Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well I certainly rise in support of that question and I just want to give a tip to the Labour backbenchers. You could see in a Stalin-esque way that they weren't sure when to stop clapping. Let me clue them in: 14 October is when the show stops after that performance by your excuse for a Prime Minister Labour Party. I say to that Prime Minister that it's quite extraordinary how he forgets who he is and who's been in Government for the last six years. There was a period there where he said I want a New Zealand where people can get ahead where it's fair and where everyone has dignity." Well actually we all want that. The difference is Chris Hipkins is the one who's been in Government with Grant Robertson for the last six years creating the problems that we have today. The Labour Party likes to say "Why can't everyone just be positive? We're doing our best. It's a good job." Well maybe he should have a look at what New Zealanders are saying. Since June last year every single reputable public opinion poll has the majority of New Zealanders saying that this country is going in the wrong direction and in the latest Curia poll by two to one. So when this Government from Labour says "Let's be positive." what they're saying is that "We have never been more out of touch as a Labour Government." and that is why 14 October is judgment day and 15 October will be retirement day for all of those Labour backbenchers who don't know when to clap. This Budget should be named the "blow-out Budget" because really just for a moment—just for a moment—I almost believed Grant Robertson when he said he was going to be responsible and get spending under control. I thought that Grant Robertson after he said he was going to spend $4 billion will at least try and be a little bit responsible so that we can get inflation under control so that mortgage rates can come down and so that life can be more affordable. Surely Grant Robertson would try and be a little bit more responsible. But oh no this is a reckless irresponsible "blow-out Budget" with $7.5 billion worth of deficit spending next year that will put all of this Government's attempts to help with the cost of living in the shade.The ACT Party predicts that with this massive blowout of borrowed money mortgage rates will hit 10 percent next year on the floating rates and that's going to put pressure not just on people that have mortgages but on businesses and people that buy from them and on tenants who rent off landlords that also have mortgages. Adrian Orr will have been saying things in his office at the Reserve Bank that I'm not allowed to say in this House when he realises how irresponsible Grant Robertson is with his spending. The problem with Grant Robertson is that he just doesn't listen even to Chris Hipkins because Chris Hipkins knows the problem. He said that it isn't right for people to be tightening their belts if the Government won't do the same. Well we're now going to see people up and down this country tightening their belts trying to make their household budgets balance because Grant Robertson can't tighten his. His deficit spending is going to shoot inflation and mortgage rates through the roof and he'll come back and say "Oh but the Treasury says inflation will go down." This is the same Treasury that two years ago said inflation would be 1.8 percent. This is the same Treasury that said last year that it would be 5.2 percent and it's now 6.7 percent. So when Treasury says that inflation next year will be 6.3 percent it's going to be higher and when they say the official cash rate is going to be 5.5 or 6 percent it's going to be higher. This is all the symptom of a Government that has run out of excuses. Excuses are the one thing that Grant Robertson has more than anything of. He's got even more excuses than he's got deficit dollars to spend. You see Grant Robertson blamed COVID. Well I'm sorry; it's officially over—the world moved on over a year ago now. Then he blamed Vladimir Putin and I can understand that as a political tactic because he's an extremely bad man. But the facts are that the oil price is now lower than it was before Putin started his war so that excuse is gone. And then perhaps most shamefully he tried to use the victims of the floods and cyclones as an excuse for his endless addiction to spending other people's money. Well I'm sorry but in this Budget there's $7 billion of borrowing and only $1 billion of extra spending for the cyclone and the floods; in fact it's not even that. There's about $900 million of new spending to help people who in many cases have lost everything and still have no certainty about what that rebuild will look like.So this is a Government that's running out of other people's money it's running out of excuses it's running out of options and it's going to do a huge amount of damage in the process. One day people will write the history of Grant Robertson and he's no Caesar. What they will write is: "He came he borrowed he bankrupted all of us." That's what Grant Robertson will be remembered for.There are reasons why people think that this country is going in the wrong direction by a ratio of two to one and the reasons are all about us. I apologise to many people in the country but I'm an Aucklander. I watch the news in my city and every day it's like a competition for a more grotesque crime. We saw it just yesterday. Somebody was brutally beaten on Quay Street outside the Ports of Auckland where the ships dock and tourists have their entrée to our country—disgraceful. A day before that a 15-year-old teenage girl was shot in a road-rage incident on an Auckland motorway—you can't make this stuff up. Sometimes I wonder if we're talking about Māngere or Manukau or Mount Albert or Mogadishu when we hear about the crime in our country and yet what is there in this Budget from this Labour Government to make the streets safer? It's almost as though it's not happening. They wonder why they're saying "Be positive everybody." and yet the people look at them and ask "What planet is