Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. I never thought when I came to Parliament that we would debate such basic economic fallacies that I read about years and years and years ago and thought that this Parliament would have left behind. But today and tonight we are debating them—brought to this House by no less than the Leader of the Opposition.You have to ask yourself what is so wrong with giving a bit more money to New Zealand companies. Well the beginning of the problem is that actually money that the New Zealand Government spends on overseas procurement is not lost to New Zealand. The way it works in the case of the trains that were bought for example—which sparked this bill and apparently the interest of the member in charge Andrew Little—is that the New Zealand dollars disbursed by the New Zealand Government to purchase equipment from a foreign provider end up being somewhere offshore. The thing about New Zealand dollars being offshore is that there is only one place in the world that they can return to where they can have any value. So the money that the New Zealand Government spends whether it spends it here or whether it spends it offshore eventually becomes an opportunity for some other New Zealand business be it domestic or be it an exporter to sell more goods and services.We know that the money spent on those trains was eventually returned to New Zealand and spent by foreigners on New Zealand exports. So the choice that the Government makes—or would not be able to make under this particular bill—to spend the money on a New Zealand provider is really money that is taken away from competing New Zealand exporters. And why would this bill be necessary? Well it could only possibly be necessary because the New Zealand provider in question was less productive than the competing companies offshore. So first of all we lose the opportunity for a New Zealand exporter to reclaim those New Zealand dollars circulating in the international economy; second of all we choose a less-productive New Zealand firm to produce the goods. Where that ends is that eventually you end up with a New Zealand fortress economy filled with businesses that are not productive and that cannot compete on the global stage and they find themselves sheltered uncompetitive and unproductive—and eventually New Zealand goes broke.We see Annette King and Ruth Dyson here in the House tonight. They remember disassembling precisely the sort of protectionism that led New Zealand to lose hundreds of thousands of people offshore as Kiwis fled to Australia and further afield because the fortress economy simply did not work. You can actually understand the problem by looking at the wording of this bill: it does not say that the Government's procurers have to choose a New Zealand company it says that they have to consider the number of jobs that are created by procuring a certain contract. The only result of that is that we end up procuring things not because they are the best deal not because they are produced as productively as possible—Clayton Mitchell: We're not talking about buying tanks from Russia apricots from Indonesia or pencils from China.DAVID SEYMOUR: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Look I am hearing a very incoherent rant from New Zealand First and it is against the Standing Orders to offer a running commentary.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am the judge of that. David Seymour continue.DAVID SEYMOUR: The fact of the matter is that if you have a policy that deliberately chooses a higher level of employment over productivity the long-term outcome is that New Zealand becomes a less productive place. So when we hear the Opposition members complaining about declining productivity in New Zealand they have only themselves to blame when they put about policies that purposely choose the least productive supplier for a particular procurement contract.The bill is really an attempt to take us back to the 1950s and the 1970s the times gone by when in actual fact New Zealand was not an open vibrant and competitive country—it was quite the opposite. It was a country that lost hundreds of thousands of people as the Government protected unproductive businesses at the expense of the productive ones. And the ACT Party says: We ain't never going back there." Thank you."