English Bill: General Debate 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:15937] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. I want to take members through some of the highlights of the Labour Government last week. It started with the shock announcement of 29000 job losses and an even more shocking statement by Ruth Dyson the Minister of Social Development and Employment that 29000 shock job losses was “not bad news”. I suppose it was not except for the 29000 people who lost their jobs. Then there was the knee-jerk back-down on the emissions trading scheme. The Labour Government gave away its main sustainability platform just last week amid anger from its core support base in Maoridom that the emissions trading scheme would knock hundreds of millions of dollars off the value of assets they had received as Treaty settlements. And that is in only a couple of days. Then there is the prospect that the Government is losing the support of its coalition partners which are just busting to break ranks on unpopular legislation so that they can survive the election. And then we saw in the last few days the competent best-ever managerially brilliant politicians in the Labour Government scrambling over revelations of a cover-up of an immigration scam it has known about for 3 years that implicates three or four of its Ministers and has one of its members in front of the courts on corruption charges. And apparently everything is going fine! 
The only good thing is that Helen Clark has left the country to leave Michael Cullen to face the music on a Government in meltdown. But those are only the small details of what has gone wrong. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: The train set. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Oh I forgot. There is the revelation that it will cost taxpayers several hundred millions more to buy a train company that we did not need to buy because the Minister of Finance either was deceitful and did not tell us the numbers or was incompetent because he did not know the numbers. But who cares? It is only a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money and what is a few hundred million dollars between Dr Cullen and his new friend Paul Little who has walked all over us and added a quarter of a billion dollars to the Australian shareholders in the rail company because Dr Cullen says that he does not want to pay them a subsidy? 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: The cupboard will be bare. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: The cupboard will be bare. But the worst news is this. Last night the Australian Government racked up competition for the talent of every New Zealander with any aspiration by locking in tax cuts—3 more years of tax cuts after 5 years of tax cuts that have already been put in place. Do members know what else it did? It locked in 3 years of tax cuts to the value of $31 billion and then it added a fourth year of a further $15 billion to its already 3-year tax cut programme. 
What has little old New Zealand been doing? It has been lying around on the beach sunning itself while Dr Cullen composes his brilliantly anguished speeches about why he has to give tax cuts. But the social democrat in him means that he will do it in a way that guarantees he loses the election because then he can feel morally justified about making working New Zealanders go 10 years with no tax cuts while Australian workers are getting 8 years of tax cuts and another one added on to the end of it which is bigger than anything they have had before. That is the difference. 
So it is true. Australia wants New Zealanders working in Australia more than the Labour Government wants New Zealanders working here. Dr Cullen has this bizarre analysis that somehow we solve New Zealand’s literacy and numeracy problem by exporting people to Australia. He says that the ones who go are functionally innumerate. That is how he describes them. So the ones who cannot count leave the place—apparently; according to Labour—to go to a Government that is competing vigorously for our talent.