Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the National leader's amendment to the Prime Minister's motion but being the ACT Party—always here to help—I'd like to fill in and add a few details. Can I start by acknowledging the suffering from the floods both in Auckland a fortnight ago and in Tai Rāwhiti and in Hawke's Bay right now—in particular the 11 who have been confirmed dead in Tai Rāwhiti and Hawke's Bay and the four Aucklanders who lost their lives in the floods two weeks ago. On top of that loss of life those people who are still not contactable and are deemed missing for the time being; let's hope that they are found; found soon and found alive. To all of those people who have experienced enormous devastation we say as ACT that we hear you we are with you and we look forward to working constructively—and that means being prepared to debate to propose ideas and to speak on behalf of those affected in a democratic society. But we look forward to working constructively to help with the recovery that is now essential. To give you a few ideas of what that looks like it looks like my constituent Erana who lives in a house that was flooded right up to the second floor who lost everything and has been burgled multiple times despite there being nothing to steal. Those are people who need help with recovery. It is people whose homes were flooded because the drains around their house were filled with gravel and—miraculously—after the council cleared the drains on Monday night after the Friday night rains the Tuesday night rains drained away with no flooding. On the grounds in the Epsom electorate and across the Auckland isthmus up to Northland down to Coromandel we are still reeling from the effects of those Auckland anniversary weekend rains and we see people that are going to take a long time to recover including those in Mt Eden who have been evacuated for two weeks while a shot tower—a historical relic—is dismantled.The devastation in Hawke's Bay and the East Coast or Tai Rāwhiti is even greater. I visited for example an orchard where they explained that the silts will ringbark the trees and kill them off that the apples on the tree cannot be harvested; they have incurred all of the expenses for this season and yet they will now have to dump that crop without getting anything this season and that's going to be the reality for the next four years because if they decide to go ahead they will have to plough their trees into the ground replant—hundreds of thousands of dollars per hectare of recapitalisation—and those trees will not bear fruit leaving them with no revenue right through to the year 2027. That is the kind of devastation on a practical level that people face and they're going to depend on two kinds of banks: will there be confidence in the stopbanks and the municipal infrastructure reinvestment that it's going to be safe to operate in that area and will the banks believe as much and fund the recapitalisation so that they can do what's necessary for their business to carry on?These are harrowing and difficult choices and they're going to resonate outside of the directly affected area. While most of New Zealand is not affected nearly as acutely as that there will be challenges and choices. And let me agree with the Prime Minister on one point: there is still a lot that is unknown. The full scale of the damage the full causes or at least the dynamics that caused the damage not being fully understood it would be premature to know exactly how to respond. But what we do know is that there will be serious challenges and choices and a requirement to respond with good policy based on sound principle. One of the most obvious revelations is that this country is going to need to change its approach to climate change. So far we have been overwhelmingly focused on emissions reduction or mitigation and it was sad it was truly sad to hear the Minister of Climate Change—someone who's had the job for five years; someone who never studied science past high school—say that he wants to take a scientific approach and then bungle just about everything that he said. For example James Shaw it was 28 centimetres of rain in 24 hours on 27 January in Auckland not 20. If he says that 4 centimetres is the difference between a bit of rain and a biblical flood then imagine what difference 8 centimetres makes. Get it right mate.Then he said that solar power is the most affordable form of energy created by humankind. Well if you know your Latin Mr Speaker then solar power by definition comes from the sun and as far as I'm aware the sun was not created by man. What I think he meant to say is that solar panels are one of the most efficient ways of converting energy from its solar form into electricity—that would be correct. But it shows the problem with a climate Minister who like all Green Party MPs never studied science past high school. They get it wrong all the time. The reality is that we have a climate change Minister who blames everybody but himself for the failure of his own policies. We have had emission reduction schemes that just don't work. It doesn't reduce New Zealand's net emissions when they are capped under the emissions trading scheme to tax tradies buying utes and subsidise people buying a Tesla as their third car. It might change who emits the carbon dioxide; it doesn't change the amount. