Volume 626 Week 92 - Tuesday 14 June 2005 
Volume 626 Week 92 - Tuesday 14 June 2005 
[Volume:626;Page:21243] 
Tuesday 14 June 2005 
Madam Speaker 
 took the Chair at 2 p.m. 
Prayers 
. 
Visitors 
South Africa—Portfolio Committee on Finance National Parliament of the Republic of South Africa 
Madam SPEAKER 
:I have much pleasure in informing the House that members of the Portfolio Committee on Finance from the National Parliament of the Republic of South Africa led by Dr Robert Davies MP are present in the gallery. I am sure that members would wish that the delegation be welcomed. 
Obituaries 
Sonja Davies 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I regret to inform the House of the death on 12 June 2005 of Sonja Margaret Loveday Davies member of the Order of New Zealand who represented the electorate of Pencarrow from 1987 to 1993. I desire on behalf of this House to express our sense of the loss we have sustained and our sympathy with the relatives of the late former member. I now ask members to stand with me and observe a period of silence as a mark of respect for her memory. 
Honourable members stood as a mark of respect. 
Points of Order 
Government Notice of Motion No. 2—Presence on Order Paper 
GERRARD ECKHOFF (ACT) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I wish to raise with you a point of order about Government notice of motion No. 2 which has sat on the Order Paper for something in the order of 6 months. I note that a member of this House can have a notice of motion on the Order Paper for only 1 week before it is removed or debated. Can I through you ask the Leader of the House when that motion will be debated and for an assurance that in fact it will be debated before the election. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 At the request of the Hon Jim Sutton the notice of motion was removed from the Order Paper last week and does not appear on the Order Paper today. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: The matter has been removed. It is not on the Order Paper at this stage. 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. Can we take it from the Leader of the House that the Hon Jim Sutton is not prepared to have that debate with Gerry Eckhoff and that once it was drawn to Mr Sutton’s attention that a debate would be called he quickly removed the notice? 
Madam SPEAKER 
: That is not a point of order. 
Questions to Ministers 
Child Poverty—Reports 
1. GEORGINA BEYER (Labour—Wairarapa) 
 to the  
Minister for Social Development and Employment 
: What reports has he received on child poverty in New Zealand? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 The latest findings on poverty levels in New Zealand show that poverty rates have declined in New Zealand since 2001 as a result of a rise in real incomes for low-income families. After tax and housing costs low-income families now have more money in their pockets each week than they did back in 2001 and income levels continue to improve across the board. This is evidence of a steady improvement in social well-being under a Labour-Progressive Government. 
Georgina Beyer 
: How does this compare with the trend in previous years? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: The proportion of children in families that earn below 60 percent of the median wage has declined significantly from 27 percent in 2001 to 21 percent in 2004. This compares with a peak of 34 percent in 1994 which shows the impact of benefit cuts market rent policies and the Employment Contracts Act at that time. The improvement over the last 3 years has been largely the result of more people in jobs as a result of the recent economic boom and income-related rents for State housing. The Working for Families package will have the effect of further dramatically reducing child poverty by up to 70 percent. 
Rod Donald 
: Has the Minister seen any reports of policies that could reduce expenditure on family support housing health care and education which could make child poverty worse than it already is? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I have seen reports on an approach that would cut taxes so that the funding would not be available to adequately provide for childcare or for key policies like maintaining income-related rents. In particular I have seen reports that the National Party would cut short the Working for Families package with massive impacts on child poverty in order to fund tax cuts that can only make those who are well off even better off. 
Hon Peter Dunne 
: If it is correct that one of the focuses of the Government’s policy has been on the income of a household so as to benefit the children of that household what is the Minister’s reaction to the OECD’s findings about the difficulties faced by second-income earners in New Zealand households and is he prepared therefore to consider a policy of allowing people to split their incomes for tax purposes; if not why not? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I am always willing to consider exciting new policies from United Future but having had a look at these policies I would say that my opinion at the present time is that the work we are doing on the marginal tax rates and the further work we are to do will be a better way to address that issue. 
Georgina Beyer 
: Can the Minister remind the House which policies are being put in place to put more money into the hands of low to modest income hard-working New Zealanders? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Almost all families with incomes below $45000 will benefit from the Working for Families package along with a substantial number with incomes up to $70000. Families making $25000 to $45000 a year will be on average $100 a week better off. To achieve that via a tax cut would cost almost $9 billion. 
Prisoners—Employment Programmes 
2. Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
 on behalf of  
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
 to the  
Minister of Corrections 
: Why did the Budget cut provision for inmate employment by nearly $5 million to $30 million when inmate numbers are growing and do the published measures properly report the effectiveness of corrections inmate employment programmes? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN (Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 I am advised that— 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: They don’t believe in work. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: About time to see the pharmacist again! I am advised that the $5 million—[ 
Interruption 
] Have I not seen your brother on a Telecom advertisement? I am advised— 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I am not commenting on the interjections which I thought were very reasonable and witty. But it is unacceptable that a Minister should bring your brother being in a Telecom advertisement into his answer and he should apologise to you and to this House. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: When there are interjections then as members know there is likely to be a response. I am sorry I have ruled on that Mr Hide. Is this a new point of order? 
Rodney Hide 
: Yes. I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. The accusation was not against a member of the Opposition; it was actually against you. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I am sorry I did not take offence at it. 
Rodney Hide 
: I did. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I am sorry you may well take offence on my behalf but I did not. I appreciate your concern for me. I do however wish the Minister to proceed with his answer. Thank you. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Is this a new point of order? 
Rodney Hide 
: When a Minister or an MP stands up and brings the Speaker into the debate by referring to “your brother” being on a Telecom advertisement that is actually a reflection on the entire House. He should not bring you into the debate and he should be pulled up accordingly. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I agree with that point. Now would the Minister please proceed with the answer. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I am advised that the $5 million difference the member refers to is not a cut to the inmate employment budget. It represents an internal transfer in 2004-05 to offset among other things a commercial loss caused by difficult trading conditions particularly in the timber processing industries. Overall there is a planned 14 percent increase in the hours of inmate employment between 2004-05 and 2005-06. 
Dr Muriel Newman 
: How can the public have any confidence in the honesty of the research produced by this Government when emails between Department of Corrections managers show that the research report “to build the case for further employment training” will “be highly skewed as we are looking for our top inmate performers people you thought would be most likely to get a job post-release.” and is this not another example of the Labour Government cooking the books to make their soft-on-crime policies look good? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: Quite a lot and no. 
Tim Barnett 
: What plans does the Minister have to increase the effectiveness of inmate employment activities and to meet demand? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: The inmate employment and training strategy is currently under review. The department is working on a number of initiatives to increase the effectiveness of inmate employment activity and to meet demand. They include extending vocational training activities and better aligning these with industry needs joint initiatives with the Ministry of Social Development to place prisoners in work on release and further developing the numbers and relevance of New Zealand Qualifications Authority unit standards delivered in prisons. These initiatives will form part of the strategic plan for inmate employment which is due for release in the first quarter of this year. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Will the Minister be taking any action over what appears to be a growing culture within his department for departmental officials to fudge the figures showing the numbers of ex-inmates getting a job and can he also confirm that his department is also fudging the prison numbers? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: There is no such culture as the member says. The Government acknowledges of course that the numbers of inmates are rising because this Government has got tough on crime unlike the previous Government which did nothing for 9 long years as was shown by the referendum in 1999 which was a referendum on the National Government’s inactivity on law and order for 9 years. 
Dail Jones 
: Why should the Opposition have any confidence in the Minister’s answer to that question bearing in mind the evidence put forward to the Minister that there appears to be an effort within his department to distort those work-related figures to the best types of workers and bearing in mind that in the past the Minister has not been able to have confidence in his department—for example as in the “goon squad” inquiry? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: The point is that the issue of inmate employment is really critical. People are now indicating to us that there are job shortages in New Zealand. I am very determined to make sure that inmates get proper education and vocational skills training so they can meet those needs. The department is highly focused on that at the moment. 
Dr Muriel Newman 
: Does the Minister expect civil servants to skew research reports by selecting “the top 10 inmates” and declaring that to be a representative sample; if not will he tell the House that civil servants cooking the books in that way is unacceptable? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I have not heard of the allegation until now and that is not what I would describe as cooking the books. I am indicating to the member that the Government and the department is very very focused on trying to make major improvements on inmate employment and training. This is the time to do it—a time of labour shortages—and it is really critical that we make improvements in the best interests of not only inmates but also communities within which they will work. 
Rodney Hide 
: Will the Minister now just front up to the House and say that it is unacceptable for the data of his departmental officials to be “highly skewed” in order to make the case for another soft-on-crime policy; or is it the case that what officials are doing—skewing the data to make results look good by choosing only the top inmate results—is exactly what this Government expects in every department: police health and corrections? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: It is hardly a get-soft-on-crime campaign when we now have the biggest number of inmates New Zealand has ever seen. That is different from the time actually when the ACT party supported the previous National Government which did nothing for the 3 years during which ACT supported it. This Government is determined to make improvements in employment training and education. We are going to make some changes and those changes will be announced in the first quarter of this year. 
Rodney Hide 
: Does the Minister find it acceptable that his manager Win McDonald sent an email on 25 May copied to his boss Royden Motu saying that they had an opportunity to “demonstrate the corrections inmate employment training results” in order to make the case for more funding and that “the report output will be highly skewed as we are looking for our top inmate performers”; is it acceptable that his managers do skew and cook the results—yes or no? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I am always highly highly suspicious of allegations from the ACT party but I will look into that. 
Rodney Hide 
: Would the Minister if it turns out that those emails are correct and that his corrections managers are skewing results by choosing a non-representative sample in order to increase their budget just tell the House whether he finds that acceptable; and what action he will take? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I will make no comment until such time as I have seen the evidence. That is clear because it is not the first time that the ACT party has got a whole pile of things very very wrong. 
Dr Muriel Newman 
: I seek leave to table the series of emails that show that those Department of Corrections officials appear to have been cooking the books. 
Documents by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I seek the leave of the House to table the results of a referendum in 1999 about National’s inactivity on law and order for 9 years. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is; it will not be tabled. 
Logging of Indigenous Forests—Crown Land 
3.  
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
 to the  
Minister of Conservation 
: What conservation goals led the Government to end the logging of indigenous forests on Crown-managed land? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER (Minister of Conservation) 
: 
 The Government protected indigenous forests on Crown-owned and managed land to help meet the goals of the New Zealand biodiversity strategy. These included maintaining and restoring a full range of remaining natural habitats and ecosystems to a healthy functioning condition. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Does the biodiversity strategy also apply under the sea; if so will he agree that the same goals should apply to the equally ancient underwater forests of tall corals and their multitude of associated species and what discussion has he had with his colleague the Minister of Fisheries about ways of protecting them? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: Indeed it does and in fact in 2004 the Government adopted a strategy to protect deep-water biodiversity. 
David Parker 
: What other actions has the Government taken to meet the conservation goals of the biodiversity strategy? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: We have increased funding for the Department of Conservation by over 40 percent enabling it to tackle weed and pest problems better than ever before. We have embarked on the most ambitious island pest eradication programme found anywhere in the world. Large new areas of forest high-country and coastal land have been protected as public conservation land. Eleven new marine reserves have been created and 2 percent of our exclusive economic zone is now in some form of marine protection. 
Jim Peters 
: What goal motivated the Government to give the West Coast councils $120 million of taxpayers’ money to cut taxpayer-owned forests yet that Minister denied many SILNA landowners compensation for the Government’s denial of their right to realise the economic value of the lands awarded to them by this House in 1906? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: I know that it was National that exempted the SILNA forests from an amendment to the Forests Act in 1993. By the time National was thrown out of office in 1999 it had not resolved the issues. This Government adopted a comprehensive policy for SILNA forests in 2002. 
David Parker 
: Has the Minister seen any reports that some of the indigenous forests protected since 1999 could be at risk? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: Indeed I have. I have seen a recent report that Don Brash and Nick Smith had called for resumption of logging of the West Coast native forests which were protected under the Labour Government. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Is it not true that conservation goals would be assisted better if his strategy required all fishing methods to undergo environmental impact assessment as the Greens have proposed and what representations is his department making to advance this? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: My department—indeed the Government—is very committed to the defence of New Zealand’s unique marine biodiversity. Different Government departments continue to collaborate closely on that issue. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Has he seen the recent Greenpeace photos in the 
 New Zealand Herald  
today and on television on Sunday in which New Zealand fishing vessels are shown hauling up then dumping over the side giant corals and rare sea creatures and how long does he think it is acceptable for that practice to continue? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: Indeed I have seen those photographs but I am pleased to announce that today my colleague David Benson-Pope the Minister of Fisheries announced that New Zealand together with Chile and Australia would lead development of a regional fisheries management agreement that will give greater protection to high-seas biodiversity. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Returning to New Zealand’s economic zone rather than the high seas does he agree with marine biologist Dr Steve O’Shea of Auckland University of Technology as reported in today’s  
New Zealand Herald 
 who describes bottom trawling as “absolute annihilation” and goes on to say: “There should be some urgency. For God’s sake let’s do something practical now before it’s too late.”; if so what will he do in New Zealand waters? 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: Indeed I do agree with those comments but as there is no international proposal at the moment for a complete moratorium on bottom trawling New Zealand is working closely with Australia to develop a regional agreement. 
Australian Shares—Capital Gains Tax 
4.  
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
 to the  
Minister of Finance 
: If a New Zealander holds shares in an Australian company does the investor pay any tax on any capital gains and could this position change after 1 April 2007? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 Possibly and therefore possibly. 
John Key 
: Why should New Zealanders who passively own shares in an Australian company be forced to pay a capital gains tax after April 2007 something they are currently exempt from given that the Australian companies they invest in are in many cases no different from the equivalent New Zealand companies that invest capital create jobs and pay tax here in New Zealand? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: As the member knows I have clearly expressed a view that there is no single solution that will treat—[ 
Interruption 
] Goodness me! This is from the party that admires the Australian tax system which has a generalised capital gains tax in place. 
John Key 
: Is this capital gains tax not just another tax grab from a Government that is spending so much that it is always looking at new ways to gain tax whether it is through sherry petrol or carbon emissions? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: I am fascinated that the member has finally read the Budget speech where I refer to this as being potentially a capital gains tax. It has taken only 4 weeks for him to wake up to what everybody else recognised in a space of minutes. 
John Key 
: How on earth can the Minister be serious about promoting a single economic market with Australia when he is now proposing a capital gains tax on Australian investments held by New Zealand residents? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: Given that Australia has a general capital gains tax it is rather strange to suggest that a capital gains tax could not be applied to any form of investment in Australia. The fact is that if we want to simplify a system that at present distinguishes between where people invest how they invest—whether on a revenue or capital account—and how they calculate the investment according to four different methods there is only one way of doing it. But of course anything that is simple is beyond the National Party. 
John Key 
: How can the Minister expect a small stock market like New Zealand’s to cope with all the offshore capital that could get repatriated as a result of his proposed capital gains tax; and is it not true that if the bulk of that capital does come home it will just end up in the property market something the Minister was moaning about during the earlier part of this year? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: Given that member’s plans to give away billions of dollars a year in terms of tax cuts I am sure he would want a lot of money to be repatriated to pay for that. 
John Key 
: I seek leave to table the tax schedules that show the New Zealander who passively owns shares today in Australia does not currently pay tax but will do so after 1April 2007. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is. 
Treaty of Waitangi—Education Programme 
5.  
DAIL JONES (NZ First) 
 to the  
Coordinating Minister Race Relations 
: What has been the total cost for each year since 1999 to all Government departments for providing both internal and external treaty-related courses and associated educational material? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Coordinating Minister Race Relations) 
: 
 I do not hold information on how much each individual department has spent on treaty-related courses and educational material. If the member really wishes to obtain this information I suggest he put down written questions to responsible Ministers. 
Dail Jones 
: Does the Minister believe that the money spent on educational programmes for State servants regarding the Treaty of Waitangi is simply feeding the—and I quote the Minister who said this last week—“treaty industry”; if not can he identify any positive quantifiable outcomes that have been made in the public service as a result of this spending and would he take as an outcome the views of Mr Graham Kelly who said on the Maori population: “There were seven canoes that came in 740 from Hawaiki so there are seven tribes. They all held each others’ hands to stop them from sinking on the voyage. Once they got to New Zealand they started fighting and eating each other so there have been Maori wars ever since then.”; and are the views expressed in Ottawa by Mr Graham Kelly our high commissioner in Ottawa an example of the positive quantifiable outcome of the Minister’s programmes? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I think it would be fair to say that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has some work to do as far as Mr Kelly is concerned. 
Dail Jones 
: Why does the Minister keep on standing up in front of the House even after a week or more declaring that he still cannot supply us with full details of the amount of taxpayers’ money that has been spent on worthless educational courses for bureaucrats and one foreign affairs official at least when the public deserves to know the extent of the Government’s wastefulness in this area and is it simply because if the true amount were known no amount of Government spin would be able to justify such a flagrant waste of taxpayers’ money? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I do accept that it would be a challenge as far as one current Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade employee is concerned having known the individual for some time but I am willing to encourage my colleagues to get the information together—not that there has been any policy change since Nick Smith was in charge of the area as far as education is concerned. We could collect the information up if the member puts down proper questions. If he really wants advice on how to draft an appropriate question—I think he was first in Parliament in 1975 but he does not know how to draft questions yet—I am willing to give him a guide. 
Dail Jones 
: Despite the Minister’s failure to answer any of these questions properly until now can he still try to tell us in what way the $6 million set aside for this Government’s Treaty of Waitangi education programme and any additional amounts will benefit New Zealanders: for example will it reduce elective surgery waiting times will it reduce the exorbitant school fees imposed on parents by this Government or has it merely created more jobs and higher pay for the Labour Party’s girls and boys? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I think it is fair to say that there would be a debate about whether the majority of the people involved in what the member refers to as the “treaty industry” are Labour Party supporters. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I wonder whether through you we may ask Mr Dail Jones to table or explain where our High Commissioner in Canada made those comments so that we can see that this is what the Labour Party MPs really think and what their appointments actually say? 
Madam SPEAKER 
: That is not a point of order. 
Land—Public Access 
6.  
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
 to the  
Associate Minister for Rural Affairs 
: When will he introduce legislation to implement the Government’s decisions on the walking access policy? 
Hon JIM SUTTON (Associate Minister for Rural Affairs) 
: 
 A bill has yet to be drafted. I intend to introduce it when it is ready. 
Hon David Carter 
: Does the Government’s proposed policy have the support of all departments and ministries; if so how does he explain the advice from the Ministry for the Environment dated 22 October 2004 stating that it remains “unconvinced about the nature of the problem and the rationale for Government intervention.”? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: The policy decisions that have been made to date have the support of all Ministers. 
Hon David Carter 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I did not ask whether it had the support of all Ministers. I asked whether it had the support of departments and ministries. 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: It certainly has the support of the departments and ministries for which I have responsibility. I have no reason to doubt that the ministry quoted by the member is now convinced of the need for the legislation. 
Gerrard Eckhoff 
: What is the Minister’s response to the condemnation of his proposed legislation by recreational groups such as Public Access New Zealand the Deerstalkers Association the Federation of Freshwater Anglers and also what is the significance of the review of the job of Bryce Johnson—his major advocate—chief executive officer of the Fish and Game Council by the board of the New Zealand Council of Outdoor Recreation Associations which according to reliable information has voted 7:5 to sack him due to his anti-rural and rural-bashing campaigns? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: My understanding of the coalition of outdoor recreation associations is that its actual position is that it wants the walking policy to go ahead even though it does not go as far as it would like. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Why did he write to Mr Webber of South Head Kaipara who complained that Carter Holt Harvey had planted two rotations of pine forest on a legal paper road denying the public access to Muriwai beach stating that he should pursue the matter through the courts and does the Government’s policy on public access exempt forestry companies from the law? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: The forestry companies are not exempt from the law in any way as far as I know. I have no recollection of the correspondence concerned. 
Larry Baldock 
: Can the Minister give an assurance to the House and to the hundreds of thousands from the recreational sector that this long-awaited access legislation will be introduced before the election this year; if not why not? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: It is certainly my intention to progress the bill to a stage where it can be introduced before the election but because I do not know the timing of the election I cannot provide an absolute assurance. 
Hon David Carter 
: Will the Minister confirm today that this Government’s policy is opposed by Land Information New Zealand which says that the policy has: “serious implications for property rights” and that it is also opposed by Treasury which says it: “does not see the benefits of the policy outweighing the detriment” and what is the opinion of the New Zealand Police? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: I can assure the member that under this Government it is the elected members and their Cabinet who set the policy not bureaucrats. 
Larry Baldock 
: Has the Minister read the United Future and Outdoor Recreation NZ policy called  
Practical Access to New Zealand’s Great Outdoors 
 and if so given its common-sense and balanced approach to the access issue and the fact that the Government will need United Future’s support for the passage of the access legislation will he assure farmers that they have nothing to fear from the intended proposals? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: As it happens I have read the policy mentioned by the member although I did not see anything about walking access in it. However I acknowledge the strong loyalty of United Future to outdoor recreationists and I can assure them that in my judgment the farmers of New Zealand should in their own enlightened self-interest welcome that policy. 
Hon David Carter 
: In light of his earlier answer that this matter will be decided by politicians and not bureaucrats can he assure the House that he has the full support of the Maori caucus for his land access policy particularly in light of Te Puni Kokiri’s advice that Maori land should be excluded because it breaches article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi which provides Maori with “full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands”? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: I am confident I have the support of my colleagues. 
Hon David Carter 
: I seek leave to table the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry paper addressed to the Minister for Rural Affairs and the Associate Minister for Rural Affairs dated 22 October 2004. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Gerrard Eckhoff 
: I seek leave of the House to table the article in the  
New Zealand Herald  
on Sunday which clearly states that the so-called Maori caucus has huge reservations about the proposed legislation. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is objection. 
Nuclear-free Policy—Review 
7.  
LUAMANUVAO WINNIE LABAN (Labour—Mana) 
 to the  
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade 
: What reports if any has he received on changes to New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy? 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade) 
: 
 I have seen two reports on a bill before Parliament designed to end New Zealand’s nuclear-free status. One report shows that a large majority of New Zealanders contrary to the intention of this bill want their country to stay nuclear-free. This bill will therefore be an embarrassment to parties that intend to repeal nuclear-free legislation but are desperate not to make their intention clear before the election. The other report is from the  
Agenda 
 programme on Saturday which revealed that neither Dr Brash nor most of the National caucus supports a nuclear-free New Zealand but will not vote for the bill. Clearly the National Party is the party that will suffer the most embarrassment from the bill. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. The Standing Orders are very clear that the Minister has absolutely no responsibility for the best part of that answer and I would like to know why you did not intervene at the beginning. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: He was asked about reports. In his answer he stated the reports he had available to him. He was not saying he was responsible for anyone else’s policy as I heard the answer. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. Are you saying that it is acceptable for Ministers to make comment on matters for which they have no responsibility? 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: The Minister is the foreign affairs Minister and the legislation being referred to is a key aspect of New Zealand’s foreign policy. Certain foreign Governments would be very interested in the prospect of any change to that policy at some time within the foreseeable future. The Minister is perfectly free to comment on the likelihood or otherwise of any change in that policy. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: My point is that we could not set down a question on the Order Paper about an article that appeared in the  
Wall Street Journal 
 which absolutely caned New Zealand for its non-proliferation nuclear one might say allies or allegiances that it has struck up around the world; something we know is a cause of embarrassment for the Government. Because the Minister has no direct responsibility for that issue we cannot raise it. So the point is if the Minister is able to use a patsy question from a member who hardly ever asks a question in the House to offer his opinions on some other party’s policy then perhaps you can free us up so that we can do exactly the same when we ask questions. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I thank the member. As I said originally if there had been hypothetical speculation on what might be the policy then no but there was a reference to specific reports. One cannot speculate on what might happen but if there is a reference to specific reports then that is in the context of addressing the question. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I have ruled on the point. Is this a new point of order? 
Gerry Brownlee 
: It is. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Gerry Brownlee. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I ask you in light of that ruling to have a close look at  
Hansard 
 because I believe there was a lot of speculation in his answer. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I thank the member for that and I shall do that. 
Luamanuvao Winnie Laban 
: Are these the only reports the Minister has seen on this subject? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: No I have of course seen another rather famous report in which Don Brash promised congressmen that under National New Zealand’s nuclear-free status would be “gone by lunchtime”. The honourable member apparently could not remember that but that is a clear case. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. That is a completely unsubstantiated lie from the Minister. If he wants to make that statement surely he needs to place the evidence on the Table of the House. I have already explained that we are not able to go into the issue of New Zealand aligning itself with Iran over nuclear non-proliferation and the embarrassment that issue is clearly causing the Government. But if we have this sort of speculation from the Minister and these mistruths put in front of the House then we have to have the opportunity to respond appropriately. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: Speaking to the point of order I say that far from it being an unsubstantiated lie I laid on the Table the transcript that showed that Don Brash contrary to assertions that the member has just made said precisely what I quoted him as saying. Don Brash could not remember of course whether he had said it but we all know what he said. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Quiet please. Points of order are to be heard in silence. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Quite apart from the fact that the Minister’s response was not a point of order I assume now that he is calling the senators who were present at that meeting liars. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: We are now getting into debating the Minister’s answer. The Minister said that he saw a report and that he has tabled that report. That addresses that point. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. The Minister said that he had tabled the transcript of the exchange. My understanding is that there was no transcript but that he had a report from an official. If in fact he has a transcript I think it would be helpful if he did table it; otherwise I think he is misleading the House—I am not saying intentionally. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: The member is quite right. It was a report from an official who is a neutral public servant on what he heard Dr Brash say. 
Luamanuvao Winnie Laban 
: What is the reason for New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: The Government’s policy reflects a longstanding commitment shared by the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders that this country should remain nuclear-free and that decisions on this issue should be made by New Zealanders according to what we think is right. Dr Brash’s behaviour suggests that he believes the opposite but will not come clean because of political expediency. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I refer you to Speaker’s ruling 145/5 which states: “… The Minister in answering about the report cannot be hypothetical about what may or may not be the effects of another political party’s policy.” I simply ask you to enforce it. The last three answers from this Minister have breached that very clear Standing Order and Speaker’s ruling. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: They were not speculation; they were comments on a report that has in fact been put before the House. So they were not hypothetical. Whether those reports were accurate is not for the Speaker to determine. But there was a basis for the statement. It was not a hypothetical assumption of what might or might not be someone else’s policy. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. Then how would you explain the Minister deviating from an answer to a question about the reason for New Zealand’s non-nuclear status by going immediately into what he thinks Dr Brash has meant? I point out to you and to the House that Dr Brash has said that we will not support ACT’s legislation because we have a position that does exactly as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade has suggested—we would put the issue before New Zealanders before anything was even considered. The issue here is that the Minister was asked a specific question about the policy but then immediately broke into his opinion on what Dr Brash’s comments might have meant and what is worse his reporting of Dr Brash’s comments was to say the least inaccurate. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: When the Minister does in fact say—and I think that in this instance the Minister did say—that he believes that Dr Brash said something then that is not appropriate because that is speculation. If in fact there is some evidence for the statement then that is within the Standing Orders. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Has the Minister had any evidence of memory lapses from the official concerned or of any lack of ability to write down what happened at the time; if not is there anything else in the report that might explain why Dr Brash no longer remembers what he said? 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. Where on earth is this Minister’s responsibility for the psychological state of a State official whose recollection of an event has not been substantiated by most of the other parties who took part in that meeting? 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: This issue could be so much more easily settled if Dr Brash simply came to the House and gave a personal explanation stating that he never said that and that he does not believe it. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: The question seems to me to go beyond what the Minister’s responsibility is in terms of speculating upon motive. However the Minister is responsible of course for officials who are in the ministries for which he is responsible. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. That is a very interesting ruling because we have been trying to get the Hon George Hawkins to be responsible for officials in his department for months. We have had repeated advice from the Speaker that the Minister is not responsible for operational matters not responsible for the direct employment of anybody in his department and responsible only for vote allocations. How is it different for the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade? 
