Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in reply to Her Majesty's speech. I want to acknowledge my fellow MPs both new and old; and fellow party leaders; and Marama Davidson for saying I'd be pleased to have some friends in the House. I want to tell Marama Davidson I've always had friends in this House but now I've got nine I actually agree with. I also want to acknowledge those people who sent us here. To my neighbours in the Epsom electorate who sent me here for a third time it's a great honour to represent you and my first job has always been to serve as your local constituency MP. To the 219031 New Zealanders who gave their party vote to ACT my fellow ACT MPs—welcome folks—will be your voice in this Parliament standing for those who want to make a difference in their own lives and the lives of those they care about not be fodder for politicians and the grand Government schemes of which we've heard so much today already.We're proud ACT MPs to stand and speak freely in this House. We're proud New Zealanders to be part of a country that just elected its 53rd Parliament freely and peacefully in 166 years. Pitifully few countries can come close to—let alone match—that record. And unfortunately while we cherish our democracy at home it is in retreat abroad. I was born in 1983. Mr Speaker hello. It won't be lost on you that you were nearly sitting in this House by that time. The first thing I recall seeing on television besides Play School was people attacking a wall covered in graffiti. Sometimes you just know something's important even if you're not sure what it is. And those images are seared on my mind. And we celebrated for two decades the fall of that wall in Berlin. Fukuyama said it was the end of history. Helen Clark said that we lived in a benign strategic environment. That was then; fast forward today and we watch the walls go back up around Hong Kong.These are just anecdotes but there's many to count. And Freedom House who have been counting these things for decades tell us that since the great financial crisis democracy has been in decline around the world. Fewer countries practise it now than they did 12 years ago and those that do are taking it less seriously than they used to. Too many people around the world decide that democracy is not working for them and they elect populists and strongmen. Sometimes it's quite amusing. The Italians at one point decided to elect a comedian; or my personal favourite the Ukrainians who took up an actor who played a fictional president in a television drama and made them their actual president. It's less funny when we remember the iron law of international relations: that the strong do as they can while the weak suffer as they must. We as a small island democracy cannot afford to ignore this trend that is unfolding around the world. And the question we must ask is why? Why after a resurgence of democracy after the Cold War do people turn away from it? Well there's lots of theories. The internet circulates fake information probably. Globalisation creates winners and losers sure. The Russians are interfering in our elections. The media are dying. And so it goes on. But I've got a better answer which is that democratic Governments just are not solving hard problems for their people. The big promise of Western Governments for the last 80 years has been: give us a third to half your income. Let us regulate all the property we haven't taxed off you and we'll solve your problems. People look around the world and they see that it just ain't happening. They see productivity growth is in the tank. We just aren't working smarter year on year. Some people around the world find their wages go backwards. We spend more time each year trying to follow the Government's rules and regulations and less time providing for ourselves and our families.Demographics are horrible. We're set up for a Millennial-Boomer civil war. It's hard for younger people to share the boomers' optimism when they can't afford a home and their taxes are paying for their retirement. And the welfare State that we're in simply does not work when you have an underclass failed by State education and trapped by State welfare. People look at these results and they no longer see shining cities on the hill but seek other much more dangerous models. And this matters not only for our security as a small island nation but because we have the same problems. I start my Address in Reply speech with this observation because New Zealand needs to ask what it can do to change this world that is perilous for us. There are not enough of us to change the world by force but we have always been an exceptional nation: children of pioneers people who have travelled further for a better tomorrow than any humans have ever migrated in history a people who can set by the power of example great change off around the world. That's what the ACT Party seeks to do in this Parliament. The problem that we have is that right now our Government does not offer positive practical solutions to our problems. We are not seeking to be a beacon of light that can actually save freedom and democracy from our place at the bottom of the Earth. Instead we have our own brand of South Pacific populism powered by smiles and slogans.The COVID period shows a laundry list of Government failing to act efficiently. No country entered the COVID period with better advantages than us. There's a few countries that are more remote. There's some with a younger more spread-out population. There's some that are more sophisticated have more wealth and institutions and better healthcare. But no country had the combination of advantages with which New Zealand entered the COVID period. We were told that we went hard and went early when we were the 63rd country to get a case. We were told the policy was test test test when in truth the Government could test only 1500 a day. We were told that there was no shortage of personal protective equipment when health professionals including those I represent in Epsom were on TV every night saying they had none in their hospital. We were told to be kind while absurd rules separated fathers from seeing their firstborn and even wives from being supported as they miscarried with their supporters outside pacing in the car park. We were told it was illegal to go out when no legal instrument requiring that existed. We were told butchers and greengrocers were dangerous places but you couldn't catch COVID at a