Groser Tim: General Debate 
Groser Tim: General Debate 
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Hon TIM GROSER (Minister of Trade) 
: 
 We have just heard the most extraordinary claim from the Opposition spokesperson on finance David Cunliffe. He got up and started his address by agreeing with the ACT Party that the Government was borrowing too much per month. This is the member who spent the whole of 2009 asking for more and more stimulus and more and more debt. He recklessly proposed that New Zealand go into massive additional debt during the largest recession that the world has seen in 70 years and he has the gall to say we are borrowing too much money. This is quite an extraordinary about-face—quite an extraordinary about-face. 
David Cunliffe was also a member of the previous Government which led the situation whereby New Zealand through debt-fuelled consumption growth had got its net debt up to the level of Portugal Ireland Greece and Spain. We heard from him the most extraordinary series of statements. He is imagining the past and remembering the future. 
Let us just sit down and look at the situation a little more calmly with a little more accuracy. Every adult in this country who is interested enough in current affairs to turn on the television in the evening or to turn on the radio and listen in the morning or the afternoon will be well aware of what is going on internationally. Even if they take only one simple message from this still dangerous situation in the major centres of developed power on both sides of the Atlantic the message they will be taking is this: fiscal prudence matters. Finally we run the risk of running out of other people’s money. 
Hon David Cunliffe 
: Trust me I’ll save Doha! 
Hon TIM GROSER 
: That is the message I say to Mr Cunliffe. People are not listening to him; they will be listening to what he said and the policies he supported as a member of the previous Government. They will be making their decision in November. When they make that decision they will remember exactly what National inherited in 2008. 
Mr English our Minister of Finance has laid out the broad outlines of what National inherited. First of all we inherited an economy that recorded less than 1 percent growth on average every year in the 3 years leading up to 2008. People will remember that not a single job had been added in the traded sector—the internationally competitive side of our economy—since 2004. Those are the facts that they will remember when they make their decision. 
New Zealanders will remember that Crown expenditure mushroomed from $32 billion to $60 billion over 8 years. Those are facts. Then in 2008 on top of what was really a completely failing policy with productivity having tanked as well Lehman Bros came along and caused this recession. We were then elected by the people of New Zealand and Treasury told us what the real state of New Zealand was. We were looking effectively at permanent deficits for the next 10 years a highly dangerous situation in any event but potentially lethal in the situation that we have been looking at internationally over the last 2 years where people get very nervous about lending ever-increasing amounts of money to countries that do not have the elementary facts of economic life in the right space. 
This is a situation that we are seeing played out right now internationally. Let us take the most extreme examples of Portugal Ireland Greece and Spain. Bills are not being paid in Greece now for basic pharmaceuticals. We are seeing a situation where in the railways sector the wages exceeded the total revenue by something like 60 percent. So finally in those extreme situations we learn the hard way that we do run out of other people’s money. So National has set about changing the track and that will frame the election debate in all aspects at the end of this year.