Madam SPEAKER 
: I think we are confusing issues here. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: No we are not. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Yes we are. The matter was about operational administrative matters. However I think the Minister will have to be very careful as he addresses this question. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: The skill that Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade officials have is to sit at meetings and accurately record what was said. The official concerned had no political axe to grind. He was quite clear in what was said unlike Dr Brash who claimed he could not remember what he said a couple of weeks earlier. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: That last part was unnecessary; that was speculating on Dr Brash’s state of mind. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: I would never do that. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Stop it. That was out of order. 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: Can I and can the House interpret the Minister’s answers to be that he has seen reports that have led him to believe that the majority of New Zealanders support the nuclear-free policy and that is the real reason why the Government supports the policy; if so does he have any fear of the issue of nuclear-powered shipping being put to a referendum and if he does why? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: The public opinion on this issue has been quite consistent since 1987. It is not a case of the Labour Government believing in the policy because of the public opinion—other parties in the House might do that. The Labour Government has been steadfastly committed—along with the Greens and I think most other parties in the House except for National and ACT—to a policy of keeping New Zealand nuclear-free. Because public opinion has been so consistent for so long there is absolutely no need for a referendum—that is already clear. The only need for a referendum is so that an expedient political party can try to get itself off the hook which is precisely what National is trying to do as Ken Shirley pointed out. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Does the Minister recall that the Hon Richard Prebble introduced the first private member’s bill to ban nuclear ships in New Zealand waters; if so has he received an explanation for Mr Prebble’s U-turn on this matter? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: I very clearly do remember that and Ken Shirley was an adamant supporter of that policy. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. How could that question possibly be in order? 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Yes I agree with the member. 
Rodney Hide 
: We are quite happy to have Phil Goff speculate on it—it is no embarrassment to us—but we must have some Standing Orders applying in the House. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: You are ahead Mr Hide. I agree that that question was inappropriate. 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: I am obliged to my leader but I am actually very proud of those three bills. They brought down the Muldoon Government. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Thank you for that bit of history. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I seek the leave of the House to table the  
Wall Street Journal 
 article in which New Zealand is associated with Iran on the complete failure of the negotiations for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which is a tragedy for New Zealand and the world. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? Yes there is objection. 
Accident and Emergency Centres—Waiting Times 
8.  
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
 to the  
Minister of Health 
: Does she stand by her statement regarding accident and emergency department waiting times: “Any patients who present with those conditions should be seen within that time and I believe they are.”; if not why not? 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Health) 
: 
 Yes. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: Why did the Minister also claim last Thursday: “If the member were to speak to clinicians they would tell him that no person who has had a heart attack or who is haemorrhaging waits longer than he or she needs to.” and does this not typify her failure to appreciate reality given that the benchmark report shows that 14 out of 21 district health boards fail to meet targets and that clinicians I have spoken to this very afternoon say that her statement is utter unadulterated nonsense? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: No it means that I believe the clinicians. I direct the member to Dr Peter Freeman head of the emergency department at Capital and Coast District Health Board who said that patients in triage category 1 are seen immediately. I believe Dr Freeman. 
Steve Chadwick 
: Can the Minister confirm the concern raised in the House by Dr Hutchison on 8 June that 14 out of 21 district health boards failed to attend to serious conditions such as heart attack and massive bleeding? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: No. Dr Hutchison misinformed this House on at least two occasions last week when he claimed that 14 of the 21 district health boards “failed to attend to serious conditions such as heart attacks massive bleeding …”. The latest report—the March 2005 report—did not show that at all. It showed that five of the 21 did not meet the benchmark. However the waiting time starts from a patient’s first contact with a triage nurse and runs until the consultation with a registered medical practitioner. Often the doctor does not log on to the medical records system until after he or she has completed the consultation. In other words doctors attend to the patient first then they log on to the system. That is why Dr Peter Freeman head of the emergency department in Wellington said that the triage report did not accurately reflect patient care. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. The Minister has suggested that I misinformed the House. I believe that she has misinformed the House by not accurately recording my entire question which showed that 14 out of 21 district health boards in New Zealand failed to achieve the measured times that were recommended. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I will table the report because the member is portraying it incorrectly—for political purposes I think. It does not show what that member says it does. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: Would the Minister care to table that report now. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I seek leave to table the latest benchmark report. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Barbara Stewart 
: What encouragement can the Minister offer to the staff and patients at Wellington Hospital’s emergency department given that patients who present with anything less serious than a heart attack massive bleeding or concussion may find themselves waiting in hallways storage facilities or the counselling room for treatment? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I am pleased to tell the member that quite a lot has been done at the Wellington Hospital emergency department. Opened only 4½ years ago it will have an assessment unit of 14 beds by August which will allow people to move through the emergency department faster and an ambulatory care zone for fast tracking of patients will be developed. It has a four-bed area that will be used for this purpose. So people in the department are doing the best they can. They are under pressure and they acknowledge that. However the head of their department tells me that they are seeing people appropriately. 
Heather Roy 
: Given that after-hours services have been closed or reduced at Taumarunui Winton Wellington Tauranga New Plymouth Upper Hutt Queenstown and Dunedin under her watch; that several boards are considering charging at accident and emergency departments; and that the latest  
New Zealand Doctor 
 polls show that half the country’s general practitioners are struggling with their after-hours situation does she rule out allowing accident and emergency departments to charge and how is it possible that she has such a disaster on her hands given that she has injected an extra $3.5 billion into health? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: The only people who think we have an absolute disaster on our hands are members of the ACT party who are trying to get some sort of traction when they are 2 percent in the polls and getting absolutely nowhere. No patient is charged for an accident and emergency service that should be handled in a hospital. But for many years hospitals have offered out general practitioner services and patients are charged the same as they would be when going to any general practitioner. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: Why has she not changed the system of recording triage times given that last Thursday she claimed it was a poor way of measuring data even though her ministry initiated the system and is this not just another case of an inept Minister ducking responsibility and trying to bluff and blather her way out of a very serious issue? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I thought the member who is a doctor would have known that triage times were not set by my ministry but by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine. He will also know that the college is reviewing with the ministry the way we recall the triage times because they do not—as Dr Freeman said—accurately show the care a patient is getting. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: Does the Minister agree with comments made by Helen Clark 9 years ago when she said: “We know that winter brings an increase in health problems. It happens every year but our hospitals must be ready to cope with the problems. It just isn’t good enough to have basic services break down.” and does she remain in denial that the reporting of patients being treated in the corridors of Wellington Hospital and of storage rooms being used for treatment is yet another sign that basic services have broken down? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes I agree with the Prime Minister. That is why under this Government the specialty of emergency medicine was introduced for the first time. One of the reasons Wellington Hospital is having some problems is that unfortunately there are not enough beds in the emergency department that was opened 4½ years ago. I wish the National Government had decided to make it bigger when they decided on its size in 1999. 
Health Ministry—Policy and Funding 
9.  
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
 to the  
Minister of Health 
: Is she confident that policy and funding originating from the Ministry of Health are achieving their intended purpose; if so why? 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Health) 
: 
 In general yes as seen by the improvement in New Zealanders’ life expectancy. 
Barbara Stewart 
: Can the Minister assure us that the funds allocated in the latest Budget will be used to improve the lives of those in aged care; if so why is the chief executive of HealthCare Providers New Zealand Martin Taylor saying that most of the increased rest home spending will be used to meet the cost of inflation and cover existing deficits? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes I can confirm that the money will be spent for the benefit of all New Zealanders particularly older New Zealanders and that the additional money that is being spent for aged care will go for aged care. 
Dianne Yates 
: Is the Minister also confident that primary-care policy and funding originating from the Ministry of Health are achieving their intended purpose? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes. The Primary Health Care Strategy I think is the greatest improvement in primary health care policy for decades. It does mean that many New Zealanders now have access to affordable primary health care. From 1 July this year the 18 to 24-year-olds will join the over-65s and the under-18s in getting access to more affordable primary health care—something that New Zealanders had until the Budget of 1991 when Ruth Richardson took away the subsidy they had for primary health care. 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: Why does the Minister not admit failure when after a further $3.5 billion has been poured into health and after massive unnecessary restructuring patients including the elderly spill into hospital corridors a situation Helen Clark described in 1996 as “disgraceful for a public health system in the middle of winter”? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: The reason is that it would be wrong. That is the reason why. 
Barbara Stewart 
: Is the Minister confident that the recent Budget funding will provide adequate funding for the elderly who lack financial resources and require rest home care and who depend totally on superannuation? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes. 
Foreshore and Seabed Act—Legal Aid 
10.  
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
 to the  
Deputy Prime Minister 
: Does he remain committed to upholding his statement of 6 May 2004 in relation to the Foreshore and Seabed Bill that it “does not establish a new avenue for legal aid”; if not why not? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 Yes. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Can the Deputy Prime Minister confirm reports from Judge Joe Williams Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court that six new appointments to the bench of that court are imminent; and can he also confirm that Treasury Budget documents state that most of those new appointments will be the result of the Foreshore and Seabed Act? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: It is expected that additional appointments to the Maori Land Court will be required to deal with applications though I think so far there have been only about two applications to it. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Then can the Minister tell us why Cabinet has approved six new appointments to that bench? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: It is in anticipation of their being required to deal with applications. Of course should those applications not eventuate then that may have an impact on requirements in the future. 
Dail Jones 
: Can the Minister confirm that those appointments were indicated by the Court of Appeal in the Ngati Apa case when it indicated that the new jurisdiction and the extra work that would arise would require further appointments to the Maori Land Court; and that the Government is merely following the Court of Appeal’s recommendation? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: That is correct. Those who did not support passing legislation in relation to the Ngati Apa decision would have been left in that position in any case. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Has the Minister participated in discussions that have resulted in a commitment for the Labour Government should it be returned to the Treasury benches to support Nanaia Mahuta’s bill that allows foreshore and seabed claimants access to legal aid? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: No. 
Apples—Australian Market Access 
11.  
RUSSELL FAIRBROTHER (Labour—Napier) 
 to the  
Minister for Trade Negotiations 
: What progress if any can he report in the battle to get access to the Australian market for New Zealand apples? 
Hon JIM SUTTON (Minister for Trade Negotiations) 
: 
 The Government has decided to inscribe the Australian apples issue on the agenda of this month’s meeting of the World Trade Organization Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. We have been trying hard for many years to get a fair deal for New Zealand apple growers. We consider that the science is clear but regrettably the whole Australian process has dragged on too long. 
Hon David Carter 
: Why has it taken the Minister so long to act; and was it just because of the threat of another embarrassing protest on the steps of Parliament next week like that over the “fart tax”? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: Multilateral action is not something any country should take lightly. It has never before had to be resorted to by either Australia or New Zealand against each other. Our objective is to get access for our apples and we have now decided to take a significant step in the World Trade Organization process. Unfortunately although we appeared to be on the brink of success in 1990 the then incoming National Government let the matter drop and did not reapply until 1999. 
Dail Jones 
: Bearing in mind that this question follows many questions by New Zealand First in recent times can the Minister confirm that he is actually taking this dispute not to the World Trade Organization but only to a committee; and when will he do something about it and take it to the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body immediately? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: To go to the Dispute Settlement Body would be time-consuming and costly. Inscription will be faster. It has worked for us before with other countries. We note that the disputes panel some time ago found in favour of the US in a very similar case it took against Japan although no apples have yet flowed as a result. A ruling in a subsequent dispute over compliance with that first ruling is expected shortly. This will be an important precedent for litigation between New Zealand and Australia and the present move will improve our chances of success should we have to go to that extent ourselves. 
Dail Jones 
: Does the Minister agree that his answer is really no help at all to apple growers in New Zealand because taking this matter just to the Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures adds another delay in the whole procedure and inevitably the Australians will make sure that the matter ends up at the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body; so why do we not take it there now as all the apple growers of New Zealand are demanding instead of caving in to the Australians once again? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: The answer to the first question is no and the answer to the second question is that I have consulted with the leadership of the New Zealand apple industry and it supports the actions being taken. 
Crimes Act—Repeal of Section 59 
12.  
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
 to the  
Minister for Social Development and Employment 
: Does he still stand by his statement with regard to parental discipline that “The truth is that the Government is working through the issue and has not yet arrived at a conclusion.”; if not why not? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 Yes I do. This Government is concerned to prevent family violence but Government measures must support parents by giving alternatives to physical discipline and avoid criminalising ordinary parents who may smack a child. Whether that is best achieved by repealing or amending section 59 is still an open question that can only benefit from debate in the wider public arena. 
Judy Turner 
: How does the Minister reconcile his statement made at the Plunket Society conference over the weekend that the Government does not yet have a policy on repealing section 59 of the Crimes Act with the Prime Minister’s indication yesterday that she believes it should be repealed; and whom should parents believe on this issue? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: The Prime Minister has made it clear that that is her personal opinion on the matter. It is clear as we have been stating for some time that we chose to invest in parenting programmes and that we will revisit the issue. As I have mentioned we are very clear on the notion that Government measures must support parents to provide alternatives to physical discipline but we want to avoid criminalising ordinary parents who choose to smack a child. And of course this issue is best opened to wide public debate. 
Helen Duncan 
: What initiatives has this Government put in place to prevent family violence? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Heaps. Family violence is a critical issue for this Government and we have established a number of policies: the Te Rito Government strategy oversees the policy; $10.8 million for Strategies with Kids—Information for Parents which is a positive parenting programme; Family Violence Funding Circuit Breaker teams; the community collaborative initiatives fund for prevention of family violence; the Child Youth and Family Services Everyday Communities programme; New Zealand Family Violence Clearing House; family safety teams; advocates for children witnessing family violence; and a Family Violence Intervention Programme in Work and Income offices from July this year. It is a great deal. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Does the Minister agree that beating children with riding crops and lumps of wood as allowed by the courts under section 59 of the Crimes Act is unacceptable in a civilised society and does he also agree that describing Sue Bradford’s bill as banning smacking is confusing and trivialising the issue? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: In answer to the first question yes. In answer to the second question my understanding of Ms Bradford’s bill is that it seeks to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act not to ban smacking. I do not know anybody in the House who would want to take that position but the National Party for its own purposes loves being confused and loves confusing the issue. 
Madam SPEAKER 
: That is not necessary. 
Murray Smith 
: Does the Minister accept that simply removing section 59 of the Crimes Act without replacing it with something else such as my member’s bill provisions would mean that any parents who physically disciplined their child would be committing a criminal offence; if so does he consider that people who commit criminal offences are criminals only if they are successfully prosecuted? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: No I do not accept the premise of the member’s question. What I think we are up to in this debate is as I signalled in my answer to the primary question that no one in the House condones anybody using violence on a child that leads to harm. Everybody in the House wishes to avoid any notion that an ordinary parent smacking a child would end up being criminalised and therefore the best step forward at the present time is to allow for an open debate. 
Sue Kedgley 
: Has he seen reports from the Plunket Society the Commissioner for Children the Law Society and many community groups such as the National Council of Women the Public Health Association of New Zealand the Paediatric Society and now the Families Commissioner all supporting repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act and would he agree that that shows that a wide cross section of middle New Zealand and groups concerned about the welfare of children and families support Ms Bradford’s bill to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I think recent opinion polls as well as that long list show that public opinion on this matter has changed quite significantly over recent years and therefore I repeat that I think the position we are in is that people are opposed to physical discipline of children that leads to harm and they want to avoid criminalisation of ordinary parents who smack their children and therefore it is time for a wide open debate about these issues which all those people have called for. 
Judy Turner 
: Does the Minister accept that unintended consequences of the member’s bill seeking to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act mean that an amended version would better serve his Government’s position on this matter? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: While members of this Government hold views on this issue there is no specific policy because as we have said we have chosen to invest in positive parenting programmes and to evaluate those. But we are clear where public opinion lies and therefore we invite members of the House to allow the wider public to have a view on this matter. It is a matter that requires the input of the public. It is very clear that the parameters of this debate are about avoiding criminalising ordinary parents and ensuring that children are kept safe. Allow an open debate! 
Judy Turner 
: Can the Minister confirm that the Government will treat the repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act as a conscience issue; if not why not? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: The only bill before this House on this matter is a member’s bill and it is yet to be decided upon. But I think it would be the view of the Labour members of the House that that bill should go to a select committee where the public can have a say on the issue rather than our trying to shut it down as some people seem to want to do. 
Murray Smith 
: I seek leave to table a copy of my member’s bill which clarifies the difference between abuse and appropriate physical discipline. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Sue Kedgley 
: I seek leave to table a document calling for the repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act signed by Presbyterian Support New Zealand Parents Centres New Zealand and many other groups. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Sue Kedgley 
: I seek leave to table a remit passed by the New Zealand Plunket Society supporting the repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act which points out that it provides a legal excuse in cases of serious assault against children. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Barbara Stewart 
: I seek leave to table my member’s bill which outlaws attacking a child with a secondary implement and also hitting a child around the head. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill 
First Reading 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 I move  
That the Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill be now read a first time. 
Bill read a first time. 
Supplementary Estimates 
Imprest Supply Debate 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 I move  
That the Appropriation (2004/05 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill be now read a second time 
. This will be of course the last imprest supply bill before the election. It is a good time to place on the record certain key facts. It is a good time to ask some key questions of the desperate and dateless members opposite us. 
This Government has a proud record and we are grateful for the support we have received from parties in the House. We have seen economic growth at the highest sustained level for 30-odd years in New Zealand. We have outstripped Australia for 4 years in a row which the National Government never achieved. We have seen the growth and innovation framework which is guiding that economic policy. We have seen employment rising with 260000 new jobs the vast majority of which are full-time jobs. We have seen unemployment dropping to record low levels since the modern indices began. We have seen poverty falling for the first time for many years in New Zealand and that is before the Working for Families package started to come into force in any great sense on 1 April this year. We have seen health spending rise. We have seen mortality rates fall and life expectancy rates rise. We have seen the growth of primary health-care organisations cheaper doctors’ visits cheaper pharmaceuticals and increased operations across the board. 
We have seen a restoration of the level of New Zealand superannuation which was cut by the National Government in 1999 at the same time that it legislated for a tax cut. One paid for the other then as it would again in the future under a National Government. We have seen the setting up of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund which secures the future of New Zealand superannuation and finally the National Party has had to accept that that fund is a permanent part of New Zealand’s public policy. 
We have seen successful industrial relations reform which has seen record low levels of industrial disputes and indeed underemployed institutions for settling industrial disputes. We have seen the introduction of paid parental leave and so much else. Moving forward we will see the introduction of the KiwiSaver scheme to help average ordinary hard-working battling Kiwis save for their future their retirement and their deposit on a first home and this Labour-led Government is the first party in 30 years to introduce those sorts of measures. 
We will see on 1 April next year stage 2 of Working for Families which will deliver to many two-child low to middle income working households $30 $40 or $50 a week extra in the hand which could never be matched by any tax cuts the Opposition can offer. On 1 July next year we will see the introduction of the rates rebate scheme which will help tens upon tens of thousands of superannuitants pay the rates they struggle with at the present time. We will see on 1 April next year the introduction—indeed some of it was on 1 April this year—of business tax changes and the simplification of that scheme. 
From members opposite all we have heard offered against that is one thing: tax cuts. National has become like the ACT party these days. Tax cuts is the answer from the members opposite to everything from paedophilia to boils on the back as far as one can tell. How do we solve the problem of too many people being in accident and emergency departments? Give them a tax cut! Give them a tax cut and they will leave bleeding but happy—marching into the golden future they will go under a National Government. 
We ask now: where is the beef? It has been promised for so long. It is a case of Salome with about 97 veils on and only five have gone; there are still 92 left to go. Under National there would be tax cuts by Christmas then it was by 1 April next year then it was in 6 or 9 years then it was for the top end then it was for the middle then it was for the top again then it was for everybody. So it goes on and on in utter confusion. 
Watching Dr Brash against Simon Dallow on Saturday morning was an exercise in elderly confusion. Like an ageing courtesan the National Party is trying to keep its policy covered up until the lights have gone out the election is on and the public cannot really see what is actually underneath. And underlying that policy is a whole set of myths. The first myth is big government. The National Government never got government spending below 32 percent of GDP. It is 30 percent of GDP now. After Working for Families and all the other things it will rise back to 32 percent of GDP and stay there. Where is this big government that Labour has been putting in place? 
The second myth is high tax. Australians have two tax rates above our top tax rate and tax on top of their higher taxes in terms of Medicare compulsory superannuation capital gains tax stamp duty—and so on and so on. 
The third myth is that National can deliver a lot to the ordinary hard-working Kiwi by means of tax cuts. What would the Australians deliver for the equivalent of a billion dollars or so a year if it was in New Zealand? Six dollars a week! Will that be the big bribe? That will not fill up a billboard will it? Not even half a billboard would be filled up by $6 a week from the Opposition—and it is not what people are expecting or have been led to believe if National were to be elected. 
National is now promising significant tax cuts for all workers. We know what that means. People are expecting about 30 bucks a week from National. National has promised movements in every threshold and to get back to 5 percent on the top rate means raising the top threshold to $80000. It has promised to cut the top rate from 39c to 36c. It has promised to cut the company tax rate from 33c to 30c. It has promised to divert all the money out of the Government account over time into the National Land Transport Fund. It has promised to scrap the carbon tax. What does that add up to? It adds up to $4 billion a year to start with rising to $5 billion a year by 2007-08. That is the cost of National’s policy. That cannot be done by simply cutting the number of public servants in Wellington. There are not enough to go around. If we cut the lot of them there would not be enough left over. 
The fourth myth is that we can pay for tax cuts next year and the year after and the year after and the year after with this year’s cash surplus. But this year’s cash surplus will be all gone by 30 June. It has been used to pay off debt. It has gone into the superannuation fund. It has gone here it has gone there it has gone everywhere. None of it will be left on 1 July. 
So what will pay for these tax cuts come a National Government if it is ever elected? We know the consequences. Firstly higher interest rates because that much looser fiscal policy must mean tighter monetary policy and it must mean higher interest rates. Those hard-working battling Kiwis will pay more on their mortgage to pay for John Key’s tax cuts. He will be laughing all the way and putting more of his money offshore as it all is at the present time. He will continue to invest overseas rather than in the future of this country as we learnt today in question time. It is pretty obvious what that was all about. The hard-working battling Kiwi will be the person who has to pay for that. 
National would have to cut into core spending. The billboard is right. It is tax or it is a cut. It is tax or a cut in health; it is tax or a cut in superannuation; it is tax or a cut in education; it is tax or a cut in law and order. That is what the battle is about as we lead into this election over the next few weeks. Electing a National Government would be the 1990s all over again—cuts cuts and cuts to pay for tax cuts for those who are better off. We saw it in 1996 1998 and 1999. 
The real question for New Zealanders is very very simple. Can they afford National? The answer for the great majority of New Zealanders is very simple. No they cannot afford National. Only a small minority can afford a National Government. That is why National will not release its policy until the last possible moment. If it is released too soon it will be clear there are holes in the policy it will be clear it does not add up it will be clear it will make this country worse off it will be clear it will make most New Zealanders worse off and it will be back to the misery and strife of the 1990s under Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch. Bring it on in 2005 for this election. 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 What a revealing speech that was from the Minister of Finance in the House this afternoon. The entire Cabinet was whipped to come to the House to listen to his speech on the Appropriation Bill. Government members were desperate to try to give their Minister of Finance some encouragement because they know a Minister of Finance on the rack when they see one. They were so desperate that they forced the entire Cabinet to come to the House to listen to his speech. About the best thing we can say is that they looked slightly more enthused with that speech than they did with his Budget speech. When Dr Cullen rose on 19 May and read the Budget the entire Cabinet looked bored. Darren Hughes was out in the lobby giving No-Doz tablets to back-bench members. It was a disgrace. It was nothing short of a public relations disaster—a public relations disaster that will cause the end of a number of casualties. Mike Munro was not happy that he was not told of this strategy. He was not told what was going on. He was unhappy. 
Darren Hughes 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I want to make it clear that the Government is happy for a 5-minute suspension in the debate to allow there to be more than one National Party MP in the House listening to Mr Key. It is very unfair of his colleagues. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: The member will please be seated. He knows that is not a point of order on which to interrupt a member’s speech. 
JOHN KEY 
: The truth is that I do not need a whole lot of people to try to prop me up and tell me that I delivered a good Budget when I know it was a bad one. I do not need my mates around me. I am quite confident in what I am doing. I am not the one who is lying in bed at night wondering how I could have got an available cash surplus of about $4 billion—and we will work our way through those numbers in a moment—and how I could have been so out of touch with the people of New Zealand. 
Mark my words this Government is on the way out because it has become arrogant and it is not listening. I was on Newstalk ZB the day after the Budget was delivered with Michael Cullen. He was asked the hard question. He was asked why there were no tax cuts in the Budget and he gave this answer: “According to our polling people don’t want them.” That is what happens when a Government is run on the basis of looking backwards at the polls. It forgets what the average battling mainstream New Zealander cares about. It is not about a bunch of flaky policies and programmes that the Government is dreaming up with thousands of bureaucrats left right and centre; it is about real New Zealanders not being forced to line up in queues at Work and Income to be turned into beneficiaries. When Michael Cullen can come to the House and tell New Zealand families why they have to pay the top personal rate of taxation at 39c in the dollar and at the same time ask them to line up at Work and Income then he will be able to answer a question that at the moment they are scratching their heads over. 
The Budget was an absolute disaster. The “deep dark secret” that Mike Williams went out and told New Zealanders about was meant to be some great tax cut. Mike Williams knows that. He has tried to argue through his Minister of Finance that it was the KiwiSaver. Last time I looked I do not think the Labour Government would like to hear what Mike Williams thinks the KiwiSaver scheme is. He thinks it is a dirty dark Tory secret. Mike Williams was trying to do one thing and that was to pump up this Budget—to pump up the fact that there was some sort of tax cut. The truth of it is that there was no tax cut. The people of New Zealand know what the “deep dark secret” is; they absolutely know. It is that under this Labour Government for as long as Labour is in office there will never be a tax cut. That is why the people are rejecting Labour and that is why they will reject it come election day. It does not matter whether the election is in July or August or September. This lot will be gone because the people of New Zealand are sick and tired of a bunch of bureaucrats being employed while their families’ belts are being tightened because the Government wants to go out and spend their money thinking it can do so on their behalf. That is the truth of it. 
The “deep dark secret” is that there will never be a tax cut under Labour. If it cannot afford a cut when there is an available cash surplus of around $4 billion when there is an operating balance excluding revaluations and accounting changes of $7.4 billion for the second year in a row just tell me the conditions under which we can have a tax cut. There never ever will be one. 
This is a Government that is out of control. Every time I get up and talk about the number of bureaucrats who have been hired in Wellington the Minister of State Services wants to stand up and say that I am somehow deluded that I must be wrong and that no extra bureaucrats have been hired. Answer me this question: if they are all the same people who are being transferred in from other Government departments if they are already on the payroll then why has the amount of commercial real estate that the Government has taken here in Wellington gone from 360000 square metres to over 500000 square metres in the last 5 years? Tell me why the core State sector has gone up from 30000 to at least 38000 if not more. Tell me why Treasury is writing to the Government to tell it that its policies are out of control that 80 percent of Government departments have been hiring recklessly that there is no increase in productivity and that there will have to be cuts. 
