Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. It was very interesting to hear the speech from the Minister of Finance. I don't think there's anybody in the world or certainly in this party or in this Parliament who thinks that the economy is the only thing that we should be concerned about. Nobody would say Oh it's only the economy that matters. It doesn't matter how people's well-being is or how connected they are with their community or how the environment is." We all care about the quality of life for all New Zealanders. That's why we're in Parliament here because we want to improve the quality of life for all New Zealanders whether it's the things that we regard as special in terms of the strength of our institutions such as this Parliament or open transparent Government which we've heard a lot about from this Government. We haven't seen it so much but nevertheless we've heard a lot about it. When we've heard such things as the quality of our environment and our tradition for low corruption and high levels of trust in our society all those things are critical to what it is to be a New Zealander. So we in Parliament in the many ways that we go about legislating across this country are very focused on improving New Zealand's reputation and experience in all those levels. What we're talking about at the Budget however primarily is how we spend our money and there's no suggestion that's the only important thing but it is an important element of what is a successful society and an economy. Why is a strong economy so important? Well I've never met anybody yet who if contemplating the thought of them or one of their loved ones getting cancer or some terrible disease is not interested in having access to the latest technology and the latest techniques in solving those sorts of health remedies and those ultimately come back to cost. You have to buy them they don't come for free and a strong economy enables us to have access to the latest technologies not just in health but in every element of society and a strong economy enables us to have good quality jobs paying good incomes and good opportunities for ourselves and for our families such as we had during the era of the last National Government. In the last two years of the National Government 200000 new jobs were created in this country providing opportunities for young New Zealanders and old and for Māori from all parts of the economy and country with every region doing well and providing new opportunities for New Zealanders. Now we've heard a lot about this Government's great concern about well-being. Well actually how many new jobs were created in the last three months? Is it 10000 a month like what was happening under National? No it's only 667—so a calamitous drop in the number of new jobs being created by this economy. So what we've seen and what we see in this Budget Policy Statement is forecasted growth in New Zealand slowing down. It's not collapsing. Of course the economy had huge momentum that this Government inherited at the end of 2017—huge momentum had built up—and so we continue to have relatively good times and good opportunities for New Zealanders. But the point is that it is slowing. The growth is not accelerating as fast as it was. So in the 2017 Budget we were predicting growth of 3.5 percent in 2018 and 3.8 percent in 2019. Now what have we got? Well that 3.5 percent in 2018 has dropped to 2.7 percent and the 3.8 percent in 2019 has dropped to 2.9 percent and nobody believes that it'll get to the 2.9 percent. So we've seen growth in this economy drop back substantially. That means fewer opportunities for New Zealanders to get ahead and look after themselves and their families provide jobs and have access to the latest pharmaceuticals and drugs and opportunities for health and welfare and there are fewer opportunities to invest ultimately in infrastructure and to grow this economy. So where has that loss of momentum come from? Well this Government has been systematically undermining some of the foundations of the strong economy that we enjoyed such as predictability around Government decision-making—such as the way that it went about oil and gas which was a shocker. Now in terms of the quality of spending I do acknowledge that this Government's desire to keep the core Crown expenses below 30 percent of GDP and to maintain surpluses and they have so far achieved that. I think they could be more rigorous but they have achieved that and we acknowledge that. They are making some progress and they are still continuing to focus on reducing net Crown debt to 20 percent of GDP or less. But it's the quality of the spending that concerns us because if we look back to the first decisions that this Government made the first decision was to do away with the tax cut that they had inherited from the previous Government. They did that because they said giving $1000 to wealthy New Zealand families with inappropriate and they weren't going to do it. Then the second decision that they made was to give those very same families $6000 worth of free tertiary education. Most people struggled to put those two things together. You take the tax cuts away from the wealthy families and then you give them $6000 worth of free tertiary education with the result that no more people actually have gone to university since then and all the extra resources that they're spending on tertiary education have drifted away from investment in the quality of the institutions to—Hon Shane Jones: Relevance? Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Yeah well the point I'm referring to here is the desire to keep core Crown expenses below 30 percent and I'm saying that the quality of the spending that they're putting in that area is not very good. If we look at the Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) we heard from the Minister of Finance saying that this is the most rigorous debate they've had over Budget bids. Well it's interesting. Anybody that doesn't make it through that vigorous debate gets sent off to the Provincial Growth Fund and that's where the money is spent. So we've seen the Provincial Growth Fund that Mr Jones looks after which I thought was about creating jobs is now about killing possums which is very interesting. It's about killing possums rather than creating jobs and beyond that it's about employing people in NEETs programmes. I mean all these sorts of programmes that were part of general Government spending—suddenly $80 million is moved out of the NEETs thing into the PGF funding because there's a billion dollars a year just floating around for that member to spend as he likes in cahoots with a number of other Ministers and his Cabinet when it gets big enough. But the point is that when we were in Government in 2015 for example there was only $1 billion allocated to new spending right across the whole of Government. That's the scale of what has been put in the hands of Shane Jones for his Provincial Growth Fund which we call a slush fund and some people think that's a little unfair. I'm sure he thinks it's a little unfair but we have to go back to what he said. What did he say when we asked him about why most of it was going up to Northland? He told us here in the Parliament "Well to the victor goes the spoils." That explains what it's all about. New Zealand First chose who was going to be in Government and as a result of that they got the $3 billion and they're going to spend it where they like. So that quality of spending or the lack of quality in spending is one of the reasons why we're not getting the results that we want to get out of this economy. When we're spending however many billion dollars on trees and you ask the simple question "What are we getting for that?" and we're told we're going to get a thousand jobs and then you look into the details of what actual jobs there are it's a very murky and slippery set of figures that you're confronted with. So I'll be very interested to hear from the Minister whether he's come any closer. We looked at the number of jobs that had been created so far out of the whole Provincial Growth Fund and we found 54 and 118 bureaucrats. The Minister has subsequently told us that in fact there are 560 and I'm very much looking forward to the breakdown of that list of jobs. I think there might be five or six of them including the gentlemen that went up and did the mulching up in Northland—mulching the seedlings for an hour—but they will probably be counted as five jobs and there'll be another 15 somewhere else doing something else. Anyway if we get back to the question of taxes what we've seen is more taxes more fuel taxes and New Zealanders are getting less for it in terms of roads. We've got very ideological decisions so anybody who is sitting on the southern motorway at the moment—there'll probably be a traffic jam there now—you can rest assured that there'll be traffic jams there for a long time to come because this Government is not spending anything on Mill Road a second critical arterial route out of the city. They don't want to do that. They're going to extend that in 10 years' time. They're not doing the East-West Link but they're—strangely enough—doing a light rail project at the cost of $4 billion. I just heard today that the Swedes and the Danish have managed to build I think a 12-kilometre bridge between their two countries for US$2 billion. So they can get a lot of bangs for their bucks over there but we're going to spend $4 billion on a slow tram to the airport that nobody can work out. So that quality of decision making is what we are dealing with with this Government. So the only question I would make at the end of this speech is yes they've made some progress in keeping the Budget in surplus and keeping the overall spending limits in check but the quality of the spending just isn't there. We think they can do a lot better if they apply themselves a little bit more. Thank you very much."