Shearer David: Address in Reply 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Shearer David: Address in Reply 
[Sitting date: 21 December 2011. Volume:677;Page:32. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID SHEARER (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 First of all Mr Speaker I would like to acknowledge you once again and congratulate you on your role as Speaker. I would also like to congratulate Alfred Ngaro and Paul Goldsmith new members of Parliament and I wish them very well in this House. 
I want to start by congratulating the new Ministers in the Government and in Cabinet. I acknowledge the work of the Canterbury MPs—of course my Labour colleagues included—whose efforts in adversity have made us proud. The devastation in Christchurch demands of this House a realisation that as New Zealanders we have far more to unite us than divide us. We will of course keep a vigilant eye on things happening in Canterbury but we would never wish for anything more or any greater success than the Government would like to have in its work there.  
 Just over 3 weeks ago the National Government and the Labour Opposition put our ideas in front of the people of New Zealand and our side did not win. Therefore Labour will be different in the coming 3 years. We will turn a page. We have a new fresh energised team which I am immensely proud of. But it is a bigger change than these fresh faces before us. Labour will listen we will learn and we will act—that much I can promise you. I acknowledge that we must earn the right to lead this country in Government in 2014 and that is exactly what we are going to do. To do this we will change our focus and put our energies into our vision for a New Zealand that we can all aspire to. Labour will support good ideas wherever they come from. We will not however shirk from doing our job of scrutinising this Government and holding it to account. We will stand up and fight whatever we think is wrong and wherever we think our values are being threatened and I have no doubt that over the next 3 years there will be some very rich pickings. 
But I aim to be constructive too. I reached out to this Government on its ministerial committee on poverty because I believe that it is a good idea. The other day a woman came into my office. She was educated she was motivated for a job but for a variety of reasons she had fallen on hard times. She was hungry—she was hungry. She did not have enough food to eat. She did not have enough money to go out there and buy food. That is something I do not think we should ever see in New Zealand. That is not what we expect in New Zealand. So I believe that the Maori Party is right to force poverty into the Government’s line of sight and today I repeat my invitation to the Government to make that committee a committee of this House. The Prime Minister should know that this is not an issue that we want to play politics over. I have witnessed poverty horrific poverty in my life and believe me there is no excuse for poverty in New Zealand. So this is a sincere offer and I hope the Government sees it right to review its position. 
Just as Labour will embrace good ideas when we see them I urge the Government to do the same. It is what New Zealanders want from us. They showed that by endorsing MMP overwhelmingly. It is also how I have lived my life—finding constructive solutions to difficult problems. Time and again New Zealanders have told me they are sick of the political point-scoring. New Zealanders want us to get on with the real problems that they face. Recovering from a financial crisis and the impact on our people and most particularly on our businesses—that is what we are here for. Rebuilding our houses and our infrastructure as well as the dreams and aspirations for all those in Canterbury—that is what we are here to do. Facing up to the environmental threats and facing up to the growing inequality which is growing faster in our country than it is in any other Western nation—that is what we are here to do. Getting our books under control—that is what New Zealand expects of us. And tackling the 20000 teenage New Zealanders who have left school and who are not in work not in training and not going anywhere but headed for trouble—that is what we need to be doing. New Zealanders expect us to apply ourselves as a Parliament to make New Zealand a better place to work to live and to raise a family. That is the deal. That is why we are elected. That is why we are here. Under my leadership I can promise you that Labour will work tirelessly to play its part because Labour is turning a page. 
 Labour will put growing the pie for all New Zealanders at the front of its agenda. We cannot be content with an ever-shrinking pie. It means growing the nation’s wealth. Labour will grasp the mantle of economic leadership and will look to expand opportunity for all New Zealanders wherever they are born or whomever they are born to. We must build an economy that produces good jobs and decent incomes and generates wealth and opportunity without sacrificing our natural assets our lifestyles and our communities. That is why I am taking on the portfolio of science and innovation. That is why I am giving to our most senior spokespeople the roles of economic development small business regional development skills and training environment and education. They are all here on the front bench. All of them are here on the front bench because they are all part of the same vision: to create the growing New Zealand we want that is clean that is green and that is innovative. 
