Shaw James: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8752. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. Ki a koutou ōku hoa Pāremata huri noa i Te Whare ngā mihi o Te Tau Hou ki a koutou katoa.[Mr Speaker greetings to you and greetings of the New Year to you all my parliamentary colleagues throughout the House.]I would like to agree on behalf of the Green Party to the amendment placed by the Leader of the Opposition Mr Andrew Little. The Prime Minister’s statement was notable only for its lack of notability. At least Auckland ratepayers do not have to fork out $4500 to listen to that one!Today I would like to talk about leadership and I would like to start by talking about a subject that many National MPs are going to become very familiar with next year. I would like to talk about retirement. One of the big challenges that this Government has promised not to fix is superannuation. Most of the people in this room know the numbers. Over the next few decades our population will age and retire our tax revenues will go down because there will be fewer people working our health care costs will go up and our superannuation commitments will double to $25 billion a year by 2028.We know that the Prime Minister is very relaxed about all of this. He is so relaxed that I sometimes wonder whether he has got a special dispensation from the associate health Minister. Former finance MinisterMichael Cullen was not so relaxed. That is why he set up the Superannuation Fund: to meet the cost of retirement for the current generation of New Zealanders. Almost the first thing that this Government did when it took power was to suspend payments to that fund. The finance Minister Bill English said at the time that this was a prudent sensible thing to do in the face of the great global financial crisis.We all know about the finance Minister’s values and his background that he comes from a farming family that he learned his frugal values as a young man growing up in the vast desolate landscapes and the cruel frozen winters of the New Zealand Treasury. It is a shame that he did not learn back then that the bottom of a crash when assets are undervalued is the best time a fund like the Superannuation Fund can possibly invest. The Superannuation Fund has estimated that his decision to suspend payments to the fund has already cost New Zealanders $18 billion. This is one of the most expensive blunders anyone in the history of New Zealand could make. This is the party that congratulates itself on being good at business good at managing the economy sensible and prudent.So what did they do instead these sensible prudent people? What did they do instead of paying into the Superannuation Fund a fund to provide for all New Zealanders? They gave us the great tax switch which has cost billions of dollars and they are still making the same mistake. They are putting aside funds to deliver more tax cuts next year. Why? Because it is an election year. The extent of National’s economic vision is to stay in power.This economic mismanagement also extends to housing. National knew years ago that there was a looming housing crisis but for a small group of property investors this crisis is a boom. Their properties are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through the mere fact of their existence. But now many New Zealanders are locked out of the property market. This is not just a problem for people who cannot afford a decent house. It is also—as the Reserve Bank says again and again and again—a serious risk to stability. It is a risk to the whole economy to the well-being of the country and to the people in it and over the years National has pretended that it has solutions.National members insist that it is a supply-side problem but then they confuse their loathing of the Resource Management Act with an actual solution. They insist it is not a demand-side problem but then they implement demand-side policies copied from this side of the House albeit in such a watered-down way that they make zero difference. By choosing not to fix this crisis they have allowed those with a large property portfolio to profit while burdening the rest of us with spiralling house prices and an unstable economy. It is a bait-and-switch that this Government loves to play—and they are playing it again with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.The story that this Government tells us about the TPP agreement is that this deal is good for New Zealand—we can all relax. It is all upside and no downside. But everyone in this room knows that trade negotiations do not work like that. It is a compromise. There are gains and there are losses winners and losers. National did not get the deal that it wanted on dairy access to the US. National said it would walk away if it didnot get it. Well it did not get it and it did not walk. It folded. But I see from the US elimination schedule that New Zealand did win a tariff reduction on boneless meat products—and so Tim Groser is off to Washington.What this Government needs to do is acknowledge the reality. It needs to stop telling us that it is good for all New Zealanders and start being honest about who gains and who loses. As usual with this National Government most of the gains most of the profits are privatised and most of the costs are socialised. Exporters get lower tariffs which is a good thing. Taxpayers pay more for our health care which is not. We have been hearing for years that this is a good deal. Well we can see it now and it is just not that great. I already know what the Government’s answer is to that. It will say that this deal is good for exporters and that means it is good for all of us. But that is not entirely true. The stuff that we export is mostly raw commodities and milk powder—industries that right now come with a huge environmental cost. And they do not pay for it the rest of us do: with beaches and rivers we cannot swim in the loss of native species and clean-up costs paid for with tax money.And we are not even that much of a trading nation. Compared with other nations our size our exports per capita are low. What we are really under National is a gigantic property market with the most unaffordable houses in the world. Our economy is based on sourcing overseas debt to buy and sell our own properties back and forth to each other at ever inflating prices. Or we sell them to investors from countries that are awash with cheap credit and hot money which few Kiwis can compete with. We have $821 billion invested in the housing market while our exports bring in less than a tenth of that in revenue every year. Under National that ratio is getting worse. The more National talks about openness and free trade and congratulates New Zealand on being a trading nation the more insular our economy becomes.Yes we are the most remote developed country in the world. Yes we should be a trading nation one that sells high-value exports to the rest of the world—not a gigantic property bubble that ships mostly milk and logs. But the way that we get there is to fix the internal imbalances in the New Zealand economy; fix the tax system which is broken by design; fix our environmental laws so that polluters pay the real cost of their damage to the environment; shift the incentives towards businesses that create high-value products and jobs instead of property speculation; create an economy and a trading system that is designed around the well-being of the people and the environment.The other thing I want to say about the TPPagreement is that this Government is hugely committed to it. It has been a focus of our diplomatic service for many years. In a list of this Government’s great achievements it ranks somewhere up between playing golf with Obama and that panda that we still do not have. What do we get out of the TPPagreement in economic terms? No one can say for sure yet. Some studies estimate that it will cost thousands of jobs in return for a tiny increase in exports. