Mallard Trevor; Seymour DavidAPPROPRIATION (2021/22 ESTIMATES) BILLThird ReadingIMPREST SUPPLY (SECOND FOR 2021/22) BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 8 September 2021.SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to. Mr Seymour would you like to take a call?DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Mr Speaker I'm very happy to take a call. I was under the impression it was the Green Party's turn to take a call but if it's me—SPEAKER: No they took the previous call. I think the member was in the Chamber at the time.DAVID SEYMOUR: Well Mr Speaker I certainly was not aware of that. I saw a National Party MP we had a discussion and you said the next call was Labour. Indeed I recall you seemed to be confused about the order of calls yourself—SPEAKER: And the member corrected me as he might well do—and he did—and I took his advice and I checked and he was right. DAVID SEYMOUR: Well I'm glad we cleared that up. Thank you Mr Speaker.This Estimates debate should be a marker in New Zealand's fiscal history. It is a debate about New Zealand's response to COVID-19 ultimately. Time and again we find the Government saying Aren't we doing a good job? We haven't made the mistakes that other countries have made." and they're able to say that because time and again New Zealand faces challenges under COVID-19 later because we are further away from the source of the original and new variants. That in a way has been very welcome for New Zealand but there is a cost to doing so. That is the amount of money that is being spent by Government the debt that is rising and the challenge that younger generations are facing in getting into the housing market as the fiscal stimulus to the economy is matched with monetary policy stimulus that has seen average house prices rise by $200000 in a year when the borders were closed and there was no immigration whatsoever.People need to get an idea of just how big the borrowing programme that this Government is committing to through the COVID period really is. Let me put it in perspective. They are going to increase net Government debt by $140 billion over four years. Let me put that into perspective. There are 5 million New Zealanders and if everyone was in a family of five there'd be a million of them. So for every family of five this Government is borrowing an additional $140000 to get through COVID. But of course that debt is not going to fall just on the older people in the family. It is going to disproportionately fall on those younger New Zealanders who will spend more time in future in the workforce more time paying tax not to provide for the roads and the schools and the hospitals needed in their time but to pay back a generation worth of debt taken on in this short COVID period near the start of their lives. This is something that I believe has not been given nearly enough attention.The Government is always congratulating itself about its COVID response but it never acknowledges the costs that it has put in place. Even if it did it's not talking about the costs that it still will incur in future taking on even more debt and printing even more money just as it's kept the official cash rate so low to get through this latest outbreak. That's why it matters to younger New Zealanders to watch very carefully what this Government is doing in this Budget and to watch very carefully what it is doing with its COVID-19 response to ensure that our strategy is not going to be to lock down the border lock down the country if the locked down border fails and borrow and print money all the while to try and keep the economy afloat. It is critical that our COVID-19 response becomes more sophisticated so that we don't continue to depend on borrowing but it is also critical that the quality of Government expenditure is improved and if there's going to be stimulus perhaps instead of spending more money on dubious projects the Government should be cutting taxes to allow the hard-working taxpayer to keep more of their own money.Let me just give you an example of how sloppy this Government has been with expenditure in recent times. We are today debating Estimates that will allow the Government to tax and spends tens of billions of dollars in this financial year. If we want to get an idea of how that might end up we only need to look at how poorly they took care of that hard-working taxpayer's money last year. Take for example the mismanagement of Ihumātao. Now this was a contest over property rights where a group of people decided to override the legal rights of the property owner that had been finely balanced and negotiated under the rule of law for many years. These people came along and squatted and the property owner saw the Prime Minister coming along. They thought "This is good. Here comes the Prime Minister of New Zealand to uphold our property rights to uphold the rule of law." And what did the Prime Minister of New Zealand do? She encouraged the squatters she empowered them and she violated the rule of law and property rights.So what did she have to do then? Well she had a terrible stand-off. What she did was she took $30 million of taxpayer money to try and fix one mistake setting a precedent for more. But it gets worse. You see the money that was given the $30 million was not appropriated through an Estimates bill like the one this House is debating today and the Auditor-General pointed out that the money was spent illegally. It was taken out of the Land for Housing fund that was never intended to try and fix problems created by the Prime Minister haphazardly wading into a property dispute. So the Auditor-General ticked them off for spending money outside the exact type of appropriations that we're debating today that are required by law for the Government to spend the taxpayer's money.You might ask yourself "Why on earth did the Government have a Land for Housing fund?" What Government would think the answer to New Zealand's over-inflated property prices was for the Government to join the market and start bidding up prices further with the taxes paid by other people trying to get into the market? I mean if you didn't laugh you'd cry. You can't make this stuff up. Altogether $4 billion of the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund were taken by this Government and put into housing. Supposedly the best way to recovery from COVID is to put money into a market that is overheated which has a shortage of labour because the borders are closed and now has a shortage of materials because under level 4 lockdown conditions materials are all sitting in Auckland warehouses unable to be distributed because the Government can't work out the testing regime for COVID-19 at the Auckland border.These are the kinds of things that the Government uses our money for: buying land without proper legal authority putting money into an over-inflated housing market and all of this money at the margin is borrowed and will have to be paid for by those younger generations who are the ones struggling so hard to get into that exact same market. The ACT Party says that the hard-working taxpayer who gets up makes the kids' lunches takes them to school goes to work puts up with the challenges they face there goes home makes the kids' dinner and goes to bed knowing they're getting about a third of all their money taken by the Government needs to know that when the Government spends money it is spending it legally according to legislation like we're debating today on the right things not putting it into markets that are already overheated and that it is actually adding value to make sure that New Zealand will have a more skilful a more productive a better-housed and a better-infrastructured future.At the moment the way this Government spends money none of that is something that we can be remotely hopeful of and that's why the ACT Party opposes this Estimates bill. We don't believe this Government is competent to spend hard-working taxpayers' money and we can't wait to write our own bill that makes savings for those taxpayers. Thank you Mr Speaker."