SpeechHon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you Madam Speaker. I've been listening to the Budget debate and the analysis and predictably enough the Government are talking it up the Opposition are pointing out the pitfalls and so it needs to be. This is the biggest economic disaster in at least a generation. We all have to pull together to make this work. We've got through pretty well on the health crisis side of things but there are many many of us—and in my North Shore community I'm hearing it all the time—who feel that we are too slow to move on and to get out of it.My colleague who's just resumed his seat Alastair Scott spoke of the $20 billion slush fund. There is so much room for manoeuvre and wriggle room here and not properly targeted to help small businesses. We need to open up. Our strong view is that we should do it as quickly as possible. So in my North Shore community for example we rely a lot on international students. We have among the finest schools in the country—if I may make that boast—on the North Shore: 55000 New Zealanders have job opportunities as a result of that international student block. Why are we not getting them back up and running by the second semester?Helping small businesses with direct cash into their hands is the other thing that is completely absent in this Budget. For small businesses who are already struggling why would they want to take on more debt? Why would they want to borrow more? It's not an appealing prospect. They need to have the money in their hands and there has not been enough from the Government to give them guidance and direction on that.National would act very differently in this situation. We need to open up the economy. We need to back New Zealanders to be resilient. We need to back ourselves to get out of this challenge and to confront it. So international education is one thing; tourism is another. Queenstown has gone from being one of our most buoyant and really profitable if you like business-oriented economies; now it is in dire straits. We need that trans-Tasman bubble to open prior to the Australian school holidays so that that can really enable Queenstown and the businesses there to help themselves. We need to give people opportunities to work. National has suggested giving back GST to businesses—that would encourage them to take on more staff. That would encourage them to expand in a meaningful way and not just to prop up businesses that perhaps may not really survive.Firing up private sector investment is also something that we are keen on doing and also we need to continue to invest in quality infrastructure. North of the Auckland Harbour Bridge we need to make some commitments around having another harbour crossing. The good old bridge isn't going to be able to sustain very much for the future. Certainly the clip-on and the ability of the SkyPath to deliver on bicycles is a great idea but at that cost in these times—is that really what we want on an already outdated bridge that probably can't bear the weight?We do have to look at the ability of this Government to deliver in the way of retraining and re-equipping. It's all very well to say in the Budget they're going to be spending $1.6 billion on apprentices: Let's spray the money around. Let's not actually target and focus." There's no detail; there's no plan and in the meantime the whole sector's been turned upside down by reforms that say more about dogma than anything else.So as we face this extraordinary crisis as a country together I believe that we need to protect the vulnerable more than we are doing. I think that the focus as we've seen internationally is that older people people with disabilities people who are isolated and at home are not able to help themselves in the way that they need to be helped by us. So we need to step into that breach as a Parliament. This Government has not done that in this Budget. Targeting the needy and the vulnerable and ensuring that they have the support that they need to get through what is going to be I suspect a very grim and fearful winter for them. For older New Zealanders who have already been in lockdown for longer than 2½ months they are looking down the barrel of a wet cold miserable winter alone without really efficient targeted help. And I know that Tim Macindoe has spoken on this and really tried to draw attention to the people who we need to remember and not to forget. I think that keeping seniors safe is a glaring omission in this Budget.So we have seen JobStart from National which would create job creation which would make meaningful jobs occur and help us start to build up. GST refunds—again there are many disappointments in this Budget when you look at it from a strong economic lens. New Zealand can do better. This Government can certainly do better. And I think that what Todd Muller said at the beginning of his tenure as our leader is that there are three people at the top of that party and 17 empty seats. This is not a Government that is capable of delivering in these bad economic times."