Shaw JamesJAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. Ki a koutou huri noa i Te Whare ngā mihi o te wā ki a koutou katoa.[Greetings Mr Speaker. Acknowledgments to us all throughout the House.]The Steven Joyce who stood up to give that speech looked and sounded like somebody who actually wanted to do something for low- and middle-income New Zealanders. But the Steven Joyce who wrote the Budget—who actually filled in the detail below the headline—was an entirely different person. So would the real Steven Joyce please stand up?The big headline in today's Budget is of course this $2 billion family income package. After 9 years of making lives harder for low-income families now in an election year National makes yet another headline-grabbing announcement to make it look like it is doing something about it. It sounds great but a quick glance at today's announcement suggests the following things: on the one hand it says that it is increasing family tax credits for some people but on the other hand the abatement rates will be higher and they will cut in earlier. It gives with one hand and it takes away with the other.The changes to income taxes go well beyond simply resetting thresholds to take account of inflation. As always with these guys—as always—the largest share of the tax cuts go to those on the highest incomes. Families who are on more than $127000 a year get a tax cut of $33.22 a week whilst those on $24000 a year or less get $5.34 a week. I am just going to say that again. Families on $127000 or more get $33 a week back in their tax cuts whilst those on $24000 a year or less get only $5.34 and that is in their package.This so-called $2 billion Family Incomes Package is just another tax cut for those on the highest incomes in disguise. It reminds me a little bit of Budget 2015 when National announced so-called benefit increases of $25 a week. That sounded great too until we realised later that fully half of all beneficiary families with children did not get the full $25. In fact some—many—got nothing at all. That is the thing about this Government. It is the master of the shell game. Steven Joyce's first and final Budget along with unprecedented waves of pre-Budget announcement shows one thing: National may be out of touch but it is very in tune with its polling data. So it has set about to look very very busy indeed. But looking busy is not the same as actual results. So let us talk about this Government's actual results. It wanted to be tested on its record; let us talk about its record.Climate change: National says it is super ambitious on climate but in the last 9 years since it came to office New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions have risen 19 percent.Rivers: National says that it is cleaning them up but after 9 years of a National Government you cannot swim in 62 percent of our rivers without the risk of catching some horrible disease.Conservation: National says it is doing everything it can to save our endangered species but it has got no problem with a coalmine in a Kiwi habitat on conservation land. Transport: National says that new motorways will drive productivity but after 9 years of a National Government Aucklanders now spend as much time sitting in traffic as they do on vacation every year. Energy: National says it wants 90 percent renewable electricity but New Zealand gets a lower percentage of its electricity from renewable sources now than it did in 1980—1980.On productivity: National says it is spending more on R & D grants in this Budget but after 9 years of a National Government we are still spending less than half of the OECD average on R & D in this country. In the Māori economy National says that it is improving well-being and job opportunities for Māori but after 9 years of a National Government Māori unemployment is still twice the national average. It has not budged in 9 years.On housing: after 9 years of a National Government New Zealand is the most unaffordable country in the world to buy a house. We have 40000 homeless people in this country—40000. Today's increase to the accommodation supplement is an admission of failure. It is a failure to build more houses. It is a failure to keep housing affordable. The accommodation supplement that takes taxpayer money and gives it to private landlords—if the Government had actually built more of its own social housing stock that money would come back to the Government to be reinvested.Steven Joyce says that he wants New Zealanders to judge National on its record and it is a broken record. Housing—broken. Our rivers—broken. The climate—broken. Transport—broken. But we can change this. New Zealanders can change this and we just need to change the Government. This Government reminds me of one of those tired old bands that keep touring the world playing their old hits talking about the good old days with that old lead singer that they used to have. The problem is the songs were not even that good the first time around. It is time to give it up guys there is a new super-group in town.Kiwis are generally a pretty happy and tolerant lot but 9 years is a long time to put your trust in a Government that is big on announcements and short on results. I mean can we really trust National to make our rivers swimmable again when after 9 years our rivers and our lakes and our aquifers are even more polluted and degraded than they were when they came to office? Budget 2017 sinks another $90 million into subsidies for industrial irrigation which will only make things worse. The braided rivers of Canterbury are on the verge of vanishing for ever. Coes Ford is an ankle-deep puddle. More than 60 percent of our monitored rivers are now unsafe to swim in.The Land and Water Forum has broken down under National. It no longer trusts this Government to act in good faith saying on the one hand that it wants to clean up our rivers whilst on the other hand it is subsidising the very things that make that impossible. Instead of trying to fix the problem National is doing what it always does: trying to wring a few more dollars out of a broken system before the public catches on. Our rivers are too precious to be spoilt in National's short-sighted pursuit of a quick buck.What of our children's future? Can we still trust National to protect our climate and move our economy towards a low-carbon future? Yes sure