dairy. I have constituents who were told they cannot return to say goodbye to dying loved ones because it's for the public good and yet the Minister of Health said testing the people who work at the border for COVID was a big lever to pull".We're told the Government's contact tracing app will help isolate any outbreaks and yet so few people use it as to render it completely ineffectual. And so it goes on. At every turn the Government's COVID response has looked like Dad's Army saved only by our isolation and the spirit of our people. And this matters because we're about to enter what might be called COVID 2 the vaccine edition. This month the giants of the pharmaceutical industry have put their reputations on the line saying they're going to deliver 90 percent - plus effective vaccines by the million within months. How will New Zealand navigate COVID 2? Will it be the same hapless approach that we took last time? Will we say our approach to risk is that we won't take any under any circumstances? Will the Government decision-making remain murky and unpredictable with businesses forced to just guess what might happen next? That can't be the best we can do. Imagine if the Government took an open transparent and proactive approach to managing the COVID world where there is a vaccine. Imagine if it published scenarios to answer questions such as when do they expect the vaccine? How will it be distributed and applied and under what circumstances will we start opening borders and to which countries first based on the risk that they pose? The world is about to drastically change and the Government hasn't even tried to communicate how we will change with it. Yet again there's no briefing paper there's no scenarios set out. We're flying blind and not only is it an injury to business but it's an insult because you get the feeling they think they're popular enough that they don't need to say. Then there's the economic management. The IMF forecasts that our incomes will be lower in 2025 than in 2019 per capita. That's extraordinary. The Government will spend nearly half of all money earned in New Zealand this year. Then there's the debt problem. Make no mistake we squandered our natural advantages in the COVID period and mortgaged our future to boot. This can't be as good as it gets. Imagine if we were truly world leading instead of just a bit lucky. The ACT Party says that it's not too late to follow those who have done well. We should follow Taiwan in having an epidemic response unit a specialist multidisciplinary public and private sector collaboration to make sure that we are actually responding intelligently. We should have Government's role as being a referee setting the rules and making sure they're followed rather than trying to do everything itself—and badly. We should take a proactive approach to managing risk. Right now we isolate people from COVID-ridden countries with the same criteria right beside people coming from countries that have no COVID whatsoever. We could use better technology but unfortunately we are virtually technophobic at a Government level and have that hopeless tracing app that is beyond ineffective. Finally we should compare ourselves with the best. We should stop living in a state of State-induced fear. We should instead be saying to people "How can we be the best in the world?" not "Aren't you lucky you're not the worst?" Will we transform our approach from getting lucky to getting smart in COVID too? Well that is up to the Government but our role in this Parliament as an Opposition party is to make helpful suggestions where possible and make constructive criticisms when necessary.But COVID is something that thankfully if nothing else will pass. The longer-term problems that the entire West faces are things like productivity. The real miracle is not that we have anaemic productivity growth in New Zealand but that anything gets produced at all in light of Government policy. I know there's some people who think productivity growth doesn't matter. Well it matters to so many people. Let me pick one: Bella Powell the brave 15-year-old with cystic fibrosis who needs drugs that are funded overseas but not here. Ultimately it's a productivity issue. I hope the Prime Minister and this Government will keep their campaign trail promise to do a proper review of the rules of Pharmac in Government—very pleased to see them take it up. But ultimately if we don't have the funds then no funding model will fund the drugs that the Bellas of the world need. You know employers I've always regarded as good people. They assemble investment ideas and products and customers together to create for people jobs. You might think that's something that a Government would encourage; yet this Government treats employers like a cash cow for carrying out the social policies they fantasised about as student politicians. Minimum wage increases beyond productivity growth are only going to destroy jobs. Five more days of sick leave for no obvious policy reason other than to reward people who might vote for the Government at the expense of people I suspect they cynically think won't. A new public holiday for purely political reasons. [Interruption] As a young man who runs a very successful ice cream shop in Christchurch—Duncan Webb will be interested to know—recently said to me "The cost of those policies will be $150000 to $200000 for our business." That man said to the Prime Minister herself would she like to have him employ fewer people or raise prices sell less and employ fewer people? That's the reality for these businesses.Now the Government wants to bring back 1970s-style national awards. They want unions to negotiate with a national employer group to set wages for a whole industry for the whole country regardless of who it is or what work exactly or whatever. The first problem they've got is there's no national employer group to negotiate with. The second is that this is not actually the 1970s. The economy is vastly more complex and jobs more variable than they were then. But the third problem is that the national awards scheme didn't work then either. That's why we got rid of it—because we were struggling under the weight of the bureaucracy and the inefficiency of that archaic scheme.Then they tell us they want to raise income tax and the most interesting thing about the Government's messaging around the income tax raise is they say it will only affect a small percentage of people. Well hang on. Since