Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. I want to join with the Minister actually in acknowledging the people of Auckland and in supporting the vaccine message. I'm not sure that the people of Auckland would so fondly acknowledge the Government and their ham-fisted response to the COVID outbreak.I've been reflecting. In my 25 years as a rugby referee I often refereed games where teams were ahead and then fell behind in the last 10 or 12 minutes of the game to run around in a frantic frenzy to try and play catch-up. I would reflect that if they had that level of intensity through the 80 minutes of the game maybe they wouldn't have found themselves in that situation. I think that's analogous to this Government because they were cruising early in the second half of the COVID game. They thought they were best in class. They thought they didn't need to worry about getting vaccine rates up sooner. In fact they went from front of the queue to Oh other countries need it more." and then they found themselves behind on the scoreboard and they were scrambling.Well they were scrambling without a plan: no plan to open up no plan to get our primary and intermediate kids back to school no plan to ramp up our health system no plan to roll out rapid antigen testing no plan to use technology to track and trace no plan to use electronic vaccine monitoring and certainly no plan to recover this economy. Well National has a plan and I was proud to be part of the team that launched Back in Business this morning National's plan to save lives and livelihoods and unleash our economy. That plan increases support for workers and businesses and it reduces spending by Government.The Minister of Finance in question time today just couldn't believe that was possible. Well those rumours about how bad he was at maths at King's High School in Dunedin are clearly true because one of the things you do firstly in order to reduce spending is to reduce the impact of a lockdown. Get business back to work sooner so they can rely on their own merits not on Government support. The second thing is to stop spending money on dumb stuff and on things that are completely unrelated to COVID. This Government has used COVID as the cloak for profligate spending on things that have tenuous or no links to the outbreak. We've gone through them before in this House: three waters cameras on fishing boats wallaby control money for RNZ to compensate for lost revenue that they hadn't actually lost.Yesterday thanks to Newsroom we had this classic revelation that funding for the arts out of COVID is even disliked by the arts sector shocked by half a million dollars to fund a match-making book site that's "headed by an American wedding celebrant with close to zero knowledge of New Zealand literature [who] has been given a massive $500000 grant from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage to 'help Aotearoa audiences access books'." I'd like to quote some of the people in that article but I'm afraid that they use language that I can't use in this House.So the simple arithmetic is this: stop spending other people's money on dumb stuff because this Government thinks it knows how to spend Kiwis' money better than Kiwis do. Let's give them the chance to get back into business to open up properly to get dining out in the open to use the vouchers that we would give them to spend the tax-break money that we would give them and to get back to normal. Yes vaccine rates are important. Vaccine rates are our ticket out of here and if the Government hadn't mucked around all winter we would be in a much better place. But I'm still confident and National is still confident that we can do that in order that we can open up before Christmas.I should say that Mr Robertson in criticising our opening up plan that was launched three weeks ago said "Oh well there's National. They're going to give people COVID for Christmas." Well under this Government they didn't need to wait for Christmas to get COVID; the Government gave it to them during the October school holidays. There is a better way and it involves much more energy. We're now in the last 10 minutes of the game and thanks to the Government's complacency we are behind on the scoreboard. I'm confident we can get back to business. We can open business up. We can get them to stand on their own feet. We can save jobs. We can save livelihoods. We can improve their mental health. They just need a Government that cares and that isn't this one."