Falloon AndrewANDREW FALLOON (National—Rangitata): Thank you Mr Speaker. Wasn't that a fantastic speech. I had every intention of responding to Jamie Strange but I think we've heard from the Labour Party research unit about four or five times today. What I'll do instead though is I really enjoyed the contributions by my colleague Stuart Smith and also by—I was going to say Paul Quinn—Paul Eagle across the Chamber. Not Paul Quinn any more thankfully.SPEAKER: It's all the same really.ANDREW FALLOON: Paul Eagle across the Chamber. What Stuart was talking about—what I thought was fantastic actually because he's been pushing it for a very long time and finally we have the Minister of Education catching up and putting a very significant investment into Marlborough through a joint college. Of course Paul Eagle our colleague from Rongotai was very excited because the significant investment in Rongotai is a brand new electorate office. After 14 months he's finally got an office. So well done Paul.But I want to talk about investment in mid-Canterbury and South Canterbury this afternoon because we've seen significant growth in that region in the last seven or eight years in particular largely under a National Government. What that's meant—what that growth has meant—is there now is enormous pressure on the existing infrastructure that exists particularly north of Ashburton in relation to State Highway 1. It's a critical transport corridor of the South Island and it's become far more dangerous.Just to put some numbers on that over the last 15 years alone international visitors into New Zealand have doubled and we are seeing a lot of that transport—a lot of that traffic—now flowing down the east coast of the South Island as more and more international visitors get out of buses and move into independent transport. We've also seen a lot of growth around Timaru with PrimePort where the number of ships entering in to PrimePort has gone from 350 just a few years ago to now 500 and that's being reflected across the whole South Canterbury economy particularly as that transport moves through to the inland port of Rolleston.All of that traffic has increased and caused traffic numbers to have doubled in the last 20 years—traffic volumes have doubled in the last 20 years on State Highway 1 between Ashburton and Christchurch. The unfortunate effect of that is that the road has become far more dangerous and I get people coming into my office every week saying that they no longer feel comfortable travelling on that road because they feel too nervous about it. Unfortunately those numbers have been reflected in statistics. We've seen since 2000 128 fatalities and serious crashes on that road making it the second-most dangerous stretch of highway in the country.So what's the Government done since they've come in? Well unfortunately we had plans to four-lane that highway between Ashburton and Christchurch to reflect the huge growth that there's been. So what's the new Government done?Hon Damien O'Connor: Nine years of National—nothing done. Outrageous!ANDREW FALLOON: Well unfortunately they've shelved it and the reason they've shelved it is they've ripped $5 billion—$5 billion—out of the State highway network. They've taken it out of regional economies and put it into Auckland—solely into Auckland rail and cycleway projects.Mr O'Connor—he's gone very quiet over there because he knows this. He knows about the significant investment we put into the Coast through the new bridge which that member never did when he was in Government. But that won't happen under a Labour Government because the money just isn't there.That's not the only thing. That's not the only handbrake to growth in the mid-Canterbury and South Canterbury economy at the moment. The second one is immigration. Before the last election the Labour Party came out with a plan to reduce net migration by 20000 to 30000 per year. Unfortunately that's now started to bite. We've seen immigration numbers come off by about 10000 since they came into Government. I look at my electorate of Rangitata particularly in Ashburton where you've now got 500 vacancies in a district of 34000 people—34000 people and 500 job vacancies. It's having a serious impact on the growth of our economy. It's holding back employers from future growth.So what's been the response to that from this Government? Well unfortunately we've had silence. Iain Lees-Galloway came down to Timaru in March. We haven't heard a peep from him since. He promised new immigration settings would be in place before the end of this year. Well it's now December and we haven't seen anything of it. What's been his focus? His focus has been defending his botched decision to grant residency to convicted drug smugglers.So in the House today we had front-bench National MPs asking serious questions of this Government about that process and they refused to answer. They refused to answer. There was not a single straight answer out of the Government about why Iain Lees-Galloway granted residency to that convicted drug smuggler and not a single answer about the protection of his estranged wife. This Government has refused to answer basic questions. That's their responsibility and it's our right to ask them.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.