English Bill: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 12 June 2012. Volume:680;Page:2837. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 It has been interesting just to hear the Budget debate wandering along. I must say that the attitude the Labour Opposition brought to the House today is pretty much the one that it has carried throughout the debate. There is no focus no real energy and no sustained intellectual effort that illustrates any attempt to get to grips with the way the economic world has changed and where Budget 2012 fits into that. In fact you would think with the way the Opposition turned up to the House today that it must have made some announcement a while ago and then turned round and changed its mind on it. That is what you would think had happened. I cannot recall an Opposition that was meant to be opposed to a Budget coming into the House with such a weak performance as today’s. It was unbelievable actually and reflects a kind of lassitude that can be explained only by the profound depression the Opposition members must feel at their inability to get a grip on political debate— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Resign. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: —as my colleague has suggested before I think the Opposition should resign. I can tell you one reason why that is. The Labour Party in particular and to some extent the Green Party are quite disorientated by the way this Budget deals with public services. There is a lot of commentary about the general economy and I can come back to that but— 
Chris Hipkins 
: Deals to public services. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well that is exactly my point—that is exactly my point. The New Zealand centre-left parties have been waiting around for when the wolf rips off its sheep’s clothing sacks half the Public Service and shuts the hospitals and then they will get their diet of media stories that enable them to put their feet up and say: “The world is the way we always thought it would be. The nasty Nats don’t care about anybody. We do and in the end they’ll vote for us.” It is not happening.  
A striking feature of this Budget and the election campaign is that all those people who at the ballot box actually do support the Labour Party are working so constructively with the Government on public services and on solving our social problems that we did not hear a word of criticism—not in the election campaign and not around this Budget—with one exception. That was over the pupil-teacher ratio and that was so obvious because it was exceptional. [ 
Interruption 
] Clearly the member does not know what Budgets used to be like when they were tight. Everybody complained about everything in the Public Service but not now because this Budget includes large investments in aspects of public services that the previous Labour Government disgracefully neglected or incompetently messed up.  
But actually no one really cares about what Labour did because there are a whole lot of people out there constructively engaged with the National - John Key - led Government on for instance taking some serious action about long-term welfare dependency. Labour members wrung their hands about it while it got worse throughout the most favourable employment conditions in a generation. The centre-left who support Labour now realise that writing strategies and wringing your hands does not work and they are constructively engaged with this Government with this Cabinet in major change in how we deal with welfare issues health issues and education issues.  
I will give just one very simple example which is immunisation rates. For 30 years immunisation rates particularly among Maori and Pacific children those who need it most have been below 70 percent and today they are above 90 percent—above 90 percent—not because of strategies workshops and consultants but simply because this Government said: “We don’t accept that. We think it can be better and if we tell people it can be better they’ll do the job.” The public health service has done a fantastic job of lifting those immunisation rates. There is now no difference in immunisation rates between Pakeha children and Maori children even in difficult areas like the Bay of Plenty. That is just one example. It did not actually take a lot more money but it did take some more money.  
The other examples are particularly around welfare where the bankruptcy of the New Zealand Labour Party is becoming more obvious by the day. Not a single idea has it contested around the single biggest allocation of funding in this Budget which is well over $250 million to welfare reform—not a word not a word. The reason is that Labour has no idea how to deal with it how to put up a better idea or how to politically contest what National is doing. What we are doing is moving on from the dreadful passivity of the previous Labour Government which said: “Because we care about our most vulnerable people we don’t actually have to do anything to stop them being vulnerable.” The sneaking suspicion is that what drives the Labour Party is that it wants people to be dependent because then it needs to get them a State house and it then needs to have workshops consultants and statisticians running a whole industry talking about it.  
This Government believes that people do not need to be vulnerable. They are not there as fodder for our political machine like they are fodder for the Labour Party political machine. We have committed over a quarter of a billion dollars in this zero Budget to doing more to help more people whom we believe can move out of dependency. The other benefit of it might be that they then stop voting for Labour. Would that not be fantastic? That would be a real measure of success.  
That is why the Budget debate has been a bit lacklustre because the once-great Labour Party has nothing to say that is relevant to the issues of the day. Labour members just harp on with decades-old slogans and hope that somehow we will stuff up public services enough that that will feed their political strategy. It has not happened despite 4 years of tight Budgets. We will deliver more and better public services for less and the delivery system that supports the Labour Party in the ballot box supports us—this Government—in the work it is doing and in what it wants to achieve for New Zealanders who depend on us.  
In a context of global uncertainty and a bumpy and slow recovery in the New Zealand economy this Budget is a sensible one. It is a sensible one. It is another step along the path of rebuilding the growth capacity of this economy building on the resilience of so many New Zealanders who have done a fantastic job of adapting to the way the world has changed. At times they are frustrated and at times they are impatient but at all times they are resilient making the changes they need to make so they can secure their jobs have viable households get their debt down and look to the future with some aspiration. This Government has never lost its sense of aspiration through these more difficult times and we look forward to presenting a Budget next year that builds further on the aspirations we have for a brighter future.