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is more optimistic. It predicts an extra 1 percent of GDP growth by 2030. That is a couple of billion dollars a year so over time that adds up to real money right? And that is why this Government is so committed to the deal.Something that we know the Government is not committed to is addressing climate change because it thinks it is going to happen way off in the distant future if at all. It is kind of like the housing market or the New Zealand Superannuation Fund—it is somebody else’s problem. But climate change has been happening for years. The world is already getting warmer. New Zealand’s weather has already altered. We are now living in the climate-changed future that National thinks will never happen and that has actual economic costs that are going up year by year. In 2013 and 2014 the combined costs of droughts floods and insurance payouts was between $1.2 billion and $2 billion a year—coincidentally 1 percent of GDP. That cost to the economy has increased a hundredfold since the early 1990s. It is still going up in line with the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and the same costs from droughts and storms and floods and fires are happening all over the world.So the gains that National hopes to win from the TPPagreement in 15 years’ time are already being wiped out by the economic damage of climate change—today. By the time we even get to 2030 any wins from the TPPagreement are going to be rounding errors compared with the costs of adapting to climate change and yet National is doing nothing about it. We are not transitioning to a low-carbon economy; our emissions are still soaring. We could be leaders in the new high-value cleantech low-carbon economy. Instead these guys treat our atmosphere—the air that we breathe—like an open sewer into which they dump 220000 tonnes of gaseous waste every day most of it sourced from within this room. We are still mining coal; we are still desperately trying to get the big petroleum companies to drill for oil in our seabed even though there is no future for oil.In December I attended the historic COP-21 accords in Paris as part of the New Zealand delegation. New Zealand signed a commitment to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees. It was an historic event but unlike the TPPagreement the Paris Agreement is non-binding. Apparently it is more important to safeguard the rights and profits of big pharmaceutical companies than it is to safeguard the air of the planet that we live on. The day after—the day after—the Paris Agreement was passed our Prime Minister announced nothing would change. It would be business as usual. We will keep on polluting and we will keep on drilling.What should he do? What would a real Government do? What will the next Government have to do? It will have to lead—to actually lead. We have regions that depend on fossil fuels for their local economy. The National Government should be starting the conversation with those regions now about how to lead the transition to a stronger more resilient sustainable economy. The longer we delay the harder it is going to be—the greater the damage to businesses and communities and families and lives. We are going to need to stop developing farmland in drought-prone areas. We need to stop property developments in flood basins. These are huge challenges with huge costs and it has to happen. The only question is whether we start now while it is cheaper and easier or later with more cost and more pain. By choosing to do nothing this Government has chosen the high-cost high-pain option so we have big problems in the future.But you know we have economic growth now right? That is what we hear from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance and the Minister for Economic Development—that last year we had one of the highest rates of growth in the OECD. They mentioned it a few times—every minute. The Hon Steven Joyce is in charge of growth. He is personally committed to growing the economy by repeatedly restructuring his own ministries to boost GDP. I reckon that by the year 2025 one in three working New Zealanders will be management consultants working for the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. OK to be honest that is not true. It is the least frightening statistic today and I made it up.National is very proud of its management of the economy and its delivery on economic growth but it should not be because when you look at what is creating that growth it pretty much comes down to our record high levels of immigration which is also driving the Auckland housing crisis. If we look at GDP growth over the last 7 years of this National Government and we take out population growth and the Christchurch rebuild the growth vanishes. It is close to zero—7 years and the real economy has gone nowhere—after all this Government’s talk about growing the economy focusing on the economy the Business Growth Agenda all those handouts and those bailouts all those sweetheart deals like South Canterbury Finance the Saudi eco-farm Warner Bros Rio Tinto Skycity and Serco. I tried to list them all but I ran out of space on my whiteboard. Take away the effect of immigration and the Christchurch rebuild and all of that adds up to a big fat zero. National has delivered nothing.Time is running out. The superannuation shortfall is getting larger. Our climate is getting warmer. This Government is into its eighth year. It has collected $510 billion in tax. It has spent $555 billion or over half a trillion dollars and it has nothing to show for it—no real economic development no ideas and nothing to say except that it is all Labour’s fault.Next year its own 9 long years in Government is going to be up and the next Government a progressive Government is going to accept responsibility and show some leadership. We will address the problems this Government ignores. We will fix what it has broken and provide leadership for a smarter fairer cleaner future. I started out today by talking about retirement. I came into Parliament only 18 months ago so hopefully my own retirement is still some way off. In those 18 months I have noticed that it is very easy to fool yourself that all of the talking and all of the shouting and all of the meetings and the press releases and the speeches make some kind of difference in the real world. Well it does not.I once worked on a microfinance project in the Andes. It was high desert country and one of the farmers whom I was working with said to me one day: “Don’t try to cross the desert by walking in circles.” I think that that is the mistake that this Government has made. It is lost in the desert of the real. It is leading us in circles and telling us how far we have come.When I do retire and I look back on my time here serving as a Green MP I know that we will not have achieved everything that I want us to achieve because politics is hard and change is hard. But I do want to be able to say that we tried—that we took on and confronted the greatest challenges of our time and we tried to solve them; that we were brave enough to lead and not just follow the focus groups—because it is better to try and if we fail to learn from our mistakes and to try again than to do nothing. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.