Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I think this is clearly a Budget that any political party in the history of New Zealand would have loved the opportunity to deliver. It's a strong economy that we have here in New Zealand. We've averaged 3.5 percent GDP growth for an extended period of time and the forecasts even though they've been downgraded a little bit in the last little while still show 3 percent average growth out into the future. So it's a strong economy that's generating a lot of jobs and creating opportunities for New Zealanders.If we look at the longer-term forecast again it drops a bit but it's still over 2.5 percent. Under National we saw GDP growth around 4 percent. These estimates are based on a steady flow of immigration so that's one of the issues that we're going to have to be dealing with going forward and I'll come back to that later in my speech. So you've got strong growth in the economy. Then you've got a set of Government accounts which are the envy of many countries in the world where we have surpluses out as far out as the eye can see and this Government has spent a lot more money but still there is capacity and still surpluses out into the future. We have debt that was on track to be down to 20 percent of GDP. Now this Government has increased that debt but it is still overall in international terms an area of relatively low debt.So as well as plenty of growth and good Government accounts that have been inherited we also see a more confident nation and prosperous nation. That is a reflection I think of the hard work of many New Zealanders over the past decade but also a reflection of the results that you see from strong stable predictable competent government such as we saw from the previous National Government. I'm certainly very proud of our contribution in this previous Government to leaving what is such a wonderful inheritance for this Government to build on over the next few years.So when we look at that and we see this is what we've got what was the opportunity for this Government? From my point of view I would say that one of the most precious gifts you can give any New Zealander is the opportunity to have a job to look after themselves and their family and to make a contribution to the community in which they live. Over the last couple of years there have been more than 200000 new jobs created. So this is a golden moment in the history of this country where we have the opportunity to solve and address some of the longstanding social issues that we've had where children have grown up in households where nobody has worked for generations in some parts of the country and we've poured resources over many years to try to deal with that group who have struggled for decades.You can have all the programmes and Government officials helping groups and community groups trying to help people but if the jobs aren't there it's very difficult to make progress. But right now the jobs are there and so we have this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real social progress in this country. In my view the Budget that we should have had in the last week or two would have focused very much on building on that opportunity focusing on keeping that economy strong in the years to come and building on and using the resources that we have available from a strong economy to continue to invest in infrastructure and delivering better public services.So we've seen some of that in this Budget and I'm not one of the ones who says it's all terrible. No there are many good things in this Budget many good investments being made in public services and that is exactly what we would have done if we had had the opportunity to form a Government. We would have invested more in education and health and that is precisely what you do when you have the opportunities and the resources available such as we have in this Budget.But we certainly would have kept our promises. That is the starting point of how you go about building trust and confidence with the population that you seek to serve in Parliament. So when political parties go out on the election campaign and promise to reduce the costs of GP visits for everybody it's not difficult—you have to do it. And they didn't. When they promised to do away with school fees you have to do it; they didn't in this Budget. I was involved in tertiary education and went to many meetings where the promise was made from Labour that they would deal with the medical students' situation give them more money—they didn't. When they made promises around increasing the police numbers—I could spend five minutes trying to disentangle all the numbers that have been put forward by the police Minister Stuart Nash but they haven't kept that promise.So what you have seen is a lot of extra spending—some of it will be useful; some of it's not well targeted—and some extra taxation more borrowing but they haven't kept a number of the promises that they made to the people of New Zealand. Then what we've seen is a very large pool of new spending some of it poor quality such as the massive investment in fees-free tertiary education which has not yielded any more students whatsoever and as the universities are realising now the cost of that has been a zero increase in the basic budget for the universities in New Zealand. So they've gone backwards in real terms. They've actually lost money this year. There's only one conclusion from that which is that they will have to make academics redundant. So you may have free access to a third-class university if you're not careful if you continue this process for an extended period of time.And we see an absolute absence of any focus on particular outcomes from the extra money invested. They've done away with all the rigour and robustness of the process that we had in social investment of actually holding the bureaucracy to account for every dollar that we're spending and looking for particular outcomes and having clear milestones in place. That seems to have been replaced with just giving more money here and giving more money there with no clear outcome in mind. The classic example of that is the Provincial Growth Fund which is $3 billion over three years—a lot of money—and there's no doubt whatsoever that there will be some useful things bought with that $3 billion. You can't spend $3 billion and get no outcome but the worry that I have is that the immense haste with which the Minister responsible is shovelling that money out the door in order to have outcomes before the next election—we will have a lot of waste in that period. It was interesting to find of course that rather than being $1 billion of new funding it was actually only three-quarters new funding and one-quarter old funding but that's by the by.So we've got this wonderful opportunity. We've had a lot of new spending; much of it will be not very well targeted or focused. There's extra taxes there's more borrowing but the most important thing I think that we need to reflect on as a country is that there was very little in this Budget about how we're going to grow the economy.The thing that worries me about this Government is they take our prosperity for granted. We're seeing a dropping of business confidence and that is a reflection of the attitude of many of this Government's Ministers. I don't like to pick on Shane Jones but we saw the latest example over the weekend where that Minister blustered away saying that businesses struggling for workers should just invest in automation and he's not going to lose any sleep over that if they have to go out and buy some new machines. Well I'll tell you the people who are struggling to find anybody to help them pick the kiwifruit at the moment for example are losing sleep over that and they can't just wander down to Mitre 10 and buy a machine that plucks the kiwifruit because there isn't one.Actually we invested several million dollars in a regional research institute based in Te Puke with one of the focuses being to build such a machine but it's hard. It'll take years. It's actually very tricky. So just to blasé say Oh well you should just invest in automation." is just a reflection of the lack of any understanding of the business realities of how to compete internationally in this world. And it comes after Mr Lees-Galloway saying that any employees who are worried about having to deal with higher labour costs are just clearly not resilient and maybe they should be doing something else then we had Mr David Parker pouring scorn on farmers and the list is going on and on and on.The thing that worries me about this Government is that they've inherited a strong economy but everything they're doing is threatening the sustainability of that strong economy in the years to come. So we will certainly be very focused over the next few years reminding them of the foundations of that strong economy that they've inherited so that we can nurture it and continue to have a successful prosperous outward-looking and dynamic country such as we've seen over the past few years and I hope that is what we'll see. Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker."