Barry Maggie: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Barry Maggie: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 30 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2688. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore) 
: 
 Talofa lava. Malo le soifua. I rise—and I am very happy to rise—to speak in support of Budget 2012. I represent the people of the North Shore and my constituents like this Budget because they are an intelligent aspirational community who understand only too well that when times are tough you have to cut your cloth accordingly. It is the right Budget for these difficult and tough economic times and its measures are prudent and sensible and will result in the kind of moderate growth that this country needs as we move towards getting the books back into surplus.  
Opposition members are of course and are indeed the no-hopers—the chattering classes. They have taken more than enough of our time with their foolish preoccupations with the minutiae the pickpocketing the paper boys and tipping old people upside down in their dressing gowns. Many of them should just retire and do us all a great favour actually. We are going to put aside that nonsense because more than enough time has been spent on it already. Let us actually look at the facts of this Budget. I know that it is uncharted territory for the Opposition but as we in this Government chart our course back to surplus we have indeed developed and delivered a zero Budget. We are sticking to our plan because it is working and that does not mean for a moment that we are not investing in and growing our economy. We are saving and reprioritising where we can and continuing to spend in the priority areas that are vitally important for New Zealanders and for this economy’s growth.  
There are four main areas I want to talk about today. There are many winners in Budget 2012 and overall we have progressed our aim of funding front-line services. Let us start with health. Minister Tony Ryall I believe is to be congratulated not only on achieving milestones with immunisation targets which are vitally important for our young people and for our future but also because under his watch there have been 27000 more elective operations. That is 500 extra a week compared with what we were able to do in 2008 after 9 years of a Labour Government. We have as a result of some slight increases in prescription charges and from savings in health and across all of our Government accounts made an extra $1.5 billion available to go into health services. This is an excellent achievement for Budget 2012. It means in fact that there are more funds going into district health boards there is more elective surgery and there is better cancer treatment. For anyone who has been through the health system in New Zealand I think they would fully approve of the move to put the extra $33 million into faster services and particularly for dedicated nurses who can coordinate care for patients. This is a vital need that has long been required and now we are delivering on it.  
When we look at welfare we all know that too many New Zealanders are welfare dependent—families trapped in poverty—which is costing us all far too much. Something like 12 percent of our working-age population is on a benefit. Unlike the Opposition we believe that those who can work should work. We want to support them off welfare and into jobs. So in the past 3 years we have created an extra 60000 jobs against a backdrop of the global financial crisis the Canterbury earthquake and of course the complete mess that Labour left our books in after its profligate spending over nearly a decade. Minister Paula Bennett has ushered in Future Focus which has saved around $17 million. She has introduced payment cards for teenage beneficiaries to help them make better choices about their budgeting and not blow their money on booze and cigarettes instead of the rent. For welfare we are investing in this Budget over the next 4 years $287.5 million to support those on welfare going into work and that is going to save the taxpayer $1 billion in benefit payouts. There is $80 million being ploughed into early childhood education childcare places because we believe that investing in our very young is vital for the future of this country. There is a further $55 million for dedicated staff who can support job seekers and sole parents back into work because they need help. It is not going to happen by itself. It is vitally important that the front-line services are improved but they need to be targeted. We are also spending in the welfare area $148 million on better youth services so that they can work with the young unemployed. These people need hope and they need a future.  
Education—there has been a lot said about it in the last few days. It is another winner in Budget 2012 with an extra $512 million. We have continued our firm focus on raising student achievement and teaching excellence. I believe that Hekia Parata is doing an outstanding job. We do have a world-class education system and a very dedicated talented and hard-working teaching workforce. There is so much to be proud of. But—and there is a but—not all of our children are succeeding and realising their potential. Something like one in five is not getting the qualifications they need and we believe that that is not good enough. That needs to change.  
Let us look at what has happened in the last 10 years. We have in the public gallery a big group of schoolchildren who are here. I think you will appreciate this more than perhaps the chattering classes on the other side of the Chamber who— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Order! The member cannot bring the gallery into the debate. She is addressing the Speaker and through the Speaker the House. 
MAGGIE BARRY 
: Thank you for that clarification Mr Speaker. In the National Party we believe that our young people deserve a lot more and we want all our children to leave school—that is five out of five of them—with the qualifications they need to make a good life for themselves. So we have targeted specifically 85 percent of all 18-year-olds to achieve a minimum of a level 2 National Certificate of Educational Achievement or equal qualification. We are also starting to increase participation in early childhood education. We want a target of 98 percent there in the next 5 years.  
Budget 2012 crucially and specifically invests in improving the quality of our teaching. The biggest change is an explicit trade-off of quantity for quality. We are not ashamed of that and we are not resiling from it. Part of the way we are funding this is to make a small adjustment to the teacher-student ratio funding in schools from years 2 to 10. These are funding ratios and we as the Government fund them. As Minister Parata has been at pains to point out on several occasions it is the schools that set their own class sizes. What is going to be the impact on schools? Let us put aside the scaremongering and the misinformation that is being peddled by the Opposition and actually address the facts. Ninety percent of our schools as the Prime Minister said in this very Chamber a couple of hours ago will either gain or have a net loss of less than one full-time teacher equivalent as a result of the combined effect of the ratio changes and the projected roll growth. Moreover there will be 10 percent of schools that will have a difference and there are a few sharp edges on that. We want to look at the people who are catering specifically for technology classes at years 7 to 8 and that is effectively the intermediate schools.  
On Monday in my electorate I met with a group of nine school principals from intermediate schools. They told me their concerns. In a 2-hour meeting we discussed their concerns in some detail. I agreed with them that their issues were real ones. We took the message back to caucus we discussed it robustly and there were clarifications that emerged from that. The Ministry of Education along with the Minister who announced it but who directed the ministry announced that there is now going to be a guarantee that the staffing entitlement in all schools in New Zealand will not be reduced by more than two full-time teacher equivalents over the next 3 years as a result of the policy changes. There is also going to be a working party that is going to get together and there is a contingency fund so that that management that transition to the new ratios will be achieved.  
That is an important issue as is the issue with seniors. I do not want to digress into a rebuttal of what the Opposition is saying. I want to concentrate on what people really care about. In my area the seniors are worried. They are very worried about the level of services for dementia care. I share those concerns. New Zealanders are going to be getting something like $10 million over the next 4 years for community-based dementia services. This is a very important area. We are also increasing funding for aged residential care beds by $82.4 million over the next 4 years. We understand that New Zealanders want to stay in their homes for as long as is possible so we are increasing funding to raise an extra $57 million compared with what was spent back in 2008.  
The asset test—let us look at it briefly. Labour is complaining that the threshold has been altered. Labour forgets of course that when times were good in the early 2000s it was looking for ways to spend money so it introduced a flat $10000 annual increase. We are actually slowing that rate of increase in recognition of the tight times and the ageing population. We are going to be using the Consumers Price Index to set the threshold just as we do to increase national superannuation every year. New Zealand superannuation like the asset testing will be geared to the Consumers Price Index and that is a very important point.  
I would like to make one last point. I personally would like to celebrate the other measure which is the encouraging news that we are increasing the funding for environmental schools—Enviroschools—by $7.6 million. It is yet another fine measure. Thank you.