Key John: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Key John: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2419] 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 We know from this Government that it has run out of puff just like the Minister of Finance has. That is why Helen Clark does not know whether the Minister will be in the job in another 12 months or 24 months. I can assure him that he will not be in the job in 30 months because by then at least there will have been an election and he will be gone along with a whole lot of his colleagues. They are destined to sit on some park bench somewhere to reflect on 9 years—6 years when they inherited an economy with which they could have delivered substantial changes to New Zealand and 3 years when they sat around contemplating their navel unsure of what to do. 
My parliamentary colleague the Hon Dr Lockwood Smith talked very eloquently about the issue of infrastructure. Infrastructure is a very interesting issue as it relates to New Zealand. New Zealand’s infrastructure is failing us and not just in roading. I heard a very interesting example just the other week about the  
New Zealand Herald 
 whose sales force used to achieve something like 14 calls a day around Auckland and now achieves six. That is not a productivity gain. Mr Jones can read some sort of clapped-out piece of research on productivity that ignores half the economy—the fast-growing bit around the public sector. He can ignore at his peril if he chooses to as Dr Cullen has the research from Treasury that told him: “We don’t know quite where you’re spending the $4 billion a year each and every year in health; we don’t really know what you’ve got for it but we think you’ve got nothing we think it’s delivered nothing and we think that fundamentally you’re going down the wrong track.” We think that is called a productivity disaster. We are not surprised that Dr Cullen referred to the Treasury report as an “ideological burp” although funnily enough Dr Cullen himself has made it quite clear that he will not keep funding a health system that is clearly out of control. He demands results from it because he knows it is on the wrong course and it has failed miserably. 
But my colleague Dr Lockwood Smith made a point around infrastructure that I thought was absolutely right. New Zealand cannot drive productivity and greater growth without infrastructure in our community. It is not just roading it is around all sorts of areas of infrastructure such as energy. We have a lakes system that is low. We are not building power generation in this country at the level that we should that we demand and that we need. The Government has no solutions at all. We are starting to see some very interesting mutterings and utterances coming out of places like the Commerce Commission which runs the risk I think of frightening off some New Zealand businesses in relation to the amount of investment they might make. 
It goes on and on. It goes around the area of telecommunications and ultimately goes around the issue of water. New Zealand’s infrastructure cannot cope with the kind of growth that New Zealand needs. Yet we are seeing a Government that is quite happy to trade that position for a position that says: “We would rather have the support of the Greens and therefore we will let the Green Party negotiate and draft probably one of the most important pieces of legislation in New Zealand’s history the Land Transport Management Bill even though we know that it will do very little.” 
I want to make some comments in relation to Working for Families and the Inland Revenue Department. The department made a number of comments when it came before the Finance and Expenditure Committee. One of the comments that I think will prove very interesting over the next 12 to 24 months related to the number of New Zealand families that find themselves debtors of the Inland Revenue Department. I say that because “Welfare for Families”—the package the Government rolled out on April Fool’s Day—requires New Zealand families to estimate exactly their level of income. If they incorrectly estimate their income and therefore underestimate their paid income they will be overpaid under Working for Families. A very similar policy was involved in Australia. That policy was rolled out and Australian families ran up about $1 billion in debt. After 24 months those Australian families had to have their debts written off because they could not afford to repay them. When we raised this issue with Dr Cullen he was kind enough to tell us that the Inland Revenue Department had made numerous changes and that those issues would not occur in New Zealand. The only small problem is that although the department has invested a little bit in technology it does not seem to have the people who can ring to tell New Zealanders that they have been overpaid. They will be ringing past tense so the families will be in debt anyway. 
By the way Dr Cullen might be a little alarmed to know that people in the department have been emailing to tell me that they are under huge pressure from the Minister to try to comply even though they have no hope of doing it. These emails are telling us that those people cannot comply with the issues and that New Zealand families will become debtors. What a disgrace it is to put families in debt.