Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I am going to begin by responding to one of the matters that was raised by the last speaker Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi which was to herald as good news the fact that the Government is now in this Budget subsidising security systems in dairies in essentially low-decile areas. Does anyone think that it is a good thing that we have got to the point in New Zealand where the Government has to subsidise locks for dairy owners in order to protect them? I think it is disgraceful that we have reached the point where one of the things that the Government heralds as good news in this Budget is the fact that it has got to subsidise dairy owners to put locks on their shops. I think that is terrible. I think that is an example of where things are going terribly wrong because what it evidences is a society that is getting worse because there is an increase in violent crime in these areas. That is not good news. If ever there was an example of a sticking plaster being put on a wound or an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff I think that is it. I am not going to waste any more time on it though because there are more important things to talk about—not that violent crime is unimportant but the idea that that is somehow a solution to a problem with rising violent crime suffered by people running dairies I think is very sad.The Government heralds this Budget saying: Oh look you know we're about growth." It comes along and it says we have got amongst the highest growth rates in the world. You know that is essentially what it says—or in the developed world. In truth once you strip out this impulse to growth that is caused by population growth largely caused by these incredibly high rates of immigration our growth rates are pathetic. They are about 1 percent per annum. This is 8 years—9 years—after the global financial crisis. Real growth rates in New Zealand after you take out immigration are about 1 percent per annum. That is not good. What is the reason for that? It is that productivity growth is low. Productivity growth is low and therefore economic growth per capita is low.What is the reason for that? Well I think most of us in this House know that the problems that we have got in the housing market—ridiculously high prices in Auckland especially homeless people at unprecedented levels and rates of homeownership the lowest that they have been since 1951—are related to our poor productivity. It is because in part New Zealanders spend far too much money trading houses—not building new houses but trading existing houses—at ever-higher prices which means that the purchasers of those houses have to invest ever-higher amounts of money in their housing which means that that money is being applied in this money-go-round where it is being invested in ever-higher prices for land-related asset classes whether they are housing farms or commercial buildings. What is the flip side of that? The flip side of that is that we are not investing that scarce and valuable capital in increasing the productivity of our country—in the new businesses that need to have additional human and financial capital applied to them in order to make their way in the world. This shows up not just in that appallingly poor productivity record that we have in New Zealand under this Government but also in exports. I found it risible that the Minister of Finance heralded this new target that the Government has got for exports which is to have so many percent of our exports covered by free-trade agreements—it is a meaningless target. Of course we need free-trade agreements to reduce tariff barriers but actually having a percentage of your exports covered in free-trade agreements is meaningless. You could actually have exports go down and you would still meet the export target that the Government has set. It has not achieved its original target which still sits there but it is risible now—it is laughable—because its ambition to lift exports as a percentage of the economy is plainly not achieved. National came to power in 2008 promising to increase exports as a percentage of the economy from 30 percent of the economy—30 percent of GDP—to 40 percent of GDP. In actual fact it has gone the other way. It went to 26-point-something percent of GDP and it still floats around 27 percent of GDP. The Government's own Budget documents show that at the end of the forecast period it stays under 30 percent of GDP. If National is in power by then it will have been in power for 14 or 15 years and its exports would still be under 30 percent of GDP making a laughing stock of its target to increase exports to 40 percent of GDP.What about the other aspects of the Budget? The Government heralds its families package and its tax package. Well the Working for Families changes—we agree with those. We make the point that they largely replace the money that the Government stripped out in earlier Budgets but we do not oppose those. What we do oppose is the tax cuts which at their simplest level increase inequality. Most New Zealanders know that around the Western World including in New Zealand we are plagued with an increase in inequality particularly affecting the people who are at the lowest income levels. So who does worst out of this Budget? People at the lowest income levels.I would have thought that even Minister Joyce could design a tax package that was fair to low-income people. Instead he was so ashamed of the effect of this Budget on low-income people who are without children that he hid the effect of this on most of them. In his Budget he announced—in his speech and in the glossy information—that the low-income people who are close to the minimum wage who currently get the independent earner tax credit would lose it. But he almost sort of said: "Well it's not that significant because the independent earner tax credit is poorly designed and only a third of people get it during the year." Now none of us sort of thought that this was trickery until we looked into it over the following day and we found out that in actual fact of the 500000 people who are at close to the minimum wage and are eligible for the independent earner tax credit 80 percent of them get it—not 30 percent but 80 percent. Why did he understate that? Because he knew that that was a vulnerability for the Government and that they were giving with one hand $11 a week to someone in that situation and with the other hand they were taking $10 off them. So those people—500000 New Zealanders—who are among the poorest working people in New Zealand get $1 a week out of this Budget whereas someone who is a higher-income earner gets $20 a week from the tax cuts. That is simply how the Government increases inequality with this Budget.Then the Government says "Oh but that person gets the accommodation supplement." and as we have said previously they do not. They face these burgeoning rent costs—they do not own their own houses this sector of society. They only get this extra money for their accommodation supplement because they are having to pay it to the landlord so it passes through the hands of the person who gets the accommodation supplement but it does not sit there. It all goes to the landlord. They do not get it unless they have got such a level of rent liability that they need the extra money from the Government to pay for that rent cost. Even then they get only 40 percent of the increase from their costs. This just increases the maximum amount they can claim but they can still only claim 40 percent of their rent costs over a certain threshold and in the end it all ends up in the pockets of the landlord not the pockets of the low-income person who is paying the rent.In respect of infrastructure again it is all spin from the Government. Mr Joyce stood up and said that this was a generational change in infrastructure spending on hospitals and schools. It is just not true. Annette King was sitting next to me as he said that and she wrote out the list of hospitals—it was a page long—that were built under the last Labour Government. They were from Kaitaia to Invercargill and included Auckland—the new hospital and the largest construction of a civil building ever in the history of New Zealand. It was built under the last Labour Government. The new hospital in Wellington was built under the last Labour Government—from Kaitaia to Invercargill Dunstan; down my way when I was the MP there—but that was just spin from the Government and it was the same on schools.What is happening now on school capital spending is less than under former Minister of Education the Hon Trevor Mallard. We built schools all over the country. There are some expensive schools now being built in Auckland—that is true. Why? Because they have allowed the population to be spruiked again because of this high rate of immigration. It was a large contributor to it. So it is catch-up but it is certainly not an intergenerational change.The Labour Party opposes this bill because it does not increase growth it does not address the drop in exports and the tax changes increase inequality."