Last Friday Treasury put on its website the Budget discussion document. I urge people to read that document. It states quite clearly that Labour’s policies are not working that reprioritisation has to take place and that cuts have to happen. That is the advice coming from Treasury not just once to the State sector but also in the Budget advice document. Mark my words there was a reason for a lot of people coming down to the Chamber to listen to Michael Cullen this afternoon and it had nothing to do with the quality of his speech or of the outcome; it had to do with the fact that this Government has got it so horribly wrong and the polls it is seeing internally are telling it that it is the end. 
Government members shake their heads. That is exactly why they are in trouble. They are in denial. We know that the NBR poll has been done by UMR pollsters. We know that UMR has been on the phone to the Prime Minister and to Michael Cullen. We know that in today’s  
New Zealand Herald 
 there was just a hint that maybe Dr Michael Cullen might be forced to bring forward those indexation changes. We know when the Minister of Finance is in serious trouble. We know that this is not the confident Michael Cullen who ruled the Chamber that this is a Michael Cullen who is under pressure. I have said many times before that when Michael Cullen was given the portfolio of Attorney-General it was the straw that broke the camel’s back—and boy did we not see that on Budget day when he made such a hash! He has argued that the available cash is $2.4 billion. Well what does he argue is the $700 million in cash that he is giving to the Reserve Bank? Is that a consumption item? Why does he include $723 million of student loans that have been repaid at over the Government bond rate? There are billions and billions of dollars of cash. 
The Minister came into the House and told us that New Zealanders should feel good because they pay less tax than Australians. He does not understand—and he should because he is the Minister of Revenue—that New Zealand has a broad-base low rate of taxation. That means that people in New Zealand can deduct virtually nothing from their income whereas for people in Australia there are many many deductions before they get there. A few weeks before the Budget I asked Michael Cullen in this House what he thought of the Australian Budget from Peter Costello and what he would do to match a situation where Australia will attract bright young hard-working entrepreneurial people. He stood in the House and answered that we should be happy because in Australia 80 percent of people will face a top personal rate of 30c in the dollar and somehow in New Zealand it is a great thing that 75 percent of people will face a top personal rate of 21c in the dollars. That tells us just how out of touch Michael Cullen is. What he has just told the people of New Zealand is that it is a good thing that 80 percent of Australians earn $70000 or less and a good thing that 75 percent of New Zealanders earn $38000 or less. 
National does not believe that earning $38000 or less is as good as it gets. We do believe in increasing the pie. We do not believe in redistribution. We do believe in those good old-fashioned principles that have made New Zealand go forward—in taking the opportunity to tell New Zealanders that they can keep more of what they earn and that we will join with them as a Government and share the upside and the good times. Michael Cullen is a finance manager and a Minister of Finance who has proved he wants to balance the books on the revenue side. There will be more Labour speeches and more Labour cronies sitting in those seats—and boy will Labour need them when it is under so much pressure! 
BILL GUDGEON (NZ First) 
: 
 The Grow Up Free From Poverty report was commissioned last January and nobody knew just how many people were falling through the gaps in international aid. Major charities wanted to know how children often the worst casualties of poverty saw their own situations. Children in 18 developing countries reported that they did not see enough of their parents. Stigmatised by AIDS or disability many knew that their best hope of living was in the sex trade. The biggest problem was their parents’ alcoholism and according to the report that was at the top of the agenda. 
What is happening in New Zealand—a developed nation supposedly? We have an accident and emergency department without a hospital or it could be the other way around; we have a hospital without an accident and emergency department. We have families who are suffering children without parental guidance and Government departments unskilled to carry out the responsibilities placed before them. 
I quote from the  
Sunday Star-Times 
 of 12 June: “CYF alerted before baby died. Family nurses lawyers and a doctor raised concerns about the treatment of 7-month-old Kathleen Harris-Talivai.” There has been famine and poverty in many parts of the world but here in New Zealand it is becoming all too common that physical abuse beyond description is part of what happens every day. How can a Child Youth and Family Services worker advise that the child in question would be better off with his or her parents when there is evidence before the worker that the child is being physically abused? Why does it have to be like this? 
The social policies of this Government have a part to play in what is happening in our communities. In speaking to a high-profile identity of the Ngati Porou iwi it was stated that many of our people have lost the work ethic and along with that have come the negative results of idleness. Family as we understand it—father mother and children—are starting to become an issue that is fading into the sunset and other agendas are coming to the fore. The reason why there is instability in our society is that there is a lack of good parenting skills and the social engineering of this Government has contributed much to that agenda. 
The elderly have been neglected especially those who have served our nation in the armed forces. This Government will give aid offshore but no consideration will be given to 35 servicemen in the Montecillo Veterans Home and Hospital in Dunedin. The Agent Orange debacle is still unclear and there is still no result as to what compensation should be given. The last words I heard from the Montecillo veteran were these: “Remind the Governments”—and that includes National and Labour—“of their promises that they made to us when we returned from the war.” What were those promises? They were that the veterans would be taken care of. 
Let me remind this Government again: $10 billion given to the armed forces works out at less than 1 percent and we still have a skeleton armed forces programme running. How can that be when defence should at the top of the agenda for any country and every country especially the democratic nations? 
JIM PETERS (NZ First) 
: 
 In the grand speech made by the Minister of Finance he asked the question whether New Zealanders can afford National. The real question he should have asked was: “Can we afford Labour yet again?”. The answer from New Zealand First is: “Absolutely no; we cannot.” 
The Minister of Finance covered the various issues that he sees as the components of his platform forgetting absolutely that in 1999 this Government inherited a very stable rural and farming economy and that nothing Labour has done since then has added one whit—perhaps a few months of help to Fonterra. That is the backbone it inherited. Looking at it from the rural economy point of view 6 frittered away and wasted years is that proud Government’s record. No wonder the Minister was so voluble making grand statements about the future; he did that on the backbone of frittered years when this Government has had in terms of the land-use economies the best years that I can remember for a decade and a half if not more. At the end of that time all we have seen are wasted time and wasted policies. 
But let us come back to the central core issue which is this. Last week the most amazing announcement was made by the Minister of Education that the head of the Education Review Office was taking 4 months’ leave to oversee the exam system for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. What an indictment on that Government’s proud record—as espoused by the Minister of Finance—that as we speak an officer has to go from one Government department supposedly concerned with the audit and review of education somehow to bring some sort of sensibility to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority! What an indictment! What confidence in our Government does that give our young students who are halfway through the examination year? It is absolutely deplorable. 
But it is no wonder because that is the sort of thing I see happening throughout the education portfolio. The Ministry of Education has people beavering away in the back room—the bureaucratic army that John Key talked about—putting together key competencies to overturn the traditional framework of education that the secondary school system has had for the past decade. People are beavering away to put together social key competencies. 
What would one expect therefore of an agency such as the Teachers Council which is empowered by the Education Standards Act 2001 to have certain key duties? One such duty is to determine the standards for teacher registration and the issue of practising certificates. That is meant to be the prime aim of the functions of the Teachers Council. As well it is to develop a code of ethics for teachers. One would expect that the Ministry of Education would have some ability therefore to go ahead and implement the intended changes to the Teachers Council which came from the Teacher Registration Board. 
I can report to the House that that is an abysmal failure. It is not just that three separate heads have resigned and been given good payouts in the process. A year ago I raised these matters at the Education and Science Committee where I was assured by Ministry of Education officials that the actual functions of the Teachers Council were working. So the House will be surprised to hear that the supplementary estimates do not have any additional votes for the Teachers Council to try to establish—which it has not done so far—and maintain its function of leadership in the education sector and also to carry out the simple process of teacher registration. That system is just not working as it ought to. Is it very surprising to me therefore to be able to tell the House that the Teachers Council has not functioned in any way as designed by legislation? There are people out there in front of classrooms who do not hold even limited authority to teach. There are people in front of our young children today who have not been registered in any form at all. There are teachers who were registered but are no longer registered. The whole system has failed dismally—that is the Teachers Council’s monitoring of educational standards and enhancement of the teaching profession as outlined in the Act and as mentioned several times by the Minister. 
Therefore all the good words I hear about the education sector—all the trial projects the short-term funding all the issues about raising the standard of teaching—have failed. Teachers are still the most important part of the school area. All the aids are but a supplement to having a sound effective teacher in front of a classroom. At the present time this Government has failed. It has failed with regard to a supply of competent teachers. It has failed with regard to teacher registration and competence. Unfortunately and most of all it has failed the young people of today. As I said last week youngsters are asking the Government to give them assurance. No such assurance can be given by the Minister of Finance with regard to his Budget or by the Minister of Education. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 Like most members in the House I am pleased to take part in the debate on the Appropriation (2004/05 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill because if there is one thing that defines why we are here it is this particular debate. It is the debate where we get to talk about how taxpayers’ money will be spent. It means we are charged at this time to say how we have sensibly applied their money to the kinds of issues that make a difference to New Zealanders. After all the whole point of collecting tax is that it is impossible for individual citizens—and perhaps the richest amongst us have learnt that it is even impossible for them—to be able to buy their own hospitals lay down their own roads run their own schools or do all the myriad of things that taxpayers’ money is raised for. 
This is the dividing line between the left and right in politics. On the right people want less and less money because they personally have more and therefore they can do more for themselves. As we move into the “average person” category they realise that if they do not make a contribution through the taxation they will not get the kinds of things that allow them to educate their kids keep them healthy keep them housed keep them fed and get them a job and do all the things that go with a civilised society. 
This election will be very much about that dividing line whereby people come down on the side of how much we will apply to those issues of collective concern and how much we will return to those who already have privilege. “Privilege” as far as the National Party and the ACT party are concerned is its own reward. The more one has the more one will get under the National Party. 
Given that background of why this debate is important I want to applaud Dr Cullen’s Budget. I think it was the kind of Budget that said: “No this intends to be a long-term Government.” It says that we are going to carry on responsibly applying the money we raised from taxpayers to issues that are of concern to them. And what a record! There are 6 years of achievement behind Dr Cullen’s administration of those taxes. He is able to point to growth in every single year above that of the OECD average. He can point to more paid jobs than ever in the history of this country. He can point to having an unemployment rate that is at the head of the OECD—that is 3.9 percent. The only country with a rate lower than ours is Korea at 3.8 percent. Fewer people are now on a benefit by hundreds of thousands than there used to be in this country. I will come back to that point. 
There has been continual investment in issues that matter to New Zealanders and in this Budget Dr Cullen has said that he wants to maintain a strong and credible fiscal stance. In other words he wants to balance the books make sure the chequebook is in good shape and ensure we can pay our way forward so that we do not go back to booming and busting the economy as was done under previous administrations. We will make sure we can pay our own way. Dr Cullen wants to be fair. He wants to include New Zealanders in the good things that are happening. He wants to ensure that every single Kiwi has a stake in this country and that Kiwis know they can get into a house afford their education and have a future here as working New Zealanders and he wants to build the conditions for growth. What a change! 
Dr Cullen wants to build the conditions for growth as opposed to what we saw from 1972 to 1998 when incomes were dropping. People in this country had become so used to things going down they wondered if they could ever go up. Since then they have. The conditions for growth have been set in place and this Budget is about that. There are no bribes no rush of blood to the head and no saying that we will do things that we cannot sustain into the future. This Budget is about carrying on laying the foundations for long-term Government long-term growth long-term prosperity and long-term social justice in this country. That is what this Budget was about. 
Now I have to say that in my portfolios I am delighted at what we are doing. In the social development area I have no doubt that this Budget will do more for people who are on a benefit but it will also make the debate around beneficiaries even more difficult for National Party members. They can fudge and they can change the figures but in the end they will have to face the fact that Dr Brash used to say in his querulous way that the National Party will get the number of people on benefits down from 500000. Then unfortunately for him he discovered the number was not 500000; he was including superannuitants. So he had to stop doing that because he did not want to be caught out on that one. 
Dr Brash then said that National would get the number of people on benefits below 400000. But unfortunately for him we have got it below 400000. So he used to say—and I notice in the newspaper today he is still saying it—that National will get it below 300000. He says it in that querulous baloney-led way of his. I have news for him! There are 298000 beneficiaries now. The number is below 300000. The number of working-age people on a benefit right now is 298000. He says that he will lower that figure in 10 years. He says he will take that figure of 298000—although I am sure it will be lower by the time we have an election because it keeps dropping—and reduce it by 100000 in 10 years. That is 10000 a year. He could do that by doing nothing. Does National have a policy or not? 
What is the point of the National Party policy which is so ambitious that the National Party promises a drop over 10 years whereby in 5 years we have taken the number from a little over 400000 to 298000? Those are the kind of promises one makes when one is 64 years old. Don Brash will be 74 by the time that promise matures—he will be living in Trinidad or somewhere by then on his gains from the Reserve Bank. So that is not a promise at all. 
In the jobs area National tells us that it would get more people into jobs against this Government’s record that shows more people are employed than ever. Don Brash will have more people in employment than ever when we have more than ever in employment. We have fewer people on benefits—we have a 3.9 percent unemployment rate. We have a superb record on this. Who believes anybody else would do better than this Government has after it was left with the deficit of the 1990s? 
Don Brash says he will fire people who are in the public service. Let us put aside nurses and let us put aside teachers whom he might have to get rid of—let us put aside all those people and just talk about core public servants. When I got my job in the tertiary education area I asked the Ministry of Education under the National Government to send me the people who were doing industry training so I could talk about the rebirth of modern apprenticeships with them. Bill Birch had cancelled apprenticeships in 1992 and we had a major problem: we did not have people being trained. So I asked the ministry to send across the people doing the training. One very thin man turned up in my office to inform me that he spent a quarter of his time on industry training. It is no wonder that there was no Modern Apprenticeships scheme. It is no wonder that there was nothing going on in industry training. It is no wonder that we had a deficit in the people trained to do our skills in our factories. It was because there was nobody in the National Government—nobody in its bureaucracy—who was employed to do anything about training. That is why we have a deficit. 
Training cannot be left to the market; if one wants apprentices everybody has to pitch in and do something about it. We do need at least one whole person to get up each day and say: “My job is to do something about training.”—at least one! To have a quarter of a person working on it is a bit low. But that is what National wants to do. It wants to take the public service back to the days when it could do nothing. 
Research science and technology are the driving forces of innovation in this country. Funding has increased by 56 percent since this Government came to power back in 1999. That is the single biggest increase in that budget in the history of funding for science research and technology. Is anybody against that? Does anybody think that is wrong? Does anybody want to say that we should not be driving innovation through science? Does anybody want to have those kinds of things cut—apart from Tariana Turia who does not believe in science anyway? Is anybody against that kind of thing? 
What about housing? The KiwiSaver project and the mortgage insurance scheme are getting first home buyers into homes. What about building State houses lowering the cost of housing and all the innovative partnerships we have running with Abbeyfield and other community groups who are building houses across this country—is anybody against that kind of spending at all? 
I ask members to look at broadcasting. Is anybody against the notion that we should have an independent culture in this country and a strong screen production centre where we are able to produce programmes films and television about ourselves that create jobs and create pride? That is why young people like this country these days. They love the notion that they can get a job have a future and get an education and that they live in the kind of exciting country we get from the cultural policies we have been investing in. Can members imagine Don Brash investing in something that might lead to a CD—if he knows what a CD is? That simply will not happen with someone as boring and as out of date as Dr Brash who would not know Shihad from Pacifier. 
Katherine Rich 
: Neither would Helen Clark! 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Ms Rich knows who Pacifier is which is good. Helen Clark would know who Pacifier are; actually she knows them personally. This is the debate that divides this House—on this side we will invest in this country; on that side they will not. 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 For the benefit of anyone who is still listening at the end of that speech I will say it was from Steve Maharey—the smarmy one as described by his former ministerial colleague John Tamihere. I remember John Tamihere telling the nation that he went to meetings with the smarmy one and was given copious notes but when he came out they did not add up to anything—there was no substance. We saw that with Steve Maharey in his speech today. We heard Mr Maharey talk about the Budget as being a good use of money and talk about the results of that. We saw last week the human face of Labour’s health policy and we saw the response from Labour when confronted with the human face of its failed health policy. 
Let me remind members what that response was. A man with Huntington’s disease was in pain and when he went to the dentist he was unable to get his teeth attended to. He was stuck on a waiting list for more than a year. That was the promise of the health waiting system—to wait more than a year because his case was said to be semi-urgent. Wellington Hospital told him that there were people in far more pain than him and that he should be happy to wait a year. When that case was raised in the House we saw the response of the caring Minister of Health. Her response was to get the man’s records and say that he was not in pain! Well that was news to him. That was news to his mum. [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister of Health laughs now. She thinks that is funny because she got away with it. Then she told the House that the man had gone to his dentist on a routine check-up. Well that was not true and the Minister now knows it was not true. The man went to the dentist because he had toothache and he had to wait a year to get it attended to in her health system. 
What has happened now? The Minister met with the man’s mother in her office. She got home and suddenly someone from our health system was on the phone wanting to see Alvin to look at his teeth and yes he has a date. Why? It is because Annette King was embarrassed. But the sad thing about it is that Alvin is just one of 180— 
Jill Pettis 
: The member would just say “Go private.” 
RODNEY HIDE 
: The member they refer to in the Labour caucus—I am sure in a kind and endearing way—as “paint stripper” or “fish wife” yells out because she does not want to hear about people and the results of the Government’s health policy. Why does she not just listen and try to help people for a change? The problem is that we got help for Alvin but 180000 people are queued up on our health waiting lists. 
Let me walk through the numbers in this Budget. In 1999 the health budget was $6.1 billion. It is now $9.7 billion. It has increased—[ 
Interruption 
] Jill Pettis yells out about how marvellous that is because being a lefty she thinks that spending money is a good thing as long as it is other people’s money. Health spending has increased by $3.6 billion a year or 57 percent. One might say: “Wow I bet that bought a lot of operations.” The figures show that we have increased the number of operations by 1.3 percent. Let us think about it. Annette King has increased the health budget by 57 percent to increase the number of operations by 1.3 percent. What a useless Minister of Health she is. And members should get this: the number of New Zealanders has increased by 4.3 percent so the number of operations per capita has gone backwards. 
Back in 1999 Annette King said that the waiting list of 96000 was criminal. Now she does not release the numbers. We have had to work for—[ 
Interruption 
] The Minister looks up. She knows that is a fact. We have had to— 
Hon Annette King 
: That’s a lie. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: The Minister can call out that I am lying. We have the dose on her because she has in this House. The waiting list was 96000. The budget was increased by $3.6 billion but what has happened to the health waiting list? It has blown up to 180000. The number of people on the waiting list has— 
Hon Annette King 
: What rubbish! 
RODNEY HIDE 
: Annette King calls out that that is rubbish. We know why that is. It is because people now have to wait in order to get on to the waiting list. That is the reality of health under Annette King. She still cannot get over the fact that a man with toothache cannot get a $5000 operation in our health system without waiting at least a year. 
The number of people who died while on our health waiting lists was 850 in 1999. Last year under Annette King 1200 people died on our health waiting lists. Annette King sits there and laughs. She knows the numbers and she should not be laughing at them. 
Hon Annette King 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I am quite happy to sit here and listen to that drivel but I will not have that member say that I am laughing at the comments he is making. It is certainly true that I would laugh at him but not at the comments he is making. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: That is not a point of order. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: The Minister can sit there and—she has admitted it—laugh through her speech about the failure of her policy laugh at the people who are queued up in pain and laugh about people having to wait in order to get on the waiting list. Treasury itself says that the Minister is out of control. We have the report. It states that the Minister has blown the budget and that health spending is unsustainable. I have never seen a report like it. Treasury advised Michael Cullen to go back to Annette King and tell her to redo the numbers because her priorities were wrong and the Budget was under stress. We have seen the wasteful spending—$3.6 billion has been spent on health with no result. More people are waiting than ever before and more are upset with the health system than ever before. 
Then we have the prospect of tax cuts. Mike Williams told the people of New Zealand that there was a deep dark secret in the Budget and when I went into the lock-up I found it. It was a tax cut of $34. I thought wow that was not bad for someone in the 20c in the dollar tax-rate range. Then I looked at it again. I had thought the tax cut was $34 per week but it turned out that it was $34 per year—a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum per week. Then I read a bit more and found that the cut would not occur until 2008. So people will receive a packet of chewing gum as a tax cut but they will have to wait 3 years for it under Labour. Michael Cullen says that he cannot afford tax cuts. I say to Michael Cullen Annette King and Clayton Cosgrove that New Zealanders cannot afford to keep paying their tax. They cannot afford to fund wananga hip-hop tours and million-dollar grants to rich American companies. They cannot afford to keep paying that tax and make ends meet. That is the situation in this Budget that we are voting on. Currently the Government’s spending total is $53 billion per year. In the next 5 years it is set to grow according to Michael Cullen to $73 billion per year. That is 45 percent faster than the rate the economy is growing at. This Government is forecasting Government spending to grow 45 percent faster than the rate the economy will grow at. 
I look at this figure. When we are thinking about what the Government can and cannot afford the key figure to look at is the net wealth of the Government. Currently the net wealth of the Government is $35.5 billion. That is the figure when we take all the assets the Government has and deduct all the liabilities. Our Government is solvent and is worth $35.5 billion. Over the next 5 years our Government’s net worth will be $63.1 billion. This Government is a rich Government. It is accumulating wealth at the expense of New Zealanders. The wealth of the Government is increasing at an astonishing $5.5 billion per year which interestingly matches the maximum cost of ACT’s tax policy. If we just held the net wealth of the Government constant we could pay for ACT’s policy. The net wealth of the Government is going up at the rate of 12 percent. That is all news to Clayton Cosgrove. He sits on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and is the only person who I noticed when I was on the committee could sleep while in the chair. It is unbelievable to watch. He actually does not follow anything that goes on in those debates. 
The Government’s wealth is growing by $5.5 billion per year. We can afford tax cuts. I say that the people of New Zealand cannot afford to keep paying for this Government and for the wasteful spending that we see. That is why they will give their party vote to ACT at the next election. 
KATHERINE RICH (National) 
: 
 If anybody wants to upset Labour right now he or she need only mention the media’s and the public’s reaction to the Budget. Mike Williams made it incredibly difficult for the Labour Party I have to say by going around various meetings in Auckland and around the country and by giving interviews saying that in the Budget was a deep dark secret. It was so deep that very few people could ascertain what it was when they first went through the Budget documents—or could not find it at all. When it transpired that the deep dark secret was 67c in 3 years’ time was it any wonder that the New Zealand public shrugged their shoulders and asked: “Is that it? Is that as good as it gets?” 
New Zealanders understand having just had the best economic conditions in a generation that they should be in a position whereby they can get something back for their work—something back for the hard work they have done over the last 6 or so years. Michael Cullen as the Minister of Finance has had the best economic conditions that many Ministers have faced in a long time. If we are not able to have tax cuts after those sorts of conditions the question most Kiwis are asking is when they can ever be relieved of some of the burden of tax. Members on that side of the House said that no more taxes would be imposed except on a few who earned over $60000 per year. More taxes have been levied on New Zealanders over the last short period of time than have been levied on most generations prior to the last 6 years. 
If we cannot afford a tax cut now when will we ever be able to afford one? That is a key issue and the key question on the lips of many New Zealanders. That is the reason I suppose that the Budget was not well received by the general public. I am not talking about the wealthy—which the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance seem to think is anybody who earns over $38000 per year—but about those hard-working Kiwis the bulk of our citizens who earn less than that and who want something more in their pockets at the end of the week. They are the people who pay for everything. They do not have a community services card. They pay for everything and face the increasing costs of petrol Nana’s sherry and carbon emissions tax. They are paying for absolutely everything and getting nothing back. 
Well we on this side of the House do not think that people earning $38000 per annum are wealthy. We do not think that people earning $60000 per annum are wealthy. If we look at our own communities we will find doctors nurses some teachers and police who earn over $60000 and who are now caught in that top tax rate. We do not see those people as being the wealthy elite. If we think that those people who earn $60000 should front up to Work and Income New Zealand to get some kind of handout then there is little future for our economy. 
This bill does not set aside money to fix the tax problem we have in this country. This bill will not give New Zealanders more than just 67c in 3 years’ time. This bill will not set aside money to fix the current problems with the police which basically leave some Kiwis ringing 111 and getting a cab not a cop. This bill and this Budget will not fix the current debacle with the National Certificate of Educational Achievement and New Zealand Scholarship. It will not give any relief to hard-working families—the families who get up every day and go to work— 
Jill Pettis 
: Yes the Working for Families package. 
KATHERINE RICH 
: Is it not interesting that Ms Pettis is now talking about the Working for Families package? That was last year’s story. Labour has dredged it up—understanding that its Budget has fallen as flat as a pancake—to try to make things a bit better when it argues in front of Kiwis who say that its Budget has been such a disappointment to most Kiwis. 
We have seen an extra $3.5 billion spent on health. We have seen a whole lot of spending in other areas as well but we have seen little gain. It was interesting to hear Michael Cullen in the Chamber take credit for good weather good commodity prices good economic conditions and good employment numbers when that member over there knows that the good conditions we have faced have frankly had nothing to do with this Government. 
Jill Pettis 
: One hundred and thirty million dollars has nothing to do with the weather. 
KATHERINE RICH 
: Is it any wonder that Michael Laws of Wanganui says he has some nutters in his town when Jill Pettis sits over there and makes such inane comments? Labour thinks that for a person to be wealthy he or she must earn more than $38000 per year. Well I can say that we on this side of the House have bigger and better dreams and aspirations for this country. When Kiwis are earning $38000 per year and the Government’s answer is to make them front up to Work and Income New Zealand to get a handout then I do not think the Government is asking the right questions. The answer is not further entrenching welfare dependency in this country; the answer is helping people to be independent. Working for Families will provide relief for only about 14000 extra families who were not already caught up in the welfare system and I do not think that that is something to crow about. 
Moana Mackey 
: Spin spin. 
KATHERINE RICH 
: Members on that side might say: “Spin spin.” but they are the ones who are spinning. They are the ones who are facing Mike Munro deeply concerned about the way the spin was handled when it came to the Budget. It is members on that side of the House who are angry that they were let down by Michael Cullen after being told that everything would be all right. They were told: “Keep quiet boys and girls. There’s going to be something in the Budget that will keep all your punters happy.” and it did not happen. Sixty-seven cents in 3 years’ time—I bet that will go down well in Gisborne! When those members are standing on the hustings and talking about what Labour is promising that will not go down terribly well. Mr Hide said it was enough to buy a packet of chewing gum. Actually it is not. A packet of chewing gum costs 70c. With 67c one would have to wait till the next year to have enough to get a packet of chewing gum. 
Some of the other ideas the Government has talked about today did not catch the imagination of New Zealanders either. They fell asleep at talk of the KiwiSaver programme. Their eyes glazed over when they were told about the deal for first home buyers. When one looks at the deal for first home buyers one realises that one would have to buy a house that was so cheap that many Kiwis probably would not want to live in it anyway and one cannot buy houses for the value that allows one to qualify. 
The Budget has been a deep disappointment to the Labour Party and Labour members know that. They can sit there and smile point and carry on but they know they do not have anything to go out and sell on the hustings and that their people are just as disappointed. It is interesting that Michael Cullen said that the reason there was not much more in the Budget was that the Government’s own polling said that tax was not an issue. It just goes to show how decisions are made in this country right now that if a poll indicates that something is wanted or not wanted that is the way this Government makes its decision. 
It is interesting that Michael Cullen said that tax was not an issue yet post-Budget it was one of the major issues of interest to this country. Kiwis are finding it harder to get by as they spend more at the petrol pump and spend more on their petrol and more on their goods and services—all taxes and levies from a Government that said that it would not raise any taxes or additional levies. So I think Labour has quite some explaining to do. Instead of talking about what the National Party will do Government members should stand up and say why they are so excited about their Budget and why they think it is a vision for New Zealand. 
Darren Hughes 
: They have. 
