Cunliffe David: Imprest Supply DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Imprest Supply Debate[Sitting date: 06 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12383. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Third ReadingHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn):It is a pleasure to rise to take a call in the dead of the morning to debate the Appropriation (2013/14 Estimates) Bill. The member who has just resumed his seat Jonathan Young said that this debate is a test of credibility and asked the question to New Zealanders: “Who do you trust?”. The answer is that they are not going to trust the party that is trying to legalise blanket surveillance on New Zealanders. They are not going to trust a Big Brother State that is intent on doing it to them not doing it with them. They are not going to trust National’s A-team in the House this morning. We have got an expert on shears here. He has shorn lots of them. We have got Tau Henare sitting up the back. He is giving his full attention to the estimates debate. We have got Maurice Williamson sitting down the front the greatest leader the National Party never had. If this is National’s A-team the country’s economy is in trouble because their recipe for economic success is simply to milk more cows. Well man this week we have learnt about the risks associated with that. It seemslike the Government should besurveilling the dairy industry notsurveilling every telephone call that every New Zealander ever makes.New Zealanders are sick to death of this Government; that is the long and short of it. They did not like Muldoon last time around and they do not like Muldoon’s mokopuna this time around either.Hon Tau Henare: What was the last poll? 29 percent.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: My goodness me! Tau Henare has woken up. That coffee must have finally found its way through.We had the temerity of the previous speaker lecturing the Labour Party about power prices and crowing that National had put them up by only 16 percent in the last 4 years. That is far more than the rate of inflation and the reason for that as my colleague has said is that National has presided over the worst economic performance in 50 years. The economy has been struggling to get out of first gear. It has not got out of first gear. When we look at unemployment—the human face of National’s failure—we see that it has changed from 3.4 percent under Labour to 7 percent under National. It is sticking very close to 7 percent now.The Government’s economic prescription has failed. Why has it failed? Well it is shatteringly simple and it is rooted in inequality. The idea was and it is a very old idea that if you give tax cuts to the rich and put up GST on the poor suddenly the wealth that is at the top will trickle down and enrich all. It did not work for Ronald Reagan’s America. It did not work for Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It did not work for Ruth Richardson last time around and it is not working now. It is not working because the top 10 percent got 40 percent of the extra money. That is unethical in a country where 270000 children are growing up under the poverty line.National’s greatest achievement in this term of office has been to shift massive financial resource from the poor to the rich—from the poor to the rich—to massively grow inequality in this country. So its constituents increasingly live behind big walls and razor wire with their security cameras. We are living in a surveillance State. Meanwhile ordinary New Zealanders are struggling to pay their ever-growing power bills and are coping with rental house prices.Labour has the answer to those problems. It is very very simple: build affordable homes. Let us cut through all the nonsense and just admit that we are not going to bring down house prices until supply increases and demand cools off. So that is why we are going to hit the speculators with a capital gains tax. Let me say it again—we are going to hit the property speculators with a capital gains tax. If they are offshore non-resident speculators they are not going to play in our sandpit because we are going to put New Zealanders at the front of the queue. National’s spin machine has been in overdrive over that issue because as theNew Zealand Heraldtold us yesterday two-thirds of New Zealanders think it is a fabulous idea that Kiwis ought to be able to buy a home and put down roots—the Kiwi dream—in their own country not play second fiddle to some foreign plutocrat who slips a few bucks to the National Party.Labour will bring down power bills. I have had enough of being lectured to by the grandchildren of Max Bradford. The Bradford regime had every opportunity to work. Goodness knows the previous Labour Government did its best. It put David Caygill in as electricity commissioner and there were several rounds of reforms to try to perfect the market. The very same Stanford University economist whom Jonathan Young referred to declared a couple of years ago after massive analysis that there was a 20 percent monopoly price premium built into that market because it was not competitive. After 15 years of tweaking Mr Young we have finally come to the conclusion that there is no way of tweaking it beyond monopoly. So we are going to have an agency called NZ Power which will buy power at fair prices and sell it on to New Zealanders.That will take Kiwi power prices down by 300 bucks a year for the average family—over a month and a half of free power bills—if they vote Labour. Let us be clear. If New Zealanders want power prices to come down if they want reasonably affordable housing it is very simple: throw the bums out and vote Labour.Kiwis will not have a better life if they cannot earn a decent living. That is why Labour stands for more good high-wage jobs—more good high-wage jobs. We are not ashamed to have labour laws that allow unions to work on behalf of workers. Yes National hear us. Unions have a role to play in a modern workplace. We are not going to encourage scab labour. We are not going to sell down labour laws just like we are not going to sell down personal freedoms and privacy.Hon Maurice Williamson: I was a member of “Nats for Shearer” but I’m going with this man now. This man should be leader.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: You know some people cannot ever get over their own personal disappointments. Maurice Williamson is a living testament—a living testament—to the dogged belief in his own self-image. The problem is nobody else has been listening for about 10 years and they are not listening now.Before I finish I have to give a couple of minutes to the Hon Nathan Guy my recent opposite number in the fisheries portfolio. He is going to get even with Tau Henare very soon because Tau Henare backed thatNgāpuhi special on the foreign charter vessels bill. Let me talk about Nathan Guy’s three great stuff-ups in the fisheries sector. The first is snapper 1. There are 650000 recreational fishermen or fisherwomen in New Zealand of which I am a passionate member myself. That is 650000 voters who will not be voting National because National has had the stroke of genius—the stroke of brilliance—of cutting their snapper bag limit from nine fish a day to just three—nine fish a day to three. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that that is going to go down like a bucket of cold sick.Carol Beaumont: It has done.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: It has done. National members are sweating because their email boxes are filling up with messages from perturbed recreational fisher people saying: “Leave my snapper alone.” Well the word is that Mr Guy earlier floated the boat—if you can forgive the pun—of a 10 percent cut in the commercial quota. The phones started ringing hot from National’s big business backers and he backed off. And now it is all the recreational fishers who are getting it in the neck and they are not happy. Strike one.Strike two—we agree with National on trying to get rid of slave fishing. We agree with National about flagging foreign charter fishing boats into New Zealand law. We do not agree with National about doing a one-off sleazy deal for one iwi which gives them another 4 years to impose slavery on the fishing industry. It is not going to work and it is not going to stand. No matter what Tau Henare has been up to in the back rooms I am hopeful that Nathan Guy is going to see sense and withdraw that iwi amendment from the foreign slave fishing bill.His third great mistake has been thepaua fishery. He did not have a decent consultation process before wanting—same story again—to increase the commercial quota and get the recreational and customary take down.Hon Members: Ooh!Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Ooh what a bad one. What is wrong with this National Party death wish in the fisheries portfolio? I predict that Nathan Guy will not be in that portfolio in a year’s time. I think his record of getting himself donkey deep in commercial interests and shafting recreational and customary interests is going to see him being reshuffled out of that portfolio.I could go on and on and on and on about the failures of this Government but you Mr Deputy Speaker would not let me so I am going to round off now and just remind people that if you want Budget surpluses if you want decent cheap housing and—