this Labour Government on?" "Planet Out-of-Touch" is the planet that they're on. What about healthcare? This is the problem with Labour's spending addiction. I wouldn't mind the fact that they're spending 61 percent more this year than they were spending five years ago when they came into Government I wouldn't mind the fact that their total spending will be up 80 percent in six years I wouldn't mind the fact they have borrowed over $100 billion in five years and I wouldn't mind the fact that they are taxing more than ever if only they were getting some results. But where are those results? Well we've just heard it's not in making the streets safer—victimisation is up in nearly every category—and think about what that means for New Zealanders. Think about the people who I regard as some of the greatest New Zealanders who work long hours for little pay in dairies and convenience stores. They often have their family living behind or above their store. They are there after hours when it's dark and they don't know where the next robbery or ram raid is going to hit. They don't know if it's going to be their place. They don't know if any support will come so they are starting to fight back. That's what the lawlessness looks like—it looks like we are seeing vigilante justice. The other day in Auckland I saw a group of people who actually locked a criminal inside their liquor store because the Government has given up on locking them into prisons. That's what happens when the Government gives up upholding the law—people take the law into their own hands. But what about health? You know there's been a 68 percent increase in healthcare expenditure in five years. That's the basic facts—$18 billion in 2017 $28 billion now—and this is post-COVID. We can't blame everything on COVID remember—that's the new rule for this debate. We don't want to hear Labour blaming something that happened two years ago. You know they used to blame the previous Government—they're always blaming something that happened that's no longer relevant. But $18 billion five years ago now $28 billion in healthcare expenditure—a 68 percent increase in expenditure on healthcare. If you were the Minister of Health in 2017 and someone had said "We're going to give you a 68 percent increase in budget in five years—another $10 billion to play with—do you think maybe you could get the hospital waiting lists a little shorter? Do you think you could get some more people to want to be GPs? Do you think you could get nurses happy in the workplace again?" I mean with just $10 billion a year would that do it—a 68 percent increase in expenditure? I think any sane Minister of Health would say "Oh yes I think that will be enough." Well they got the $10 billion a year they got the 68 percent increase in expenditure and what did they do? They decided to blow up the healthcare system and restructure it in the middle of a pandemic. They decided to rebuild our healthcare system around the ideology of identity politics instead of the practicality of getting the operations done and the patients seen and the workforce happy in their jobs again. The result of that is a 68 percent increase in healthcare expenditure and nobody is happy.What about education? Well sadly it's a similar story. We've seen the education budget go from $14 billion to $18 billion a 38 percent increase in healthcare expenditure and yet we have fewer kids going to school and learning less when they do. Once again we have a Government that has put the ideology of identity politics well ahead of the practicality of transferring valuable academic knowledge to the next generation.Now it might surprise members to know but I'm a bit of an old leftie when it comes to these things. I simply believe that people in this society or in any free and fair society around the world should have a place where their kids can go where they will be safe from bullying and violence and where an adult they regard as respected and knowledgeable will transfer valuable academic knowledge that will equip them to navigate their future. That's what I believe. That's what the ACT Party believes. It's one of the reasons the ACT Party was founded out of Labour and yet where is the Labour Party on this question? They don't even know how many kids went to school and when they get there they're filled with ideological gobbledegook—anything but the facts of life and academia and reading and writing and arithmetic which will actually get them able to navigate the 21st century.In fact it's so bad that in the last 20 years we have been overtaken by Russia at 10-year-olds' reading scores. Just think about that for a moment: children growing up under a corrupt megalomaniacal dictator called Vladimir Putin are getting better reading lessons than children growing up under John Key and Jacinda Ardern. That is how bad things are in education and yet we do not have a commitment from this Government in this Budget to actually get back to teaching kids valuable academic knowledge without the ideological gobbledegook. In fact we've got a commitment to more ideological gobbledegook and the results for those kids that don't get the valuable academic knowledge they need for their future are absolutely devastating. Then there's the cost of living. People don't like to talk about the cost of living because they're embarrassed that they work hard and they often lack the dignity to be able to make ends meet each week. People in that circumstance—they still tell me things occasionally. They say "You know what? My front two tyres failed the warrant. It's 200 bucks a corner. Now I've got to balance my household budget for the next 12 weeks"—the next six pay days—"until I get back on an even keel and I hope nothing happens like that again." Then there are people who are worried about the uncertainty. A young couple who bought a small house together when they had children have now decided that they've saved and paid off enough of their mortgage. They've got some equity. They're thinking about buying a bigger house that has a bedroom for each of their kids and