Brash Don: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Brash Don: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:623;Page:18160] 
Dr DON BRASH (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I move  
That this House has no confidence in the Government led by Helen Clark who given the opportunity to outline her vision for New Zealand has failed to even identify the big challenges which lie ahead for our nation whose Government has confiscated from hard-working New Zealanders the fruits of the best international economic conditions we have enjoyed for many decades and who sees our future as the creation of an all-powerful all-knowing Government rather than the result of the Kiwi spirit of enterprise skill innovation and hard work which resides with individual New Zealanders. 
 It seems that Helen Clark’s idea of a vision speech amounts to no more than outlining what the Government will do with taxpayers’ money. I would like to thank the Prime Minister for clarifying that the Labour Party believes that the Government is the solution to everything and that individual responsibility and enterprise have no role in modern New Zealand. She is a Prime Minister who continually confuses the efforts of New Zealand workers with the muddling efforts of a handful of Ministers. She claims that the Government has carefully built a surplus but it was taxpayers who built that surplus. That is why families are struggling financially why average real disposable incomes have not lifted at all under this Government and why the income gap between New Zealand and Australia continues to widen. 
Economic growth has been strong yes as it was through the 1990s. But that has had nothing to do with this Government. The unemployment rate has come down because of that growth as it did in the 1990s but the number on the sickness benefit and the invalids benefit has gone up by almost 40 percent since this Government came into office. Spending on health is up hugely but to what effect? We have seen a massive growth in bureaucracy little impact on waiting lists and an actual decline in the number of operations performed. The overall crime rate is down somewhat—it has been falling since the early 1990s—but violent crime remains at close to record high levels. The biggest risk a violent criminal faces is getting a speeding ticket as he leaves the scene of the crime. What Labour does not understand is that confiscating taxpayers’ money and advertising a spending increase is simply not good enough. It has to get value for the taxpayers’ money that is used. 
The so-called vision speech was nothing more than election year puffery—a collection of rambling incoherent meaningless feel-good phrases. It was a vision of big Government but small people; a vision of well-funded bureaucracies but struggling families. It is Labour’s vision of an ownership society: people earn it but the Government will own most of it. The reality is that this is a Government that will drag people via high taxes five steps back down the ladder of success then use their money to lift them three steps back up while kicking away the two rungs above them and then expect their thanks. This Government thinks it has money to spend rather than understanding that every dollar it spends has come from some hard-working taxpayer. It is hard to know whether Helen Clark is really aware of what she is doing to working people in this country. She seems so enamoured of spending their money and then offering some of it back to them in subsidies grants and incentives that she has lost sight of the fundamental unfairness of the transaction she is promoting. 
Equally disturbing is that Helen Clark is starting to sound like Steve Maharey—spouting an incoherent mess of bureaucratic weasel words. She talks of the ownership society. But what most prevents many New Zealanders from owning their own homes and other assets is the overtaxation of hard-working New Zealanders which is the hallmark of this Government. The National Party and I strongly support the concept of home ownership but Labour’s tinkering will not offset the impact of overtaxation. 
What Helen Clark will not do is to state clearly where she stands on the major issues of the day. How can she outline a vision for New Zealand if she not only fails to address the major challenges that will determine this country’s future but also does not even identify them? I have identified quite clearly what I see as the pressing issues for New Zealand. And unlike Labour I am making it plain to the electorate just where the National Party and I stand on those issues. Just over a year ago at Orewa I outlined the National Party position on treaty issues. With a will and with the right Government in place all the objectives I outlined at that time can be achieved with treaty settlements completed by 2010. National is committed to that goal. But the Labour Party has paid lip service to those treaty issues. Under Labour there will be no end to the treaty grievance industry no end to the special treatment of Maori in the Resource Management Act and the Local Government Act no abolition of separate Maori electorates and no end to political correctness in the education system which sees our children brainwashed with a revisionist version of New Zealand history—or should that be “herstory”? I made it clear that the next National Government would change all that. 
Six months ago I addressed the issue of law and order. I made it clear that we would abolish parole for all violent and repeat offenders so that rapists and murderers among others are kept behind bars for their full court-imposed sentence. I made it clear that we would increase police numbers that we would require DNA testing of all those people convicted of a crime and that we would amend the Proceeds of Crime Act in order to target organised crime more effectively. I have also made it clear that we would block Labour’s plans to pay compensation to some of our most vicious criminals for their hurt feelings. Labour has made some polite noises about dealing firmly with criminals but the reality is a joke. Just last Sunday the media reported the case of the leader of a Middle Eastern gang in Auckland who was convicted of 22 offences of theft and burglary—offences to which he pleaded guilty—being sentenced to 200 hours of community service. That is Labour’s idea of getting tough on crime. 
During this past year I have also outlined National Party policy that is designed to solve the transport gridlock in our major cities. I have spoken on energy supply issues on the environment and on biosecurity. I have attacked the culture of big government that this Government is fostering—a culture that is evident in the bureaucratic nightmare strangling our health and education sectors in red tape. Together with my caucus colleagues I have exposed the diversion of a stupendous amount of taxpayers’ money into programmes that have had no oversight by anyone with an ounce of common sense and in which there has been absolutely no accountability for the disastrous results. If he had any sense of decency Steve Maharey—the Minister who was in charge of the numerous rorts in the tertiary education sector and in social welfare—would have long since resigned and if Helen Clark had any sense of decency she would have sacked him. 