KATHERINE RICH 
: No they have not. They have stood up and talked about the National Party which I think demonstrates a deep sensitivity and a deep understanding of what the problem is. We on this side of the House are delighted that the Government has fallen flat on its face with a Budget that has not excited anybody at all because it allows us to demonstrate a difference in terms of what National will be offering at the coming election. Kiwis will see through what the Labour Government is offering. It is all about spin. Government members are deeply disappointed. They might be pretending that they are as happy as sandboys but we know they are disappointed with what Michael Cullen has delivered. 
ROD DONALD (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Today— 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: Don’t talk about oil! 
ROD DONALD 
: I will be talking about oil. I thank Mr Cosgrove for reminding me. I will talk about it later so I ask the member to be patient. 
Today we are talking about the supplementary estimates and we are also debating an Imprest Supply Bill. That imprest supply bill will give the Government the money it needs to run the country if an election is held before the Budget is passed. This year I am confident that the Budget will pass its third reading before the House rises for the general election in the same way that 3 years ago I was confident that the Government would pull the plug before the Budget was passed. In fact just before the supplementary estimates debate started 3 years ago Prime Minister Helen Clark told the whole country that we would have a snap election. That was on 11 June 2002. At that point we knew what was ahead of us. We had an election date and I wish Helen Clark would give us the same courtesy now and set an election date. But I would have to say that she did not need to call a snap election on 11 June 2002 and she certainly does not need to call one now. 
I would like to look back briefly over the last 3 years at the Government’s report card in relation to the debate that took place on 11 June 2002. Labour has passed some good legislation in some crucial areas but it is interesting to see what it has not advanced. On that date in 2002 the Marine Reserves Bill was waiting for its first reading in Parliament. It got that first reading after the election thanks to support from the Green Party but it still languishes at the Local Government and Environment Committee because the Government is more interested in advancing legislation on marine farming than it is in marine reserves. We call on the Government—Mr Cosgrove may be leaving the Chamber; I hope he will stay and hear what I have to say about peak oil. The Marine Reserves Bill is still stuck in the select committee because Labour lacks a serious commitment to increasing the number and area of marine reserves in New Zealand. We have to contrast its dragging the chain on conservation with its pushing ahead on economic growth. 
Another bill that was held up by the snap election was the Minimum Wage Amendment Bill. The Greens supported it. The Minimum Wage Amendment Bill is another example of legislation United Future has opposed in this Parliament but we are very pleased to give our support to Labour on such legislation because we are just as committed to social justice as we are to protecting the environment and making the economy sustainable. It is good that the minimum wage does continue to increase. It is now $9.50 an hour—a lot more than when National was last in power. But it is not enough. It is not good enough. New Zealand workers deserve at least $12 an hour because without that level of income one simply cannot bring up a family in any sense of decency. I know that most New Zealanders would rather get a wage that is enough to live on than have to rely on family support or any other Government handout. So we advocated for that legislation and we made some progress there. We advocated for the transfer of undertakings and that legislation has finally managed to get through in the last 3 years. In fact 17 bills passed in this term of Parliament have passed only because of support from the Green Party. Those bills simply would not be law without it. There would be no Supreme Court no Maori Television Service no Care of Children Act no Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act no Climate Change Response Act and so on without the support of the Green Party. 
The Government has certainly learnt a lot in the last 3 years and those pieces of legislation are examples of what it has learnt. The Labour-Progressive minority Government has done a very good job of managing this House. As an advocate of MMP I would like to give it credit for that. Despite having only 53 seats out of 120 it has successfully mustered a majority for most of its legislation by turning to a number of parties for support. United Future has been the only party to vote for two Budgets—because Labour was intransigent on genetic engineering and therefore did not enjoy our confidence—and seven other bills have passed only because of United Future. As I said the Greens are responsible for the passage of 17 bills and New Zealand First was the only non-Government party to vote for the Foreshore and Seabed Bill. We got a warning in the last term of Parliament when Labour relied on New Zealand First for the passage of two bills both of which have turned to custard in various ways. So members should look out for what will happen to the Foreshore and Seabed Act. 
 Despite what the critics say MMP has not led to the tail wagging the dog. Indeed before Christmas Labour worked with United Future the Greens and New Zealand First in turn to pass legislation under urgency. However it is disappointing but not surprising that Labour’s management of the economy and of voters’ expectations is not as good as its management of Parliament. Let us face it Dr Cullen’s Budget was a public relations disaster. As I said at our recent conference Arnold Nordmeyer is Michael Cullen’s hero but that did not mean he had to deliver such a grey Budget. It was timid on issues such as tax cuts where it should have been bold. Last year’s Budget was bold with Working for Families and we supported that. In the last term the superannuation fund was bold even though we opposed it. But this time as everyone says 67c a week in 2008 for low and middle income earners has done nothing to excite voters and everything to turn them off Labour. What is more Dr Cullen’s failure to address mounting student debt is alienating a whole generation of young people their parents and their grandparents. 
Labour’s KiwiSaver package is a good move but for many people with no discretionary income it only highlights the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Homestart was another good idea. It basically restores what National axed in 1992 but it is still only a token gesture in the face of rocketing house prices. So instead of Labour forcing through the Overseas Investment Bill under urgency later this week it should be banning the sale of all land to foreign investors because those sales are artificially inflating the price of entry-level properties. Inflating house prices mean that the Kiwi home instead of being a dream to aspire to has become a nightmare for first home seekers. 
I give Dr Cullen credit for one thing: pinching the title from my 2001 conference speech on his superannuation fund—which I called “Invest now to secure the future”—for his Budget which he calls “Securing our future”. That Budget I am afraid will not go far enough to securing the future for the nation as Dr Cullen proposes because he continues to gamble a big slice of our taxes on the overseas sharemarket instead of using that money for sustainable infrastructure to future-proof our economy to educate and train our young people so that they can be productive citizens and to meet the community’s health housing and social needs. There is not enough money going into protecting the environment either. 
The supplementary estimates if I may discuss them briefly put aside some money to deal with flooding. That is a good thing—there is something like $32 million in the supplementary estimates—but where is the money going for planting forests where they are needed? One of the environmental commitments that this Government should be making is reforestation of marginal land as well as long-term measures to put the brakes on climate change. In going beyond reforesting headwaters the Government would be making some bold moves to tackle climate change. The Government is not doing enough to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in this country and I point it to the Green Party’s energy package which has recently been announced. That package gives the Government a very clear plan of what we need in New Zealand. 
Some of our proposals would have been in those supplementary estimates had the Government been committed to protecting the environment to making our economy more sustainable and to improving the quality of life of New Zealanders. At the top of that list is half a million solar water heaters for homes in New Zealand which is something that we will be campaigning for strongly after the election along with a sustainable energy commission a one-stop advisory shop for households and not using coal to generate electricity because the use of coal only adds to our carbon emissions and will put the Government in an even worse position than it appears to be in in relation to carbon credits. We say to the Government that it should look at the Green Party’s energy policy and its tax policy which makes the first $5000 of income tax-free so that people can afford to pay not only for the increasing cost of power but also for doing the good things like insulating their homes and putting in energy-efficient light bulbs etc. 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade) 
: 
 It was a bit rich to hear the Greens who apparently want to spend more money on everything joining the National Party chorus by saying that they want more tax cuts. We have heard from the National Party already that that is the big promise for this election but its members will not tell us what those tax cuts would be and where they would come from. 
We know where the tax cuts would come from and where the money would go. We know that the money would go to the rich because Don Brash has said it would. In fact he said he could spend a third of the surplus and that would cover cutting company tax rates and the top personal tax rate to 30 percent. So we know that the money would go to the rich and we know that it would come from ordinary New Zealanders and from the areas where Government spends most money. 
National superannuation would not be safe from National. It promised in 1990—I remember it; I was on the campaign—that there would be no superannuation cuts. There were no ifs no buts no maybes. What did National do? It increased the surtax to the highest level ever. I remember Lockwood Smith talking about student fees. He said they would be removed and that if they were not removed he would resign. He doubled the fees and he stayed there for 6 years. One cannot trust the National Party. I am sorry that the Greens would choose to align themselves with it. 
This election will be about track record and leadership in Government. It will be about credibility and about vision. On every front it will be the Labour-led Government that wins the support of New Zealanders because of 6 years of competent stable consistent Government. I have been in this House long enough to know that different parties over different times have gone into election campaigns making promises and then have reneged on those promises. Then parliamentarians wonder why their credibility in the wider electorate fell as low as it did. I am proud to have been a member of a Labour-led Government that promised only what it could deliver and delivered on what it promised. That is refreshing in terms of New Zealand’s political history. It is about credibility reliability and trust. 
We know that the National Party is promising everything. It put out a law and order policy and I got my people to cost it. It would spend $722 million more a year on law and order plus $1.8 billion in capital expenditure. Over a 10-year period it would be a $9 billion promise. That from the party that says it will cut taxes and slash Government income! It will spend a whole lot more on law on order—but where will the money come from? Nobody on the National benches will tell us. There is absolute silence from those members. There is not even an interjection from the crowded National benches because they cannot answer that question. We all know that the money would come from ordinary New Zealanders. They would get it in the neck. 
Many New Zealanders will remember the 1990s the age of Ruth Richardson Bill Birch and Jenny Shipley. But they should not forget those who are still in Parliament—Lockwood Smith Bill English David Carter— 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: Nick Smith. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: —Nick Smith Tony Ryall—all the old failed tired hacks from the past who expect us to believe them now. Tony Ryall is the only Minister of Justice in this country’s history who has faced a referendum on his term as Minister of Justice. In that referendum 92 percent of New Zealanders showed that they had no time for the absolute and abysmal failure of the National Government to deliver. We have delivered in law and order. We have delivered the lowest crime rates in 23 years. We have delivered the best police resolution rates in 22 years. We have now put another 1200-plus police staff into the police force. Compare that with National’s plans which we uncovered when we became Government to slash police numbers by 540 to pay for the failed INCIS scheme! How can National have credibility when its members look at their track record of their failure to deliver? We can stand proudly beside our track record and say that we have delivered for this country. 
 Let us look at what we have delivered. We have delivered the best growth rates that this country has seen in decades. For 4 years in a row we have had higher growth than our bigger cousins across the Tasman in Australia. We have delivered 260000 additional jobs—260000 more New Zealanders able to pay their way able to contribute through the taxation system and able to improve their standards of living and the strength of the county. We have lowered poverty and we will lower it further. That is something we are particularly proud of. We will pull from a third to a half of kids currently living under the poverty line out of that poverty through the Working for Families package. 
That is something to be proud of—not big tax cuts for former Governors of the Reserve Bank chief executives or merchant bankers. That is what the National Party stands for. Its leader and its finance spokesperson are former bankers and they are standing up for the rich and powerful giving them all the assistance they need—or do not need as the case may be. They are ignoring the people on the ground who need the help—the kids who need a decent education and the people in the health system who need better health-care. 
And that is what Labour has delivered; we have cut the cost of going to a doctor. That is the key thing that saw people end up in hospital—because they could not afford to get to the doctor. Through primary health organisations we have lowered the cost. We have lowered the cost of pharmaceuticals. We have committed to delivering more operations; more orthopaedic and cataract operations are provided for in the latest Budget. We are making New Zealanders healthier. People are better off under Labour and when they think about the choices they will come to that conclusion. 
We have delivered paid parental leave. We are about to deliver 4 weeks’ holiday. Don Brash said that he was against that and that the country would go bankrupt but when he looked at the polls he thought he had better say he was for it. We know about National in the past saying it is against things changing its mind to make it look as if it is for them and when it is safely elected changing its mind back again. 
Then of course we have the nuclear-free policy. National does not have the courage of its convictions. It has a bill introduced by ACT before the House that says this country will cease to be nuclear-free. A senior National MP told the  
Agenda  
programme on Saturday that Don Brash and most of the National caucus do not believe in a nuclear-free New Zealand. Will they come out and tell New Zealanders that? Not on your life! They know that two to one New Zealanders are in favour of the policy so those members will dissemble about it and betray their promises if they think they can get away with doing that—just as they have done in the past. 
The tax cuts are a myth. Yes of course we would like to pay less tax but we know there is a cost to tax cuts and that cost is a cut in the expenditure that is badly needed for the people of this country. We are giving superannuitants a rates rebate which will be the first decent increase in rates rebates in more than 30 years. We are looking after health needs. We have reversed National’s cuts in superannuation. That would be the first thing to go under National’s policy. We know that what those members are promising simply does not add up. We know that the Australians spent $22 billion on tax cuts last month in their Budget but what did that deliver to the average income earner on between $23000 and $58000 a year? Six dollars a week! In my electorate on 1 April this year families on the average wage with three kids got 55 bucks more a week—$55 more in the pocket to help them meet the needs of their growing families at the time that they need that assistance. 
Those sorts of benefits in real disposable income can never be delivered through tax cuts. Tax cuts would help the wealthy. Tax cuts would mean a cut in the major social expenditure areas of health and education. Tax cuts as the OECD reported to us would end up being inflationary and we would end up with higher interest rates. What the National Party would give on the one hand it would take back in additional interest rates on the other. 
I am proud to be in this party that has delivered for New Zealand. I am proud to be in this party that has competent leadership. Can we remember Don Brash on the foot-and-mouth hoax? He was going to produce what Annabel Young the chief executive officer of Federated Farmers said would have been New Zealand’s Chernobyl. We cannot rely on him. We have a competent and able Prime Minister; we will still have that person as Prime Minister after the election this year. 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 It is very clear that between now and the election the Minister of Finance Dr Michael Cullen will try to convince the nation that there is no room for tax cuts following this year’s election. However this assumes that any alternative Government would carry on with his expenditure plans exactly as he has determined them and that they would be funded in exactly the same way as he has intended. In other words there is only one form by which the Government can spend its money and fund its way forward and that is the way that Michael Cullen has determined—there is only one form of architecture for the house. Well that might be true for the house that Michael built but let us be clear that there are alternatives. 
Dr Michael Cullen’s Budget is not carved in stone; it is not Holy Writ and it can be changed. If someone else—for example a sensible stable prudent reliable centre party—were to be part of a coalition after the election then it will be changed. I mean let us get real. Dr Cullen is running a massive multibillion dollar surplus but at the same time he is saying that there is no room for tax cuts until 2008. Hello—is something missing in that statement somewhere? Of course there is room for tax cuts and they will be happening if United Future has something to do with it. We have a good track record in that regard. 
The other day in the House Minister Steve Maharey said that the previous Government had cut taxes. Well let me tell the Minister that the previous Government was a National - New Zealand First Government and under that Government there were no cuts in taxes. In fact the National - New Zealand First Government actually reversed the tax cuts that had been announced by the previous Government. That previous Government—guess what?—was a National - United Future Government. So it is very very clear from our track record that every time United Future is brought into the frame taxes go down; when we are not in the frame taxes go up. 
United Future will be cutting taxes in a number of ways. First of all we want income-splitting for couples who are raising children. It is quite unfair that a person who has no dependents pays exactly the same tax as a man or a woman who is supporting maybe a spouse and two or three children. That is quite unfair; we want to bring it to an end and income splitting will do that. We want to reduce the company tax rate over 3 years from 33c in the dollar to 30c in the dollar and we want to introduce a $3000 tax-free threshold. 
I would like to ask the Hon Phil Goff who just resumed his seat how that puts more money in the pockets of the rich. Can anybody tell me that? It puts more money in the pockets of everyone. Every single taxpayer would get more money every child would get more money every tertiary student would get more money and every superannuitant would get more money. In fact there are no exceptions to that rule. That is not putting money into the pockets of the rich. That may be the National Party’s tax policy. Eventually I guess we will get to hear what that policy is—maybe about 2 weeks before election day the way things are going? But United Future’s policy is to give a tax reduction to every single taxpayer and that will do it. 
We will also adjust the tax brackets by $5000 so that the income threshold of $38000 will go to $43000 for those on a tax rate of 33c in the dollar and the income threshold of $60000 will go to $65000 for those on a tax rate of 39c in the dollar. We will do it not in 2008 but in 2006—1 April 2006. And it gets even better. United Future will raise the amount of money that ends up in the pockets of New Zealand’s 476000 superannuitants. In our tax cuts we are also offering them a boost in their annual amount of superannuation. We will do that first of all because they will benefit from the $3000 zero tax threshold and secondly because we want to take out an anomaly in the present formula for calculating superannuation where it is always based on retrospective data in relation to the cost of living and the average wage. We would make that formula rather prospective so that on 1 April every year the calculation would be done based upon what we expect the consumer price index and the average wage to be over the next 12 months. That is a fair policy. It means that superannuitants actually get the right amount—65 percent after tax—of the average weekly wage concurrent with the movements in that wage rather than always being on the back foot and being behind. 
We will take GST off rates which again will leave money in the pockets of superannuitants and all other residential ratepayers in this country. How much will that cost? Well I can tell the House that it will cost a little less than $2.5 billion to bring in all those very very sensible and very good tax cuts. It will leave money in the pockets of families. It will leave money in the pockets of companies. It will leave money in the pockets of children. Fancy at the moment we tax the earnings of kids—their pocket money. We put a tax on it. We want to get rid of that. We put a tax on the few dollars that tertiary students earn while they are trying to pay their way through a university education. We will bring that to an end as well. We will leave more money in the pockets of children. They will have some pocket money—the actual amount that is given to them as pocket money and not reduced through taxation. As I mentioned we will put quite significant amounts of money into the pockets of superannuitants and give them a fairer deal as we move forward. 
Now when we think about it let us put that in context. United Future says that it will give tax reductions of about $2.5 billion. Michael Cullen says that there is no room to give tax reductions of $2.5 billion. He has said so in the House several times already. When I ask him a question about any old thing these days he comes back and says: “If we go ahead with the tax cuts that that member is proposing there will be no room for expenditure on health there will be no room for expenditure on education there will be no room for expenditure on police and there will be no room for expenditure on defence.” But does he ever mention the fact that he is actually budgeting for a surplus of between $6 billion and $7 billion a year? How come he is silent about that reality? I think the silence needs to come to an end. 
I think that the media also needs to do some pretty simple basic arithmetic here because the people of New Zealand certainly are. They say that if the Government has a $6 billion to $7 billion surplus and a party comes along and says that it will leave $2.5 billion of that amount in people’s pockets and people’s purses so that they can have more money to service their debt and more money to provide an adequate income to their families so that they can give their families the health and education services they want for them and ensure that they are able to have some little family celebrations occasionally with plum pudding and the like—so that they can do all those things that we take for granted as part of the New Zealand tradition—it is no reply if they are told that that cannot be done because Dr Cullen’s surplus is only $6 billion to $7 billion. How big does a surplus have to be before we can afford tax cuts? 
Let us do the simple arithmetic. Let us follow the logic through. I challenge the media today to get stuck in and say: “Let’s unbundle all of this.” We are collecting that $6 billion or $7 billion surplus from taxpayers; that is where it comes from. So when we say we cannot afford tax cuts United Future says that Dr Cullen is wrong. We certainly can. If we have something to do with this we will. It is time to shift aside from the simplistic analysis that the Minister of Finance is giving to the nation on this. If he cannot afford tax cuts—and that is what he is saying; that the nation cannot afford tax cuts and it would be better if he said that the Labour Government cannot afford tax cuts—well let us get some new advice from somebody else. Let us get some new vision from someone outside the Labour Party that will see more money in everyone’s pockets. At the same time can I say that by just rearranging the architecture and the balance sheet of the nation we can at one and the same time by innovation and by doing things differently ensure that we continue to build a world-class health system education system police system and so on in this country. We do not have to have this false dichotomy that says that we cannot do both. We can and if United Future has anything to do with it we will. 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 A couple of things came out of the Budget last week that I should comment on. One of them was something that is an absolute rarity—it is as rare as National Party members in this House getting up to speak. It was the emergence of a National Party piece of policy. Paul Adams and I got to hear it first-hand on Friday in Auckland. What was it? It was the National Party’s policy on helping the disability providers—the people who care for people with disabilities in New Zealand. What was it? It was from its spokesperson Sandra Goudie and she said this: “We’re going to help the disability provider employers. We are going to take penal rates off the workers in that sector who work on public holidays.” Who are they? They are the people who go into the homes on public holidays and look after the elderly and those with disabilities. To help the sector Sandra Goudie has promised that the National Party will repeal the Holidays Act and take away penal rates from those hard-working low-paid New Zealand workers most of whom do it for love not for money. 
That is the National Party’s policy that we heard last week. What a doozy! National members will go out on the hustings and tell those workers that the way to solve the shortage of the workforce in the disability sector is to whack the workers over the head and take some money off them. Well contrast that with the policy of this Government. We have put money into that sector badly needed money so that those workers can in fact be trained so that they can be paid more and so they can go into the homes of the elderly and the disabled and work and get recognition for that work. But National Party members true to form say: “Nah we’re not having that.” Low-paid New Zealand workers—some of the lowest-paid hardest-working people in this country who look after the elderly and the disabled—are to be punished to pay for the tax cuts for the rich! 
Well what does one expect of the National Party when one looks back at its track record? Remember the tax cuts of the 1990s? How were they funded? National sold 13000 State houses—that is how it funded the tax cuts—after it had already sold the railways. Of course this Government has had to buy the railways back because that was an absolute failure as we saw our railway system stripped away and the money was ripped off by the people whom the Government sold it to. That left us with an enormous burden on the roads because our rail system was not doing its bit. 
I suppose to fund the next round of tax cuts if Dr Brash ever gets his way National has not much that it could sell but he said he will sell Kiwibank. That will be great for the low-paid medium-income New Zealanders who are lining up at that bank to take advantage of the lower interest rates that no other bank would actually offer! Through the home ownership scheme this Government is in fact helping more and more people into home ownership through the mortgage insurance scheme which is another good feature of this Budget as is also the KiwiSaver scheme that will put $10000 into the pockets of hard-working Kiwi families so that they can buy their first home. That scheme will be delivered through the likes of Kiwibank that Dr Brash wants to sell. 
Let us look a little deeper because to cut the tax from 39c down to 30c which National said it would do and the company tax down from 33c to 30c will cost about $2 billion and not one single low-paid or medium-income family will see a cent as a result of that because they do not pay the top tax rate of 39c nor do they pay company tax. But $2 billion will be down the tubes gone and cannot be spent on health and it cannot be spent on education. As Dr Cullen said one will get a tax policy but it is actually a cut in health a cut in education a cut in defence and a cut in law and order. 
 But hang on. Let us see what National has promised to spend if it ever gets a chance to be the Government again—well $2 billion on cutting tax for the wealthy and for the companies and it wants to spend $4.5 billion on transport over the next 10 years. that is pretty miserable but nevertheless it is new spending. It has promised to build the Waikato expressway. It has promised $120 million for Northland roads $110 million for Tauranga and so on and so forth. Wherever National members visit they promise to spend. 
But there is a hidden issue. How will they fund that? They will have toll roads. What is a toll? It is a tax. So Dr Brash is going to say that the wealthy can have a tax cut and the companies can have a tax cut but all those other fellows will have to pay to build the new roads by paying tolls. How will they manage that? That is what we want to know. They will also have to pay more for education for their kids and for tertiary education for their older kids. 
Everybody knows what happened in the 1990s as a result of taxes being cut. There was not any money to supply our education system with what it needed. Labour has put millions and millions into bringing back to some sort of reality the spending on schools the spending on tertiary education and the spending on health. National members would also be opposed—and we know they are—to the half a billion dollars that this Government has stumped up with to pay nurses. The most highly rated profession in this country is nursing. It is not politicians it is not the police but nurses. This Government recognises that we cannot afford to import nurses to work in our hospitals while we export our trained nurses to the rest of the world so that they can earn a decent living. So that half a billion dollars cannot happen if there is a tax cut and if all that money is spent on roads—as the National Party said it would do. 
Then there is the $4 billion they have said they will spend on defence so that we can be equal to Australia. They have committed to spending $722 million a year on law and order. Members will remember that National is going to abolish parole. When they do that they will have to build more prisons. They cannot just have the prisoners wandering around in the paddock. They will have to build more prisons and at $220 million each they will have to build a lot of prisons when they abolish parole. 
Where will that money come from? That is what the country wants to know. Where is Dr Brash who prides himself on being an economist and a miserable one at that? He put up interest rates year after year so that New Zealanders could not afford to buy a house. Rates of homeownership plummeted to record lows as a result of his regime of interest rates. Dr Brash is saying that his party if it is ever elected to Government will help low to medium income families. Well let us hear how he will give them a tax cut and spend the extra $4 billion which Labour has in its Budget for health. How will he keep the promise to elderly New Zealanders who have seen this Budget take away asset testing or the first steps towards it? Where will he find the extra $18 million that is going into home-based care situations which I have talked about? Sandra Goudie has said that those workers do not deserve that and she will take their penal rates off them. 
What about the $71 million for residential aged-care that this Budget stumped up with? What about the $297 million to lift quality in tertiary education? In this Budget there is $45 million for industry and trade training to make up for the fact that last time National was in Government it did away with trade training and apprenticeships. So now we have nobody to build our roads our hospitals our schools and all the infrastructure this country is crying out for. 
It is not voodoo economics; it is something worse when a party can tell people it will give them a tax cut but it will not tell them how much when or whether they will get it but it will still be asking people to vote for it and trust it. That is what the National Party will say. That is what we know National will say. But we want the hard questions put to them by our media and by the public. How can we have all the things we have now in health education defence and law and order and have a tax cut too and how can they afford to do that when they have already promised to spend more and more on roading transport law and order etc.? It just does not add up and any person who scrutinises National’s voodoo economics will see right through it—and through Dr Brash and his colleagues. 
At least Sandra Goudie was honest enough to come up with a stupid dumb ignorant policy—that was better than none at all—when she said that the lowest-paid the most caring workers in this country. will lose their penal rates on weekends and holidays and that will be the one piece of party policy that we can guarantee National will deliver on if it is ever allowed to. That is how it will fund its tax cuts. They will take it from the lowest paid. 
KENNETH WANG (ACT) 
: 
 One thing is absolutely true in this debate about how taxpayers’ money is to be collected and spent. We are debating this bill under urgency but I am wondering why we are debating it in such a big rush. The one thing that is clear to me is that this Government wants to spend more. It wants to spend more and more. This bill is about grabbing money from hard-working New Zealanders and squandering it. If we look at the figures we see more tax collection. Actually we do not need to look at the detail; we need to look only at the ballpark figures to see that tax revenue is at a record level and that $3.4 billion will have been collected by the end of this financial year. That figure is in addition to all the levies penalties fees and fines so overall we are looking at nearly $5 billion in revenue collection this year. There will be even more waste and we will see Government expenditure jump up to a record high of $6.5 billion more than the previous year as the forecast shows. 
What is the revenue being collected for? We all know what it should be for. It is meant to help ordinary New Zealanders and their families but we all know that it will be spent on hip-hop tours wananga—which is a raced based policy—and social engineering. A story in the  
Dominion Post 
 today under the headline: “Taxpayers fund $1m grant to US company” tells us that taxpayers are funding a company called Navman. I want to draw members’ attention to the fact that 3 years ago this Government via Industry New Zealand spent $23000 of taxpayers’ money on that same company by paying for its American owners to stay at Huka Lodge and be taken on a fishing trip. That money was squandered and I wonder how the Government can spend more money—up to $1 million—on that American company. This is an example of grabbing taxpayers’ money and spending it on corporate welfare. 
We have to look at Labour’s repeated claims that the proposed tax cuts are just for the rich. I would like to draw members’ attention to the fact that tax cuts are not for the rich as we see when we look at what ordinary New Zealanders are saying. I personally encounter many New Zealanders who run their own businesses while battling to raise their families. Are taxi drivers rich? Are they being bracketed with the rich who will be ripping off the system? Members may recall what I said in my maiden speech at the end of last year. Dairy owners are battling for their lives to keep their shops open with the help of family members who are all struggling. What about the people in the public service like police officers teachers and nurses? Are they rich? Certainly not. They are hard-working New Zealanders. At the most their incomes can be bracketed as just middle-class incomes. What have they got? We all know what they have got. They have got a packet of chewing gum a week but not yet—they have to wait for 3 years. 
