Robertson Grant: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12061. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):Under this Government—under Steven Joyce’s vision of economic development—we can say one thing for sure: if he has got one policy about economic development it is a big night at Skycity. That is economic development in Steven Joyce’s book because that is the big idea of this Government when it comes to economic development.I want to welcome my colleague Meka Whaitiri to the House and I want to note that when we were campaigning around the Ikaroa-Rāwhiti electorate there was one aspect of economic development that came up at every single meeting: the jobs mahi. “Where is the mahi?”—that is what people said everywhere we went. It is no wonder that people in the electorate of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti are looking for economic development because under this Government the two-speed economy says that the Government’s mates get the jobs its mates get the economic development and the people living in that electorate are the ones who do not. The statistics bear it out.There is a two-speed economy in a geographic sense. Outside of Auckland and outside of Canterbury where it is about disaster recovery - led economic development those provincial towns and cities in Gisborne in the Wairarapa and down in the South Island as well—where my colleague Rino Tirikatene spends his time—in Invercargill and on the West Coast are the places that are suffering. They are the places where the jobs are disappearing because this Government has taken its eye off the ball. It is out of touch with the needs of those regions and those regions are suffering. Every time the Labour Party goes into those regions be it up in the Hawke’s Bay last week or around the country that is the message we hear: the National Government has forgotten us. The National Government has forgotten the regions of New Zealand.The National Government has forgotten the young people of New Zealand. That is where the statistics really blow out. The youth unemployment statistics in New Zealand are appalling. The real-life stories that go with that are important. I had a letter from a mother in Christchurch just last week saying that her kids have done all the right things. They have gone in and they have tried to get the apprenticeships. They have tried to make sure that they can stay in the workforce to get the skills and there are no jobs. That mother is in Christchurch in a place where the economy is supposedly booming but because the Government sat on its hands for 2 or 3 years and did not train up New Zealanders we have got David Bennett and people crowing about the fact that we had to import labour. Nicky Wagner stands up and says that it is fantastic that 23 migrants a day arrive in Christchurch to help with the rebuild. Those jobs should be being done byNew Zealanders. If this Government had actually got off its hands and trained up people straight after the earthquake there would be New Zealanders in jobs. Instead we end up with a situation where we have youth unemployment around 15 to 20 percent in all of those regions that I have mentioned. We haveMāori youth unemployment even higher. We have Pasifika youth unemployment even higher than that.That is the record of economic development of this Government of a two-speed economy. But if we really want to see the two-speed economy it is about the gap between the rich and the poor in this country. It is about the growing inequality in New Zealand that will slow down economic development. Mr Joyce thinks that all his trickle-down economic theories will work but the reality is that for the people at the bottom of the heap things are getting worse. This Government started the ball rolling on that with tax cuts that said that 40 percent of the benefits go to the top 10 percent. It set the ball rolling on making that inequality grow and it has just got worse. The OECD has recently said that in New Zealand there is a considerable gap between the richest and the poorest. The top 20 percent of the population earn five times as much as the bottom 20 percent. That is how we end up in a situation where the Australians are saying that it is fantastic and that they are going to move businesses to New Zealand because it is 30 percent cheaper to do that. What that means—what 30 percent cheaper means—is people getting low wages. That is what that means.Steven Joyce says that it is a wonderful investment opportunity. Well that is real estate agent - speak. That is the kind of thing we expect from the speculators in this Government—that it is an investment opportunity that New Zealanders are getting lower wages than Australians. Just imagine if under this National Government we had not exported 200000 New Zealanders to Australia. The unemployment rate of 6 percent would be over 8 percent. That is the economic record of this Government.