Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Co-Leader—Green): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. There are things that none of us could do alone. There are few New Zealanders who have the individual wealth to build schools or hospitals or pay the $20 billion annual superannuation cost that we have as a country. That is why we form society. It is why we decide to come together to help to pay for things whether that be the infrastructure or the services that all of us fundamentally agree and value and say that we need. That is the point of a representative democracy—the point of all of us as 120-odd MPs in this place coming together to make decisions on behalf of New Zealanders about how we best make decisions in the collective. Unfortunately the discussion that we are having tonight on the bill which implements the spending announcements in Budget 2024 is that we are not so much grappling with vision for the future of this country let alone the present day; what we are grappling with is a shredder. There are no foundations in this Budget for the flourishing or the wellbeing of people or the planet.There are a lot of different places I could start on this so I'll start just firstly by responding to two Ministers who have so far contributed to this debate—the former the Hon Louise Upston who just said she thinks this side of the House thinks that New Zealanders just don't get it. And I'd really like to respond to that point because this is something which I've been banging on about for the last six or seven years that I've had the privilege of occupying a seat in this Parliament. I think New Zealanders are a heck of a lot smarter than a lot of politicians and a lot of the mainstream media give them credit for. I think New Zealanders can see through a lot of the nonsense and the bluster and the slogans that come out of this place. So I just want to address that right upfront: New Zealanders are actually tired of the nonsense that comes out probably in most people's perspective of every single political party that's represented in this place.The best that any of us could do or hope for with the privilege of our position is to engage in a robust evidence-informed debate. To that effect I'd just like to put it on the record for the sake of the House's knowledge that I wrote to the Minister of Finance in the wake of the Budget and asked for her to carry on with the work that she had promised she would do in Opposition—that is to pursue the independent policy costings unit which of course the former Minister of Finance the Hon Grant Robertson and the Hon James Shaw as associate finance Minister in our first term in that relationship with Labour tried to get across the line but was shot down by National. So we're hoping to revive that for the sake of transparency and independence so that we can have a meaningful and informed evidence-based debate on Budgets least of all on a universal set of figures.Now there have also been some statements from the likes of the Hon Chris Bishop who was speaking about how this Budget is occurring in the context of unconventional monetary policy especially post-COVID-19. For the uninitiated unconventional monetary policy was the programme by which the Reserve Bank decided to basically print more money—Hon Paul Goldsmith: Money-printing.CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —yes the Hon Paul Goldsmith—through programmes like the Large Scale Asset Purchase programme and Funding for Lending. Interestingly enough back in 2020 Treasury and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand advised the Government—and the Greens actually went on about this quite a lot too over the last few years—that the pursual of this unconventional monetary policy without mitigating fiscal policy would result in what the Reserve Bank and Treasury called distributional impacts" but what the rest of us in the real world call "greater inequality". That is something which the Greens are on the record time and again asking the former Government to meaningfully address. We cannot pretend that what the Reserve Bank did happened in a vacuum back then and we cannot pretend that what they are doing now also operates in a vacuum. Monetary and fiscal policy are supposed to operate hand in glove.We also heard commentary about the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update and there's a really interesting point in this actually—that is we know based on the projections from this Government's operating allowance that they've handed themselves that they have said in this window of the next two years they are going to have $2.4 billion of new operating allowances for each of those next two years. But guess what! What Treasury what the Government's own officials say is that you need at least $2.5 billion. That's $100 million more than the Government has already allocated themselves just to keep the lights on—that is with the level of services that New Zealanders are accustomed to and expect. So that might be why it is we are starting to hear out of our nurses and our doctors and our medical profession that there's effectively a hiring freeze on at the front line. And do you know what that does? When you don't invest in issues as they arise those costs accumulate. That is in direct contradiction to all of the bluster and nonsense that we have heard from this Government—that they are somehow good economic or fiscal managers. You don't get to have that reputation simply by saying it especially when the facts operate in entire contradiction to that.What this Budget does is in fact actually set us up for austerity. It sets a bunch of programmes up to fail so that the Government can ultimately end up cutting those programmes or privatising those programmes. We see hints of that in the changes to the school lunches programme which takes the average cost per child from approximately $8 to $2. I can point to a number of schools within my constituency who have written and pleaded with the Associate Minister of Education that this will not work for them and whether there is any wiggle room or discretion whatsoever. These are the hard choices that the Government keeps telling us about. Its hard choices are to cut school lunches for our kids and to hand $2.9 billion in tax cuts to landlords. Those are some really hard choices for this Government!We're also seeing the can kicked down the road on climate change and the Hon Megan Woods spoke a little bit about this.Hon Simon Watts: What a load of rubbish.CHLÖE SWARBRICK: I'm so glad that the climate Minister is here in the House to actually hear the recounting of his inability to answer any straightforward questions at scrutiny week last week. We heard from that very climate Minister that the market was working properly when the emissions trading scheme (ETS) auction failed last week. Do you know what that does? It puts a $700 million hole in their revenue plan and the Budget that is unable to now be directed not into the Climate Emergency Response Fund—because they cut that; they're not interested in decarbonising industry. What it does is it cuts $700-odd million from the revenue that they need to fund their tax cuts for landlords. Madam Speaker make it make sense!On top of that we also heard both from the Minister of Climate Change and from the Minister of Finance that they are still committed to our nationally determined contribution on the Paris Agreement. This is a really important point and if I can drill into it because the Minister of Climate Change of all people should be interested in this. Our contribution as a country as one of 196 countries under the Paris Agreement is to say that we are going to keep below 1.5 degrees of warming. And as the UN Secretary-General put it just this past week that is not just some airy theory abstract target; that is the scientific fundamentals for retaining life on Earth as we know it—in fact the climate necessary for growing food which this Government constantly tells us it cares about. And do you know what? What we have from the Ministry for the Environment and from Treasury last year in approximately November 2023 was an estimate paper that they pulled together to try and put some kind of figures on the amount of money that we are liable to be on the hook for up to the year 2030 as a country regardless of who's in Government. And do you know what they estimated?Our offshore liabilities are looking to be somewhere between $3.7 billion and $24 billion for offshore mitigation. That is a necessary figure to the tune of however many billions of dollars even if we were to meet our very own emissions reductions budgets that we will have to pay others to reduce their emissions. Meanwhile—riddle me this—this Government has also made decisions knowing full well on their own official advice that their Budget will also increase emissions. But they haven't budgeted for those offshore liabilities to the tune of billions of dollars to 2030—again kicking the can down the road on that. And on top of that alongside shredding the work programme that was already under way at the Climate Change Commission to price agricultural emissions—the only sector in our economy that is currently not priced under the ETS but also represents 5 percent of our GDP and half of our emissions—they've also set up their own working group to apparently do this work by 2030 which as we discovered at scrutiny week with the Minister of Climate Change has no budget allocated to it. They can't tell us the terms of reference who the members are or how much this new working group is going to cost.We're left scratching our heads and again in a position where we are dealing with a ticking time bomb whether it is on the front of climate change or whether it is on the front of inequality or child poverty. There is so much more that could be said about the fact that this Government is just leaving the infrastructural deficit to continue eroding away at the quality of life that New Zealanders deserve. Different choices could be made. And I'd note interestingly enough that the Government itself and the Minister of Finance referred to the need for us to do fiscal consolidation. To that effect there are tons of international bodies the likes of the International Monetary Fund and the OECD who have pointed out one of the key things we could do is fix our tax system with a capital gains tax."