English Bill: Adjournment — Sittings of the HouseText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: Adjournment — Sittings of the House[Sitting date: 11 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15495. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) on behalf of theLeader of the House: I moveThatthe House do now adjourn until 2 p.m. on Tuesday 28 January 2014 and that the sitting days in 2014 be as follows:January 28 29 and 30;February 11 12 13 18 19 and 20;March 4 5 6 11 12 13 18 19 and 20;April 8 9 10 15 16 and 17;May 6 7 8 13 14 15 20 21 22 27 28 and 29;June 17 18 19 24 25 and 26;July 1 2 3 22 23 24 29 30 and 31;August 12 13 14 19 20 21 26 27 and 28;September 9 10 11 16 17 18 23 24 and 25;October 14 15 16 21 22 and 23;November 4 5 6 11 12 13 18 19 and 20;December 2 3 4 9 10 and 11.Mr Speaker can I pass on to you and the other members of the Speaker’s team our best wishes for the Christmas season. Of course it is a time when traditionally we dothank those people who support us in our work in politics and in Parliament and it is only when you go to write down the list that you realise just how much help we have from so many people. So can we thank the Office of the Clerk staff; the Hansard staff; our security staff and messengers who had their mettle tested occasionally this year; the parliamentary librarians; the buildings services staff; all of our ministerial support and Parliamentary Service staff who ensure that MPs are fully supported personally; and our VIP drivers.Can I particularly thank the gardeners around Parliament who do a fantastic job of maintaining the pleasant surroundings of this venerable building; our cleaners; the out-of-office staff working in all of our electorate offices; our staff in the ministerial offices; other support staff; our research units; and the Copperfields staff. We benefit from the assiduous attention of all these people who have a feel for the institution and what is required to make it operate smoothly. I think we all appreciate—certainly I do—the gentle humour that they use when politicians break the rules do not turn up or cause some other inconvenience.On behalf of the Prime Minister can I thank the Government’s coalition partners. Each of them has had their testing times this year but throughout those testing times we have maintained between us our relationships of respect. We have not always agreed but there has always been an openness to discussion a frankness of opinion and an honesty in the assessments and it is a tribute to our coalition partners that the Government is stable and credible and has maintained a working majority in this House. Not only that but it has actually been able to pass a very substantial amount of progressive legislation through this House with the support of those parties.Can I also thank the members of the National Cabinet and caucus. If there is one thing that is the same as this time last year it is that this caucus remains cohesive and is united energetic and forward-looking. That is a tribute both to the MPs and to the way that they have applied themselves to the task and to the privilege of governing that has been given to us by the New Zealand people. It is also a tribute to the leadership of our Prime Minister. In his absence can I thank him for his efforts—his fantastic efforts—first in representing New Zealand overseas. Despite the fact that he has been a Prime Minister for only 5 years he has become one of the senior leaders in the APEC region. He is well known with a great network of friendships and acquaintances across a range of countries that affect New Zealand’s interests. But more particularly I thank him for his upbeat and aspirational leadership here in New Zealand. The fact that New Zealanders have come through a recession so positively with more confidence than they have had in a long time in their ability not only to handle adversity but also to deal with the opportunities this country now has is in no small part due to the leadership style of the Rt Hon John Key. He is so positive and aspirational about his country and also about every New Zealander whom he meets and we know that because that is the experience that they tell us about when they meet the New Zealand Prime Minister.The Government finishes the year in pretty good shape. We are overseeing a stronger economy with more jobs and growing productivity and that means higher incomes for New Zealanders. We are seeing a safer community where there are lower crime rates. In the last 2 years the number of young people going into our court system has dropped by 25 percent. We are overseeing a quiet revolution in our environmental framework with the freshwater framework and the legislation of our wider economic zone where oil and gas drilling is taking place. We have progressed strongly with the massive rebuild in Christchurch which is one of the single biggest challenges that this country and certainly this Government has faced.We are particularly pleased with progress in welfare and housing reform. This Government is taking more seriously than previous Governments the obligation wehave to provide more support for those who need it most to be able to escape welfare dependency and become participants in the wider society. We are changing the passive industrial model of welfare fostered by the previous Government to a flexible personalised model that treats every single person on our welfare rolls with respect responsibility and aspiration. The benefits are showing every single day already when people front up to our welfare offices because they are now being treated with the respect that they can participate where previously the Government system had written them off.The change is exemplified by Trevor Mallard’s story about theWainui second-hand dealer. Every beneficiary in New Zealand who now needs a washing machine and qualifies for it gets a new one with a guarantee at the same price or for slightly more as the second-hand one that Labour gave them. I cannot think of a story that sums up the difference better except for the woman whom the Minister for Social Development saw crying in the Ministry of Social Development office not because she was being put upon and hassled as the Opposition alleged but because she said that for the first time in her 7 years as a sickness beneficiary the Government had shown enough interest in her to ring her up and get her to come to the office to tell us what she was capable of so that we could help her. That kind of story is being replicated every day across New Zealand. Alongside that we are getting rid of the ineffective wasteful monopoly of Housing New Zealand Corporation one of Labour’s favourite State institutions which has failed New Zealanders for decades and has wasted billions of dollars.Not much has changed in Labour in a year. The leader is still called David and Grant Robertson is still undermining him. That is how it works. The big test for the Opposition was whether it would promise to buy back the assets. I am not sure which is worse—the fact that Labour is being too lazy to take a position consistent with being the most intellectually lazy Labour Party that New Zealand has ever had that it has no new ideas that it is anchored in 1994 or that it is harvesting the best ideas from the 1970s. Labour members could not even get up and say whether they would do anything. Mr Cunliffe said: “Yeah nah. If it is appropriate and the money is there we might do it.”That was actually worse I think than the Greens’ effort. Try to understand what the Greens had promised. You would think that having gone to all the trouble of a referendum and gathering signatures they would know what they would do with State assets. But they actually have no idea what they are going to do. I cannot find Russel Norman’s press release but it is something like: “We will let them not pay the 50c and substitute for the number of shares that might have been cheaper and they give them to the Government and the answer is 63 percent.” So now we know that after 3 years of debate on asset sales the Greens’ answer—at least the Greens have got one—is consistent with their higher levels of energy their better focus on the media their stronger intellectual capacity and unfortunately their greater capacity to wreck the economy. Talking to the Greens about the economy is like talking to Jack the Ripper about community safety. But at least they have got a position. Labour does not and by next Christmas the Greens will not either.