Borrows Chester: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBorrows Chester: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 21 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18179. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon CHESTER BORROWS (Minister for Courts):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. It is a privilege to be able to stand in this Budget debate. I had an interesting week last week. On Monday just gone I went and spoke to Grey Power South Taranaki. We had a really good discussion. Grey Power South Taranaki is a pretty feisty bunch of people. They are always happy to take it to you and ask you the hard questions when you are there to speak to them. But the fact is that South Taranaki and Wanganui over the last few years are experiencing something they have not experienced before and certainly not under other Governments and that is that they are experiencing a higher level of GDP per capita than they ever have before and funnily enough inWanganui’s case a higher level of employment than is the national average. This is because both areas within my electorate are built on the back of the export industry. What we know is that under the previous Government there was not a single job grown in the export sector for 10 years. Looking at where that sits now this Government is focused on providing some certainty around financial policy and some certainty around people investing in the economy particularly in the export sector.The economy of Taranaki and South Taranaki as it comes into the Wanganui electorate is built on the back of dairy farming and the oil and gas industry. Those people involved in oil and gas receive a higher level of remuneration than those employed in similar jobs in other sectors. That is the nature of the industry and it has been very very good for our part of the world and very very good for our country. In respect of dairying though that as people know has been undergoing a purple patch over the last few years in terms of reward for those who are involved in the industry not only farm owners and operators but farm workers as well.The big threat here comes from those promises we have already had from the other side of the House in terms of a Labour-Greens Government. What we know is that there will be a change to personal income tax. It will go up under a Labour-Greens Government. We also know that commercial tax rates will go up under a Labour-Greens Government. We also know that there will be changes to the labour sector—for instance the loss of the 90-day trial and the increase in minimum wages to $15 heading towards $18 after that. We also know that there will be changes to ACC and changes to the Resource Management Act. We also know that there will be the imposition of a capital gains tax and we know that there will be increased charges for carbon. So what we know then is that electricity prices will go up as well and the cost of doing business in this critical export area of dairying is going to become very very heavily taxed and levied. The average dairy farm milking about 400 cows for 140000 kilograms of milk solids is expecting then that it will pay well in excess of $2000 per week in excess taxes and levies and the averagedrystock farm about $1000.This is a critical thing for our electorate. Those people whom we are working with and whom we are speaking to have got their heads around that very very well indeed. The response for instance at the Wanganui riverside market was interesting too. Wanganui as people will know is an area that has struggled in some aspects. Its demographics are such that it has a higher than average older population. That population does not keep in as good health as other relative populations. It has a lesser number of people who are well educated and they are involved in less remunerative work. So the gains that we have made from health care for instance are very very near to the hearts of those people in Wanganui. While many developed countries are freezing or reducing health funding National is spending more on health than any other Government in New Zealand’s history—$1.8 billion of extra investment over 4 years—and taking health spending next year to a record $15.6 billion.It is interesting to note that over the last few years of the Labour Government the Whanganui District Health Board struggled. It struggled to meet its targets it failed in a number of areas and it was in the media for all the wrong reasons. Yet over the last 6 years it has been in the media for all the right reasons. When you look at the measures and when you look at the traffic light index of where those hospitals are required to perform it is meeting all those targets and sits in about the top five of all district health boards around the country except for a couple of measures which are mainly around smoking cessation and others.When we look at the education sector in Wanganui we do very well with our schools there albeit after a lot of depopulation; there are more schools than are required for the population and there are a number of empty chairs. What we do know is that the schools that operate within Wanganui do incredibly well. It is good to note too that the Government is investing heavily in education and recognising the expertise of teachers and principals and their ability to share their expertise around the community in which they work. As every electorate MP knows you may have many many schools within your electorate and they operate at different levels. You can walk into some schools and they are absolutely humming; you walk into other schools and it is like putting on a big wet duffel coat. To share that expertise around those schools in order to make sure that every child has the opportunity for the best possible results in their education is a great thing.I would like to talk a little bit about my portfolios in respect of courts and youth justice. Over the last few years we have invested in courts and invested in savings and we are seeing the results of that which are fantastic. We have invested in the modernisation of courts and I know that across the House we have received support for the investment we have made. Implementing the use of technology within our courts has been a high priority for us and we would like to one day achieve the status of a paperless court. That is some way off; nevertheless it is an ambition that we hold dear. It seems ridiculous to me that the way New Zealanders interact with their banks pay their bills book their hotels and air travel and do a number of other things is all online but when we have to deal with the courts it has got to be a paper-based system. We are moving very quickly in order to be able to change that. An example of that for instance was the Environment Court’s 5-week hearings in relation to theDenniston Plateau where the whole of the court hearing was held oniPads. There was not any paper used through that court process whatsoever.But the big bugbear in courts is reducing waiting times and work on hand. So overall in the last 12 months we have seen an 8.9 percent drop in the time it takes for a court case to move through the District Court system. That is a 16-day reduction. In the criminal jurisdiction it is up to 18.3 percent or a 23-day reduction in the average time of work on hand. Disputes tribunals have sped up just over 21 percent or 17 days quicker than they were before. We are seeing this reflected all the way through our court system and we have firmly between our teeth the bit that is going to take us to an even more efficient system. In collections for instance when we came into office we inherited a debt book of unpaid fines. It was $806 million when we came into office in 2008 and now it is down to $554 million. That is $554 million that is incredibly frustrating because you cannot get your mitts on it. It is like knowing there is $100 stuffed down the back of your couch but you cannot quite get to it. We are doing everything we can to ensure that we can get our mitts on it.I want to finish off with a bit of a story around our youth justice results. When we came into Government in 2008 we set about changing the way we were delivering youth justice to our young people. We received a lot of stick for that. As the legislation went through the Social Services Committee we had a lot of stick about the initiativeswe were taking in the youth justice sector to extend the periods for supervision with activity and supervision with residence and to bolt on to the back of that the ability to have therapeutic treatments around drug and alcohol violence and abuse and those sorts of things. Probably the hottest one was around the introduction of military activity camps. Just to bring Parliament up to speed in respect of our results there in the first 12 months post - military activity camp 79 percent are reducing their frequency of offending 16 percent are not offending whatsoever 81 percent are reducing the severity of offending and there is a 53 percent reduction in violent offending. It is good to note that the heat has now gone out of this debate. Labour the Greens and all parties on the Opposition side are fully in support of the youth justice initiatives that we implemented in 2008 because we are seeing the benefits of them. Thank you.