way before Mr Cunliffe gets in with the Greens and tries to shoot it down dairy is only 20 percent today of New Zealand’s total exports of goods and services. So here we are doing the things that old Rip Van Winkle over there has woken up to and said: “My gosh it would be a good idea if we actually exported something else besides meat carcasses.” He needs to do his homework. That is the conceit of the Labour Party. It went out of office and it has come back today with the same prescription for 2014 as it had in 2008 and 2011. It has not learnt anything. It has not bothered to check what is going on today which is also conceited. Meanwhile the New Zealand economy is growing strongly New Zealand confidence is growing and the public of New Zealand know that the way to become successful is to keep doing the things that this Government has New Zealand doing.That is the focus that this Government has and we have the greatest level of confidence since the 1990s. We have one of the greatest levels of growth across the OECD and it is likely to continue. It is not nirvana yet but if you give us another 3 years you never know how far you will get. But what you do know with the Labour Party is that you go backwards to a bunch of failed and rejected policies—policies that were rejected in 2008 and rejected again in 2011. What we do need to do is continue on the considered sensible conservative path where we understand that there is a balance between spending and people’s incomes. We understand that you actually have to reward people for their own hard work and you have to trust them with their incomes to make good decisions. Those are the sorts of things that you have to do. And you have to do good public services.I was bemused to see another one Jacinda Ardern up there before going on about how they will get prison populations down. Well hello we have done that. While she was not looking in 2008 we inherited a prison population projection that was going up like this. Now it is going down like that and crime levels are at record lows. Meanwhile Jacinda has picked up the 2008 election plan and says: “Oh we had better protest about the state of the prisons and how too many people are going to be in the prisons.” Believe me these people in the Labour Party need to update what they know. Sadly I do not know what they have been doing in the last 5 years but they have not been updating their knowledge at all they have not been learning what is happening in the world today and they have not been learning what is working.This Government has been getting on with the job of improving public services and of delivering far better results than Labour ever managed with its avalanches of money. This Government is getting on with building a strong competitive economy that supports and encourages investments and competitive Kiwi businesses; getting on with frankly balancing the books getting rid of the decade of deficits and getting New Zealand into a position where we can have a strong economic future in this country; and above all getting on with rebuilding our second-largest city.Yes we get an economic benefit of that—this country does—but by goodness we got the economic pain of that in 2010 and 2011. For Mr Cunliffe in his conceited manner to wander around and say that you should discount the growth of Christchurch—well that basically involves discounting the pain that Christchurch went through as well and we cannot do that. So yes there is some benefit in that but if he thinks that it is about a milk and Christchurch story then frankly he is damning the efforts of many New Zealand businesses up and down the country that are competing and succeeding on the world stage.This Government supports those people. It is providing a platform for growth and competitiveness from this little country at the bottom of the Pacific. The Opposition needs to wake up and decide it needs a new song.