ACT knows what it is to be rich. Those people are bracketed as rich by Labour. Those people hard-working New Zealanders are being labelled by Labour as rich. I can say that they are certainly not rich. 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 I would like to address an anomaly that I have picked up in the agriculture supplementary estimates. In 2004 there were two major flood events—one in the Bay of Plenty and one in the lower North Island in the Wanganui-Horowhenua region. The estimates have given $6 million to the Bay of Plenty and over $26 million to the lower North Island for farm restoration. That sounds really good. I applaud the Government for giving that money to farmers. But for farm restoration? Basically that says that we have had those severe storm events the farm has been destroyed or the farming operation has been interrupted in some way or another but here is money so that the farmer can put the farm back to the way it was before the event. That may have been fine back in the days before we were aware of climate change when we could do whatever we liked and be fairly certain that pastoral land would be sustainable in the long term. But Cyclone Bola proved that that was simply not the case—that land use actually plays a major part. If we simply restore pasture to pasture after it has been devastated by a flood we will not stop the same thing from happening again in the future. 
At the time of the floods I implored the Minister to consider the afforestation of marginal lands and he agreed with me. But let us look at the estimates. Forestry encouragement under the estimates has zero dollars. There is absolutely nothing for developing forestry. If we had forests on marginal lands those lands would not slip. Trees actually hold the soil together on the steeper slopes. We have to say that climate change is here to stay. I am not suggesting for one moment that if we plant trees on marginal land those trees will change the climate. Of course they will not. But what they will do is ameliorate the effects of climate change. When we talk about one-in-100-year flood events or storm events we simply have to say that that is no longer the case. We are looking at maybe one-in-10-year events. 
I think the Government should take a much stronger line in terms of climate change factors and think about land use that will mitigate the effect of future events. One of the things that I think we should do is to get a realistic and updated assessment of the erosion susceptibility of soils particularly in hill country. It just makes sense to convert marginal pastoral land use to some other land use. I accept that in the short term farmers who are farming sheep and cattle pastoral farmers simply cannot afford to close up their paddocks and plant trees or allow them to revert to native bush. But we do have to say that those farmers need to be supported in some way so that their land use will not have a detrimental effect on people further downstream. We need to find out what crops—whether trees or other crops—are appropriate to topography to vehicle access to soil type to steepness of slope and all that sort of thing. It makes sense for us to grow trees. 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: What about hair? 
IAN EWEN-STREET 
: We could grow hair as well. That would slow down one kind of erosion I suppose. 
One thing that I think we could have done in the supplementary estimates rather than giving money to farmers and telling them to go back and restore their farms was to say farmers had to come up with a plan that would make their farms more sustainable in the longer term. Farmers should have to come up with a management plan for their farms before they get the money. So if the farm has a variety of soil types for argument’s sake the farmer could say the class 7 soils would be put under trees and the higher class soils would be kept for pasture and what have you. That sort of thing is very easy for the Government to do. It is a condition of the farmer receiving the money. Most farmers would simply say that it makes sense. Why does the Government not do that? I do not know. We are not talking about rocket science. It is a simple thing to do to simply put a condition on the money. 
I think it also makes sense to have a public insurance scheme to cover events like the floods. Why does the Earthquake Commission look after residential properties but not farming properties? 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Health) 
: 
 I am very pleased to speak in the appropriation debate. This is an opportunity for parties to showcase their policy for the forthcoming election. This is the last appropriation debate we will have before we go to the polls. Parties are able to come into this House and set out clearly for the voters of New Zealand what they intend to do. 
I have to say that I have been underwhelmed by the contributions from the National spokesperson and the ACT spokesperson. John Key’s speech was less than memorable. He managed to attract an audience of one—Lindsay Tisch. He was the only person who turned up to hear John Key’s speech. That would not be unusual except that I was in the House on the day John Key gave his Budget speech. Some members will recall that on that day he had an audience of one—Lindsay Tisch. I want to ask National members why they do not like John Key. Why will they not come into the Chamber to support and listen to John Key? I can only assume it is because he has absolutely nothing to say. That is what his speech was. It was full of nothing. It was empty blancmange. There was not a bit of policy not a single principle. All his speech was was a rant a rage and a whinge. 
Then I listened to the verbal diatribe—or was it verbal diarrhoea?—that poured out of the mouth of Rodney Hide. But I have to say that I looked at him when he was giving his speech and I pitied him. I felt pity for that man. He is a sad case. He is a sad man. He is desperate and he is dateless because nobody wants to play with that party. He is undermined by his own members. He spent the whole weekend trying to shore up his leadership of that disappearing party. He is outshone daily by Richard Prebble the previous leader. He is out principled by Ken Shirley. He is out of sorts he is out of condition and he is out of here. That is the truth about Rodney Hide. No Parliament I have to say needs to have a malicious fabricator but that is what Rodney Hide is. 
Kenneth Wang 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I think you should draw it to the member’s attention that this debate is about the 2004-05 supplementary estimates. It has nothing to do with leadership. I think this speech is totally out of order. 
Darren Hughes 
: I understand and respect the member’s sensitivity about the state of the ACT leadership but this debate is traditionally a wide-ranging debate. I am sure the Minister was well within the Standing Orders but we respect that party’s sensitivity at this time. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: I thank the member for his help. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I know that the member has not been here long and that this is his first appropriation debate. He probably did not listen to his own leader’s speech which was very wide ranging. 
I have to say that I do not think this Parliament needs a malicious fabricator. Rodney Hide makes up figures he makes up stories and he is full of blatherskite. I do not think this Parliament will miss that at all. I am waiting to hear the National Party’s health policy. I suppose New Zealanders are as well. We get a lot of negative whingeing and moaning from National’s health spokesperson. He goes around New Zealand saying how it is all bad; how the whole health system is in crisis. Most people scratch their heads and say that when one looks at the patient satisfaction surveys one can see that 88 percent of patients think that the health system is very good indeed. However I thought that Dr Hutchison might in the near future like to give us some health policy. We have waited for 6 years and we are prepared to wait another 6 weeks or so. However I did get a little glimpse of what we are likely to get from the National Party’s health policy on television during Queen’s Birthday weekend when Dr Hutchison gave the first hint. He said that National’s health policy in relation to elective surgery was to bring back waiting lists. 
Hon Members 
: Oh! 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes members heard me right. He said: “We’ll bring back waiting lists.” I was interested to hear a person from the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists say that putting people on waiting lists would not improve their health one way or the other. However we now know that part of the National Party’s health policy will be to bring back waiting lists. That is a complete turn-round from National’s policy which was clearly set out by Bill English on 16 September 1997. It was a policy that National set about to implement from 1998 and it was called the booking system. When we became the Government we looked at that policy and asked how it worked. We asked whether it was a good policy whether we should continue with it and whether we should try to improve it. We thought that it was an honest policy. It was one of the few that we got out of the National Party in the 1990s but it was an honest policy. 
The booking system told people whether they would get an operation when they would get an operation whether they were close to getting an operation or could expect to get one and whether they would not get one within the resources. That system was set up through a series of interventions that were made in the late 1990s. First of all Bill English said that we needed to get people off waiting lists and he said that the way to get them off waiting lists was first of all to just keep raising the sustainable threshold. That would get them off any waiting lists. Then by 1998 National started to implement that policy. So I can only assume that having implemented it they now think we will go back to a waiting list system where 96000 people waited and waited. They were the same people—they were not going on a list being seen and going off a list. They were the same people and some of them had waited for 12 years. Some had waited 8 or 10 years or whatever. Some of those people never went on a holiday because they were scared that a letter might come from a hospital saying that their name had been taken off the list and they would be offered an operation. Now we have a party that says it will go back to putting people on waiting lists—[ 
Interruption 
]—and David Carter thinks that is fantastic. I say that it is dishonest to tell people that by putting them on a list they might get an operation. A health organisation should be able to tell people what can be done and when it can be done within the resources it has. 
The other thing Paul Hutchison has taken to doing is going around New Zealand telling people how terrible everything is. He was in Tairawhiti just last week and he said that the number of people waiting for operations and the number of people getting operations in Tairawhiti was worse than it was in the past. Well I have to tell members that he made that up. I have the latest information from the Tairawhiti District Health Board and it shows that it is doing more operations than it was in the past. It is doing more operations this year than it did last year and people there are scratching their heads as to why he came to their place and said that in the media. We do not need that sort of dishonesty when it comes to the health system. Members should look at what is really going on. They will see that huge progress has been made by the many many doctors and nurses who work within our health system. 
Kenneth Wang said that our doctors and nurses are not overpaid. He is absolutely right. They would have been paid a whole heap less if we had not put money in this Budget to settle the biggest nurses’ pay claim this country has ever seen. Half a billion dollars of health money will go to increase the wages of nurses in New Zealand. Let me hear ACT deny that that is good expenditure of money. Over the last 3 years our doctors in our hospitals have had a 50 percent increase in their pay. Why did we do that? We cannot run a health system unless we have doctors nurses hospitals and facilities and we have to invest money in that. It does not happen by itself. We respect that investment. We want that investment. Finally we are starting to see that investment pay off in New Zealand. The rebuilding of a public health system takes money and time. We under-invested in health right throughout the 1990s. Only now have we got it to some state of equilibrium and 60 percent of that expenditure has gone into the wages and salaries of our health professionals in particular. 
We have heard a lot about the growth in numbers of bureaucrats. I have to tell members that more people have been employed in the health system but the growth in bureaucrats—which has been thrown around—has been 0.4 percent over that whole 6 years. Only 0.4 percent of that increase has been in so-called bureaucrats. Of course the bureaucrats are the booking clerks the people who ensure that people will have operations and the people who answer the telephones. They are the sort of people that National said it will get rid of. National said it would take that money and put it into health. Well a person will be lucky to get an extra ingrown toenail operation out of getting rid of the bureaucrats—as National calls them—in the health system. I am very proud of what we have done for health in our Budget and we intend to do more when we return to Government. 
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
: 
 It is a delight to follow the Minister of Health and her contribution in this debate on the supplementary estimates. I start by saying to the Minister that we have and New Zealand has lost faith in her. One has only to look at the headlines in the  
Dominion Post 
 today and the Minister had the opportunity to do something about that and she chose to ignore it totally. The  
Dominion Post 
 headline stated: “Emergency overload; Hospital A & E staff struggling to cope”. It goes on to state: “Wellington Hospital’s emergency department is bursting at the seams … Patients are spilling into hallways and staff are struggling to cope. One staff member described the situation as ‘near crisis’.” Yet we have had 10 minutes of absolute garbage from the Minister of Health and she refuses to address the real issues and the reason why the public of New Zealand have no faith in that Minister or the health policies of this Government. 
As we debate the supplementary estimates today it is the final debate in this year’s Budget and will not Dr Cullen and his Labour Government friends be pleased to see this debate out of Parliament once and for all! Because as we all know this Budget has been a total disaster for the Labour Government. Helen Clerk had the—I was going to say the “audacity” but I think it would be truthful to say the “stupidity” to say that that is the Budget that Labour wants to campaign on. I say to Annette King and the few members of the Labour Government sitting in the cross benches to make my day! I am happy to debate with the people of New Zealand the absolute generosity of Dr Cullen when he promises hard-working middle-income New Zealanders a tax cut of 67c a week provided they wait around in New Zealand for the next 3 years! 
What arrogance a Minister of Finance displays by coming into this House acknowledging to taxpayers throughout New Zealand that they are paying too much tax and then having the stupidity and the arrogance to say that Labour recognises that New Zealanders particularly middle-income New Zealanders are overtaxed and if they stick with the Government it will give them 67c but they have to hang around New Zealand for the next 3 years! That was just the most stupid thing that Dr Cullen could ever have done and Labour Government members now on the opposite side of the House hang their heads in shame to think that they were part of such a Budget policy this year. [ 
Interruption 
] 
 I welcome the opportunity to debate with Harry Duynhoven on any platform he likes Labour’s tax cut of 67c a week against National’s tax cut policy which will be announced in the not too distant future. If he thinks his Government’s policy will be a winner he is as out of touch as Dr Cullen. I suspect he is because that is what has happened to the Government. It has become so arrogant so out of touch it is failing to realise what New Zealanders are really worried about. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: Which electorate do you represent? 
Hon DAVID CARTER 
: I want to take the opportunity to talk about some aspects of the supplementary estimates but first I will pick up on the rather inane interjection from Harry Duynhoven. I tell him that I represent the farmers of New Zealand who have had enough of that Government. I refer particularly to Supplementary Estimates of Appropriations at page 12 which talks of $2.649 million more being put towards Jim Sutton’s campaign to develop public access in this country. That is on top of the money that had already been spent in last year’s appropriations. That is on top of the $2 million being budgeted next year for the next 3 years by Jim Sutton and Helen Clark as they progress an agenda to open up the privately owned farmland of New Zealand to people who Helen Clark thinks should be allowed to wander over that land. 
If Harry Duynhoven thinks that that policy is popular he is as out of touch with New Zealanders as he could possibly be. He should realise that the issue is a major concern for New Zealand farmers. Now he is nodding his head. He is actually one of the few who have woken up to the fact and acknowledged that this is a major concern for farmers. Farmers who live in isolated areas know they do not have the resources of the police force. They know the situation where Peter Bentley was being beaten to a pulp and his wife was on the phone ringing 111 and the police kept Mrs Bentley talking on that phone and would not let her get off that call to ring the neighbours for help. No help arrived for a matter of an hour or more. That is why farmers feel so deeply about this public access debacle being advanced by Helen Clark and Jim Sutton. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: What about foreign ownership? 
Hon DAVID CARTER 
: I tell Harry Duynhoven that it is not for some selfish reason that farmers want to lock up their land. They are willing to let the people of New Zealand wander over their land but they want to be shown the respect of being asked. They are the ones who have spent their hard-earned cash buying the farm in the first place and they want the opportunity of saying yes or no to people who ask whether they can wander. 
I remind Harry Duynhoven that it has worked well for 160 years and all that goodwill is about to be destroyed. I look forward to seeing that member and the other few members of the Labour caucus currently in the House being on the steps of Parliament on Thursday week when thousands of farmers are going to descend on this Parliament to again lodge their protest over this public access debate. It is the No. 1 concern that New Zealand farmers have at the moment and they have absolute disgust for Jim Sutton as he continues surreptitiously to advance that policy. 
We tell him to table the legislation. We have been asking him all year to table it. We heard a few weasel words over the weekend saying the legislation will be in the House before the election. We took the opportunity to ask the Minister a direct question at question time today and his answer as to when he would table the legislation was: “When we are ready.” Jim Sutton should wake up and listen to and feel the concern of farmers. 
I bring to the House’s attention one other interesting supplementary estimate—that is the $3.133 million being added to the budget of the Weathertight Homes Resolution Service. That is a bureaucracy chewing up $18.5 million a year but it is meant to be out there resolving the disputes and problems around leaky homes. The House has been told time and time again that the number of cases being brought before the resolution service well and truly exceeds the cases resolved so far. At the current rate it will take over 100 years to resolve the claims. 
I was amazed at some interesting statistics that Nick Smith provided. It is costing over $100000 of bureaucracy to resolve the average claim. That typifies this Government whereby it throws money into a bureaucracy and employs heaps more civil servants in Wellington and thinks that that will resolve the problems of this country. It is no wonder New Zealanders feel grossly overtaxed when they know their hard-earned taxpayer money goes into building a bureaucracy that is some 40 percent bigger than it was 6 long years ago. I say to middle New Zealand: “Help is on the way. Tax cuts will be delivered but you’ll have to vote for a change of Government to get them.” I trust that middle-income New Zealand will do that. 
CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour—Waimakariri) 
: 
 As my colleague Harry Duynhoven said the previous speaker for the benefit of those who did not know this was one David Carter the former failed finance spokesperson who was sacked by his leader sacked off the front bench twice— 
Darren Hughes 
: Twice? 
CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: Twice. And now in theory David Carter is National’s spokesperson on agriculture and the leader of the C-team within the National Party. I first want to address a couple of points that Mr Carter made. He talked about the accident and emergency department at Wellington Hospital bursting at the seams. Well there is a reason for that I tell him as he scuttles off like a paddle crab. There are not enough beds in the emergency department because the department is not big enough. We can ask why that is. I am not a medical practitioner but I assume that when an emergency department is being planned one projects out on a population basis and finds out what the demands will be over the life of that building over the next 10 or 20 years. But when the planning approval was given for that building in 1999 by the previous National Government of course it did not make provision for enough beds in the department nor for enough room in that department to put in those beds. That is why sadly the accident and emergency department at Wellington Hospital as the member read from the headline in the  
Dominion Post 
 is bursting at the seams. National could not run a bath let alone set up the planning and project it forward for an appropriate medical facility for the people of Wellington. That is the truth. 
Then we come to the issue of leaky buildings. My colleague Mr Duynhoven reminded me that before I arrived in this place the warnings were there. One can just ask any builder in my electorate. I talked with one last week. He said the warnings on the leaky homes issue were around for 10 years before 1999. There were warnings about the Rockcote the polystyrene the lack of gaps and the lack of ventilation all causing leaks in houses. 
Brent Catchpole 
: Why did George Hawkins refuse to acknowledge that? 
CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: The previous speaker got up but before Mr Catchpole or “Tadpole” or whatever his name is was in this place— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Please withdraw that comment. 
CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: I withdraw. Before that member was in the House so he should zip up and listen for 10 years before 1999 the building industry was warning Nick Smith and the then Government about leaky homes. The question I have for Mr Carter as he embarks on his road to Damascus - like experience is what the devil did he do or Nick Smith as Minister do in 10 years to correct that problem? They did nothing. 
In addressing the appropriations I want to touch on Mr Hide’s speech just briefly. I know that the Minister of Health has commented on it. But what a sad speech it was from a very very sour member. [ 
Interruption 
] Mr Wang needs to read the Standing Orders. This is a wide debate. What a sour speech that speech from Rodney Hide was. That was Custer’s Last Stand—or maybe from “Old Yeller” it was “Custard’s” last stand—because the great delight I will have at the next election when I stand up on the stump—[ 
Interruption 
] Mr Tisch should stump up and give us a policy. When I stand up on the stump I will debate our policy of providing $83 a week for Sue and Nick who have a couple of kids and earn $32000 a year—which would take a 9c in the dollar tax rate if one was to do so under a slash-and-burn policy like National’s. 
The one thing I will take great delight in after we do win this election is that that crew over there which includes Mr Wang and the so-called leader of the ACT party will not be here. That cancer in political terms will be excised and cut out of this place—and I say that not in a disrespectful way. That wound will be excised from this Parliament. Gone will be the days of wading through the political sewer and bringing this Parliament and its members into disrepute. I say to Mr Hide that he should remember when he is outside this place as a citizen in the free world there will be 120 of us who will be inside and then we may see that member and a few of his mates called to account. I look forward to that day. “Old Yeller” will be right outside this place and we will hold him to account. 
I want to go back; I have digressed. This debate on the appropriations goes like this: National members want a tax cut that by their own figures if one dumps in excise cuts cuts to company tax cuts to personal tax—you name it—will add up to in effect $5.5 billion which is half the Health vote. They say when asked how they will get the dough that they will cut out all the so-called waste in the Government. If we look at the figures when National was in office we see Government expenditure was 33 percent of GDP. What is it now with that so-called waste? 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: 30! 
CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: Thirty percent my colleague says. What is it forecast to be once the Working for Families package is fully implemented? 
Darren Hughes 
: 32! 
CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: Thirty-two percent—1 percent lower than when the National has-beens were in Government. I ask those members how they would do that because $5.5 billion is half the Health vote. That is not cutting waste out of the Health vote; that is gutting health. There will be no health system if $5.5 billion is cut out. The question is: which hospitals would they close? I say Mr Tisch should stump up with a policy. Which hospitals and which pre-schools in my electorate would he close? Would National do what it threatened to do in my electorate before I became the member in 1999 which was to gut and close Rangiora Hospital and Oxford Hospital—are the National members going to run that up the flagpole? By God I will enjoy defending those hospitals. I will be in the trenches defending them if ever after the election National managed to implement that particular policy. 
I was on CTV with Gerry Brownlee—there was not much room on the screen I have to say. I asked him where he would get the money for tax cuts from and he could not answer that. He said to me in the advertisement break that it was a bit like treading water—that until National announces its policy it has to keep treading. National members have bleated on and some may sink like deadweights. I say to them that they should get the tax policy out. If they are so proud of it they should do two things: first announce it today; and second put it before the Finance and Expenditure Committee system that even National signed up to unanimously whereby Treasury would gain a consultant—which it has done—who could cost all the political parties’ tax policies. Even the ACT party dipped into that one and submitted its policy—Mr Prebble must have been in charge that day. The Green Party submitted its policy. United Future submitted its policy. Labour’s policy is out there. It has been picked over trodden on booted around and chewed around for years. Which party did not submit the tax policy that it is so proud of? That crew—the National Party. We have done one costing and now there is a second round. Treasury does not get involved in politics. It has hired a reputable economic consultancy firm. But why will National not have its policy costed? 
I predict that National will announce its tax policy but that in no way will National go anywhere near anybody who would independently cost that policy. National will not go near anyone to have that done because it knows the hidden traps that are in its policy. The hidden traps are that every member of Parliament including Mr Wang over there on the Opposition benches will get a couple of hundred bucks a week I predict out of a Don Brash tax policy. Mr Wang and a few others talked about hard-working Kiwis. Well what would they know about hard-working Kiwis? What would every battler on $32000 or $37000 a year get from the so-called tax cut? Nothing. What would Nick and Sue in Oxford in my electorate get? Members should hunt them down and talk to them because they are now receiving $82 a week as of this year but under a National Party tax cut they would get nothing. If I am on $55000 a year what would I get from a National Party tax cut? I may get $5 a week. [ 
Interruption 
] I hear an interjection from over there in the Opposition. Mr Hide says our policy would only buy a stick of gum. I suppose $5 would buy a triple meat burger for Rodney Hide. But a family of four kids and two parents earning $55000 under our Working for Families system today and given their rent and other costs gets $150 a week. I said before that it would require a drop to a 9c in the dollar tax rate to give a family on $55000 a year the equivalent of $150 a week—and I assume that at that point so little tax would be coming in that it would be a case of “the last one out switches the light off.” 
That is where the debate will lie for those working people. After this appropriations debate at the appropriate time that is what we will go out and debate at the election. Then we will match Labour’s record with National’s record. The only record National can stand on is what it did last time it was in Government in respect of the pension. I ask where National would make the cuts—in health in hospitals or in the police? Where would it do that? The people want to know and National should be honest enough to stump up and give them a tax policy. 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 I tell all the listeners sitting in their cars that the speech we were just treated to from Clayton Cosgrove was his “Please make me a Minister next time.” speech. 
Hon Annette King 
: He doesn’t need to say please. He’s doing all right. 
RON MARK 
: Oh so Clayton Cosgrove is going to be a Minister in the next Government? 
Hon Annette King 
: Oh yes you wait and see. 
RON MARK 
: That is a very fine announcement from the Minister of Health who will be departing along with her entire front bench as Labour leaves Government. 
That factor brings me nicely to the point I wanted to make. It is one thing to have a debate and a speech targeted on the facts; it is quite another thing to have a member of Parliament stand up and use sarcasm vindictiveness and nastiness—to call one member a paddle crab; to call another member yellow and not be pulled up by the Chair; and to imply that another member is so big and fat that he did not fit on the TV screen in a particular interview. If that is the sort of arrogance this Government wants to bring to the next Parliament and to the next Cabinet then so be it but I suggest to Annette King that it is a little bit presumptuous to assume that Labour will be in Government. 
I point to another comment. There was a little interchange that speaks very loudly of the culture. When Mr David Carter spoke—and God knows I am not here to defend him—he was questioned by Government members as to what seat he holds and what constituency he represents. Immediately to the fore came Judith Tizard Annette King Harry Duynhoven and Georgina Beyer to ridicule him as though he were some sort of B-class MP because he does not have a constituency. Here is the point: Georgina Beyer is herself now on the list; the Deputy Prime Minister of this country the Hon Dr Michael Cullen is a list MP. It smacks again of an arrogance that can be demonstrated only by people who believe that they are beyond reproach and that they are as constituency MPs more important than list MPs. 
It brings to mind the Jill Pettis comment in answer to a question from a person on the street as to whether she could govern with New Zealand First. Her answer was: “They’re so unsophisticated.” Imagine that comment being reiterated in the freezing works amongst the hard-core Labour vote! Imagine that comment on the marae! If Winston Peters is less sophisticated than Jill Pettis and if that is the proviso the chief Government whip is going to bring to the negotiating table—that she wants to govern only with people who are sophisticated—then it suggests that Labour is a country mile away from its roots. The people on the marae the tangata whenua whom Labour so proudly claims to represent are not going to take kindly to that sort of arrogance. 
 It is the sort of arrogance displayed by Mr Maharey who made all sorts of promises in Opposition then became a Minister and reversed his position. That act created the “Maharey principle” which is the ability to say one thing when in Opposition and do another when in Government. It was most aptly summed up not by Mr Cosgrove in his very sad speech but by Dr Cullen himself who said in the House: “We won. You lost. Eat that!”. That sums it up. Mr Carter was quite right when he pointed out that the commentary we hear from Labour MPs and Ministers is pure arrogance. 
The Budget is my next point. I have just come from a Grey Power meeting in Porirua on law and order which the Hon George Hawkins attended. I give him 10 out of 10 for attending—brave chap. He is a nice chap actually. I have known George Hawkins for a very long time—since he was a member of the Mike Moore team. But for him to stand and justify the Budget the supplementary estimates and the expenditure of money in this Government’s coffers by telling the people of Porirua this afternoon that crime is falling was summed up by the reaction of the audience members who crossed their arms and put their heads down and shook them. After the meeting was over I asked a number of people whether they knew of anyone in their family who had been a victim of crime and who had not reported that crime and if so to tell me why it was not reported. All the people standing around me said that of course they did—not one member of their family but many members. For the Minister to justify his reduction in crime-fighting expenditure an insignificant increase in the police budget and an insignificant increase in police numbers over 4 years by telling those elderly people who have read in the papers of another two elderly people murdered in their home that crime is falling smacks of either stupidity or arrogance—one can take one’s choice. 
The same man said that burglary rates are down. Burglary rates are not down—reports of burglaries are down. Let us ask any policeman policewoman or citizen whether he or she believes that burglaries are down. Let us go to the national crime statistics and the victimisation statistics. They state that crime is under-reported by a massive 60 percent. Do we see a commensurate increase in expenditure in this Budget? Do we see a commensurate concentration on burglaries? No. When I went to the Northern Communications Centre I saw all the burglary cases from that night being stacked up as priority three to be looked at not on Saturday not on Sunday but some time on Monday. How does that settle with average New Zealanders? Average New Zealanders who have had their home burgled try not to disturb the scene because they truly believe that when they ring the police a policeman or policewoman will come around to examine the scene collect DNA and collect fingerprints and that then the family will be free to get on and clean up the burglar’s mess—that home-invasive mess. But that is not what happens. We all sat there—Marc Alexander myself and Martin Gallagher—and watched all those burglaries be classified as priority three to be left for the Monday or Tuesday. In fact we now know that burglary scenes are never investigated on the night or day they are reported—never. And the Government has the nerve to tell us that burglaries are down? No. 
