Woods Megan: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 11 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1483. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I think it was quite telling that in question time today the Prime Minister informed the Leader of the Opposition that he was getting tired of being asked to be straight-up. Our Prime Minister does not want to be reminded to be straight with the New Zealand public. I think it is a bit of a theme of how this year is going to run. We have a Prime Minister who is slippery we have a Government that is arrogant and we have a Government that is out of touch. I think that nowhere was this divide between the Government and the Opposition drawn more sharply than in the two state of the nation speeches that we heard from John Key and from the Labour leader Andrew Little. Labour stands for jobs. Labour wants to create jobs and National wants to flog off our State houses. That is where the divide is drawn and that is where we have put the gauntlet down.Labour believes that we can do better as a country and National is labouring under the mistaken belief that you can create more houses by reducing the number. I am interested to see the arithmetic. Nick Smith showed us that 20 plus 20 equal 44—Hon Annette King: Forty-eight.Dr MEGAN WOODS: Forty-eight I am sorry Mrs King. Forty-eight was his answer in question time today as an interjection across the House and it is this kind of arithmetic that is lying at the heart of the housing Minister’s changes to our housing stock—a man who cannot add 20 plus 20. So we will be watching this with great interest as we go through. National’s State housing sell-off is a mess and it does carry a huge risk that National will not build a single new house. National is failing New Zealand families when it comes to housing but Labour has a plan. Labour is raring to go. We started this 51st Parliament holding this Government to account—holding this Government to account on its arrogance on its inability to tell the truth and on the way it conducted itself—and we will not resile from that. It is our job to hold this ailing Government which is suffering from a severe bout of “third-term-itis” to account and to tell it that the time is up and New Zealanders want a change.When the current Government came to office there were fewer than 100000 unemployed New Zealanders. There are now 46000 more New Zealanders unemployed compared with when this Government took office. Simply putting in your speech notes and chanting over and over again that you are about jobs and growth is not enough. You need to show the evidence and you need to show New Zealanders that you are about well-paid sustainable—sorry Mr Assistant Speaker; I know that you do. The Government needs to show New Zealanders that it is about creating jobs and well-paid jobs that are fit for the 21st century. In the last quarter alone the number of out-of-work Kiwis grew by 8000 and that is simply not good enough. This needs to be turned round and this will be a priority for a Labour Government in 2017. When Labour maintained unemployment at 4 percent or lower for 4 years from 2004 through to 2008 we had the lowest unemployment figures in the OECD and today we have fallen to 10th. This is not good enough for us. This is something we want to turn round.This is a Government that is not doing its job. It is a Government that has let standards fall so far and it is showing that it is absolutely not up to the task. And then we have the great story of the deal of the century from the Government from the master negotiators John Key and Steven Joyce who went in to get a deal for New Zealanders. They are the same deal makers who brought you buying Novopay when you could not fix it the same deal makers who ended up with a pretty bum deal down south the same deal makers for whom everything they touch turns to custard. So what do we have? We have a free convention centre that is no longer free but we are told that it is still a good deal for New Zealanders. But the stitch-up is unravelling. It was a shoddy deal whereby John Key and Steven Joyce stitched up the deal on the quiet without any proper competitive bidding and this was always going to come back to bite them. But for the free convention centre that we were offered all we had to do—and it was not much to ask—was sell off our gambling laws those pesky laws that would control how we could regulate gambling in our country. That is all we had to do and hey presto we would have a free convention centre. Well that is going to cost the New Zealand taxpayers $130 million out of their pockets as well as a downgrading of their gambling laws. What kind of deal is this? What we have is corporate welfare going on from the people who promised to make sure that taxpayer money was well guarded.But what we are also having is a lot of protesting from the National backbench in particular I would think about what unity there is in the National caucus. We had what sounded like a spill speech yesterday from Jonathan Young. I think he is getting excited about the prospect of leaders from New Plymouth and thinking that he might have a crack. We are hearing that they are all united they are all standing together. I think they are worried that a bit of “Abbott-itis” might spread over the Tasman and it may be that everything is coming undone. And we saw that today in the Finance and Expenditure Committee with Bill English running a million miles from the Skycity deal not wanting to have anything to do with it. As my colleague Grant Robertson said the Southern Man wanted to show that he could put together a much better deal than the wide boy negotiators from Auckland.But 2015 is panning out to be a year of the musical in this House. We had constant mentioning yesterday about Winston Peters’ Little River Band refrain to Northland that help was on its way. But what have we had from the National Party? Well we have had Bill English telling us that he wanted to walk away. He wanted to walk away from the deal. The Southern Man the Kenny Rogers of the National Party knew when to fold ’em. He knew when to walk away. But I implore Bill English to come over here to a different kind of tune because under Andrew Little we are singing a very different song from the wide boy negotiators of Steven Joyce and John Key. Well there might be shonky deals and massaging of the truth to put it nicely but over here with Andrew Little it is all straight talking three chords and the truth. That is the kind of music that we are making over here and that is what we will continue to have. We have a Government that has no answers.We have the great State house sell-off as one solution that has been put up for housing but then we do have another solution from the housing Minister one of the “Holy Trinity” of housing Ministers as they have been described today—from Nick Smith—and that is when all else fails say you are going to change the Resource Management Act. Give some numbers say that is the only thing holding up housing and change the Resource Management Act. Well what we have to be very aware of is Trojan horses creeping in when we are not going to see this as a solution to our housing problem. What we have—Dr David Clark: It’s not a musical; it’s a charade.Dr MEGAN WOODS: That is right. That is right Dr Clark. It is not a musical. It is not a musical at all.Hon Annette King: It’s a pantomime.Dr MEGAN WOODS: A pantomime played out by Dr Nick Smith. What we are going to see—Iain Lees-Galloway: He’s behind you.Dr MEGAN WOODS: Watch out! What we are seeing are some numbers that have been made up and that are not going to decrease the cost of housing in this country at all. This is an arrogant and an out-of-touch Government that does not have the answers that we need. We have got a Government whose only solution is to sell off State houses. The Government is telling us that we are obsessed with who owns the houses. Well I would say that its ideologically driven agenda about selling off State houses to property developers in the private sector is about an ideologically directed agenda when it comes to housing. So let us see some straight talking and getting back to three chords and the truth as we are over here.