Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): It's an absolute pleasure to rise after Gerry Brownlee who is clearly the National Party's best speaker. I'm just dumbfounded why he's not on the front bench. Why has he been relegated back there to the second bench? But what I will say is there is one job that is distracting the National Party at the moment and that job is the Leader of the Opposition. You can see it on their faces. Every day this divided distracted bunch trundle into this House. It is the only thing on their minds and things are getting desperate.It's fair to say that some of us on this side of the House have been through our own years of disquiet—let's say—around leadership. But even in the darkest days did we ever have a leader who was so desperate that he tried to engineer someone to leave his own party and set up another one? Even in the worst of times we never got to that point. But these are desperate desperate times for the National Party. And I guess when you reflect on the fact that the only thing that the National Party is holding on to and Simon Bridges is holding on to is We're polling 40 percent."—well newsflash: that's all of you. That's all your mates in the playground consolidated into one group. Forty percent does not make Government.So what are they trying to do with the invention of imaginary friends? They tried it with the "teal deal". It didn't fly. Even the imaginary friend didn't want them—even the imaginary friend didn't want to play with them in the playground. So Simon Bridges in the guise of "Snuffleupagus" with "Big Bird" is setting himself up with the imaginary friend of "King Alfred"—"King Alfred"—who is going to lead them into the promised land of Government. "King Alfred"—yeah. I guess it has gone in a sense like this: "You know we need some friends. Go forth form a party and what we will do is we will try and get there." It is not working but that is how desperate it is. Then we had the best speaker in the National Party Gerry Brownlee stand up and say "We will be judged on our score card." that Governments get thrown out when they neglect the things that Norman Kirk laid down. He said "housing". So let's have a look at how they did when they were in Government on some of these things. Let's go through their report card. Housing: we inherited a shortfall of 70000 houses because that Government had no plan. Health: health was underfunded by $2.3 billion over the nine years that they were in office. That was a Government that neglected health and in Government we are setting about rectifying it. Then let's turn to education: a billion-dollar shortfall to meet the demands for school property alone over the next four years 214 overcrowded schools and pay that had not kept up in the sector by a group of people that simply did not care. But in only eight sleeps' time on this side of the House we will deliver a Budget that is beginning to rectify the neglect that that crowd left this country in—a wellbeing Budget that has people at its centre a Budget that has the courage to lift its eyes beyond the three-year political cycle to govern for the next generation and not the next election because that is all the National Party did when they were in Government. They didn't think about the long-term benefits. They did not focus on wellbeing. They did not focus on the big issues such as climate change and how we were going to address it. They did not focus on the wellbeing of their people. Instead all we are seeing from the speech that the best speaker in the National Party gave us is a tirade about us.I did not hear one thing that "Snuffleupagus" "Big Bird" or any of the other divided bunch in the National Party actually want to do to address the long-term issues that we have in this country. They are intent on being divisive they are intent on making up friends because no one else will play with them and they are not fit to get into Government. They have no ideas and they do not have the ability to think in the long term and about what is good for future generations."