when was it OK to pick on people if there aren't very many of them? Well the funny thing is this Government is happy to pick on people so long as they are doing something so long as they are successful. The values it sends—no wonder we've got a productivity problem. We tell our kids to study hard and listen to their teacher do their homework get good grades and turn that into jobs that turn into careers that make them prosper in the long term and what this Government says if you do all that and you save some money and you invest it carefully—if you do all of that then we won't just tax you more; we'll have an extra tax rate to tax you even harder. It's tall poppy syndrome in the tax code. That is the values that this Government promotes and that's one of the reasons we have a productivity problem. Then they go after the sectors. You know farmers in rural New Zealand are the only people who have a job that is to be a conservationist. Their revenue and their income next year depends on how well they look after their land and their animals this year. They have local rules and community cooperation to deal with local problems and manage outliers and it works. But oh no this Government comes along and from on high imposes rules that are unworkable that have never passed cost-benefit analysis and that will put cost on to the rural sector for almost no environmental benefit whatsoever.Then there's energy and resources. This Government seems to be determined to stop New Zealanders extracting natural resources—unless they do it in Australia. The announcement that the oil and gas exploration will be banned will not reduce carbon emissions but it sends a signal. No papers no consultation not even a Cabinet process—just "We're at the podium"-ocracy and "We're going to do it from the podium". That sends a signal to the world about what sort of place New Zealand is to invest. So much of our valuable minerals lie tied up in the Department of Conservation estate—areas of no conservation value that could be extracted—while DOC itself is short of revenue to conserve the parts of its estate that it should be conserving. It's nuts. As for getting permission from the Environmental Protection Authority for relatively straightforward projects forget it. Go try your luck in Australia.Then there's our global links. What about the next generation who want jobs that are interesting globally connected and well paying? Well there's foreign investors who want to send money and know-how to our country to help raise our productivity. It beggars belief but oh no we've got a special Government department to stop them doing it called the Overseas Investment Office. What's worse this Government in the middle of COVID when it says it wants a recovery has actually erected more barriers to foreign investment under the fog of COVID-19.Then there's new technology. I have students come to me saying we can do amazing things with genetics. We can actually make cows that emit less methane a useful thing for New Zealand. But oh no our medieval and superstitious laws mean as soon as they want to take it out of the lab they'd be better to take themselves off to California. And you can tell the same story about financial technology. We are so hostile to technologies that would raise our productivity it's no wonder we are anaemic and lacking in them. This can't be as good as it gets. But imagine if we made productivity growth one of our main goals—not saying "Oh we've got other measures wellbeing etc."—if we said we actually want to raise productivity in this country. What if we had a regulatory responsibility bill that forced politicians to ask the questions: what problem are we trying to solve what are the costs and benefits of this law who pays the cost and receives the benefits? Imagine if we started doing that how much better the regulatory environment would be for investment jobs and growth in this country.And we should go further. We should say that investments originating in friendly democratic OECD countries needn't pass through the Overseas Investment Office; they need only be screened to check for their security status. Imagine if we set out the friendliest environment in the world for investment jobs and growth.But then there's housing. This Government was elected to solve the housing problem. I actually thought the Government might change in 2017 when I knocked on so many doors and people said "I love the way the housing market's going except I've got these kids and I don't know how it's going to go for them." I recently saw a tweet that summed up how that's worked out three years later. It said "The working class they asked 'Can you make housing affordable?' National Party: no. Labour Party: no heart emoji rainbow emoji aroha." That pretty much sums up the response that people have got. The Government's flagship policy of KiwiBuild was so embarrassing I almost feel that it's kind of not cricket to bring it up in this new Parliament but the disaster was completely predictable because the problem was a shortage of serviced land and even builders working for the Government cannot build affordable homes on $700000 sections.Then they went after the foreign buyers Chinese-sounding names. Remember that? Then they wanted to subsidise some buyers. Now they want to extend the so-called brightline test for a second time. You know trying to end a shortage of houses with a brightline test is like trying to end a famine by taxing food. The reason that we have unaffordable housing is that the price of a section in Auckland went up 900 percent in 25 years. Unless we solve that problem we're not going anywhere. And the common element in all of the Government's policy solutions is that they're not designed to solve the underlying problem; they are designed to make sure that people who might vote for them are more likely to be in line to buy a limited supply of houses than people who won't. This can't be as good as it can get.Imagine if we had honest conversations about the real problems with our housing market and we actually took the Productivity Commission's Better urban planning report not the Randerson report a report designed to repeal and replace the Resource Management Act with something designed to get homes built. And then we took Infrastructure New Zealand's city and regional partnerships and had 30-year partnerships between central government that has the cash and local government that does the planning to get infrastructure