Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's my great pleasure to rise on behalf of the ACT Party and deliver a dispatch from the cross benches of this Parliament because you see it's quite interesting to watch the way that positions change on an issue. Issue one: ANZ's business confidence surveys. Only a couple of weeks ago they were down and the Government told us that they were some sort of conspiracy by ideologically minded business people who simply did not like a Labour Government. Today they've recovered slightly—still not very healthy—but we have the Government taking patsy questions shouting from the rooftops how good the ANZ business confidence survey is.But just to be fair take another issue: GDP. Only a couple of weeks ago the Government was telling us that GDP didn't matter very much. We don't need to worry about GDP! In fact Treasury with its Living Standards Framework is dreaming up whole new ways of measuring prosperity so that we won't have to worry about GDP so much. My friends in the National Party meanwhile said that GDP was absolutely everything and must be taken with the utmost of seriousness. Today GDP is looking pretty healthy. Anyone's got to admit that 1 percent per quarter in a developed country is pretty good growth. Of course the Government has suddenly discovered that GDP after all is everything and the National Party has of course got less to say about GDP than they have had at any other time.Here in the little old ACT Party on the cross benches we'd like to focus on a few slightly more long-term issues and here's one—one that our country should be thinking about and that any Government should be thinking about. It's this: in the next couple of generations we are going to have about a billion people in Africa Bangladesh and India—low-skilled people who will work for nothing—entering the global workforce. That means that if you're a low-skilled person then your wages are going to be static and maybe will even go down over the next couple of decades. That's really sad but what makes it sadder is that we have a Government that spends about 150 grand on a kid's education for a decade and one in six of them 15 percent come out functionally illiterate and innumerate. You put those two things together and that is a real problem. That is a pathway to a country that is two-speed that is divided and then worse.What is this Government doing to work on the problem of educational inequity? Well the most substantial thing they've done so far is close charter schools—charter schools that back on the theme of being on the cross benches the National Party tolerated for six years and has since discovered were their cause célèbre all along since they're no longer in Government; charter schools that the Government closed without any such thing as a review. This Government reviews and consults on everything but when it came to the one part of the education system that was showing some promise for disadvantaged New Zealanders they closed it without asking. What have we heard from the Māori caucus in the Labour Party? Not a peep. And I'd say to those members: you'd better get in quick because of the waka-jumping legislation. It's going to take a bit longer than the Government expected but it's going to go through and then their ability to stand up for issues like that is simply not going to be there. They'll have no leverage because they won't be able to leave.Here's another long-term issue: we pay Treasury to tell us every couple of years that we are going to be 200 percent of GDP in debt in another generation—worse than Greece—if we keep spending the way we do if productivity doesn't increase twice as fast as it has and if we don't start managing entitlements. But can we find anyone on the Government benches who wants to seriously confront the cost of superannuation anyone who wants to do what every other country is doing and start adjusting the age of entitlement for superannuation like every other country in the OECD is doing? Nope. The best you can get is the National Party which wants to start doing it in 20 years' time.So we can go back and forth on the issues and it's fun to sit on the cross benches and watch National and the Government change positions week after week depending on the circumstances but at some point this country needs a Parliament that is prepared to look into the future confront our challenges and take decisive action so that we really can have a better tomorrow. Thank you Mr Speaker.