they signed up to the Paris Agreement committing us to a low-carbon economy. But at the same time under their stewardship New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions have been getting steadily worse. They are now 19 percent higher than when this Government came to power and they continue to rise and rise and rise.Budget 2017 makes things worse. These guys are still stuck in the 1950s thinking that they can spend $9 on motorways for every $1 they spend on rail—more pollution more congestion for Aucklanders. The National Government's failure to take meaningful action on climate change means that we are going to have to pay other countries to reduce their pollution so that we do not have to. That is going to cost us a fortune.The Green Party revealed this week Cabinet briefing papers that estimate that the cost of National's inaction on climate change is going to cost us at least $14 billion over 10 years. That is nearly $1.5 billion every year just to buy carbon credits overseas. It is a massive transfer of New Zealand wealth overseas and that is at today's prices. When the price of carbon increases we will be stuck with a bill that makes our looming superannuation goal look teeny by comparison.We still have a small opportunity to act. New Zealand has got the resources and the clean energy expertise to meet the climate challenge and to show the rest of the world how it is done. This is in fact one of the greatest economic opportunities in at least a generation and one that National members are simply letting slide on by while they have their heads buried under the sea looking for oil. If you want to live in a country that is not crippled by climate debt one that is truly sustainable with innovative meaningful well-paying jobs you need to vote to change the Government before that window of opportunity closes.This year we estimate that the Department of Conservation (DOC) will have $53 million less to invest in protecting nature than it did in 2008. That amounts to a cumulative budget cut of $422 million since National started cutting. These long-term budget cuts have resulted in fewer front-line rangers on the ground protecting our most precious and vulnerable birds from further decline and extinction. It also means we have fewer scientists discovering new ways of doing conservation smarter.After 9 years can we really trust National to protect the wild spaces that we love when they are happy to starve nature's front-line defenders whilst handing out fat subsidies to oil companies to drill in the Maui's dolphin sanctuary? Give me a break. Only a vote for the Green Party in 121 days' time will restore DOC funding for nature and create a whole lot of good jobs out in the regions where they are needed the most.There has been a lot of talk about social investment. National's big idea is to use big data to target social spending more accurately especially when it comes to our most vulnerable children in order to reduce future Governments' fiscal liability. Children are not a liability. They are our greatest asset. And you do not target children; you care for them. Everyone knows the old saying that it is better to build a fence at the top of the cliff rather than have an ambulance waiting at the bottom. The Greens have argued for decades that investing a little bit more up front in things like early childhood education will enable our children to grow up to be thriving adults with strong families and good jobs.Social investment has the potential to be the Holy Grail of social policy—an evidence-based approach to building a 21st century welfare system that actually does what it is intended to do which is to lift families out of long-term intergenerational cycles of poverty and exclusion and into ever-increasing cycles of inclusion and opportunity. But how can you trust a National Government to deliver on that promise when at its heart it is simply using the language of social investment to cloak 9 years of cutting social spending in order to deliver Steven Joyce's small State dream. National is not building a fence at the top of the cliff. It is leaving a tangle of barbed wire on the edge and hoping that nobody trips over it and falls over.If Steven Joyce truly believed that people mattered National would have curbed its instincts to blame and bully beneficiaries. If Steven Joyce truly cared about our most vulnerable families National would have reacted very differently to the stories of indifference and bureaucratic blockheadedness that are regularly encountered in Government agencies like ACC or Child Youth and Family or Income Support and in our prisons.When times are at least theoretically so good for the New Zealand economy explain to me why people who are working who have jobs and are doing more than 40 hours a week in those jobs are living in cars. Why are people who are working 40 hours a week or more living in cars? Why are New Zealand's houses so cold and so damp that there are 40000 visits by kids to the emergency rooms every winter because their homes make them sick? Why do 1600 people die in the winter months every year compared to the rest of the year?New Zealand's homes kill five times more people every year than the road toll and this Government killed off the very home insulation scheme that was designed to save those lives. Social investment—give me a break. The home insulation scheme had a benefit-cost ratio of 6:1. This Government understands the cost of everything and the value of nothing.Yesterday the Prime Minister posted a survey on his Facebook feed asking his followers what sort of pie he should eat today. The answer is humble pie. Budget 2017 disappoints in its lack of a big vision for our great nation and a lack of self-belief that we can actually solve the great challenges of our time if we change the direction that we are heading in. We can have rivers that we can swim in. We can lift tens of thousands of children out of poverty. We can fix the housing crisis. We can show the world what it takes to have a truly sustainable economy that works for and includes everyone. Budget 2017 will not be the defining political moment of this year. That moment belongs to the people of New Zealand at election 2017. After 9 years of a National Government it is time to change the Government—and change is coming. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.