Reported burglaries are down for economic reasons. First most people do not have home contents insurance. They can make no claim. So there is no point in their reporting the crime because they know full well that it will never be solved and they do not need a claim number from the police because they will not put in an insurance claim. Second those people who do have home contents insurance policies will make an evaluation as to whether they want to affect their no-claims bonus or excess. They will make a value decision as to whether they will report the burglary. Again for the Government to talk of its pride about the police budget is a very very sad thing. It belies its true commitment to resolving crime and bringing crime rates down. 
For Mr Hawkins to say that the road toll is down and that that justifies the quota ticketing system is a nonsense. Speeders are not the only people who kill on our roads. What kills on our roads is bad engineering. If people need proof of that they should go out on State Highway 1 and look at the good engineering that has been done to divide off those lanes along the coast. That sort of thing reduces road fatalities. Education—the excellent advertisements on television—reduce road fatalities. None of the people in Grey Power believe that the quota ticketing system on its own which collects $100 million per year is responsible for reducing the road toll. Children reduce the road toll when they tell their mum dad and grandad to put their seatbelt on. That comes from education. The quota ticketing system is about one thing and one thing alone: redressing the balance and bringing $96 million in revenue into the coffers. Engineering education and road safety together reduce the road toll not quota ticketing on its own. Nobody believed the Minister when he tried to say that it did. 
As for the lowering of standards in police recruiting nothing in this Budget or these supplementary estimates suggests that this Government is serious about bringing safety to our streets with a serious increase in police numbers. For the Government to crow about 247 officers over 4 years is pathetic. We need 2500 officers now. Auckland—[ 
Interruption 
] The Minister Judith Tizard laughs. She should read the police’s own report from 2002. They needed then an extra 100 response units and they still do not have them. 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 There are apparently 2 minutes left so I will not embark on the major part of my contribution to the debate until after the meal break. Instead I want to respond to some of the comments made by the member who has just resumed his seat. He has with this Government a point of agreement and some points of disagreement and I want to tease out his arguments a little. 
He had a point of agreement when he said—and he said it only the once—that enforcement alone will not improve road safety. He is right. We agree with that. We think enforcement alone will not improve road safety and we are not supporting an enforcement-alone approach. That is why the advertisements on television that the member referred to are running. They are being paid for courtesy of the safety administration programme run by this Government. That is why more money is going into road safety engineering this year than ever before. That is why roads that are being built or refurbished today are safer than ever before. That is why the median strip along Centennial Highway that the member referred to went in under this Government. We understand that engineering education and enforcement together matter. What will not work is education and engineering. What will not work is two out of three. That just will not work. Two out of three will not do. Education engineering and enforcement together are mutually reinforcing. 
It is not OK for the member who has just resumed his seat to suggest—and here is the point of difference—that this Government has enforcement in order to raise revenue. We do not. We would like nothing more than to collect nothing from speeding tickets. We would like nothing more than for nobody to receive a speeding ticket. It would suit us down to the ground. We would lose money. Actually if we take a venal approach to it and talk about money only instead of lives we can say that we would probably make money on that because we would avoid the costs of hospitalisation of people whose cars have been crunched and the accident compensation costs that are inflicted upon society. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: I have one question to ask the National Party. Where is its policy? Where is its policy on tax cuts? A policy on anything would do but I ask where the policy on tax cuts is. The reason I am asking is that the National Party does not have a very good record of following through. It did not follow through on Orewa I. It did not follow through on imprisoning a whole lot of people in jails that had not been built and that it did not have the money to build. It did not follow through very well on what it said about taking babies from solo mums and putting them out for adoption. It has caused itself quite a headache by having lots of little dabs about where it might go if it were ever to become the Government but never following through. 
Now the weeks since the Budget are beginning to count. There has been no follow-through. Colin Espiner said in the weekend  
Press 
: “If National doesn’t release its tax-cuts policy—not just drop hints—in the next fortnight it will drop back behind Labour in the polls.” It will do that anyway but the question is where is the tax policy. The reason it matters is that the ACT party has in the interim managed to put out its tax policy. All the details of that policy are out in the public arena. It makes no sense of course but it is out there. United Future has put out its tax cuts policy. The Greens have even decided they have things to say on taxation. But the National Party has simply said that it would give mighty big tax cuts. It is not saying how big or for how many—unless we add them all up. Let us add up all the hints that have been dropped about 39 percent becoming 36 percent and 33 percent becoming 30 percent and about making sure that an extra $600 million—coming out of taxpayers’ pockets—is spent on roads as well as about getting rid of this tax that tax or the other tax because National does not like it. When we add it all up we get a very big number. 
It has not yet been confirmed in a tax policy statement from the National Party. Why not? Because the National Party is starting to work out that it is not a minor party that it cannot drop big tax numbers without coming under the immediate scrutiny of the finance sector of the Labour Government and of anyone who knows anything about how to drive an abacus. The National Party knows that it has to come up with a tax policy that is saleable and it has gone and oversold. It cannot possibly put together a tax policy that would give the cuts of $30 $40 or $50 a week that New Zealand families would say is good enough—because that is the sort of money just for starters they are getting from the first part of Labour’s Working for Families package. So if National intends to give $30 $40 or $50 a week to New Zealand families it needs to tell us where the money would come from. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: The surplus. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: The associate professor of something or other from an earlier time has interjected that he thinks the word is “surplus”. I have news for that gentleman: there is none. The operating balance excluding revaluations and accounting changes is a surplus that is spent on capital investment the Cullen fund retiring debt building hospitals and building schools. There is no surplus. So we have promises for rich New Zealanders and for middle-income New Zealanders. We have promises of cuts in the carbon tax in company tax and in income tax and we have promises of no cuts in services. That does not add up. 
The National Party has got itself into the beginning of a hole. It said that it would give New Zealanders tax cuts of consequence it said that every New Zealander would be better off as a result of tax cuts from National and it has worked out that it cannot afford the money. The only way it can afford tax cuts is either to borrow in order to fund them—and guess what the word “Muldoonist” was used against Don Brash the leader of the National Party in the  
New Zealand Herald 
 today by a widely respected commentator—or to make swingeing cuts to health education social welfare justice and law and order. Those are the two options: borrow and hope or swingeing cuts to social and security services. 
The National Party is in a hole. It had a great time a few weeks ago. It is in a hole now and it will have to announce its policy soon because otherwise the hole will get bigger. That is the problem faced by the National Party. The hole will not get any smaller; it will get bigger and bigger. As the expectations of tax cuts rise in the country as the smart alec two-word signs go up around the country showing the difference between Labour and National and as National thereby comes under the spotlight questions will be asked more and more often by commentators and then by the public: “Where are the tax cuts? Where is the difference? What will this election be about?”. If it is not about tax cuts then the public already knows how it will vote; people will vote for the Government they know and love so well. But if National can pull 5 billion bucks worth of magic from somewhere and call it tax cuts then people in New Zealand might want to give it a bit of a chance. 
So National has an opportunity to go to the people and say: “This is what we mean by tax cuts.” Then the debate can begin. Then we can decide whether this nation wants the Government to become an even smaller part of the country—whether the Government becomes even leaner and meaner and cuts spending on health and education much harder than National ever did in the 1990s. [ 
Interruption 
] The member might remember that when the big benefit cuts took place at the beginning of the 1990s the amount of money taken out of the economy was $1.3 billion—only a quarter of what is needed. We would need four times the money raised by the “mother of all Budgets” in order to get anywhere near the amount of money National has already promised to give New Zealanders. So National has to decide whether it will front up. Will it be tax cuts by Christmas? Will it be tax cuts by 1 April? Will it be tax cuts in the first 3 years? Or will it be tax cuts only when we can afford them which is on the never-never? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 Labour ought to listen to what people are saying about its 67c tax cuts. 
Jill Pettis 
: Not much. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: That is right. In fact they are saying worse than not much. It would be better if they were saying nothing. If I were that member I would think it better if the drivers on the taxi rank outside Auckland airport were saying nothing about the 67c tax cut. Instead they are talking to every single passenger about what a waste of time it is and more importantly about how they feel taken for granted. That is the strategic hole Labour has fallen into. Dr Cullen has been so busy trying to buy the election in 2008 that he has forgotten that Labour has to get some votes in 2005. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Oh you’re going to buy them! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well that was what he was meant to be doing. He has taken voters for granted. The Labour back bench will realise one of the long-term truths of politics: the punters are never grateful. The voters in New Zealand have a healthy disrespect for Government. The less damage the Government does the more the voters may be grateful. But if Labour thinks that people ought to be grateful for getting back their own money the lesson of history is that they will not be. Voters who think they are taken for granted do not behave well at the ballot box when a Government is looking for support. That is the problem. 
There are middle and higher-income New Zealanders who have supported Labour at the last couple of elections and Dr Cullen and Ms Clark in particular have made the arrogant assumption that these people are social democrats of some kind. Well they are not. They are good conservative mainstream Kiwis and their support has to be earned by any party. National used to take them for granted and it learnt the hard way that it cannot. Now Labour is taking those people for granted. 
 That breach of trust between those voters and Labour is at the heart of Labour’s problems now. Dr Cullen and Helen Clark just assumed that because they were so magnificent those people would keep voting for them. I know that Dr Cullen is talking about the last election campaign—all sorts of lessons were learnt from that—but the pity is that he does not appear to have learnt them. 
I will spend some time on Dr Cullen’s accounting because it is quite important. He has tried to change the definition of the Government’s surplus. He has tried to take us back 15 years—in fact more than 15 years; it is now getting on to almost 20 years—when the Government accounts ran on—[ 
Interruption 
] The early 1990s. It was Mode B (Gross) and Mode B (Net) and all that stuff. He is trying to take us back to when the Government just ran a simple fruiterers cash-register system of “cash in cash out”. 
In fact there has been bipartisan agreement for almost two decades if one includes the time that the policy was in the making that “cash in cash out” was not the way to run a modern Government; that in fact accrual accounting mattered. Dr Cullen had one chance to change the rules which he took when he came in as Minister of Finance. He said that the current surplus was not a good way of measuring the activities of Government so he would change it. That was his opportunity and he changed it to the operating balance excluding revaluation and accounting charges. 
That turned out to be a bit of a puff of smoke in the wind because the operating balance excluding revaluation and accounting charges has been significantly different from the operating surplus in only 1 year. It makes a big difference to the management of Cabinet expenditure because nothing undermines Cabinet Ministers’ self-discipline more than finding that they have been made to make savings and then finding that the surplus gets dramatically changed because of a revaluation of the Growth Services Fund. They do not like that at all because $500 million can just get changed overnight on an accounting change when they have spent months hacking away saving $100 million. 
Dr Cullen changed the system but he did not change it to a cash system. If he had really believed what he now says about how the Government should account for its activities he would have changed it then. He now knows that because he left it until it suited him the public have no idea what he is talking about. As far as the public are concerned they believe the numbers. Why would one blame them? We spent two decades educating the public about good public policy and good public accounting and when they see a $4 billion $5 billion or $7 billion surplus they believe the numbers. 
In the last 3 or 4 months Dr Cullen has taken on the job of trying to change the public’s mind. If Dr Cullen is as clever as he thinks he is he should know that it would take a good 5 years to change the public’s view; to tell them that the actual surplus is not the surplus or to explain to the public that he has got all these other uses to which he puts the surplus which means that there is not really a surplus at all. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: So it’s not true then? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: No the point is that he had the opportunity to change the rules and he left it too late. Now the public believe the numbers that have been published. They believe that the Government has an operating surplus. It is going to be very difficult for Dr Cullen in the next 3 months to change the rules that have been in place for 20 years. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: He will fail. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: No it is worse than that. He has failed. The time for that argument is over. The look on his back-benchers’ faces shows what a revelation it has been for them. They believed what he told them which was that because he was so smart the public would change their minds just because he said they should. But in fact they have not. 
I will spend a little bit of time on the Government’s spending; in particular in my own area of education. I have had as everyone else has had the released Official Information Act request on the Budget bilaterals for education. It shows a bureaucracy and Government completely at sea when it comes to understanding what it is doing with the money that it is spending on education. The Treasury reports on the bilaterals make it quite clear that the Government has no concept of value for money in education. It has had almost no control over the expenditure of money in education—particularly in tertiary education. The official documentation of the last 3 years outlines a trail of incompetence and waste. The public because they have seen so much of it have now come to understand the incompetence of the Government with their money. 
That is the other thing Dr Cullen will have to come to grips with. Although he sees himself as some kind of fiscal hawk who has ridden the Cabinet and caucus hard on spending the public increasingly believe exactly the opposite because they see the evidence. In the public mind value for money matters. It matters more than collaboration cohesiveness and partnership—all those weasel words of the day that mean no one is accountable under this Government. The public want value for money. If there is $3 billion more spent on health they want to see $3 billion more of health services. The problem is that they see almost no extra health services. If they see a couple of billion extra dollars spent on education they like to think that some people are learning something. But they have discovered that that is not happening either. 
Jill Pettis 
: Extra institutions. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: As that member will find out our polytechs—public institutions of which she is supportive—will all get into huge financial problems over the next couple of years despite the expenditure of huge amounts of money by the Government. 
Hon RICK BARKER (Minister for Courts) 
: 
 That was the leader-in-waiting for the National Party but—regrettably for the National Party—he is also the leader who took that party to the biggest defeat in its history. The biggest defeat that National has ever suffered in an election was under that man Bill English. It just shows the value of the currency of his opinion. It is also worthy of note that he had some time in the finance portfolio. I reiterate the point made to the House earlier by Clayton Cosgrove that the Finance and Expenditure Committee had agreed that it would have Treasury examine the tax and finance policies of each party independently in order to offer the public a fair opinion of those policies. The only party that will not put its policy through that process is the National Party because it is afraid of what will be found—and it has good reason to be afraid. The other policies it has put forward like for example social welfare have been justifiably trashed. Its members do not talk about social welfare policies any more. 
Hon David Carter 
: Ha ha! 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: Opposition members may laugh but let us go back for the joke. The joke is that National’s leader Don Brash said that the party would have the unemployed line up outside a post office. That was the National Party’s policy on social welfare. We all know—except the out-of-touch National Party—that post offices have long since gone. The National Party then went on to say that women who refused to name the father of their children would have to face a financial penalty. The bad news for the National Party is that that is now the case. The National Party then said that there would be a 90-day trial period for beneficiaries who were trying to find work. Again the National Party was wrong because that is already policy. It also said that it would have people work for the dole—that if people could not find jobs National would get them jobs in the community. Analysis of its own policy back in the terrible 1990s shows that that did not work. The people who were put on make-work schemes were less likely than others to find jobs. 
The Labour-Progressive Government has been outstandingly successful in employment. When we came into office we inherited approximately 160000 people who were on the dole. The National Government in 9 years had managed to increase the number of unemployed from approximately 100000 to 160000. This Government has taken that number down by 100000—100000 people are off the dole so while there were approximately 160000 people unemployed there are now about 60000. There are 22 percent fewer people on benefits than there were before. This Government has been spectacularly successful in reducing youth unemployment and long-term unemployment and I say to Bill English that the public will be very grateful for that. 
When I was an MP in the 1990s parents came to my electorate office and were desperate with concerns about their children’s prospects for a job. That is no longer a particular concern for parents because this Government has increased the number of people in industry training by approximately 80000. It has almost doubled the figure. The National Government got rid of apprenticeships; Labour reinstated apprenticeships and it is giving kids jobs hopes and skills. 
We have increased industry training funds so the whole emphasis of this Government has been on creating jobs giving New Zealanders skills to get those jobs and filling job vacancies with New Zealanders in preference to importing people from overseas. It has been spectacularly successful. New Zealand now has the second-lowest unemployment rate in the OECD. When in our history can we recall New Zealand having fewer unemployed than Australia Britain the United States Germany Japan—almost anywhere? When can we recall the time in its history when New Zealand had a greater participation rate by the workforce in work? That is a remarkable achievement and the public will be very grateful to this Government for leading such a remarkable turn-round. This country now has hope and opportunity unlike the situation that will be put forward by the National Party. 
National is saying that it will give people tax cuts and we are talking there about approximately $5 billion worth of tax cuts. Now the public are not as stupid as that. They will know that $5 billion worth of tax cuts will have to be paid for from somewhere. What will National cut? It has lined up what it calls a “bloated civil service”. Well will it cut the extra 2700 teachers this Government has put on stream? Will it cut the extra 3300 nurses who are employed under this Government? Will it cut the extra 950 medical staff or the extra 1250 clinical support staff? This Government has invested heavily in public services to make sure they are functioning and workable for the New Zealand public. 
We used to have public services that were malfunctioning; they did not have staff or resources. This Government has invested heavily in roads jobs education and health services. New Zealand after 6 years of a Labour Government is a vastly better place than it was when we inherited it. It is not perfect; we know there is more work to be done. That is why this Labour-led Government will campaign hard in the next election on its record: lower numbers unemployed more people in jobs wealthier people and a Working for Families package that means we have reduced child poverty. On every front and against every measure New Zealand is a better place today than it was before this Government came to office. We have a proud record and we are prepared to stand and have our years in Government compared with the nasty 1990s of the previous National Government. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Appropriation (2004/05) Supplementary Estimates) Bill be now read a second time. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 51; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7; Maori Party 1. 
Abstentions 8 
Green Party 8. 
Bill read a second time. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill be now read a second time. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 51; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7; Maori Party 1. 
Abstentions 8 
Green Party 8. 
Bill read a second time. 
Appropriation (2004/05 Supplementary Estimates) Bill 
Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill 
Third Readings 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 I move  
That the Appropriation (2004/05 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill be now read a third time 
. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Appropriation (2004/05 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2005/06) Bill be now read a third time. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 51; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7; Maori Party 1. 
Abstentions 8 
Green Party 8. 
Bills read a third time. 
Urgency 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 I move  
That urgency be accorded the debate on the performance and current operations of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises and the passing through their remaining stages of the Land Transport Amendment Bill the Tariff (New Zealand - Thailand Closer Economic Partnership) Bill the Taxation (Base Maintenance and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill (No 3) the Overseas Investment Bill the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill (No 2) and the Courts and Criminal Matters Bill and any bills into which those bills may be divided.  
This motion is moved to allow for additional sitting hours this week to consider legislation the Government wishes to see passed before the end of June. 
SIMON POWER (Senior Whip—National) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Madam Deputy Speaker. Could the Leader of the House just confirm that it was his intention in that motion to have those matters go through all stages? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 Yes. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the motion be agreed to. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 51; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 55 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7; Green Party 8. 
Motion agreed to. 
Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises 
In Committee 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: The debate on the performance of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises is a series of debates on individual reviews of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises as reported by select committees. The debates on the individual financial reviews should be relevant to their performance in the 2003-04 financial year and their current operations. A member may have no more than two calls on each review. Three hours is allowed for the debate. At the conclusion of the 3 hours it will be reported to the House. A list of financial reviews available for debate is on the Table. I understand that members have indicated the Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises they wish to debate. 
Reserve Bank of New Zealand 
LINDSAY TISCH (Junior Whip—National) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. If we do not speak to it are we able to vote on it? 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Yes. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the report be noted. 
Ayes 69 
New Zealand Labour 51; Green Party 8; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 47 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7. 
Report noted. 
Air New Zealand 
Earthquake Commission 
Government Superannuation Fund Authority 
The Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation 
DAIL JONES (Junior Whip—NZ First) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. Can I just clarify something? I take it this is a fixed 3-hour debate so if we have pointless votes we are cutting into our own speaking time. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Yes that is exactly right. 
DAIL JONES 
: And that last vote was called by the National Party? 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Yes. 
Reports noted. 
Television New Zealand 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 Well it is just over 2 years ago that Television New Zealand was turned from a State-owned enterprise into a Crown entity and given new legislation a new charter and a new mandate. There was a tremendous amount of hype and indeed a lot of hope. We were going to have a State broadcaster that would reflect New Zealand to New Zealanders. It was not going to show the same incessant diet of foreign programmes available on TV3 and other commercial television channels; it was going to show New Zealand to New Zealanders. We gave it money to implement its charter—about $25 million last year and the previous year. I think it is timely 2 years later to take stock and to ask ourselves whether it has worked. Has TVNZ lived up to its expectations and have we seen as we were told at the time that we would more and better of New Zealand on our television channels? 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: All that ballroom dancing! 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: I will come back to the ballroom dancing. When I looked at the fine print which I did recently I discovered that we have had less not more New Zealand programming on TVNZ since it has turned itself into a Crown-owned entity since it has had its charter and since we have been pouring money into it. The total number of first-run New Zealand programmes is actually down by 3 percent or 185 hours since the charter came in in 2003. If one takes out the repeat programmes and looks at the 6 a.m. till midnight figures—which is what internationally one normally does—one finds that the Television One figure was actually down last year from 43 percent to 42 percent and the TV2 figure was down by 1 percent to 17.9 percent. Overall for both of our publicly owned television channels 38 percent of the programmes that screened from 6 a.m. till midnight were New Zealand programmes—in other words 62 percent of the programmes were foreign. Frankly that is appalling. In particular what is the point of owning a television channel TV2 when 83 percent of its programmes are foreign? We were assured that we would not see the same incessant diet of foreign programmes available on other channels. In fact that is exactly what we have. 
The television channels have managed to hide slightly the fact that we are actually going backwards in terms of New Zealand content by setting voluntary quotas. That is basically a public relations exercise where one sets a quota one would like then trumpets that one has met the quota. But when I actually looked at the quotas I found that Television One has reduced the quota it has set itself. It was 53 percent in 2003; in the last year it has reduced the quota it has set itself to 52 percent. And TV2 has set itself a quota of 19 percent. We have to ask why TV2—the channel that our young people watch—is screening fewer than half the number of New Zealand programmes that Television One screens. It is quite extraordinary. The total number of first-run New Zealand programmes has gone down by 3 percent since the charter came into effect in 2003. 
We have to ask ourselves what the point of it is. We are not getting more New Zealand programming; actually we are getting less. Where has all that money gone? What was the $25 million spent on last year if it was not spent on increased numbers of New Zealand programmes? It certainly was not spent on children’s programming which was something else we were assured we would have more of. In fact TV2’s children’s programming was down by 115 hours to the lowest level in 5 years. Once again we see a steady decline and that is exactly the opposite of what we were assured would happen—we were going to see more New Zealand programmes and so forth. 
Everyone is asking where all the charter programmes are. People are talking about the fact that we seem to have an off-peak charter in that the charter is being met in off-peak hours. 
Report noted. 
Auckland District Health Board 
Bay of Plenty District Health Board 
Canterbury District Health Board 
Capital and Coast District Health Board 
Counties Manukau District Health Board 
Hawke's Bay District Health Board 
Hutt Valley District Health Board 
Lakes District Health Board 
MidCentral District Health Board 
Nelson Marlborough District Health Board 
Northland District Health Board 
Otago District Health Board 
South Canterbury District Health Board 
Southland District Health Board 
Tairawhiti District Health Board 
Taranaki District Health Board 
Waikato District Health Board 
Wairarapa District Health Board 
Waitemata District Health Board 
West Coast District Health Board 
Whanganui District Health Board 
Health Research Council of New Zealand 
Health Sponsorship Council 
New Zealand Blood Service 
Residual Health Management Unit 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 Thank you Madam Chair for the opportunity to speak in this very important debate on the financial reviews of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises. It is very important to look at these reviews in the context of some of the things that politicians like Annette King and Helen Clark said in the 1990s. At that stage of events they went around the country saying they would cut bureaucracy and blitz the waiting lists. They said that if they taxed people a little more they could fix health and education. They said they would deliver. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I just remind the member that we are talking about the estimates. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: I absolutely agree with that. 
If we look at the 2003-04 financial review of the Auckland District Health Board what do we see in terms of delivery? We see that the board has a current deficit of $44.7 million. In 2002 the Minister of Heath told the Health Committee that there would be no deficits by 2005. They would be gone—blitzed; nothing there. But what do we see in the report of the Health Committee? We see that in 2003-04 that board has a deficit of $44.7 million. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: How much? 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: It is $44.7 million and according to our advice that is likely to increase in the 2004-05 financial year to more than $83.3 million. The Minister of Health who is the Minister in the chair told the select committee in 2002 that there would be no deficits in any of the health boards. She said the combined deficit would be nothing—it would be blitzed. 
That is just like what she said about the waiting lists during the 1990s. What do we know about the waiting lists in the district health boards in 2004? Let us just have a little snapshot because the Minister is keen on snapshots. The number of patients waiting longer than 6 months for their first specialist assessment is 2602. According to the Minister of Health that is blitzing the waiting list! What about one of her other commitments about delivering? 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: Scalpel! 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: Well if only she had got the scalpel out and sorted them out! What about patients waiting without a commitment to treatment and whose priorities are higher than the actual treatment threshold? These are patients who undoubtedly are pretty unwell who are in pain and often are losing their vision. How many were there? There were 351. This is the Minister who said Labour would deliver and blitz the waiting list and in the Auckland District Health Board in 2004 1261 patients were given a commitment to treatment but were not treated within 6 months. 
That is the sort of clarity that Annette King gave patients when she went tearing around the country in the 1990s saying that Labour would blitz waiting lists cut bureaucracy and deliver results. But in the Auckland District Health Board in the year in question there were literally thousands of patients waiting for longer than 6 months—patients who had worse situations than those required to receive treatment and who did not receive treatment and patients who were given a commitment to treatment but were not treated within 6 months. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: There was a new hospital being built. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: Well there was a new hospital and who went and opened it? 
Hon Annette King 
: Nobody yet. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: We can guarantee that when someone does open it—well there is every chance that she will not get the chance. In 2 or 3 months’ time there will be a new Government. The Minister will blame the previous Government for any cost that might have accrued to Auckland City Hospital. It is as predictable as night following day that the Minister will once again not accept responsibility. She will blame the last National Government—after 5 years and $3.3 billion. It is probably only $3 billion I say to Mrs King but to her that does not mean much because she gets nothing from it. 
STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) 
: 
 I am pleased to speak in this State-owned enterprises debate because this is a Government that has incredibly strong leadership. The important issue as we go into the election is that we have financial security and that is what New Zealanders care about. This Government is committed to Crown entities and State-owned enterprises working together with industry and with the private sector to benefit all New Zealanders. I am proud of that. 
Our commitment to State-owned enterprises is not something we are going to flip-flop on or change our minds on. Our State-owned enterprises are working really well and before I talk about health I would like to talk about Mighty River Power. In my own electorate it is working with industry—Norske Skog—to look at cogeneration of geothermal power. But our State-owned enterprises are also involved in social spending. Mighty River Power is involved in a “maintain New Zealand” partnership with the tertiary sector the local college and Norske Skog and it is training maintenance engineers and has young kids doing apprenticeships. I think that is fantastic. Good on it! 
We have looked at the Opposition’s view of these State-owned enterprises. Dr Brash says that minor changes are not quite enough. John Key on the other hand knows that privatisation is a really really toxic issue. But what is more they do not know quite where or what to target. I say they will move into icons like Kiwibank and New Zealand Post. Just watch this spot. I wonder how many electorate MPs in the Opposition have gone out and seen the wonderful initiatives undertaken by New Zealand Post. It is working with communities on such things as New Zealand Book Week for little schoolkids—lovely iconic brands like that. 
I want to move on to which State-owned enterprises National will flick. I am deeply concerned about the health sector. I worked for 9 years under the National Government when it made its cuts. What did it cut? It cut the very things that made the difference to connecting communities together. National said that parenting courses were not part of maternity care any more. It said they were not part of core services so it flicked them out to the private sector to see who picked them up. It is deeply worrying to me when National members talk about tax cuts that come to $1.9 billion. I have to look at health and ask what will go next. Of course there is a very tidy package called the Working for Families package which we really love because it targets— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the member but this debate is about financial reviews. The member needs to come back to the question. 