they're thinking maybe at a stretch they could keep their older smaller unit and maybe use that as an investment for their retirement. Do you think they're going to be doing that now after this reckless and irresponsible inflationary Budget that will push up mortgage rates when they've got a Labour Party that's now going to campaign on introducing capital taxes that will whack them if their investment works out? Of course they're not.Then you hear from people in small business—restaurateurs—who say "All our prices are up. We can't afford to pay our staff any more. They can't afford to drive to work. I've been slipping them petrol vouchers under the table so that they can afford to get in to work and do the job to keep my business running where if I raise my prices any more I lose my customers." That is the inflationary cost of living crisis that is really a productivity crisis that has left New Zealanders by two to one saying that this country is going in the wrong direction.But there is actually an alternative and it doesn't come from the National Party. It doesn't come from telling people that if you vote for us then we will send you a tax receipt in the mail—like it's 1997—to tell you how much you have been paying in tax. People already know they're paying too much tax and the ACT Party is proud that we have published a fully costed alternative Budget that would cut out Government waste invest in the areas that matter and get this country flying again.This alternative Budget reduces expenditure by $38 billion over four years and we do that without touching a single front-line service—not one cop not one teacher not one nurse not one doctor. In fact as I come to it we will pay some of them even more and how do we do that? Well it's pretty simple. We're going to reduce expenditure by $8 billion a year but we're doing that in the context of a Government that has increased its expenditure by $49 billion. We are offering to take about $1 in $5 of this Government's extra spending and give it back to you in tax cuts because I just so happen to believe that a Government as wasteful as this one could spend $1 less than $5 and give it back to the people who are struggling at home. That's what our alternative Budget does.But actually it doesn't give all of that extra dollar back; it invests some of it in critical areas. You see there are some areas where the Government doesn't spend enough. It's too hard to get into a GP—we don't have enough of them. Young graduates aren't choosing the GP specialisation. We have GPs giving up and retiring or not working the full week. We have GPs moving to Australia where they get paid more and as a result of that the average Aussie shares their GP with 574 other Australians and the average Kiwi shares their GP with 820 other Kiwis. So if you wonder why it's hard to get in we don't have enough of them. That's why the ACT Party would increase GP capitation fees by 13 percent so that it's more attractive to be a GP and so that fewer will quit more will train fewer will leave and more will come to be GPs in this country and you might have a chance of actually getting seen—and yes that will save money throughout the secondary and tertiary healthcare systems. In this country we have taken defence for granted for far too long. We don't live in Helen Clark's benign strategic environment and that's why ACT's alternative Budget would increase defence expenditure to 2 percent of GDP so that we can play our part and pull our weight in a fully interoperable ANZAC defence force to send a credible message to the rest of the world to back out of the South Pacific.The biggest public policy failure in the last 30 years has been the failure to fund the infrastructure to build the homes so that the next generation can truly feel like they have a place in this country—not Australia—unlike our Prime Minister who celebrates New Zealanders being able to move to Aussie and get a passport in another country. This alternative Budget would take $1.2 billion a year and give it to councils to fund the infrastructure so the next generation can build their homes. When it comes to that almost—how do you even describe it? You know what the streets of Auckland are like: it's like that scene in The Lion King when Simba returns and the hyenas are running it. We've got to get serious about justice. We've got to stop the tag-and-release policy where youth offenders just go in and out and in and out of prison. We need to start locking people up who have no other option and rehabilitating them and not letting them out until they do. For that reason in ACT's alternative Budget we take corrections for youth out of Oranga Tamariki put them into the corrections system and put some of these youth offenders—perhaps for the first time in their life—in a place where they have the mental health support the physical safety the nutrition and the education. But we also make it clear that they've done wrong and they can't leave until they've been rehabilitated. We'd do the same thing for adult prisoners. Labour's experiment of letting 2000 or 3000 people out of prison to see what happens to crime is complete. The jury is in: New Zealand becomes lawless and it's not safe for many people to go about their lives. We will end that experiment and fund the imprisonment rates that we had in 2017 then start rehabilitating people and not letting them out to see how much crime there is. With all of that we are able to cut taxes so someone—say a nurse on 70 grand—would keep another $2300 a year. That is what a responsible Budget would look like: back in surplus cutting waste funding the basics and cutting taxes where possible.There is a real choice for New Zealand and it's not between Chris and Chris because it turns out that's not much of a choice at all. The real choice is one of real change: to give your party vote to the ACT Party and choose a future for New Zealand where we truly become a prosperous First World nation and an island paradise which has always been New Zealand's dream and ACT's vision for our country. Thank you Mr Speaker."