Our agriculture and our primary industries are the backbone of our economy; they have been for generations and they will continue to be central. But we cannot multiply our dairy industry five times to catch up with Australia nor can we rely on our tourism industry. Yet our economy is declining in relation to others. We all know that. Forty years ago our meat exports paid for our pharmaceutical bill 18 times over. Today they pay for less than seven. The Government’s strategies go something along the lines of this: as China and Asia grow richer they will demand a higher-protein diet. We grow protein; therefore we are ideally positioned. Well that is not a strategy; that is just a hope. That is a hope. It is a hope that we will not have to change anything and that we can keep on doing and saying more or less the same things as we have since the 1960s. I want to unleash New Zealand’s innovation and see New Zealand grow global businesses. 
A couple of years ago I bumped into a guy called Sean Simpson a person who was in my own electorate who founded the company called LanzaTech. It had developed he said some pretty clever technology for turning steel mill smokestacks into liquid fuel. He said that its potential was huge. If China converts just half of its steel mills to use Sean’s technology it will generate 20 percent of China’s liquid fuel needs. That means billions of dollars for New Zealand—billions. That science and research expertise is not just in our manufacturing areas; it is also in our agriculture. The potential is among us but we just do not recognise it. 
Other countries have made big changes before us. Less than 20 years ago Finland was in a similar position to New Zealand. It is a narrowly based economy with high unemployment and a tanking stock market and its economic future was looking pretty dire. They elected a new Prime Minister who told them that only the Finnish people could fix their own problems. Only their own brains and talents were going to be able to take them forward. From there they started setting out a pattern of change. They took bold decisions. They created global world-beating businesses through their own innovation and talent and today they sit near the top of the OECD. No prizes for guessing where we are and where we are headed. But the most important change they made was their attitude. New Zealand faces a more glacial decline than Finland did but a decline nevertheless. If they can change it so can we. 
So the reason I profoundly disagree with this Government’s direction is that it is just drifting along. It is not about creating the clean green clever New Zealand I am talking about. There are no good ideas out there. There is no plan for New Zealand. People have become so disillusioned that as a result they are leaving New Zealand in record numbers. It does not have a vision for changing New Zealand for growing our economy or for investing in our people. Therefore we end up without the money we need for the services that our people deserve. Therefore New Zealand does not have a future that can create decent wages. You know one-quarter of the people who go to the Salvation Army are actually working New Zealanders who are being paid. They are being paid but their wages are so low that they are living in poverty. That is what we have to change—that is what we have to change. When two-thirds of all businesses do not know what our plan is and do not believe we have a direction there is something seriously wrong. We are a proud nation of hard-working people. I think of those people I have met out on the streets—people with two jobs shift workers or the self-employed. Often many of those people are working for less than the minimum wage. They are looking to us to get behind them to bring them in and to give them a break. 
We are an inventive people. We have great ideas but too often we are failing to commercialise those ideas or we sell out to commercial big global interests and let overseas investors reap the rewards of our good ideas. The economy Labour wants to build is going to leverage our global advantages. It will leverage off our environment first and I have mentioned that but also it will leverage off our education. This is an area I am particularly passionate about. We need a school system that gives our children the confidence and skills to be leaders in a new economy. It is too easy for a school-leaver to drift out of school and get lost. But we need them. The pathway between school and tertiary education is broken for too many of our young people and they are falling through the cracks. When more than one-third of our Maori and Pasifika kids leave school without any qualification then something is seriously wrong. Lifting those kids back into training we know is hugely expensive and takes a massive effort. We cannot let them fail in the first place.  
That part of our education system needs an overhaul. Education is the best plan that exists anywhere in the world to open opportunities and offer new chances. I want to unleash New Zealand’s innovative drive and determination to help Kiwi companies make the most of every opportunity to make New Zealand the global leader it should be but is not at the moment. But if I look at the Speech from the Throne where do I find the ideas? There are no ideas to create the smart innovative economy that I am talking about. There are no ideas to help prevent future generations of Kiwis from simply packing up and taking their skills their qualifications and most important their energy elsewhere. 
It turns out that National’s big idea boils down to three short words: sell it off. That is it; that is the big idea—sell it off. I say to this House that New Zealanders know in their heart of hearts that sell it off is the last resort of a Government that has simply run out of ideas. We cannot get richer by selling our inheritance. It only leaves us worse off. And once those assets are gone they are gone. The Government does not even know how much it will get for them but it is happy to pay $100 million or perhaps even more in fees to foreign advisers lawyers and accountants who are helping to sell them. 
Well I can think of a whole lot of better things to do with $100 million than that. I am thinking about getting more sick kids to the doctor. I am thinking about putting new technology and extra teachers in our schools. I am thinking about more science investment to tackle our agricultural carbon emissions. Spending $100 million for advice on selling assets we should not sell is not a plan. That is simply not a plan.  