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has said it didn't help to ban oil and gas exploration; in fact it may have been counter-productive. And it did not help to subsidise biofuels—even the Labour Party has now accepted that policy was futile—and it didn't help to subsidise people to plant pine trees all over Tai Rāwhiti; in fact as we know they subsidised an environmental harm that made the situation worse.So if we want to talk about being science-based and economically literate then actually the people to blame are not all of the disbelievers that the quasi-religious James Shaw rages at in frustration. The reason he's frustrated is that he has failed and this country needs an approach to climate change that works for New Zealanders and focuses on adaptation. One thing we could do for example is start using the nearly $2 billion revenue from the emissions trading scheme for an adaptation fund; that would be smart instead of various boondoggles bribing people to try and reduce their emissions. The rest of the world hasn't got the memo—that's why we're experiencing these weather events and we need a policy that works for New Zealanders and that means adaptation and we see it working. We heard about Stonefields from James Shaw—that's true. I told you about the drain clearances between rains in Auckland that made a difference. I heard from Kirsten Wise the Mayor of Napier about the $68 million in municipal infrastructure investment that meant that the city of Napier itself was largely OK in these rains last week. It shows the power of an adaptation approach over a futile and often counter-productive emission reduction approach and James Shaw needs to stop moralising and blaming everyone else in his quasi-religious tone and start looking at the man in the mirror because he's been the climate change Minister for the last five years and he needs to take responsibility and maybe a maths class.This Government will also see further inflation on its watch as billions of dollars are dumped on to the inflationary fire by the global reinsurance industry just as the Reserve Bank is trying to take away the punch-bowl. There will also be a serious resource crunch for tradies and builders and plasterboard and building materials. And when you have too much money chasing after too few goods what you get is inflation. Expect inflation to take off again and how is the Government going to respond? Well the first thing it can do is start looking at its own books. If it believes the situation has changed then it needs to stop spending spending spending. This is a Government that inherited the books spending 27 percent of GDP or about $87 billion a year; now it's spending around 35 percent of GDP—up $40 billion a year to around $127 billion—and even when that spending from COVID comes off as Grant Robertson promised they'll be spending 32 percent of GDP. When a Government increases spending by 5 percentage points of GDP and when it borrows the money to do it that's inflationary and the floods are going to be inflationary too. So what's the Government going to do to reduce its effect on inflation? Is this Government really going to tell us that every dollar it's spending is worth it? It used to say that about the biofuel subsidy and it used to say that about the RNZ - TVNZ merger. If those things weren't necessary then maybe Auckland light rail—that was never a good idea—needs to go as well. Maybe the three waters merger that was never a good idea needs to go as well. Maybe this Government hiring an extra 14000 bureaucrats for no improvements in outcomes for tax-paying Kiwis needs to go as well in order to save the money so that the people of New Zealand have a chance to fight the cost of living crisis and price rises they already face which will be exacerbated by these floods. There are more things the Government could do in order to exacerbate the inflationary pressures of the floods. Imagine having a recovery visa: anyone from a visa-waiver country can show up at the New Zealand border and enter the country for 90 days almost no questions asked. Imagine saying to anyone from a visa-waiver country Six months allowed to work any job in the flood-recovery region—no problem—and we'll process it within 24 hours." I was speaking to a business group this morning; there were several infrastructure companies there and they were nodding along at that one. Will this Government have the courage to do it? They could have a materials equipment register. There'll be a plasterboard shortage again. They need to start saying that if a material is allowed in Australia or if it's allowed in the United States or Japan it should be allowed to be used for the recovery. We can't afford to run a parallel market or actually three or four parallel markets—if you take the councils from the East Cape down to Wairarapa—and hope that the global suppliers will come to those fragmented markets. We should have the New Zealand Defence Force out supporting constables right now whether the problem is gangs whether the problem is looting whether the problem is domestic violence or whichever one the Government is saying it is from day to day. But let me pay the Government one compliment. I think that Chris Hipkins got something right when he said that the response should be driven from the locals. I was lucky enough to meet Sally Crown Annette Brosnan and Kirsten Wise who are two councillors and the deputy mayor and Mayor of Napier—what impressive leadership. They are the sorts of people that should be listened to. The emergency response should be supporting local leadership not undermining and gaslighting local leadership as we heard the Commissioner of Police on the radio this morning. When local people say "We need to see police. We are fearful." we need a police commissioner who does better than saying "Don't be scared." "The police are there." and "You're wrong." We need to start listening to local leadership and that's one good thing that Chris Hipkins has said; I'd just like to see the reality of it. What we see in this Prime Minister's statement as we turn to New Zealand's longer-term future is again an enormous number of dumb ideas where the RNZ - TVNZ merger the hate speech laws and the biofuel subsidy all came from. We have the excessive expenditure. We have the increase in minimum wage by more than even the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment advised putting more costs on to small businesses that are going to have a very tough year as the economy turns south and what is the Government doing? Well they're appointing more and bigger bureaucracies. We're going to have a grocery commissioner and the hope