Dyson Ruth: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dyson Ruth: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 30 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2686. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 I want to commend the member who has just resumed his seat Maurice Williamson for 10 minutes of serious repetition of the National Party line. That was extraordinarily well repeated Mr Williamson. I know he is in the competition to replace the Rt Hon Lockwood Smith when he takes his vacation when we are joined in the House by—I am sure he will soon be after he returns—the “Hon” Aaron Gilmore who is escalating rapidly in the stakes in the National Party. A lot of the time that the National members have been taking the calls they have been crowing that Labour members are voting against the Budget and that means we are voting against the asset sales programme. Well I just want to confirm that. Labour is voting against the Budget and we are voting against the asset sales programme. Just in case anyone in the country is in any doubt Labour does not support National’s asset sales programme.  
Tragically that is about all that is in the Budget. That is why it is quite correctly being described as a zero Budget. At the end of last week this House went into urgency to discuss the critical measures that were contained within the Budget. So what did the House do? We passed three bits of legislation. The first one rattled upside down the poor young paper boys and paper girls of New Zealand. It turned them upside down held them by their ankles and shook them until their pocket money came out of their pockets and into Bill English’s hands. Mr Key described them as “small employees”. Those of us on this side of the House do not call them small employees; we call them children actually. They are young people in New Zealand and they earn a tiny little bit of money. Up until the Budget last week they could keep it all; now they have to pay tax.  
That was the first big initiative in the Budget. What a great leap forward for New Zealand that was! What a vision from John Key and Bill English that we saw: “Let’s get the money out of the pockets of the paper boys and the paper girls.” It did not feel very visionary for me. It did not sound as if the National members who spoke during urgency supported it or could feel a vision either. But nevertheless that was the first big measure.  
What was the second? Well the second big initiative in the Budget—again passed under urgency—was to reduce the support for tertiary students. That was the second big bold initiative. It was no doubt rammed through Cabinet by Steven Joyce. I do not know whether he shared as much information with his Cabinet colleagues as the Hon Hekia Parata did but if he did he will be in bother later this week as well because nobody in Cabinet knew the details of the education budget cuts. I am not sure the Hon Hekia Parata knew them actually until teachers and parents drew them to her attention. So that was the second big bold initiative: “Let’s cut the support for tertiary students.” In bad times the most important investment that a Government can make is investing in the skills the training the education and the employment of our citizens so that as we come out of the bad times we will be better off. But instead for 4 years in a row this Government has cut back on that.  
The third big bold initiative in this zero Budget—what was it? I am sure that everyone in the House remembers the debate from last Friday. Certainly every Grey Power member around the country remembers the debate and will be reminding National members of it. It was to freeze the asset threshold—not a little tinker not a minor reduction—so that instead of the annual $10000 a year increment in the amount of assets that could be retained by a person going into a rest home or a hospital-level care facility that is now frozen at CPI. So out of the pockets of young people earning a little bit of pocket money out of the pockets of tertiary students and out of the dressing gown pockets of rest home residents the Government shook a few miserable dollars and said: “That’s it; that’s our vision.” Well no wonder hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of New Zealanders—good New Zealanders people we want and need to stay here and contribute to our communities and our nation’s future—are saying: “Forget it. There is nothing here for us. This is a Government with no vision giving us no hope for the future. We are on the next plane out of here.” Record numbers of people are leaving our shores permanently to go to Australia.  
Mr Williamson said: “Judge us on our financial management.” Nothing would give us more pleasure actually Mr Williamson than doing that because every year the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have overpromised and then failed to deliver. You can get away with it once but you cannot get away with it every year. You cannot promise more than you are able to deliver be shown to have failed and then try that same trick again. New Zealanders are not foolish. New Zealanders can read the record of this Government. Last year for example the Prime Minister said we would have 4 percent growth; 4 percent growth was what he promised New Zealanders. Now he is projecting just over 2.5 percent in this year’s Budget. That is quite a difference. The Hon Maurice Williamson can do the sums quite easily I am sure. The difference between 2.6 percent and 4 percent when you are talking about economic growth is quite a lot. The difference between misleading and promising is very narrow in the way that the Prime Minister does it. 
 Last year the Prime Minister said we would have 170000 additional jobs and this year that has been cut in the Budget commitment by 16000. They are not numbers they are not figures and they are not statistics; they are people. They are people who want and deserve a job. Maurice Williamson has got the audacity to say that people are being paid to do nothing. They do not want a benefit Mr Williamson; they want a job. They want a job and if there was a job on offer they would take it as they did in their thousands when we were in Government and supporting employers supporting the export sector and supporting innovation within our business community so that more jobs could be available for the people who currently are stuck on a benefit with the only choice available to them being to stay on the benefit or leave our country. That is not a vision that I think is good enough for New Zealanders.  
Last year the Prime Minister said real wages would grow. This year we see it peaking at 1.6 percent and then declining. So not only are people not able to get jobs—thousands more than previously—but when they do get a job their wages do not even keep up with the rate of inflation. New Zealanders and our nation deserve better than what we are being offered. We want leadership. We want leaders with the ability to look at the hard decisions that are confronting our country to engage in a public debate and to come up with real solutions—not re-pose questions or stick to tired old outdated arguments but come up with real solutions for the future.  
A surplus in the Government accounts is important. Labour maintained it for a long time and was consistently attacked by the National Party for not spending more money. We said we wanted to maintain a surplus for that rainy day and it came in buckets and the National Government blew it all. It did not save any money to invest in New Zealanders. It blew it all on tax cuts for the highest-income earners—the people who did not need that additional money—and at the same time put GST up which hurt the most vulnerable people in our community.  
The Budget is about choices it is about decisions and it is about providing a vision. This Government has given us no vision. It has given us a zero Budget. The choice it has made is to rattle the money out of the lowest-income earners and make them pay tax to stop additional support for tertiary students and then at the other end of the age scale it has rattled the dressing gowns of our most vulnerable senior citizens to get a few extra dollars out of them. The Government calls that a vision. It calls it leadership. It is neither. It is a zero Budget and New Zealanders deserve better.