Joyce StevenHon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): Well the member who has just resumed his seat Peeni Henare obviously did not listen to my last contribution when we went through some of the things that were happening in Northland as part of the Northland regional growth strategy. And yes I think that it would be great to get the Ngāpuhi settlement over the line in Northland but the suggestion by the member that that is the only thing that will have an impact in Northland is wrong. Actually there are 50 or 60 initiatives and I would recommend that he do the people of Northland the honour of actually reading the regional growth strategy that they put together rather than bagging it and saying that there is no plan because all of these regional growth strategies were put together by the relevant regions not by Government agencies or Ministers. So every time the member turns up and says that there is no plan he is basically going to each region and saying: I don't like your plan." The member can say that if he wishes but I do not know that that will be a particularly mana-enhancing experience in each of those regions. He also mentions the need for employment in parts of South Auckland. I happen to agree with him. The great thing is that there are huge opportunities in that part of Auckland and it is about matching the young people to the jobs. I want to tell him about an initiative called Ara at Auckland Airport which is a skills exchange modelled on one in Australia that has been developed for New Zealand. We have 39 companies working at this site out at Auckland Airport. They are training people. We have got apprenticeship coordinators. We have got the Ministry of Social Development there matching people into jobs. We have got a whole bunch of training for drivers' licences so that people who need to get to and from the airport to work can actually get their driver's licence quickly in order to do so. The whole idea of that is to help put the people into the jobs of which there are something like 20000 more over the next 10 years in that part of Auckland alone. So it is all about working collaboratively and locally. I wanted to note a very important part of the Estimates which is the Innovative New Zealand package: $761 million over 4 years to invest in innovation. I note particularly the biggest investment ever over 4 years in science: $114 million for the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment Endeavour Fund which is the contestable mission-led fund that is all about funding the sorts of sciences that solve issues like water quality climate change gas emissions and all those things. For discovery research—for the bright scientists who start out and have ideas they need to follow which so many New Zealand scientists have been successful in doing—there is a big investment. There is a big investment in what we call the Strategic Science Investment Fund. Health research is another one and there is investment in start-up companies as well.Hon David Cunliffe: Smoke and mirrors.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: So there is a huge amount of investment which Mr Cunliffe who holds his calculator up the wrong way is misunderstanding. There is also a big investment in tertiary education. The good news is that that is really working. We are seeing big growth in the sorts of skills that we need for a modern innovative economy. We are seeing big increases—40-odd percent—in the number of engineers being trained at university and increases at the polytech level. We are seeing big increases in the number of ICT students who are being trained in software engineering at our universities—an increase of about a third over 7 years. We are seeing increases in the trades. BCITO in the last couple of weeks came out and said it had passed a milestone it had never reached before: 10000 apprentices in the building trades—10000. It has never had that number before and that is a tribute to the hard work of that sector. We have more people working in construction than we ever had before. We are training around 38000 more for that sector and that is where the rubber really meets the road. That is where you have to sort of get away from the slogans and talk about what is actually going on and the work that is being done. Regional New Zealand and those industries that need these workers know that the work is being done. I met a senior construction executive—one of the most senior in the country—the other day and he said: "Look that stuff the Government's doing in tertiary education for engineering and for the building trades and so on is fantastic." We have never had the level of response by the tertiary sector that we have had this time around in the construction boom that we are in today which is the biggest that this particular gentleman has seen in 40 years. That is doing the work for economic growth."