Luxon ChristopherCHRISTOPHER LUXON (National—Botany): Look a few weeks ago I spoke about how living in New Zealand right here right now feels like we're living in the main street of Disneyland. You walk down it you see the saloon you see the emporium you see the lolly shop you look back; it's just a facade and Mickey Mouse is having a smoke behind the facade. There's nothing in this Budget that's fundamentally changed that view for me.I want to talk about three things. The first thing is yeah it was great to see the Welfare Expert Advisory Group recommend an increase in benefits but they also made another significant recommendation that wasn't picked up which was do the work make the investment to help people get from welfare into work. On this side of the House we fundamentally know you should do that work in order to make that happen. Spend significant amounts of money to get people out of a pathway of hardship where they're sitting there on State dependence on benefits into a job. That's the only way that we can get them moving forward.The second thing is that we've actually got a squeezed middle and it's very obvious this Government doesn't care about the workers of New Zealand. These are the people who are waking up each day they're taking on the extra shifts they do the two or three extra jobs they raise their kids right they pay their taxes on their lower middle incomes and there's nothing in here to support them. And yet this Government's gone off and increased the cost of living for those very people. Think about it. The costs are piled on to small business—that's reflected in higher prices. The costs are piled on landlords—reflected in higher rents. Food's up 9.5 percent rents are up 30 percent and fuel's up 17 percent. Power's up. Building costs are up. There's a four times increase in shipping and air freight costs. All these labour and material shortages—we're getting increasing prices and the cost of living is going up for the squeezed middle and there is nothing in this Budget for these people. It is quite obvious that this Government for workers and for small-business owners they are not their tribe and they don't care enough about them.The third thing is that there is nothing in here about growth and private sector - led recovery because there's a fundamental belief in this Government that We know best. We don't trust you to go off and make things happen in this economy. In fact we create the jobs." The Government doesn't create the jobs. It's the private sector that fundamentally creates the jobs and I can tell you right now the prosperity of our nation and the quality of our life is single-handedly going to be improved by improving our productivity. And who does that? It's actually private sector and private enterprise creating jobs and growth. There's nothing in here that's pro-trade or pro-growth. And the reality is in the next two to three years all the global economies are bouncing back big time. You're seeing double-digit growth out of China. You're going to see high single-digit growth out of the US. And we're not going to be able to participate in that global recovery because we haven't got the economy shaped up in the right way. What we've got instead is we've been talking a lot about—you know we've done a tidy job on COVID and keeping it out of New Zealand an island nation at the bottom of the world with lots of water round it. Great—good stuff. But the bottom line is we've got nothing going on in terms of vaccination so our vaccination plans and our trade plans which are we want to keep people healthy so we can get our economy powered up are not happening. The second-worst economy in the OECD in terms of vaccination roll-out and speed. The risk here is that we'll do an OK tidy job on COVID but we'll miss the huge opportunity economically that sits out beyond COVID because of our settings and our vaccination plans.I think the biggest saddest thing is there's nothing here about seizing on the opportunities that exist out there in the world. We know the biggest problem we have in this country is our productivity disease. It's been with us for 30 years and there's some big things that we need to be able to do that. We need to power up our export firms and make sure they operate at global scale around the world and actually can raise the floor be better firms and raise the total business environment as a consequence. We know there's a lot of work to do on labour skills because it's all very well talking about improving productivity getting to higher-value sectors getting more money through the front door but when you can't get your kids to school and then you've got the lowest levels of reading science and maths that we've got in the OECD—in the bottom two or three—you're not in a great shape to go off and create higher wages and salaries and therefore give families and people more choices as a result.The last thing is we're not really delivering infrastructure. We're borrowing a hell of a lot of money but we're not fundamentally putting that money in between hard hard infrastructure that's about nation-building reimagining what our country can look like for the 2040s and beyond. We just continue to band-aid and number eight wire stuff. There's no real solution around a second harbour crossing. There's nothing nation-building that's going on here. There's no big plan. It's all really tactical stuff and yet we know fundamentally that improving productivity is the biggest thing that we can do and export firms education and infrastructure are the way in which we can get that job done.So what we've learnt in this Budget is exactly what we've always understood: fundamentally a National Government grows the economy. It cuts taxes and it creates jobs and what we're seeing here is exactly what a Labour Government does every single time: it increases taxes and spending and it grows not the economy but bureaucrats. Thank you Mr Speaker."