built. And then we removed councils from the building consent game because there's no good reason to think that a council would know whether a building was being built properly or not. If we took the steps we could solve one of the big problems that all Western countries are facing. And that takes us to demographics because nobody wants to spend their life fighting their parents or indeed their children. The property market is only half the problem that we have. We have a problem with housing but we also have a problem that every time Treasury publishes a long-term fiscal outlook it becomes obvious to us that we can't afford to continue with the healthcare and superannuation policy settings to which we're currently committed. There's two ways out of this. We either fight and tax each other the way that some parties would like to or we grow our productivity and we build homes and we actually go forward as generations together. It's that simple. We either grow together or we tax each other and we fight each other. Imagine if instead of the current obsession with redistribution we had an obsession with growth for all generations.Then there's our welfare State. I'd go as far as to say it's a total failure. And the reason I say that is that it doesn't work—well there's people who don't really need it and they would be fine anyway. I dare say if the welfare State disappeared from the Epsom electorate tomorrow we'd fundraise for our schools we would look after our neighbours and we would actually be fine. To us it's mostly a cost but we wouldn't mind if we knew it was giving people up and down this country an equal shot at life.The truth is we had 300000 people on a benefit before COVID struck. The truth is we have one of the highest recidivism rates coming out of our prisons of any country in the world. We send unskilled and often illiterate former prisoners down the road with 300 bucks and say "By the way don't get in touch with your former associates." Then we have one of the greatest inequities in educational attainment in the developed world and we have opportunities to do things about that. In fact we did in the form of charter schools. You know what this Government did? It closed them down one day and reopened them the next with only two changes. One they no longer had to report on their performance and two they did have to use union contracts. Isn't that disgraceful? The Government that puts children at the centre of everything put labour relations at the centre of the most important investment in the future of our country. This can't be as good as it gets. Imagine if instead we chose to put every family in charge of their share of the education budget and let them purchase a tailored education to get the best potential out of every single child. Imagine if we retooled our welfare State and used electronic income management to make sure the benefits actually go to the kids that it's supposed to be all about. And imagine if we made our prisons learning centres where early release was contingent on upskilling and preparing for life outside. That would be the policy of a country that wished to lead the world. I should make a couple of comments about things that weren't in the Speech from the Throne and I hope that omission was deliberate. The proposed naked power grab where a party that wins a seat would not get its full representation where Debbie Ngarewa-Packer would not resume a seat in this House because her party didn't make the 5 percent threshold. That is naked partisan and disgraceful. The only time electoral laws should change is if there is a genuine public problem to be solved. To take away full representation for parties that win a seat just because of a threshold is undemocratic and an affront to those who voted for a particular party. Then there's the question of free speech. All of the problems that I've talked about today are a footnote to a bigger problem that we face across the Western World and that is the ability to talk through our problems without being cancelled de-platformed and shouted down by the mob. Now there is something cultural going on in New Zealand and actually around the Western World at the moment where people find it harder to express themselves and disagree civilly. I think that is a real shame. There's lots of theories about why it is. Maybe it's the internet it's parenting it's smaller family sizes—people don't have as much biff with their siblings—who knows? But one thing that would make it much much worse is if this Parliament decided to start legislating what can and can't be said based on the subjective criteria of offence because once you can be punished on subjective criteria for your political views we no longer have freedom of speech and conscience. We no longer enjoy the humanity that each of us has the right to think our thoughts and express them so long as we don't incite or threaten violence. We have mob rule. Minorities should care about this because people who are popular and in the middle don't need free speech. It's those who are different who need to call on its defence and have done throughout our history. It is critical that this House upholds free speech and if this Government decides to legislate it away with so-called hate speech laws I can tell you the ACT Party will rally this country and bring a citizens-initiated referendum to overturn those laws because they are too important to our culture and our ability to be human and solve our problems. The free and democratic world needs to wake from the slumber in which it's been since the Cold War. We are losing out there and that is a real threat to New Zealand and we're losing because we fail to solve hard problems. This Parliament cannot afford to settle for its own form of kind of South Pacific populism powered by smiles and slogans. We need to look into our future and confront hard challenges that face our country. That means we need to go all out to solve the problem of anaemic productivity growth. We need to make it easier to develop property and build homes and we need to retool our welfare State so it actually works for those who really need its help. We ain't going to do it simply by taxing more regulating more and using other people as fodder for the schemes of politicians. We must restore the independence dignity and self-responsibility of every single New Zealander and be a beacon to the world of what democratic countries can achieve. Thank you Mr Speaker.Debate interrupted."