Just over a month ago I outlined the National Party stance on taxation issues. My speech focused on incentives. We need to have a taxation system that rewards enterprise skill and hard work. Yet today we have a taxation system that punishes all those things. Our taxation rates are too high at all levels. Our taxation of families is punitive. Our tax and benefits systems are destroying the incentives to work and penalising those who work hard. They punish those who save and block their ability to build an ownership stake in society. Because of that our taxation system is fundamentally unfair. We want the initiative energy ideas and drive that Kiwis have to be expressed and developed in this country—not exported across the Tasman. 
Just last week I addressed the issue of entrenched welfare dependency. Around 15 percent of the workforce is on a benefit. If we add in the children of those working-age adults we have more than the equivalent population of Christchurch and Dunedin combined. Our forbears would be aghast if they could see what has happened to the attitudes of personal responsibility self-reliance and independence that have been the essence of the Kiwi character. As a result of the change in attitudes a solo mother interviewed by an Auckland suburban newspaper saw nothing ironic in saying that although the father of her daughter provided her with some financial support “some solo mothers want independence and should not have to rely on fathers for financial support”. Independence? What nonsense! Why should fathers escape their financial obligations—as they have increasingly been able to do under Helen Clark’s Government—and oblige taxpayers to carry the burden? 
And what about those who while already on the domestic purposes benefit have several additional children? Nobody pretends that it is easy to deal with that situation. But there is surely something fundamentally wrong with a system that allows and perhaps even encourages women to have more and more children while on the domestic purposes benefit. At the last count there were more than 6000 women on the domestic purposes benefit who have had two or more children while on the benefit and more than 1700 women who have had three or more children while on the benefit. Helen Clark seems content to tolerate that situation; National is not. 
We need to remind ourselves that welfare benefits are funded from the taxes levied on those who go out to work each day including the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who work overtime or take second jobs who are on very modest incomes and who find themselves little or no better off than their beneficiary neighbour or relative as a consequence. They are New Zealanders who try to do the right thing by themselves by their families and by other taxpayers. For them this transfer of income in order to fund welfare—an average of $50 per week for every worker—takes place at a huge cost to their ability to save to educate their children and to buy their own home. Those are the New Zealanders whom Helen Clark has forgotten. Those are the New Zealanders whose attitudes of self-reliance and personal responsibility will be massively undermined by the Working for Families package because that package will mean that the self-reliant will end up in much the same financial position as those who do not make the effort who do not take on responsibility who do not do overtime or take on an extra job and who do not invest in building marketable skills. 
The Labour vision has pulled the plug on aspiration and drained away the confidence that people have in building a future in this country. As a result we are bleeding talent overseas. The massive inflow of new immigrants required to replace those losses threatens to change the nature of our society more abruptly than is healthy and more decisively than most of us want. That is no way to build a nation with a common set of values and sense of purpose. 
From talking to New Zealanders it is clear to me that there are many aspects of the way New Zealand is developing that concern them. Part of the problem is economic—we do not seem to be able to generate jobs that pay enough and we grossly overtax hard-working people. Part of it reflects inadequacies in our social policies. Our health system seems always to be lurching from crisis to crisis. Our education system is failing about a quarter of our children and is achieving mediocre results for many of the rest. Part of the problem reflects the fact that our communities especially the poorer ones are becoming fractured. We have gone soft on crime and are reaping the consequences. Our families are struggling to cope while this Government overtaxes them and wastes much of their money. Part of the problem is also cultural and attitudinal—our policies punish enterprise and achievement encourage acceptance of mediocrity and thus undercut aspiration. Part of it is that we have allowed the goodwill symbolised by the treaty settlement process to be swamped in a riot of race-based political correctness. 
It is that interrelated set of concerns—partly economic partly about social policy and partly cultural and attitudinal—that lies behind the departure of so many New Zealanders from this country. Turning that round will be the priority for the next National Government. Those are issues that the Labour Party is woefully ill-equipped to deal with because its policies foster most of those problems rather than solving them. In many cases Labour does not even recognise them as being problems. 
As we have just heard the Labour vision has immense faith in a centralised bureaucracy with all the social engineering that goes with it but little faith in the common sense of ordinary people who would rather make their own decisions with their own resources. The Labour vision has no role for competition to encourage innovation and service quality but instead actively encourages State monopoly. Labour policies are sending a terrible signal to the next generation of New Zealanders about how to get ahead in life. There is a dismal lack of imagination from this Labour Government an unwillingness to debate issues a fear of new ideas and a fundamental gutlessness in standing up to the challenges we face. Helen Clark leads a Government enamoured of ideas that are 30 years out of date. Labour is a classic tax-and-spend Government. And it has become apparent that Labour’s core values are wildly out of line with those of ordinary New Zealanders. This Government has even stopped standing up for principles that it was proud to proclaim just a year or two ago. Rather than nailing its flag to the mast so unprincipled has this Government become that Labour will go down with no flags flying. 
What New Zealanders will be deciding at the next election is much more fundamental: what is fair and unfair; what is right and what is wrong. It is right that we have one law for all; it is wrong that different races are treated differently. It is right that violent and recidivist criminals should serve the sentence given them; it is wrong that they should be free after serving only one-third of their sentence. It is right that enterprise initiative and sheer hard work should be rewarded with lower taxes; it is wrong that punitive taxation should stop people from getting ahead in life. It is right that the unemployed should be given financial support conditional on contributing to the community; it is wrong that we should pay them to be idle indefinitely. I do not believe in a culture of envy; I believe in a culture of aspiration and achievement. And a culture like that when harnessed to shared values of compassion for those in need and a determination to take care of the weak the ill and those who have simply stumbled upon bad luck will produce a society that we can all be proud of. This is the sort of New Zealand that the National Party represents and will be fighting for at the next election.