Twyford Phil: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Twyford Phil: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 29 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2598. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 Labour opposes this Appropriation (2012/13 Estimates) Bill.  
Chris Auchinvole 
: No Phil! 
PHIL TWYFORD 
: Yes it is true. Yes it is true: we are opposing this bloody hopeless nit-picking penny-pinching Budget. The poor members on the other side of the House have been subject to all sorts of criticism over the last few days. They have upset the paper boys they have upset aspiring postgraduate students they have upset elderly people looking at going into residential care and worse than that they have been criticised and lambasted by every respectable financial and economic commentator in this country.  
But there is one group that the pundits forgot. There is one set of organisations that are the beneficiaries of this Budget and they have not been given the recognition they deserve. That group is Western Australian mining companies. They are thrilled by this Budget. They have never seen a better Budget from a New Zealand Government. The Western Australian mining companies are over here recruiting as we speak holding public meetings in places like Kaitaia and Kaikohe. Their public meetings are overflowing with skilled New Zealand workers looking to go and work in the Western Australian desert in goldmines and so on. This Budget is the best thing that has ever happened to them because the flow of skilled workers across the Tasman to Western Australian mines will be speeded up by this National Budget.  
It is as we have been saying a zero ideas Budget and what is amazing about it is that for four Budgets in a row now Bill English has stepped up on Budget day and made the most remarkable promises about economic growth and about job growth and he has consistently failed to deliver. Year after year he has made claims that Treasury has put into his hands of so many jobs being created and so much economic growth and every year he has failed to deliver. Last year he promised 4 percent growth and in this Budget he has scaled that down to 2.6 percent. Last week he said that exports were rising whereas the House now knows that statistics show that exports fell by almost 17 percent last year. Last year he promised growth in real wages and this year we have seen growth peak at just 1.6 percent and then decline.  
In this House I represent the people of Te Atatu. We want jobs and we want growth in west Auckland. This Government has offered absolutely nothing to the people of my electorate in terms of hope that this economy will get back into growth and nothing to make them believe that there is any realistic prospect of more jobs being created. West Auckland is the happy home of a boatbuilding industry that has been very successful in recent years and yet under this Government’s economic stewardship we have seen one of the major superyacht builders internationally lose a major contract which led to 50 workers being made redundant—50 workers. Since then we have seen another boatbuilder go into receivership. The owners and managers of that business have gone off to Australia. Why? Because under this Government the exchange rate punishes exporters and members on that side of the House refused to do anything about it.  
Well Labour has produced a very clear and credible alternative budget over the last few days. We have heard my colleague David Parker laying out what Labour would do. We would introduce pro-growth tax reform that would not only make everyone pay their fair share in tax but also encourage more productive investment. I am talking about the capital gains tax. We would increase savings through a universal KiwiSaver scheme. We would re-establish the research and development tax credit scheme that National has decimated over the last few years and perhaps most important we would adjust monetary policy so that it actually takes into account the need for jobs exports and overall economic development. But no National does not want to hear any of that. What has it given the nation in the last few days? A penny-pinching pathetic beige Budget that does nothing to address the big structural challenges facing our economy.  
I want to talk about school class sizes because this is one of the most interesting aspects of this Budget. John Key when asked on Friday how many schools would be affected by the Government’s change to class sizes said that one or two schools would be affected. Well what do we know? Now we know that every intermediate school in the country is going to be affected by job cuts and that class sizes are going to go up dramatically. In my electorate of Te Atatu there are three intermediate schools: one of them was set to lose eight teachers and the other two were set to lose six teachers each. They have been distraught over the weekend. They have been absolutely distraught. The Minister of Education comes to the House today and says that no more than two teachers will be lost by an intermediate school—two teachers—and she makes that claim for just the next 3 years. Well I have got news for the Minister. One of the intermediate schools just down the road from where I live has 20 teachers. If it is going to lose two teachers as the Minister seems to be saying that is a 10 percent reduction in its staffing—a 10 percent reduction in its staffing. That is an outrage. After the next 3 years what is going to happen? Will the rest of the job cuts come through? That is my question and I ask members on that side of the House to get up and explain that policy.  
There is a deep dark secret in this Budget. While the Government has been nickel-and-diming postgraduate students the elderly and the paper boys the big deep dark secret is that National’s spending on its roads of national significance is bloated and out of control. Billions of dollars under this Budget continue to be misspent. That is low-value spending by the Government’s own data. These motorway projects were hand-picked by Steven Joyce when he was the Minister of Transport most of them even before any kind of cost-benefit analysis had been done about the economic value of those projects. It is a huge amount of money—$14 billion over the next 10 years—poured down a rat-hole in many cases. It is poor-value expenditure and when this Minister of Finance was asked in the House recently about that the best he could say was: “Well we campaigned on it and we won the election and that’s why we are going to continue doing it.” That is an extraordinary thing for a Minister of Finance to say to justify billions of dollars of expenditure on poor-value gold-plated motorway projects. And when he is asked to explain it in the House the best he can come up with is: “We campaigned on it and we won an election.” 
 At a time of austerity when everybody else in the country is being asked to pull their belts in a notch Gerry Brownlee’s bloated roads of national significance are out there stealing the lunch of every other category of transport spending. From the far north to Southland every local council is screaming that they do not have enough money to maintain their roads. Local roads are being squeezed of the resources that they need to be properly repaired. Milk tankers and logging trucks are tearing up those roads. National members opposite who represent rural electorates will be very aware that their councils simply do not have the money because National’s roads of national significance have been gobbling up all of the budget. If it is not a road of national significance there is a moratorium on new State highway projects around the country. It is virtually impossible to get a new State highway project done unless it is a road of national significance—unless Steven Joyce has personally hand-picked it.  
I want to finish on what is the crowning glory of National’s economic plan under this Budget. I am talking of course about asset sales. I want to note one particular thing that I think was one of the most depressing aspects of National’s Budget last week and that is the so-called Future Investment Fund. National is selling off assets that the mums and dads of New Zealand already own and that deliver a damn good dividend to the New Zealand taxpayer every year. It is selling them off. And what is it going to do with the proceeds? It is going to put them into a fund—a Future Investment Fund—that Bill English conceded last week is a notional fund. So National is selling real assets which we and our forebears sweated blood to build and it is going to put the proceeds into a notional fund. KPMG the accountancy firm criticised the Future Investment Fund for using the cash merely to fund existing commitments. It said that the fund was for things the Government had already committed to. That is a sham and that is why we oppose this Government’s Budget.