is that the grocery commissioner will be just as successful as the Commerce Commission's attempts to increase competition amongst petrol stations which by the way have been totally ineffective because the importer margin—the amount charged by the petrol stations—remains the same as it was before they put the latest layer of bureaucracy on to petrol stations and then the building supplies industry is going to get its own bureaucracy. All this Labour Party knows how to do is basically—well it's what we used to say: in the back line shovelling as the French say merde. Instead of actually solving problems they shovel them on to the next person and create a new commissioner or imagine that's the solution when actually what people know is that groceries haven't got cheaper petrol hasn't got cheaper and building supplies won't get cheaper either just because there's a new commissioner. They say that they're going to fix mental health. You've got to admire the sheer audacity of this Government—this Government which wouldn't even report on the number of people being seen in mental health. It stopped reporting its own measurements they were so bad. It's like they've failed so hard for the last five years the audacity of asking for another go and pretending that nothing that has happened for the last five years is their responsibility is truly admirable. I'll give them this: they've got some chutzpah. Then they say—what else do they say? They say they're going to apply the Housing Acceleration Fund. Well funding infrastructure so houses can get built is a very good idea if only they did it. They announced it; they just haven't done it. We're going to have a Natural and Built Environment Bill a more bureaucratic version of the Resource Management Act. All it's going to do is replace sustainable development with te Oranga o te Taiao. Now does anyone know what that means? No they don't. The courts will figure it out. It'll take 15 years. By that point Indonesia will have overtaken us in living standards and GDP per capita but that's what it's going to take to understand the natural and built environments law which is more complex than the Resource Management Act which it replaces and it's also novel meaning it's going to take a long time to figure it out. Meanwhile getting stuff built just ain't going to happen. Then for businesses up and down New Zealand there's the bureaucracy of the fair pay agreements. All you've got is a repetition and continuation of Labour's failed policies and it's not surprising because the new Prime Minister is the one who has a cast-iron—or should I say a cast-lead—track record of failure. This is the police Minister who spent a year and $6 million delivering seven fog cannons to embattled dairy owners up and down New Zealand. The criteria he gave one jeweller in Ellerslie was that they had to be ram-raided in order to qualify for protection against ram-raiding. Whatever happened to preventative policing? This was the Minister of Education who had seen record levels of truancy and they don't even measure it. We just heard from Jan Tinetti the education Minister that she knew how bad the school attendance figures were for term 3 last year in December but she didn't release them till now because the numbers weren't very good. I mean is that what we're teaching our kids: "If you have bad news just hide it."? Where are the values of this Government? Where's the honesty? How is it possible to solve a problem in education if even the Minister of Education is hiding from it? But Chris Hipkins was also responsible for Te Pūkenga and Te Pūkenga is kind of like the KiwiBuild of Labour's second term. It's almost unfair to bring it up because they've failed so hard—it is a byword for mismanagement and Government mediocracy. Then of course you've got the Prime Minister who was the Minister for COVID response who leaked the private information of a pregnant Kiwi woman hiding with the Taliban and he wouldn't apologise until the courts made him—what a guy! What a lovely man we're going to have and what an interesting year of politics we're going to have when those aspects of his character and performance start to come out. Then he's also the guy who's been responsible as State services Minister for growing from 47000 bureaucrats to 61000 bureaucrats with no increase in productivity whatsoever. We can be so much better. Imagine a New Zealand that is not divided by its Treaty. You see all through human history treaties have brought people together. Under this Government we have the first ever treaty that is designed to divide people into tangata whenua or land people and tangata Tiriti or Treaty people—the world's first treaty of division. Imagine New Zealand as a modern multi-ethnic liberal democracy with a place for everyone entitled to one 5-millionth of the opportunity this country has to offer. That is a New Zealand we can get behind. Imagine a New Zealand with growing productivity. Well that's hard at the moment because the statistics department were supposed to release the productivity stats on Wednesday but they have their own productivity problem and the stats for productivity are two weeks late. But imagine productivity actually rising in New Zealand as we end the war on immigration and welcome skilled people to our border with a minimum of fuss as if we're actually competing in a global war for talent where right now Canada and Australia are eating our lunch and imagine ladders of opportunity for young New Zealanders who can see their path to owning their part of a property-owning democracy. Imagine one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world having the infrastructure funding the building materials regime and the consenting regime to create habitat for humans. Imagine that: the real dream of New Zealand for which people have come for generations—a First World nation in an island paradise. That is what ACT is working to deliver this year and we can't wait to get stuck into the political year. Thank you Mr Speaker."