STEVE CHADWICK 
: I will get back to the financial reviews although I am talking about health Madam Chair. I heard the Opposition talk about deficits. Under this Government deficits in our district health boards are better than they have ever been. It is all right to go out there and give a promise but do members know what Labour has given to this sector in terms of deficit management? It has given certainty. How did the Minister give financial certainty to the district health boards? She went out with a 3-year funding package. So for the first time for years the district health boards were able to actually get their heads around long-term security of funding. Funding was based on a population-based formula so that it did target areas of deprivation and it did target inequalities in health status. Because of this good funding in health—and it is a substantial increase in funding—we are seeing reduced mortality rates and reduced morbidity. That is important to me. I would hate to see cuts to our funding of services of the kind that the Nats did when in office for those 9 years when they said those things were no longer seen as core funded issues. They cut bits out and just funded what they believed Vote Health should actually support. 
In health I want to talk also about this “exploding public sector” myth. In health let us just see what has gone. The Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit has gone and the Health Funding Authority has gone. In health the size of the State spend has reduced from 33.3 percent in 1999 down to 30.1 percent. So the exploding public sector is a myth. Labour members will counter those myths when we go out there in the election campaign because we know that this sector is working well. 
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First members are very pleased to have seen increased funding for health Crown entities over the last 2 years. We want to see health funding reach levels that are comparable with other European nations such as France which spends around 10 percent of its GDP on health. Dealing with the health sector is tough. It is at the coalface of society’s ills and it must deal not only with the physical but also with the emotional brunt of healing. 
One of the most disturbing studies over the past year has been a Treasury report showing that despite increased spending on health the sector has falling productivity—that is fewer operations from more money. This report highlights the obsession within district health boards to balance the books no matter what even if this does mean cutting some of the services. A clear example of this was the Nelson Marlborough District Health Board which reduced the number of operations it was performing by 12 a week last October when it was discovered that surgeons were performing more operations than were funded to be provided. So meeting the obligations of the balance sheets has come to mean vacancies and cutting staff even in essential services. This is not the way to provide the First World health services that New Zealanders deserve. 
We must question many of the monitoring regimes which are expensive and seem to be yielding few results that are in place across the district health boards. Do not get me wrong; adherence to procedures and protocols is really important but when it becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end we begin to lose sight of why they are there in the first place. When we choose to keep increasing the number of accountants and auditors at our district health boards rather than the number of doctors and nurses we have a real problem. Given the advances of modern technology both in medicine and in information technology the health sector ought to be booming. Instead it is barely managing a fizzle in some areas. 
A second issue of major concern in the health sector is the training and retention of health practitioners across the whole range of professions. Hospitals are crying out for qualified doctors surgeons and other specialists. We know we have shortages of dental therapists rural general practitioners radiographers and other technicians and the list goes on. 
Jill Pettis 
: We need more immigrants. 
BARBARA STEWART 
: The member on the other side of the Chamber calls out for more immigrants. We actually want qualified immigrants—people who can add to our economy. 
We have to face up to two simple facts in this area. The first is that we are in a global marketplace for these skills and we are competing with Australia the UK and Canada. If we wish to maintain a First World health system people who have those skills are absolutely essential otherwise we are consigned to sending more and more of our patients on to waiting lists or offshore for treatment and that is something that we definitely do not want to do. We need to develop some strategies to ensure that we have sufficient graduates in the areas of need. [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister is acknowledging that we will do that. Secondly we also have to face up to the reality that we have to pay First World wages if we are to have a First World health system. This could include options such as bonding graduates for a number of years in return for writing off their student loans. It could also include targeting increased funding in health spending specifically for pay rises for those parts of the sector that need them to retain staff. 
One of the areas where we particularly want to see some action is that of adolescent oral health. Many teenagers cannot access dentists because the subsidy paid to dentists is insufficient. Parents often come to me and say that they cannot even get their child on to the dentist’s waiting list because the books are closed. The dentist has enough teenagers on his or her books and cannot provide extra cheap services to any more. Another area we need to be more honest about confronting is the state of our mental health services. Dealing with those who have mental health difficulties is one of the most taxing areas covered in our health system yet this is one aspect of health care that often has its budget cut and its staff numbers reduced and its staff have substandard wages. 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 As the previous speaker referred to an interesting debate is emerging about why despite all the funding that has been poured into the health sector over the last couple of years Treasury reports falling productivity. Why could this be so? There are many speculations about why this might be so but I believe that one of the key reasons is pointed to in a report that came out quite quietly last year from the Ministry of Health called  
Looking Upstream: causes of death cross-classified by risk and condition New Zealand 1977 
. That report quite extraordinarily analyses the 20 top causes of death by risk factor in New Zealand. Diet is twice the risk factor of any other single risk factor. Poor diet is the cause of an estimated 30 percent of deaths in New Zealand. Somewhere between 9000 and 11000 deaths are caused by poor diet. No one believes me so I have to take this chart with me when I go out and show it to them. Then they finally believe me. 
So if that is the case what have we done about it over the last year or so of this Government? We have published a wonderful health strategy that does appear to be addressing the issues. It states the 13 population health objectives: improve nutrition reduce obesity increase the level of physical activity reduce the impact of diabetes improve oral health and so on. When these population goals were announced we were absolutely delighted. Then the Government announced that it was going to bring out a world-leading report on healthy eating and healthy action and we were delighted with that too. The Minister of Health has trumpeted it internationally at the World Health Organization saying: “Isn’t this wonderful?”. 
But the problem is that we have this major initiative this Healthy Eating - Healthy Action but when we look at the books alas there is not any funding for this wonderful new initiative. Thirty percent of deaths are caused by poor nutrition and poor diet and this strategy states that it is going to focus on this issue. We have these population health goals. One would think that this flagship strategy would have some new funding but alas there is none. 
Sure some district health boards—and I have met them—in some parts of New Zealand are beginning to get their heads around the issue and there are some positive initiatives particularly in the Waikato and in Manukau but basically the Government has no specific funding for it. One would think that if this were the overwhelming cause of death in New Zealand way more than road deaths and all the other issues we tend to focus on there would be a national strategy a huge new programme but alas there is none. 
I have just touched on one issue of big concern. The second issue concerns Pharmac. The Green Party strongly supports Pharmac. We are concerned that a big public relations campaign is developing against Pharmac and against its single-supply contracts. We saw that earlier in the year when some public relations people visited me and I could see it coming. Suddenly and it does not surprise me at all some parties in this House like United Future rose up and became part of this campaign to undermine Pharmac and its single-supplier contract. 
We do acknowledge that there are all sorts of issues that we would like to see improved with Pharmac. There is great room for improvement but we are concerned that there seems to be an across-the-board strategy to undermine it and that is a real concern from a fiscal point of view and many other points of view. 
Finally I would like to talk about how the Government is quietly working without any political mandate to hand over the control of our dietary supplements and our pharmaceuticals to a trans-Tasman therapeutic goods agency in Australia. It has no mandate for that whatsoever. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 A few speakers ago we heard the member for Rotorua Steve Chadwick say that one of the achievements of this Labour Government was that it had given certainty. I say: “Tell that to the 25000 patients taken off the waiting lists in 2003 by the Minister of Health Annette King and sent to a life of absolute uncertainty.” And I also say: “Tell that to the Auckland District Health Board.” which in this financial review is recorded as having a deficit of $44.7 million and there is a prediction that by 2004-05 it will be $83 million. 
The Minister of Health came to the select committee and said that she did not believe that. She said that the Minister of Finance and she had got together and they just did not accept that there would be a $100 million deficit by the end of the year. But let us look at the letters the Minister of Finance sent to the Hon Annette King in 2003 in which he stated: “It will be important that the additional funding leads to increases in outputs and is not absorbed by cost increases. My officials will be working with the ministry to put in place appropriate accountability and monitoring measures to address this issue. … Output activity data continues to support our shared concern about productivity in the health sector. Analysis of Ministry of Health data suggests that despite significant revenue increases”—significant amounting to about $3 billion—“volumes in the sector are static if not declining.” 
So when the member for Rotorua talks about certainty when she just happens to forget that 25000 patients were culled from the waiting lists to spend the rest of their time in uncertainty—and then again on 1 April this year at the Counties Manukau District Health Board another 2000 were taken off the waiting list to live a life of uncertainty—[ 
Interruption 
] We hear Moana Mackey the pretender for East Coast and what happened at the Tairawhiti District Health Board? It took 596 patients who had been waiting longer than 6 months for a first specialist assessment to get to square one and send them back to their general practitioners. What does the Minister say? She says they will be monitored. 
When I spoke to one of the patients Peggy Griffiths who had been thrown off the waiting list at the Counties Manukau District Health Board she told me that no one had said how and when she would be monitored. The Minister of Health will say that she is now back on the waiting list. It took a huge amount of effort by me to bring it to the attention of this House and suddenly and mysteriously Peggy Griffiths is back on the waiting list—and the Minister of Health will claim credit for that! First she cuts people off waiting lists causes the huge disappointment and uncertainty to people of just not knowing what was going on— 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Have you got more? 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: Yes there are eight or nine. I have a little file. Members can imagine that every time I bring those people up they will suddenly and mysteriously be put back on those waiting lists! 
While we are talking about the Auckland District Health Board it will be helpful to say just what a professor of surgery had to say about this Minister’s interpretation of the waiting lists: “So now patients are culled upfront and those accepted for surgery are still required to wait just like the old-day waiting list. A double jeopardy now exists. The elective surgical booking system has degenerated into the elective surgical blocking system. The Ministry of Health has some explaining to do itself. Blaming health boards is a patent distraction ploy.” It is one of the things this Minister of Health has become an absolute mistress of: perpetrating the patent distraction ploy. She is an absolute mistress of that particular performance. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: That’s a career option. 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON 
: There is a career option. I shall talk about some of the other things that have plagued the Auckland District Health Board with its predicted deficit of $83 million when the Minister said there would be no deficit. 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I should say upfront that none of this is personal about the Minister of Health. I actually quite like Annette King. I think that she is a lovely lady and is good fun but I have to say that she is the most inept Minister of Health we have ever had. We see that from the data we now have before us in this country. While we are doing the financial reviews I shall take members through the Treasury report. It is damning of Annette King and I shall read from it. The report is to the Minister of Finance Michael Cullen and it states: “The current oversubscription reinforces the importance of not only managing the immediate pressures back but of addressing the unsustainable growth path of health spending over the longer term. Treasury advises that you”—that means Michael Cullen—“request the Minister of Health to manage within her allocation and that you defer any consideration of the roll-out of future allocations until the sustainability work has been completed.” The concern there was that the current expenditure path is totally unsustainable and Treasury went on to recommend that the Minister Annette King resubmit her budget providing “a reprioritisation of her current proposals so that total expenditure comes within the allocation and a demonstration of how she will manage known risks so that expenditure remains within the agreed funding track.” 
Why did Treasury recommend that? Because that Minister cannot manage. That Minister has taken the expenditure on health up to $3.6 billion a year and produced worse outcomes than previously. She has actually produced worse outcomes. She has increased expenditure by 57 percent. The number of operations has increased by 1.3 percent. [ 
Interruption 
] Government members do not like to hear their own numbers. The number of operations has increased by only 1.3 percent. [ 
Interruption 
] They do not like it do they? They do not like to hear their own numbers come back. We know that Steve Chadwick the chair of the Health Committee said in this Chamber last week that no New Zealanders on the health waiting list were in pain—that is what she thinks. We know that Annette King has totally failed. Why? She told the National Party that to have 96000 people on the waiting list was “criminal”. How many people are on the health waiting list now? There are 180000 people on the health waiting list. They are queued up waiting to get on the waiting list. 
Here is another thing. Annette King said to the Health Committee that she would take the district health board deficits down to zero. What happened? What is the deficit at the Auckland District Health Board? 
Dr Paul Hutchison 
: $83.4 million. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: Annette King poured money in and got no result. I am afraid that as a Minister she is a total failure. That is why $3.5 billion— 
Hon Annette King 
: Louder. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: The Minister asks me to speak louder. She should actually ask her colleagues not to set up a barrage of interjections—I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. It is not about whether I can take it; it is about the Chair. [ 
Interruption 
] 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. The member knows very well there will be silence during points of order. That is the final warning. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. That is the problem. You are not applying the rules at any stage. The Government whip just called out during a point of order. Opposition members are invariably asked to leave when they do that. It is against the Standing Orders to set up a barrage. I am having to speak through six Government members who are not actually interjecting. That would be one thing but they are just calling out a barrage so no one can hear me speak. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I have heard your point of order. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I am not finished on my point of order. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I have heard your point of order. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: Well you will hear another one. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Mr Hide I have heard your point of order. When I get to my feet you must sit down. I accept that there was barracking and that it was too much. I ask members to refrain from barracking. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. The Government whip called out during my point of order. The rule that has been set down on that by the Speaker is very clear. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. I have dealt with that matter. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: No please continue your speech. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. I have dealt with the point of order that was raised and I have spoken to the Government whip and given a general warning. There was a lot of barracking going on from all sides. I have spoken about that. Mr Hide I ask you to continue your speech. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I want you to explain to me the rules. There was a lot of barracking but not from all sides; it was only from the Government side. My point of order about the Government whip calling out is that there was no barracking while I made my point of order. There was one interjection from a Government whip. The rules that have been set down in this House are very clear. Whenever an Opposition MP calls out during a point of order the member is immediately shot out of the Chamber. Madam Chairperson I would like you to explain why the Government whip who should be setting the standard and certainly should be held to the same standard as other MPs is allowed to get away with that. What is the difference? 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I give you another warning about raising points of order that are not points of order. When I have dealt with a point of order that is the end of the matter. I have dealt with that point of order. There was a lot of barracking. I have dealt with the two points of order that you raised. I give you a warning that raising points of order that are not points of order is in itself disorderly. I now ask you to continue your speech. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Mr Hide please be seated. Your point of order will be heard if it is a new point of order. You will not relitigate the two rulings that I have given. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I am not relitigating your ruling. I want to understand what you are applying here. You have not— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Mr Hide you will be seated please. You are relitigating my rulings and I ask you to continue with your speech. [ 
Interruption 
] 
RODNEY HIDE 
: Thank you. So what we see from this Labour Government—[ 
Interruption 
] 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Order! Please continue. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: So what we see from this Government—[ 
Interruption 
] I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated. I had asked that the barraging stop. I want Mr Hide to continue his speech in silence. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Is it the point I have dealt with? 
RODNEY HIDE 
: No it is a new one. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Point of order Rodney Hide. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: When Darren Hughes called out he was in direct defiance of your ruling. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Mr Hide please be seated. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I have not finished my point of order. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Please be seated Mr Hide. As you know interjections are tolerated. There was an interjection and then another one. When the second one was called out—although it was not barracking from one person—because there had been a lot previously I said you could continue your speech in silence. I expect there to be silence. That matter has been dealt with. I warn you again not to trifle with the Chair—not to relitigate the ruling I have given. Please continue with your speech. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. My point of order is this and you have not yet heard it. You gave a ruling and you said there was to be no barracking. I sat down. Immediately Darren Hughes barracked. That was not an interjection. You silenced him. I stood up to speak again. He immediately barracked. He is still in the Chamber and I say he is the member who is defying the Chair not me. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Mr Hide I will give you one final warning. You are relitigating what I have already ruled on. Please continue with your speech. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I have sat quietly and watched this interesting exchange. I think the problem we have here is that it appears that Mr Hughes has moved to another seat in order to gain advantage from the microphone being closer to you. There is no doubt that your instruction was that Mr Hide would be heard in silence. Then Mr Hughes—the very young member that he is and with perhaps a slightly impetuous nature—barked quite loudly towards Mr Hide. I think at least some rebuke of Mr Hughes would be necessary. He may even like to resume his own seat which is much further away from the interference zone than where he is currently sitting. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I thank the member for his assistance. However I have dealt with the matter. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: What we see from this Labour Government is an inability for the Minister of Health to front up to the big issues. We have to have Trevor Mallard Darren Hughes and the fishmonger’s wife Jill Pettis stand up here. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I am sure you heard what that member said and I am surprised you are not on your feet already to deal with it. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: The member knows that that is not acceptable. Members are to be called by their correct name. I ask the member to withdraw and apologise for that remark. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I withdraw and apologise. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. The Chair cannot anticipate a speaker. From where I am sitting I clearly took the inference that after the name “Jill Pettis” there was a full stop and there was then the start of a new sentence which was not allowed to progress because of the point of order raised by Trevor Mallard. I would be quite interested to know what Mr Hide has to say about the fishwife. I am sure there is a lot more to come. I am sure it is not offensive to the Committee and I say that Mr Mallard should be asked to contain himself until he understands the circumstances in which any particular comment is made. I notice that Mrs Pettis also understood there was a full stop after her name. She certainly does not look offended to me. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I just warn the member. Please be seated. I am dealing with this point of order which was not a point of order. Mr Brownlee that came close to trifling with the Chair. I had dealt with the matter. The member had apologised. I ask the member to continue his speech. 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. We may have a dilemma here. You have ruled and I am not questioning your ruling that the member should be heard in silence. The issue then arises that those of us who are offended against by for instance Mr Hide’s last reference to a particular member are then precluded from any retaliation at all. I am not challenging your ruling. I just seek your advice. When it is ruled that a member of Parliament should be heard in silence that is fair but if that member then decides to hurl abuse and make derogatory comments or to use derogatory names about members on any side of the Chamber those members have no option regarding that and cannot retaliate. I seek your advice on that point. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I just make this point. The members I believe overdid their interjections and that is why I asked that the member be heard in silence. That is the price to be paid. However the point of order that was raised by Mr Mallard was dealt with. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I just ask you to clarify the rules of this debate. Is my understanding correct that this is a fixed 3-hour debate and that all these points of order have come out of the time that the Opposition has to scrutinise the Government? 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: The member is correct. It is a fixed 3-hour timed debate. This time comes off the members’ time so we have probably wasted the equivalent of one speech. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: The fishmonger’s wife too is stuck on the waiting list. That is the trouble. We have 180000 New Zealanders stuck on the waiting list. The fishmonger’s wife the cobbler’s wife and the baker’s wife are all stuck on the health waiting list and here we have Steve Chadwick— 
Jill Pettis 
: Yes we can change our occupations but you will be out of here. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Order Jill Pettis! Order! The member’s time has expired. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. I stopped and because you were talking I sat down. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: Your speech time had finished. 
Rodney Hide 
: Yes but I am interested in why you were talking over my speech while my time was still going over the microphone. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I was calling for order. Your speech time had finished and I wanted to call the next speaker. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Chairperson. Is Jill Pettis in trouble or does she get away with that one too? 
Jill Pettis 
: Tell him to dry up. Grow up! 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: I am on my feet. I warn the member. Mr Hide I have dealt with the matter. 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Greens are pleased to see in the supplementary estimates that some further money has been invested in the area of problem gambling and the enforcement of the gambling regulations although it is not enough to curb the social and economic harm caused by the proliferation of gambling opportunities including particularly pokie machines. My colleague Sue Bradford has been a strong and effective advocate for responsible gambling laws in this country that provide the greatest possible protection to our community from the harms of gambling. Sadly this protection does not yet exist in our law. 
In the health supplementary estimates there is $2.4 million for the funding of costs related to the administration of the problem gambling levy. That levy remains very small when compared with the profits derived from gambling The gambling industry has of course a massive vested interest in keeping the problem gambling levy as low as possible. Many of the industry’s representatives have argued that the scale of the gambling problem is exaggerated and that the cost of dealing with it is overrated. But in 2003 gamblers in this country lost a record $2 billion—an increase of 9 percent on the year before. That is $5 million a day in this country much of which is taken out of the homes of some of our lowest-income families. The industry continues to complain about the levy and clearly wants to keep problem gambling strategies focused on treatment rather than on the additional public health goals of health promotion and harm minimisation. 
We need only recall the case a couple of years ago of the pokie-machine outlet money-lending business and problem gambling treatment centre all within the same building complex and all associated with the same single director—a lucrative immoral ring of business interests. We need only recall the pokie-machine bar in the Otara shopping centre that contributed to the costs of a fenced children’s playground right outside the front door of that pokie bar. Or we need only recall the objection by the gambling industry to the regulations requiring pokie machines to display how long a person has played and how much money he or she has lost to know that the industry is committed to the maximisation of its profits and not the minimisation of social and economic harms from gambling. 
Sky City recently wailed about how these regulations would lose it money—regulations that will affect all new slot machines after 1 October this year and all machines from 2009. This company has over 2000 gaming machines in New Zealand with a forecast annual profit of $100 million. This complaint was despite the Government figures that show that New Zealand has 100000 problem gamblers who contribute $2 billion to that industry. Eighty percent of people who come in for treatment from the Problem Gambling Foundation say that they have a problem with pokie machines; for Maori women the figure is 96 percent. 
The fact that the proceeds of pokie addictions are then used for the benefit of all sorts of worthy causes should not be an excuse for any values-based group to continue to endorse this industry. The Greens would like the many community organisations that now rely on the proceeds of human misery for their continued survival to consider other funding options and for Government and other non-gambling funders to better resource the sector so that groups do not feel obliged to depend on the addictions and desperation of some of our poorest people for the pursuance of their good works. 
Despite some of the minor improvements over the last 6 months—and we note the increase in the Vote Internal Affairs supplementary estimates of $1.17 million to enforce the new regulations in the Gambling Act—the levy and the legislation so far are not enough to deal with these harms. The Greens want to see much greater reduction in the number of pokie machines operating in this country and a total revamp of the way the profits of those that remain are distributed. 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Health) 
: 
 I thank members for their contributions to the debate on the performance of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises. It was interesting that both the National member and the ACT member raised the much-maligned Treasury report. Of course if we were to believe Mr Hide everything that Treasury wrote would be absolute gospel although I note that he does not take much account of Treasury’s report when it comes to its views on private insurance. However those members quoted the much-maligned Treasury report and talked of falling productivity. Of course what that report tells us and what Treasury says is that at this stage it is able to measure only about 46 percent of hospital activity and it is not able even to measure what happens in the primary health sector. 
It goes on to state that 60 percent of the costs are the wages of those who work within the health sector. I make no excuse for saying that the wages in the health sector have gone up—so they should. I think it was Barbara Stewart—and she always makes a considered intervention in this House—who said how important it is for us to retain our health workforce. Well we do not retain our health workforce in an international market if we do not increase wages and salaries. So the settlement for nurses which is backdated to last year and going forward is half a billion dollars. It is the biggest increase that nurses in this country have had at any time and they have fought for it for a decade. Past Ministers of Health know exactly what the campaign has been over that time. It has been settled and I am proud that nurses will have that increased pay—they deserve it. I also tell members that over the last 3 years doctors in the hospital system have had about a 50 percent increase in pay. We needed to do that to retain our medical workforce. I make no apologies for spending health money on that either. 
I also make no apologies for investing in new hospitals and rebuilding old hospitals. It was absolutely crucial because in terms of the hospital sector we actually have to have the bricks and mortar in order to provide the health service. We have put money into that. I believe that we are now seeing a health system that has had the investment in it that it needed. In fact if we look at investment in health throughout the 1990s we can see that in comparison with OECD countries we under-invested in health. We needed to catch up and we certainly have been doing that. 
Dr Hutchison talked of deficits. I remind the Committee that under the previous Government deficits reached 5 percent of the Health vote. They are now 1 percent of the Health vote. By anyone’s measure that is an improvement. We have seen nearly every board in New Zealand reduce its deficit with the exception of Auckland and Auckland remains a particular problem. Many issues impact on Auckland not least the impact of a building project that did not realise the $80 million of saving that was promised. It did not come about. However the board is working very carefully on the issue and we believe that it will reduce its deficit this year as well. 
Dr Hutchison mentioned the booking system. I think Bill English will be very disappointed in Dr Hutchison’s view on this. After all it was introduced in 1998. I think the booking system is a good system because it is honest and it is fair. It tells people whether they will get an operation— 
Hon Bill English 
: That’s not what you used to say. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: It certainly is. Let me tell the member this: in 1999 40 percent of those who were waiting for their first specialist assessment waited longer than 6 months. That figure now is 21 percent. It is getting better. I admit that when we started we started from a low base and it had to be built up. The system I believe is one of the best we can have in terms of being fair about elective surgery. 
Dr Hutchison mentioned bureaucracy. There has been an increase in staff of district health boards. In fact the biggest increase has been in nurses. The next-biggest increase has been in doctors. In fact the total increase in the number of bureaucrats in the health system has been 0.4 percent. Those are the facts. Opposition members talk about the bureaucrats but the people they call bureaucrats are those who book the operations answer the telephones and help to run the system. Those members would have us get rid of people who help to make the system work. National would turn the funding for that handful of people into “funding for health”. Well it would be lucky to get much out of that I have to say. 
I then heard Barbara Stewart talk about workforce issues. I agree with her. We have put a lot of investment into trying to improve our health workforce. To begin with we reopened two training schools for dental therapists in 2001 and 2002. I know that it sounds amazing to the member but all the training schools were closed in the 1990s; no dental therapy training schools were left in New Zealand. I am not quite sure how we were going to provide the service. Perhaps we were going to employ therapists until they were 99 years old; we certainly were not going to produce any more. It now takes 3 years to train a dental therapist—there is a degree course. We had our first graduates out of the Otago school last year and we had our first graduates out of the Auckland school this year but we need at least 40 graduates per year to provide oral health to the children and adolescents of New Zealand. We will get there but we have to invest in training. We have to be committed to training. 
We have also increased the number of medical students by 40 per year—the first increase since 1981. We actually have a much better grasp on those health workforce issues. We were training only 16 radiation therapists per year; we now train 38 and for the first time we can provide radiation treatment in New Zealand within the guidelines. It is fragile. We have to keep training and producing them for our own needs. It has taken a huge investment of money and energy to try to rebuild our health workforce. 
Then we heard from the very very sad member Rodney Hide. I actually pity that member. I have great pity for him because he is now a very bitter twisted and thwarted man. He has been thwarted by his own party actually. He had to spend the whole weekend stopping his members from getting rid of him. He has decided that he will go on a crusade on health. The unfortunate thing is that he is unable to put the facts out in a straight manner which means that people do not believe him. He over-exaggerates and overcooks everything and the consequence is that nobody believes him and nobody takes notice of him. 
He talked about the sustainability of health expenditure. Certainly there has been a big investment in health over these 6 years. I have already talked about the need to invest in our health workforce infrastructure and so on and also in our primary health care where we will get the results we want. But there does need to be a look at the sustainability of health funding in the long term. The Prime Minister announced at the beginning of this year that work would be done on the long-term sustainability of health funding. That work is now under way. It will be done properly and I can assure this Committee that the Government will go through each part of that expenditure in order to get the best use of it. It will not be done with slogans and smart statements. 
I conclude with reference to the Green member Sue Kedgley. She talked of the Healthy Eating - Healthy Action strategy. It is a nationwide strategy. It is not about a few people in the ministry trying to run a strategy around healthy eating and healthy action. It actually happens out in our communities in homes and in schools. It is about engaging all those players in getting through the message on healthy eating and healthy action. I believe that as one of the first countries—if not the first country—in the world to put such a strategy in place we will address those issues over time. But there is no quick fix solution to the fact that there are obese and overweight people in New Zealand. We have a growing number of them. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Oh where? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I say to Gerry Brownlee that I could not possibly say I see any of them in this Chamber—I know that he is asking where they are. We have a few folk who are overweight and unfortunately far too many children are overweight. There is funding and action taking place. 
I conclude by saying that very rarely do I agree with Sue Kedgley in any debate but that I totally agree with her comments about Pharmac. She said that she supports Pharmac that it does a very good job and that there is a campaign to get it. I support her and I believe that she is correct. 
Reports noted. 
