Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Associate Minister of Finance): Indeed talk is cheap. The member asked what I did for health services in Otago. Hon Jacqui Dean: Not much. Hon DAVID PARKER: She says Not much." Actually Dunstan Hospital was in a severely degraded state under the prior National Government. The last Labour Government with some advocacy from the then Minister from Otago rebuilt Dunstan Hospital. What capital works of any significance have occurred in the Otago now Waitaki electorate in the nine years of the last National Government? Kieran McAnulty: Nothing. Hon DAVID PARKER: Nothing—nothing. What capital works are proposed under this Budget in respect of the Otago region? A new billion-dollar hospital for the tertiary facility at Dunedin. Next month I will have been in this Parliament for 17 years. I've been through a number of Budgets under the last Labour Government a number through the National-led Government and now some in this. I can say hand on heart that this process has been different. As a Minister in that process it has been different to any that I have—Brett Hudson: Oh nonsense. Hon DAVID PARKER: He says "Nonsense." Well I'm expressing my personal opinion here and it was different for me. I'm going to cover a couple of the areas in which it was different. Before doing so I just want to reflect on when I was speaking to the Trans-Tasman Business Circle in a speech that was largely about economics. It was about the new venture capital fund and also the sustainable land use package that's in this Budget. They asked me at the end what I thought would be the most transformative part of the Budget and actually in truth it was the bit that they were most interested in. They weren't so interested in the issues that I was speaking about although they found them interesting. They were most interested in the mental health violence and addiction package. The package that pushes against our problems in mental health family violence and properly funds addiction services or helps fund addiction services is I believe the most transformative part of this Budget.Why is that? It's because the chief science officers together with the departmental heads Ministers and the Prime Minister agreed that amongst the priorities for the Budget we were to take mental health seriously and that then drove a cross-departmental process that also required all the Ministers with an interest in these things to work together to develop the package. So they put aside their excessive focus on their own departmental priorities and their own ministerial priorities and they worked to bring a package that crossed all of these ministries broke down the silos and delivered what I think will be the biggest lasting effect of this Budget which is the very significant increase in funding for mental health violence and addiction. I can attest to seeing that happen in respect of that area of policy but also in respect of the sustainable land use package the same thing happened there. It was a ministerial grouping that included me the Minister for Climate Change James Shaw the Minister of Forestry Shane Jones the Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage and the Minister of Agriculture the Hon Damien O'Connor as well as Nanaia Mahuta. We came together and we actually agreed that in order to overcome both our climate change challenge and—particularly in this Budget actually—our water challenge we had to come up with a package that had three parts to it. It had a package that changed the regulatory settings because we do need some regulatory change. We need to establish the Climate Commission. We need to strengthen our policy framework around water quality. We needed to do some policy work in respect of waste. So there was a policy part of the package. We needed better information and tools for people who are going to be implementing these changes that we want of society. So we invested in things like improvements to OVERSEER and also to provide assistance to councils to update their plans and to have better information sets for people to take decisions upon including information sets that farmers need when they are in farming. Then the third part of the package was extension services through the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) but also through the private sector in order to enable farmers to implement these changes on-farm through farm environment plans. Now we sat around the table and we said "Well what are the priorities within there?" and we agreed as a group of Ministers that actually the bulk of that money needed to be spent on the outreach services and that the MPI part of this was actually important because we needed to enable farmers to identify what is the bit of land that's losing most sediment what's the most eroded piece of land that needs to be fenced off from intensive grazing pressure what is the little stream that needs some riparian planting and what's the change in methodology that's going to make sure that we don't have excessive nitrate application at a time when the plants can't absorb the nitrogen and so it's lost to waterways? So we agreed to that. We also all agreed that these packages were linked. You can't have the money for the support for farmers to change if you haven't got the regulatory underpinnings that require better performance of both regional councils and farmers. By the way we weren't just picking on the rural sector. We know that there are sediment problems in respect of subdivisions in urban areas that have been degrading some waterways. So we as a team got around and we agreed our priorities. Then the amount of money was a bit less than we wanted initially so we got together and we reprioritised it. We didn't just argue for our own corner but we actually came together through this wellbeing framework to actually address what was one of the priorities which was transitioning growing and modernising the New Zealand economy while ensuring a just transition to a low-emissions future which is one of our five priorities. It also touched on building a productive nation by supporting businesses and it also touched on Māori aspirations in respect of their development aspirations for underdeveloped Māori land. That's how the process worked and I can tell you from someone who's been around here for 17 years that it was different to any other process that I've been involved in in respect of Budgets. The last matter I want to raise is in respect of the venture capital fund that we have created. There's $300 million which will be matched by some private sector funding at the rate of probably $1 or $2 per $1 that the Government commits so there'll be between half a billion dollars and $1 billion going into early stage venture capital markets. There is a hole in the venture capital cycle at the moment. Early seed or what is sometimes called angel investment as well is supported. Later stage financing is also well supported not just from New Zealand but overseas as evidenced by the fact that Rocket Lab has raised something like $200 million in to that one company in the last year. But there is a gap in respect of early stage series A and series B rounds. This has been well catalogued and it's not disputed by anyone actually that we have a hole in these capital markets. Now we're in the middle of this technology revolution born of affordable computing power robotics sensors big data in the Internet of Things and—Stuart Smith: Big google search. Hon DAVID PARKER: No it's a lot more than a google search but if you've discovered that you've made more progress than when you spoke last time. But this combination of technologies and the digitalisation of economies is producing real challenges in the Western World that we're going to have to deal with through the future of work and just transitions as we move towards a low-carbon future. So those are some of the challenging sides of it but the opportunities lie in these new digital technologies and we must make sure that New Zealand gets our fair share or indeed more than our fair share of these opportunities that lie in those technological innovations. Now we know that one of the productivity challenges in New Zealand is that we have low per capita capital investment in our productive enterprises. Part of that is caused by excessive investment and bidding up our speculative asset class prices like residential property but part of it lies in under-investment in the productive sector. So this will assist by having money coming via the New Zealand Superannuation Fund through the Venture Investment Fund to private sector venture capital funds who will make the investments into these series A and series B capital rounds which will enable more of our high-growth companies to thrive. Fewer of them will have to sell themselves overseas prematurely for want of capital adequacy in that part of the market in New Zealand. That's not to say that they shouldn't sell themselves overseas or be bought out at times. We're not prohibiting that; we just don't want that to be caused by inadequacy in that. Through this we are on the journey from volume to value. It's one of the reasons why New Zealand exports are going up after they went down under the last Government. It's another example of us mobilising capital from speculation to productive investment."