Benson-Pope David: Budget Debate 
Benson-Pope David: Budget Debate 
[Volume:639;Page:9623] 
Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to take a call in this debate which is a very important one for Parliament and for New Zealanders to have. I will begin by responding very briefly to the unfortunately churlish comments of the previous speaker Christopher Finlayson. Those comments were out of character I suppose. Yesterday I conveyed to the member personally that I had heard him speak with erudition accuracy and eloquence at the State dinner for Mr Karamanlis earlier in the week. But the churlish comments he has just made about this country’s Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister cannot really go without a response. 
Most New Zealanders are only too aware of the extraordinary contribution that Dr Cullen has made in the establishment of what has become known as the Cullen fund—somewhat to his embarrassment. We now recognise that this fund will guarantee the partial funding of superannuation into the future. That is despite the ACT party’s efforts which clearly will be unable to come to fruition because ACT will not be in Parliament and nor will any parties with which that party would have been in coalition. Not only has Dr Cullen cemented his place in the political history of this country with that contribution to policy development and policy implementation but he has gone a step further with some of the key elements of last week’s Budget. The element to which I most refer is of course the initiation of the enhanced KiwiSaver package. 
Irrespective of what the National Party does and irrespective of what its position might be—and we will wait for some weeks or months to know that given the uncertainty we constantly see repeated about what its positional policy might be on anything—Dr Cullen’s contribution in terms of this policy is an extraordinary one. In the words of one of the journalists from the  
New Zealand Herald  
who has been reporting the Budget for the last little while “Cullen will … go down in history as the Finance Minister who had the guts to tackle savings … when so many of his political predecessors wimped out.” 
Well the previous speaker has certainly wimped out as has his leadership in respect of the risks that this economy currently faces. For any politician in this country given the inflationary pressures this country currently faces even to suggest tax cuts is downright stupid and irresponsible—and it is not often that I agree with Bill English but at least he has had the integrity to stand up to bad policy development in his party. For me and I think for most New Zealanders Dr Cullen’s policy on savings is the great strength of what is happening in this country. People have realised how sensible how appropriate and how timely that key centrepiece of this Budget has been. 
I will continue by setting a bit of the social and political context in New Zealand for this Budget. For those of us not in this House those listening to the  
Hansard  
record internally or those listening on the radio it would be hard to understand or get a decent grasp on that context. The context is that we live in a society that for 11 consecutive quarters has had unemployment rates significantly below 4 percent. That is unparalleled in the OECD. The reality of the context in this country is that we live in a society that now has historically low unemployment levels cemented into place. It is not a society of the sort that the National Party developed where unemployment went as high as 10 or 11 percent but a society where we have moved from having 161000-odd people on the scrap heap on the unemployment benefit without prospects or an immediate future—under National—to 25000 people on the unemployment benefit. That is an extraordinary reduction of 83 percent in the 8 years of this Government in the number of people on the unemployment benefit. That can be put alongside the sorts of initiatives that we announced last week. 
But before some tired National MP runs out the tired old myth of people being shifted around to gild the numbers let me talk about the total— 
Anne Tolley 
: It’s not a myth; come to Opotiki. 
Hon DAVID BENSON-POPE 
: I ask Mrs Tolley please to listen and let me talk. I ask her to open up her ears and just for once to listen. The total number of working-age benefits—I say to Mrs Tolley that that is “total”; it involves adding up all the numbers—received in this country since New Zealanders had the good sense to get rid of Mrs Tolley’s lot has reduced by 35 percent. 
The most powerful of those figures is in respect of 18 and 19-year-olds who receive the unemployment benefit. When National was last in Government the number of beneficiaries aged 18 and 19 receiving that benefit was 17514. I can now tell the House that last month that figure for 18 and 19-year olds had dropped to fewer than 1400—not 14000 or 17000 as it was under National but 1400. 
I will dwell just for a moment on those young people. Young people get a bit of hard press sometimes because of the ridiculous stupid and highly undesirable behaviour of their minority. But we saw the best of young New Zealanders when we looked at the vox pop on television last night and saw young people being asked about KiwiSaver. All of the people I saw onscreen last night—young people down the street in Wellington or wherever Television One or TV3 found them—when asked about KiwiSaver said without exception what a great idea it was. These are the young people who are so unimportant and so peripheral to the National Party. All of those young people said what a great idea it was. 
We listen in this House or to the radio anywhere in this country to stories that the National Party would have us hear about its advocacy but frankly do we believe that advocacy and concern for low-income people and the young? Well really! Let us go back to an article from Tracy Watkins just a couple of days ago; Tracy says it all in her  
Dominion Post 
 article. The first line which talks about the Budget reads as follows: “You would have to be a mug not to sign up to Michael Cullen’s turbo-charged KiwiSaver scheme.” The good news is that New Zealanders unlike the National Party and those sad people on the Opposition benches are not mugs. I know that New Zealanders will make the right decision here. 
I would like to tell the House a story I heard from one of my home town’s supermarket smoko rooms—I hope they do not smoke any more but that is what the rooms are still called—and the story goes like this. The workforce there were discussing KiwiSaver and the people to a woman and to a man said that people would have to be mugs—just as Tracy Watkins said in her article—not to sign up to KiwiSaver. Do members know what people in that lunchroom thought was the best part of it? They thought the best part of it was that their employer would have to make a contribution too—and I have to say that I do not think the employer-employee relationship in that enterprise was as desirable as it might have been or as it is in most places. Well does that not stick in the craw of those National Party members who hate the idea that any employers should have to make a contribution? 
But the good news is of course that that view is echoed by the poll that has been released today by the Business Council for Sustainable Development. Most employers are not the mean nasty short-sighted people that the National Party depends on for its funding; most employers know that the sorts of initiatives that will develop incredible loyalty and support the economic future of their workforce are also to their advantage. 
 The last message that I want to give today to New Zealanders and to members on the other side of the House is that it is becoming ever more clear that if this Government were to change in any way all of these initiatives would be under threat. National members are the people who cut the benefits gave us market rentals cut superannuation and gave New Zealand one tax break in all the time they were last in Government. The National Government did that every year consistently and its members over there are the ones who voted against business tax cuts. So New Zealanders understand that not only the Working for Families package but also the KiwiSaver proposals will be at serious risk if National is allowed to get its dirty paws anywhere near them.