Goldsmith Paul: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoldsmith Paul: General Debate[Sitting date: 04 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13254. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): What an unedifying spectacle we have before us watching the three candidates from Labour—Cunliffe Robertson and Jones—crawling all over each other to offer more to their mates. The unions will be happy but the rest of New Zealand will be wondering who is going to foot the bill. It is a lolly scramble said John Armstrong in theNew Zealand Herald this morning and I found myself agreeing with him.So what are they going to do? They are going to immediately lift the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Well that is up 9 percent on the current minimum wage. On top of that the privileged Government workers—I have not quite worked out why Government workers need to be so much more privileged—are going to have their wages lifted up to $18.40 an hour. That is a 34 percent increase on the minimum wage tomorrow. Is that not wonderful? That is up by a third. It is going up faster than the Auckland rates. Now all you have to do is vote for Cunliffe and vote for Robertson and your wage magically goes up by 34 percent. I wonder who amongst them is going to commit that they would reject any cascade of relativity agreements about this. The people who are currently earning $18.40 an hour will think “OK well it’s gone up so we should go up to $22.” and the people earning $22 an hour will think “Well that’s not fair. Mine should go up to $26.” And what about the Public Service Association members working for the Government who are earning $100000 a year? They will be asking: “Well theirs have gone up 34 percent. Why shouldn’t mine go up 34 percent?”—and so on and so on. Where will it end?You have to go back to 1985 to see such a reckless inflationary piece of public policy put on this country. I think it was Stan Rodger and David Lange—the lady there in charge of the health policy in Labour these days Annette King was in Parliament back then and Phil Goff but nobody else was around since we have had such a reckless inflationary piece of public policy put on the parchment as what we are talking about here. We expect it from Mr Robertson. He is a public sector union man through and through. He is all about spending and redistributing money not about earning it. But I am surprised that we see it from Cunliffe a man with some business experience.David Cunliffe theQuade Cooper of New Zealand politics should know better. He should know that you cannot pass off this kind of thing as costing $20 million when we know that it could be $2.5 billion which is our expectation of the increase in minimum wages if they are going to give everybody who happens to work for Parliament a minimum wage of $18.40. Why would they do that? It is not as if we do not have very very generous redistribution arrangements with Working for Families so that anybody on the minimum wage with dependent children in New Zealand receives credits rather than tax and gets a significant boost from the rest of New Zealand.It is very worrying watching this lolly scramble that we are seeing on the other side because it reflects a world where by magic wages can be put up and where by magic Mr Jones can walk into the supermarket and reduce the cost of food everywhere bydealing with the so-called duopolies. I do not want that man anywhere near my chickens. It is all about pandering to the entitlement culture that bedevils New Zealand. This is the truth. New Zealand as a nation is not entitled to anything. We are not entitled to any standard of living other than what we go out and earn. We have to earn our way. The Government must manage its finances it must operate its Public Service in a way that is focused on results not just spend money for the sake of it and it must focus on building a more productive and competitive economy. That is what National is doing and that is why it continues to enjoy such success and why it is making great progress to get us back to surplus and to get this country growing effectively—so much more effectively than so many other countries in the OECD.We are living in a golden age right now notwithstanding the terrible events in Syria that the previous speaker Dr Kennedy Graham alluded to. When we look around our region we see India and we see China growing; hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty as we speak. They are looking for products. They are looking for the sorts of things that New Zealand produces. This is a wonderful time to be living in New Zealand and it is a very positive time for this country but we have to grasp it. We need to reward enterprise we need to celebrate entrepreneurship and we certainly do not hear any of that from the Labour Party. Instead we have a parade of dinosaurs pandering to the insular unrealistic entitlement culture that is holding us back as a country and it is time we heard the end of it. Thank you.