 And how much is New Zealand going to get for these assets when we do sell them? Well the Government says the assets are somewhere in the region of $5 billion to $7 billion. That is a $2 billion difference. That is a lot of money. That could buy the rail link in Auckland Mr Joyce. You could pay for the difference by buying us a rail link. It might be chump change for the National Party but it represents what it is happy to risk at the bottom selling our assets at the bottom of a market. We are in just to remind you one of the most unstable economic environments since the Great Depression. None of us have lived in more testing times than these. The economic forecast is dire and in the midst of that we want to sell off our assets. Would anybody here want to sell their house at the bottom of the market when they do not have to? Of course not. 
Before the election National said it would delay the asset sales if the conditions were not right. But the day after the Ministers were signed in it announced that Mighty River Power was on the block—the day after. The global conditions are now worse than they were before but we are plunging ahead. Selling Mighty River Power will not create a cleaner greener New Zealand. It will not help families and communities. It will not help to make us a more inclusive New Zealand and that is why Labour will lead a campaign up and down this country against the sale of our assets. It is just ideology. It is not going to change New Zealand or make it a better place. This is no vision and it is no vision to help the 157000 people who are out of work at the moment and who could be in productive employment and paying taxes. They could be paying taxes and playing a real part in their own communities but they do not have the opportunity. This Government has no vision. On Treasury’s own figures more people will be out of work in 2014 than when National took office. That is a searing indictment. Six years on and unemployment will be up not down. There will be more people on the dole not fewer. 
I would like to make this clear pledge. If officials ever presented me with a set of projections that showed unemployment to be worse in 6 years I would change my policies; I would change my policies. Six years and it gets worse. That is failure and that is what failure looks like. That is a testament to a lack of ideas and the lack of a plan. 
I want to remind this House of some profound words I heard here recently about why we are in Parliament: “Once in office you have to do something and that is why having a plan matters.” It is very sage advice and it came from that side of the House. It came from Simon Power as he signed off from here. Those words are and they were words of warning to this Government. It is wrong just to drift. It is wrong just to drift as this country is doing at the moment under this Government. It is wrong to think you can take New Zealand forward without a vision for the New Zealand you are trying to create and therefore the Opposition has no confidence in the programme the Government has outlined. That is why I move an amendment as follows:  
That the following words be added to the motion: “and the National-led Government will sell New Zealand’s assets against the will of the public; the Government has no ideas to create jobs or a clean and innovative New Zealand; that the Government is widening the gap between the very rich and the rest and therefore this House has no confidence in the National-led government.” 
The National-led Government used to talk about its aspirations for New Zealand but those aspirations are now frail and feeble and I do not actually get to hear them much any more. Now what it aspires to is a low-wage New Zealand where opportunity goes to just a few. It used to say that our best and brightest would no longer need to leave New Zealand but people are leaving faster today than ever before. It used to talk about a step change but we have had a step back and that has been recognised because we have just been downgraded.  
We have never owed more as a country in our history and we have never had a Government ready to do less and create less than ever before. We must change. We must change. Labour as I said before will listen to good ideas. We will get behind policies that are right for New Zealand no matter who puts them forward. We will be constructive but we will oppose with all our energy those policies that will undermine a clean clever future and that weaken our families and our communities. 
We are all about to go on holiday and I sincerely wish you all the very best. Personally I will be spending much of that time hooking up with people in the pubs and the clubs and the camping grounds around the country. But I am planning a few days to head north to a beach that is very special to us for some fishing and some surfing. Sitting on a board waiting for that perfect wave to come—or probably in my case missing that perfect wave when it does come—and looking down into that clear water or back to those white beaches is magic. It is magic. I believe that there are places in New Zealand that everybody feels the same attachment to. We can all think of places that are special for us. 
But our beautiful places are not enough to hold our young people here. They are not enough to bring our talented people to come and live here. Yes they will visit but they will not stay. They need reward for hard work and creativity. Imagine a New Zealand that is not only green and unspoiled but home to creative ideas and world-leading technologies. Imagine a New Zealand known all over the world for smart thinking and for really smart businesses taking the world by storm. Imagine a New Zealand that is compassionate towards those who need a hand up that is independent and that makes up its own mind on global issues according to its values. That is the country that I want to live in. That is the country I would love to lead as the head of a Labour Government. That is why we need change. That is why we need to turn a new page. That is the change that the Labour Party stands for. Thank you.