Career Services 
Learning Media Ltd 
New Zealand Qualifications Authority 
New Zealand Teachers Council 
Tertiary Education Commission 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I want to raise some issues with the Minister Trevor Mallard about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. The board has decided to appoint Ms Karen Sewell as the acting chief executive officer. I ask the Minister to tell me whether this is the same Ms Karen Sewell who used to be the principal of Green Bay High School. The community around that school thinks that it will take at least another 5 years to clean up the mess she left. I know that she has been running the Education Review Office— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Very well. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well the Education Review Office reports are sounding more and more like old-style primary school reports than they ever used to. 
I ask the Minister to tell us why he thinks that that appointment will restore any confidence in the role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in administering our secondary school qualifications. I can tell the Minister that my feedback has been that it will not. That lack of confidence will be built on by his silly initiatives today. Is it not just so much the Labour Government that when there is a serious issue with exams and assessments for our secondary school students it spends months and months chewing it over and then comes up with the solution of having a workshop and a seminar? The other thing it will do is put out a pamphlet. This Minister thinks that less time spent teaching and more time spent putting out taxpayer-funded spin will fix confidence in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). I want to know why he thinks that that will be the case. I want him to tell us how he will explain to parents that sending teachers off to more workshops and more seminars is the answer for NCEA. 
It is time the Minister accepted that there are a couple of critical problems. The first is that the assessment is not consistent and valid and the second is that NCEA is not manageable. It needs more resources at the margin than are worth it. The Minister should just fix those problems. Instead we have gone back to the line that this Minister has taken right from the day he took the job—that any people who do not like NCEA or think there is a problem with it do not understand it and therefore must be stupid. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No just this member is stupid not everyone. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: He thinks they are all stupid so the Government will send them a pamphlet in the mail that will tell them that NCEA is actually fine. Then they will think that the Government is fine. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: If they can read. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: If they can read—they are the lucky ones. I want the Minister to tell us a bit about that. 
I also want the Minister to tell us what his plans are for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. I will give him a little bit of advice if he is still thinking about those plans. He should not roll the New Zealand Qualifications Authority into the Ministry of Education. That would be a mistake. If the qualifications framework is going to work then it needs to be administered by a body with statutory independence so that we do not see happening to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority what has happened to the Tertiary Education Commission whereby the Government is shamelessly manipulating the funding levers to meet its own political requirements. 
 The qualifications framework is important for New Zealand. It should be kept separate and at arm’s length from political intervention and that means running an independent statutory body in the way the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is set up now. If the Minister rolls it into the Ministry of Education that will do more than anything else to undermine the existing bipartisan support for the qualifications framework. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Oh we’ve really noticed that. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: The Minister knows that NCEA is only part of it. Of course there are questions about the quality of what is in that framework but the concept of the framework itself is supported by both parties. So I tell the Minister not to roll it into the Ministry of Education. That would simply put it under the control of people who have already made a mess of NCEA policy. Why give them the job of administering this as well? I am sure that if the Minister persists until the election he will not get a permanent chief executive officer. But as the new Minister after the election I will be able to get a new chief executive officer for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority because National will take a set of measures designed to increase the credibility of the qualification. [ 
Interruption 
] Well when the board sees a Government getting to grips with community concerns about the qualification it will be able to go to potential chief executive officers with some confidence whereas at the moment it is out there trying to recruit people to resuscitate a body that is on life support. Of course that is not a particularly attractive job. I want the Minister to explain to us also the rise in costs in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and other bureaucracies because that is where he is spending all his money instead of in the schools. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to focus my attention upon the same agency. There are some genuine difficulties with this particular agency. As the report on the 2003-04 financial review notes during that period of time the New Zealand Qualifications Authority faced the challenge of simultaneously trying to introduce both level 3 National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) and the scholarship examinations. When the review was carried out in February this year we were right in the middle of the scholarship debacle. That exposed also some serious flaws in NCEA level 1 level 2 and level 3 particularly with regard to the variability of results. It has to be said that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority simply did not rise to the challenge it faced in the financial year under review. What is even more serious is that we do not believe it has faced up to the real problems that created the debacle at the end of last year and the beginning of this year and we believe and predict that as a result of it not being prepared to face up to the issues another debacle will occur at the end of this year. 
The real problem is the fact that the agency has focused absolutely on standards-based assessment and has not recognised the limitations of that assessment. For example something like 300 out of 900 students who sat the English scholarship examinations got a scholarship but only nine out of 1000 biology students got a scholarship. The authority tried to argue that that is because there was variability amongst the students. It is absolute bunkum to say that 33 percent of the students studying English were able to meet certain standards and only 0.9 percent of those studying biology were able to meet the standards. That raises some very very serious questions about the whole underlying premise upon which the authority set the examinations. That is its task: to set the assessment tasks. 
I have to say that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has appeared before the Education and Science Committee and been reviewed more often than any other agency and with very good cause. Phil Smith who is the immediate past-president of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association made a very telling statement. He said: “If only NZQA had applied the same level of quality assurance to its own processes as it insisted that schools apply to their processes then we would not be in the difficulties we are.” 
I say to the Minister of Education that one of the things that has come through—and as I think the Minister knows I am not somebody who goes out and tries to attack people; I try to get to the root of a problem—is that this is the most untidy organisation I have ever come across. The information that is received from it by the select committee is time and time again purely and simply inadequately prepared. It has not been considered and researched. We saw flow charts for example that had examiners being trained before they had actually been appointed chronologically. When we pointed this out to the people from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority they said: “Oh we got that one wrong.” It has been a continual litany of errors from this particular agency. 
We have the sequence of events that led to the announcement of the Level 3 Distinction Award which is all reported in the review report. The issue is that on 17 January this agency reported the variability of the results to the Minister by email. It did not red-flag it. OK that might have been a mistake—it is certainly untidy at least. But almost 1 month later the chief executive officer could not explain why it was not red-flagged. A month after that error which had caused the Ministers considerable embarrassment the chief executive officer still could not explain why that matter had not been red-flagged. That suggests to me that there are some systemic problems within this organisation. 
Explanations have been given for the variation in results. These are I have to say absolute and utter bunkum. They do not make any educational or scientific sense. Yet the public the Minister and we in Parliament are expected to accept that these are the rationales and that these are the proper processes. I say to the Minister that he has to take responsibility for this agency. He did not set it up. In fact this Government did not set it up or create its culture; that was done by the previous National Government. But this Government has been administering the agency for 5 years and should have fixed it before now. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I too want to address concerns about the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. These are not just the concerns of this House; they are the concerns of parents all over New Zealand. Since 1990 the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has held itself up as a world leader in assessment; that is what it says it is. It has foisted on us the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) which parents now call “No Chance of Ever Achieving”. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority does not even know what world standards are; it is not even interested in world standards. The NCEA scholarship has been a disaster. NCEA levels 1 2 and 3 have been a disaster. As the Hon Brian Donnelly said the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has been reviewed reviewed and reviewed. The State Services Commission review set terms of reference relating to standards processes and communication. These things should have been in the system long before it got to the stage of a State Services Commission review. They are all basic things that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority could not even get right. 
The purpose of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is to provide “quality assured qualifications”. What other Crown entity is the subject of a Tui billboard? This Tui billboard ridicules one of our most important secondary school qualifications. It says: “I past NCEA Inglish. Yeah right.” 
How shameful for a Crown entity that holds itself up as a world leader in education standards to be the butt of a joke on a billboard that advertises beer! That is about how far it has gone. The chairman Mr Fraser has gone. The chief executive officer Karen Van Rooyen has gone. The Ministers will not take responsibility for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. We now have an acting chief executive Karen Sewell who I am reliably informed is a very nice person. But as one prominent New Zealand principal likes to say she was on her way to turning Green Bay High School into the only sole-charge high school in New Zealand. Parents took their children away from that school in droves. There were no standards at that school. In fact it was so bad that when the zoning boundaries were redrawn $50000 was immediately overnight wiped off the value of properties that were brought into the zone of Green Bay High School. That is how bad it was. And now this Minister has allowed his board to appoint someone like that. 
 The problem is that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is so bad now and the level has reached such a poor standard that it will be well-nigh impossible to attract anyone of quality to that position. Who would want to be handed a hospital pass like that? 
What does the New Zealand Qualifications Authority cost us? In 2003 the Government threw $30 million at it. The Minister said that all the problems were due to not enough resources and that it just needed more money. What did the Government do? It threw $52 million more at it in 2004. What was it I ask the Minister—double or quits? Just keep throwing millions at it and all the problems will go away? [ 
Interruption 
] 
Labour’s solution to everything is to just shovel more money at it. Students already pay to sit their qualifications. Despite that when students were very kindly invited by the Minister to be reassessed in the NCEA scholarship disaster would this Minister rescind the $30 reassessment fee they had to pay? At least David Benson-Pope said he would consider rescinding it but no the Minister of Education totally ruled it out. Well why should the Labour Government rescind it? It was just another tax as far as it was concerned. 
The New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Minister were warned and warned that the NCEA scholarship would be unworkable. A non-competitive system cannot be grafted on to a competitive exam. The solution is to give those qualifications back to organisations in the private sector like the New Zealand Education Scholarship Trust which for years has run scholarship with no problems at all. We never saw that on a Tui billboard. We never saw New Zealand bursary university entrance or even School Certificate which had some problems on a Tui billboard. A whole generation of New Zealand students has been subject to an experiment. It is not just an unfortunate experiment; it is a total disaster and they have been severely disadvantaged. It is child abuse of the mind. 
LYNNE PILLAY (Labour—Waitakere) 
: 
 I am pleased to speak tonight from a more positive approach to our education system. It is really depressing to hear members on the other side of the Chamber banging on all the time about doom and gloom and not acknowledging all the good things that are happening in our education system. I will start my speech at the beginning with early childhood education. We have seen the statistics and so much research that shows that through investment in early childhood education there are real results later on in terms of achievement. 
Jim Peters 
: For some. 
LYNNE PILLAY 
: Yes certainly not for the members of his caucus but generally speaking our children in New Zealand are achieving. We are seeing the statistics about the achievement of 11-year olds now who have had the benefit of early childhood education. That is something I prefer to celebrate. I am proud to be part of a Government that celebrates that. Why are those young people achieving? They are achieving because they had quality early childhood education that delivers. That is why we are increasing our commitment to and our investment in early childhood education. We have committed to 20 free hours’ funding per week in community early childhood centres for the future and we know that that will build on the achievements we already see. 
Jim Peters 
: Only for some. 
LYNNE PILLAY 
: I do not know what the member means by that. I just cannot understand why members relish being so negative. I know many of them have chosen to leave after the next election which is a very wise move but I prefer to work and to celebrate all the good things that are happening. Increased investment and achievement in early childhood education means there is also an increased demand for training. That means upskilling and it means scholarships in early childhood education. That is a major investment of this Government and it is one that I am very proud to see happening. 
I will move on now to when children move from early childhood education to primary school which I have seen in my electorate. It has been very very good to celebrate not only with children and our Government but with their parents and with the community at large. There are laptops in every school. Under this Government every schoolteacher now has the ability to have a laptop to work with and to share with the children. What an advantage! That is something that happened under this Government’s funding. We should not forget that this Government—which does not promote vouchers or private education—stands for the right of every child in New Zealand to go to his or her local school. That is something that this Labour-led Government is very proud of. It is a real right that we see not only for our children but for their families and our transport system is not clogged up by people trying to whip across town because a child might be a good rugby player and might have been poached by a school. We stand by the right of every young person in the country to go to his or her local school. 
We should also acknowledge the building that has gone on under this Government. I have been to more school hall openings refurbishments general extensions on schools and general celebrations of achievement than we have seen happen over the last decade in this country. Why? Because we are investing in our schools and we are doing it wisely. That also means many many more teachers and more funding for special education because we know that that investment delivers in terms of achievement. We are not a party that says we think we are spending too much and will advocate for tax cuts that will not deliver. 
BERNIE OGILVY (United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to look at the financial reviews of three Crown entities. When I read out the names of the three education Crown entities—the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Tertiary Education Commission—what comes to mind for parents taxpayers learners and children when those three entities are made known across the airwaves in alleyways and in the schools and universities around New Zealand? People will reply straight away to my question by saying that the issue common to all three is that they have been poor performers. 
All three entities have been in the news as I understand it for very wrong reasons. All appear to be unable to control their own appetite for increase and for their own purposes. All impose on those they are looking after—monitoring and auditing—what they are not prepared to see imposed on themselves. In fact they are less able to control themselves than the schools universities or whatever that they are in charge of. Worse still I have noticed as have a lot of people that there is a tremendous overlap between those Crown entities. There is duplication and sheer waste when for instance the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the New Zealand Teachers Council and the Tertiary Education Commission all work separately to assess and appraise private training enterprises. I know of at least two teachers colleges where that has happened. There is a lot of duplication and waste. That is what comes to mind for a lot of people. 
 It has already been said that it is a fearful thing. It is of concern to myself and others and I think to some on the Education and Science Committee that it is intended that the Ministry of Education take some of those entities under its wing. We in United Future do not sense that their independence should be squished and squashed away and lost. They need true statutory independence to do their jobs. 
Some members have been talking in the House about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) programmes which in my mind and in the mind of everybody in the National Party started as a dream in order to bring forth learning into our schools. But NCEA has not ended as a dream; it has ended as a nightmare for a lot of people and certainly for a lot of students and employers around this nation. Do I need to say more? Well others have said a lot and tonight I want to quote from the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) advisory officer Julie Ellison. She said that there was enough evidence in the report the PPTA had to show that some very poor-quality moderators were operating. That is only one comment she made. More dollars have been spent on NCEA with fewer outcomes than people have deserved. 
What is the New Zealand Teachers Council renowned for? It has produced more chief executive officers than any other Crown entity in the last 2 or 3 years that I have been in Parliament. It is amazing! The only thing it has ever produced as I see it is a code of ethics. When I asked in the select committee what that really meant—did it mean accountability?—they said it was definitely not a code of accountability. Then I asked why they went to all that trouble over $103000 worth to produce a toothless wonder in reality. 
So many people out there are declaring that the Teachers Council needs a complete rewrite—a complete rerun—because it is a toothless wonder. As for the Tertiary Education Commission it is becoming a very very protectionist organisation for a few what I would call State institutions. For instance I have on the table in front of me an application of concern from Unitec for that institution to obtain university status. The amount of money that has been spent by all parties at this time in our maturity to come to an obvious answer is laughable. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 One of the entities we are talking about tonight is the Tertiary Education Commission and I would like the Minister—now that he is in charge of tertiary education—to explain just where the Tertiary Education Commission fits in. It is my hope on behalf of 2.5 million taxpayers that he will do a better job than his predecessor the Hon Steve Maharey. I think that any history of public administration in New Zealand will record that member’s efforts as among the worst of any Minister—[ 
Interruption 
]—and it is laughable that the member for Otaki is probably going to vote for him when Labour eventually changes its leadership. In fact I think that Mr Maharey’s tenure as the Minister in charge of tertiary education should have put paid to any leadership prospects he had. 
Darren Hughes 
: Give us a tutorial now. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Just settle down. 
I want the Minister to tell us now what is going on with the Tertiary Education Commission. Mr Mallard is getting headlines again as in the Christchurch  
Press 
 today with talk of redundancies at Christchurch Polytechnic. Mr Mallard is wandering into the polytech sector like a bull in a china shop and he is causing a great deal of strife by proposing changes that he will have to back off from. In fact if he has not been told to back off by the Prime Minister already then she will probably do that before the end of this week when her media-monitoring unit counts the polytech headlines around the country. 
What has happened is that the Minister has made a number of aggressive and irritable speeches saying that he is going to cut back a number of course types. Now on the face of it that looks like a reasonable thing to do—except that a couple of months ago he announced a whole series of reviews of courses in tertiary institutions. And that sounds as if it would not be too unreasonable except that prior to that the Government made an agreement with those polytechs about how they would handle the community education allocations in particular. That would have made some sense except that before that the polytechs had done their charters and profiles in great detail for the next 3 years and they had been signed off by the Government. 
So people are trying to run a polytech and provide skills for an economy that needs them and there have now been four different interventions from the Minister and the Tertiary Education Commission. I do not necessarily sympathise with the sector generally but I have to say that that is just grossly negligent public management. It is a case of ministerial whim; every time Ministers feel a bit of pressure they go out and say they will do something else—whatever it is. So the chief executive and the council are sitting there trying to work out which plan the Government will carry out—because all those plans came from the Government. 
Well can the Minister tell us what he will do? Will he stick with the original agreements about charters and profiles or will he stick with the next agreement his predecessor made about community education? Or will he throw both of those over in favour of pursuing the raft of reviews that are being done by former corrections officers and people with PhDs—people who have never had a job but are reviewing our tertiary institutions? Or will he follow the statements he has made recently that he is sending a package off to Cabinet that will involve taking tens of millions of dollars out of the polytechs? I would like him to tell me that. 
The other thing I would like him to tell me is just what he is doing about the viability of those institutions. Will he go around the same circle that Steve Maharey did where everyone stands around collaborates and wrings their hands? He coughed up money for the polytechs just because he could not stand not being nice to them. So he bailed them out. Then 3 years later they were all back in financial difficulty again. Clearly the Government has failed to get to the nub of the problem in relation to the viability of polytechs and I want to know why the Minister will not take a sensible and measured approach to the matter. Why does he feel that he has to go out there and aggressively strut in front of the sector to show that he means business? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I did not think it was possible. I really did not think it was possible. I did not think that Bill English could be a worse ditherer than Don Brash—but he is absolutely. I did not think it would be possible for someone in this Parliament much less in the country to dither more than Don Brash but we have had it from Bill English. He rammed into the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology and criticised it for all its courses— 
Darren Hughes 
: He didn’t enrol? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well no. I think they have some standards! 
But now something is being done about it and some changes are being made. The jandal has flip-flopped. The wrist has gone the other way and it is almost unbelievable. We knew we had a tired and confused Leader of the Opposition who was very patchy in his approach and pretty hopeless overall. But what do we have now? We have the former Leader of the Opposition working really hard to try to make the present leader look good. [ 
Interruption 
] Well I think Bill English is more of a “Mr Sad” tonight because what he has seen is what a number of us have seen recently— 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Are you talking about the estimates? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Actually I am talking about the reviews and in particular the review of the performance of Bill English. He has been well reviewed by his caucus colleagues. He relied on Nick Smith to count the numbers yet he complained about a few polytechnics being out of balance. Well relying on Nick Smith to do the numbers is I think a fair sign of where that all sits. 
 But I turn back to the reviews. I think there is not much doubt that Career Services is a particularly tidy organisation. I do want to congratulate Patricia McKelvey on her Queen’s Birthday honour. She has made an enormous contribution to education in New Zealand as the principal of Wellington High School and recently as chair of the board of Career Services. I think she is also on the council of Victoria University. Career Services is a very tidy organisation and I think it is fair to say that if all the other education Crown entities were of the same degree of tidiness we would have some more focus on educational rather than administrative matters in New Zealand. 
I want to thank the Hon Russell Marshall for agreeing to take on the position of chair of the Tertiary Education Commission. He is someone who has a lot of respect in the sector someone who was my predecessor some time ago and someone who worked very closely with the Hon Richard Prebble when they were friends in the Labour Government. They worked very closely together on important issues at some stages and less closely later on. I look forward to the new chief executive arriving for the commission I understand at some stage next month. 
I notice that Mr English has taken a line that I think is rather unwise around Karen Sewell who is a well-respected public servant. She is someone who I think has given following the Rodger review and the initial work of Judith Aitken the Education Review Office the reputation of being an organisation with an iron glove. 
Hon Member 
: She is soft. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: No a velvet glove and an iron fist. On some occasions she is a little soft but as the member who used to be the principal of a college in Northland knows on occasions the Education Review Office is forced to tell the story as it is. It is full and frank and not always desirable and I tell Mr Peters that people are not always comfortable with the reports of Education Review Office. 
Jim Peters 
: Because they are not always reliable. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I know on some occasions people get really bad reports and I am amazed that we have gone all this time with the member as a member of Parliament and no one has had a good look at them. But I have had a read of them. I think it is particularly— 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: Would you like to table them? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well I think they are on the public record. 
Hon Richard Prebble 
: Oh please! 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: The member could go all high-tech and look them up on the web if he wants to. [ 
Interruption 
] I know we have a couple of very retiring members further back and I am surprised we have had a valedictory speech from Rodney Hide but have not had one from the two members who are going voluntarily. I invite them to take a call and tell us what they care about. 
Reports noted. 
Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority 
LARRY BALDOCK (United Future) 
: 
 I rise to speak on the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. United Future members would like to make it known that we are great supporters of this agency. We think it is doing a good job and that it has some very practical solutions to some of the problems the country faces. 
For 2 years now we have put in Budget bids for this agency to have increased funding and we believe that it deserves to have more funding from the Minister of Energy. We hope the Minister will continue to be an advocate for this agency. If the Government is serious about its energy conservation strategy it ought to be putting more money into this agency so it can achieve real reductions and real successes in energy efficiency rather than just this little bit of money which is a slight indication of commitment. 
It is time that the Government walked the walk in terms of the so-called effects of climate change. I see that a great deal of the money that this agency is given is actually siphoned off to deal with reports on climate change and on the effects of carbon dioxide gases rather than actually doing the things many New Zealanders believe would make a difference in our country such as increasing the use of solar water heating in our homes. We were pleased to see back in 2003-04 that funding doubled so that solar water heating could be installed in more homes but it is still so little that it is hardly going to make a dent in reducing our dependence on energy. What is needed on that front is for the industry behind solar water heating to be given a very clear signal that the Government is serious about solar water heating being installed in all new homes and seeing many of our older homes being refitted. Until the Government gives a clear signal that it really is serious about that the industry will not respond and get ready for the massive infrastructure it needs in order to meet the demand that will come. We urge the Minister to take that initiative to really deliver for the people of New Zealand in that strategy and to support the good people in the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. 
We have welcomed the work that the agency has been doing with energy- efficiency ratings for homes and we are pleased to see that in the 2005-06 Budget it has been given another $0.6 million to increase the number of homes that it can rate. But again it is still too little. We would like to see United Future’s policy implemented whereby all homes will need to have energy-efficiency ratings when sold. We think that is a good way to have market measures involved in upgrading our homes to be more efficient. It is not a huge expense for a home to be given an energy-efficiency rating. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority is able to deliver this service and more people would be able to be trained if the demand were increased. For a very minimal cost people could come and rate our homes find the spots where heat is leaking out and find the ways in which insulation and efficiency overall can be improved. They would consider the ways in which we light and heat our homes. There is much saving that can be made. We believe that if an energy-efficiency rating were required at the time of the sale of a home people would be motivated to get better ratings because they would be able to get better prices for their homes. The market would very much take care of this improvement. So we look forward to the Minister getting behind the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority and offering it more support through Budget allocation in the years ahead so that it can do a lot more. 
We hear an awful lot about the worries of climate change and the impending effects of human-induced climate change. The Government is imposing a carbon tax on our country and our businesses. It is seeking to raise something like $300 million with that carbon tax yet it is giving less than $30 million to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority which could actually make a real difference. We do not think the carbon tax makes any sense at all and we oppose it absolutely. But perhaps the tax would make a little more sense if it was being directed to the authority so that it could make rapid progress in energy-efficiency initiatives around the country. 
Report noted. 
Civil Aviation Authority 
Land Transport Safety Authority of New Zealand 
Maritime Safety Authority of New Zealand 
Transfund New Zealand 
Transit New Zealand 
Transport Accident Investigation Commission 
Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) 
: 
 In the few minutes that I have I wish to focus specifically on Transit New Zealand. The reason I do so is that it is the Crown entity responsible for the maintenance and construction of the New Zealand highway system. I have to say that back in 1999 Labour came into office with the promise of fixing New Zealand’s roads. I recall that Labour members went up and down the country saying that and especially in Auckland they made that kind of boast. What is their record after 5½ years? 
Frankly it is one of failure. The reason I say that is that in 2000 and 2001 expenditure actually went down. Transit ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent money in the bank simply because the Government put everything on further review—the best single example being the North Shore bus lane. It was approved back in 1997 and finally started this year with construction to be completed at the earliest in 2009. Think of that—a 12-year period to do a simple project! 
Last year Transit issued a document which I will seek leave to table later that went to every single household in the Auckland region called  
Getting Auckland Going 
. The information in this document caused that now infamous rift between the Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association the Auckland chamber of commerce the Minister and Mike Williams. The reason is that this document is a bunch of lies. That is the truth of the matter. It lies from start to finish. 
I want to produce this particular evidence. The document refers to 17 projects. I guess they got two of them right. Do members know why they got two of them right? Because the construction had been finished when the document was issued. So I guess when they said in relation to the Puhinui interchange that construction was complete at least they could go down there take a photograph and say “Yes that is complete.” They did the same also for another project Grafton Gully stages one and two—also complete. They got that part right. The rest of it was fundamentally untrue. In particular and this is where Auckland feels so deeply let down they went through a list of projects. 
Construction on State Highway 18 the Hobsonville deviation was to start in 2005. Bear in mind that this document went out in September 2004. It was issued by Transit to every householder. Has construction started on State Highway 18? No. That was a lie in this document. 
The construction of State Highway 20 the Mount Roskill extension was to start according to this document in 2004. That is about 12 weeks after this document was issued. Has it even started yet? No. 
So they could not predict even 12 weeks in front. That is just amazing. The next example is State Highway 20 Manukau extension: “construction starts 2005”. Has it started? No. 
State Highway 1 new Waitemata crossing—“studies start in 2004”. Bear in mind that this document was issued in September 2004. They had to project forward only 12 weeks—just 12 weeks. Did they get that right? No. Has the project director started his work yet? No. 
 So that is the reason why Aucklanders feel so deeply disappointed. The truth is this. The only thing that one can now believe on whether construction has started is if one sees the bulldozers actually starting work. Anything else does not count. I read in the last week that State Highway 20 which as I said was to start last year is to start in August. All I can say is that we will have to wait and see whether that is true. 
The problem is this and it comes back to governmental responsibility. Everyone in Auckland knows that our highways are clogged. Everyone in Auckland knows in particular that State Highway 20—the western ring route which everyone acknowledges is absolutely crucial—has to be done to make Auckland’s traffic flow. The Government has said that we have said that and all Auckland mayors have said that. 
When the Government’s road builder Transit—under the authority of Ministers of Transport—says that the project will start and it gives very clear dates just within 12 weeks frankly people have relied on this document. The document was sent to every single household in Auckland—that is 500000 households—with the intention and expectation that people would rely on the document; that they would read it and believe it. In a sense I guess that was part of the Government’s preconditioning for this election. Frankly the Government has let Auckland down. Virtually every project that was predicted to start in 2004 and 2005 has not happened. 
Hon Parekura Horomia 
: Rubbish! 
Dr WAYNE MAPP 
: The Minister of Maori Affairs who I guess thinks he knows Auckland well says “Rubbish.” That speaks of his ignorance. If he had read this document he would be able to compare just looking at the roads themselves whether the roads were started on the days months or even the years stated in the document and he would know that the answer was no. It is a judgment on the Government that members in Cabinet do not know whether their own proposals to fix Auckland’s roads have succeeded or been started. In fact that is an incredible indictment on that Cabinet. That it is so ignorant and has let Auckland down so badly that it has deeply misled— 
Darren Hughes 
: Is the member’s tunnel part of National’s policy? 
Dr WAYNE MAPP 
: We support public-private partnerships I say to the junior whip. National has a clear policy on fixing the roads. We are committed to spending all of the petrol tax on roads over the next 6 years. We have also said that we support public-private partnerships. Well-conceived projects like a second crossing ought to be put out to tender. Frankly if we go by the situation in Sydney and Melbourne they will come. It does not require any Government funding to do so and that is the case in Sydney and Melbourne. 
This Government in its land transport legislation from last year has let this country down disgracefully. 
Sitting suspended from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)