Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well that was very ironic: a Government that's always telling New Zealanders to be kind but when they get their chance in the House they pour bile over the Opposition that's doing their job and trying to do its best for this country to have the opportunity for New Zealanders to get the best outcomes in a time when the country is facing a jobs crisis. In the last figures of the week to 21 August the country had 2717 people I believe join the unemployment benefit. They had lost their jobs and since March there's been about 75000 New Zealanders go on to benefits. That's 75000 households where somebody's lost their job. They're having to adjust to less income and the trauma of losing their job. This is a really difficult time for many New Zealanders and we're also at the same time seeing continued pressure on rental house prices a lot of it due to the regulations that have been passed by this Government narrowing the supply of rental houses. They watch and they see the fiasco that was KiwiBuild that has delivered fewer houses than the Prime Minister has stopped being built at Ihumātao by her ill-advised adventure there which we still haven't heard the answer to. Grant Robertson was supposed to have had fixed that. Here we are. We know that New Zealand First in their inimitable way have stopped anything happening there but the landowner at Ihumātao hasn't been able to do anything with their land for more than a year now the houses haven't been built and it's just another element of the story of this Government: big on rhetoric big on talk and very slow on delivery. So there's a lack of jobs there's a lack of housing rental stock and we've got a slowing economy. Now at lot of that is due to the COVID crisis that we're seeing around the world but it is an undisputable fact that the economy was slowing before COVID came in. It is also an undisputable fact that this Government inherited colossal surpluses from the previous National Government and within two years have burnt through the lot and were projecting a deficit before the COVID-19 crisis came along. They were already projecting a deficit and now we've got colossal deficits and we'll be looking at debt going up perhaps $140 billion. We'll wait and see what the PREFU—the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update—from the Treasury says as to whether that debt will be higher. Certainly that debt has been made worse by the yo-yoing back into lockdown that we've all experienced over the last few weeks. Look nobody has complete control over a virus of course and of course there's always the risk of the virus getting in but the critical thing is for a Government to do everything it can to reduce the risk of that happening and to be swift in their response. All New Zealanders were shocked to learn that the testing wasn't being done at the border facilities and that gave us a greater risk of the virus getting back and getting out into the community. We've seen time and time again the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. We've seen the Minister standing up saying that We are the single source of truth." at conferences and that has not been borne out as we've seen with all sorts of muddles around testing all over Auckland over the weekend. Then today we've had this issue of the quality of the spending because the Government has got the firehose out. It's spending as much as it possibly can borrowing $1.3 billion a week on average for the rest of the year and some of that spending is required. Of course at a time of crisis like this we do increase Government spending in order to stimulate demand and to help people get through a difficult time but everyone wants to know that this money is being spent based on need and efficiently and what we've seen over this saga with the Green School has shocked many of us. What we've seen as it appears from the emails that were published on Newshub last night is that the Associate Minister of Finance Mr Shaw said "I'm not going to sign off on these projects unless you include my project." and then we had Minister Hipkins saying "Oh well yes that was the Greens getting a win from this fund." So that perfectly encapsulates how this Government works. It gets a big sum of money—a $3 billion fund; it's the second $3 billion slush fund—and it says "OK coalition partners here's some for the Greens here's some for New Zealand First here's some for Labour. Here are your wins and we'll divide it up depending on which Government party gets the win." And then they have the temerity and the guile to come out and say "There's no politics in COVID—no none whatsoever." and yet the decisions made about this Government's spending have been based on divvying up that money for political purposes. That I think is something that is going to be emerging over the next few days and it will be of great concern to New Zealanders at a time when we've lost so many jobs already."