Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. We're speaking obviously about the Budget that has been passed by this Labour - Greens - New Zealand First Government that is wreaking so much havoc in this country and this economy. But when we look at the overall Budget there's no question that it represents as the last Budget did and the Budget before that a huge investment on behalf of all New Zealanders in health in education in innovation in keeping our people safe through the justice sector and in all the many ways in which Government contributes to the lives of New Zealanders.Interestingly enough I was watching that well-known political commentator Anika Moa on TV recently when she interviewed Winston Peters. Winston Peters who as everybody knows is effectively the Prime Minister at the moment and will be for the next few weeks—it'll be the first time in New Zealand's history that the leader of a party that has garnered so few a vote about 7 percent ends up as the Prime Minister of the country for an extended period of time but that's all by the by. Winston Peters was explaining his understanding of the New Zealand economy. His two basic points were that it all went wrong in 1984 and secondly that subsequent to that there was a massive free-market experiment that has led to all sorts of terrible consequences for New Zealand—excessive and uncaring capitalism.I just wanted to sort of make those points because obviously he seems a little bit—Darroch Ball: What are you speaking on?Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: I'm talking about the Budget and the context to the Budget.Darroch Ball: You're not talking about the legislation.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I decide. The previous speaker spoke for three minutes without mentioning the Budget all right? So I decide.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you. So the acting Prime Minister says 1984 was where it all went wrong. He forgets that before 1984 we had a totally unsustainable economy high unemployment and massive Budget deficits and we couldn't carry on the way that we were doing because we couldn't ultimately pay our bills. Subsequent to that we had reforms.Now when you look at this Budget and you look at the Budget of last year and all the Budgets of the previous National Government there's no way that any honest assessment of that could be made which says that this is a hard right capitalist country that we live in where we've gone according to the trickle-down theory and somehow we don't care about people. If you look at the Budget and you look at last year's Budget under the National Government most of the Governments spending has been about taking money off better-off New Zealanders and giving it to New Zealanders who are struggling. There's massive redistribution. If you look at the papers in the Tax Working Group you'll see that basically half of the population of New Zealand receives more in services—whether it's free education free health Working for Families tax credits and grants—than they put in and a relatively small group a third of the population of New Zealand pays by far and away the largest proportion of tax.So fundamentally what this Budget represents is a massive redistribution of wealth and income from those who are better off to those who need it which is right and proper. But you have to have a very warped view of the world if you look at that and say—DEPUTY SPEAKER: I don't.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Sorry. Any commentator such as the acting Prime Minister Winston Peters would have to have a very warped view of the world if you were trying to categorise that as trickle-down economics or some hard right free-market extreme example of capitalism. So we don't have that in New Zealand we haven't had that in New Zealand and in New Zealand we invest very heavily in ensuring that all New Zealanders have access to the opportunity to live a full and healthy life.Now you can have arguments about whether you should spend even more or redistribute even more and this Government has talked a big game about doing that. We haven't seen a huge amount of evidence of it. Yes they cancelled the very modest tax adjustment that would have seen wealthier families receiving a small or modest tax cut but there was no coherency in the way that they went about it because they then went and turned around and spent $2.8 billion on middle-class welfare in terms of giving free access to tertiary education. It probably means that the overall effect of the Budget is less redistributive than it was before so they're muddled and confused in their thinking. But certainly there hasn't been a fundamental shift to what the New Zealand Budget is all about.But what we have seen since they have been in Government is a series of decisions that have undermined the business confidence of this country. We know that the economic development Minister thinks all those surveys are junk and we just heard from the previous speaker Fletcher Tabuteau who said that they're National Party - sponsored business surveys. I'm sure the ANZ will be thrilled with that characterisation of their work but that's how it was described. And that arrogant view that more than 1500 business leaders who were asked about what their investment plans are for the next year what they're planning to invest in—and the answer to that question by 1500 leaders was they don't know what they're talking about according to the economic development Minister because the results are pure junk according to him. I don't think they're junk. I think what they indicate is that all those business leaders and would-be investors are putting their hands back in their pockets and they're not spending and they're not investing because there is an enormous amount of uncertainty about what this Government intends to do.We all know that there's 122 reviews going on about what they should be doing the biggest of which is around tax policy. This Budget that we're debating today didn't include the introduction of a capital gains tax but the Government has signalled that they want to do that. The ideological leader of this Government—not the Prime Minister not the acting Prime Minister but David Parker the most ideological Minister in this Government in the economic sense of view; there's all sorts of strange ideologies in the other areas of the Government but in economic terms—desperately wants to introduce a capital gains tax and will do so and it will probably affect people's KiwiSaver accounts and all sorts of other things that will surprise people when it comes up. But when people are trying to make a decision about whether to invest to hire people to buy new plant to buy a new business or to take a risk they're all sort of asking themselves Well am I going to be paying a capital gains tax or not?" They don't know and as a result of that and all sorts of other uncertainties that this Government has introduced there is less government going on.Anyway time rattles on. There's been over the last couple of weeks this Estimates process whereby we on the Opposition side have had a chance to question Ministers. It has been a rather dispiriting period because we haven't got any decent answers. We had for example Shane Jones come in to talk about the regional economic development portfolio and the $1 billion a year that he is meant to be spending on the Provincial Growth Fund. We call it the political survival fund because it turned out that the vast majority of the spending so far was going to one region. Northland had asked for about $55 million worth of projects. They've got $61 million so that was good for them—they got more than they asked for. But the rest of the country had asked for $240 million and got $42 million. So there would seem to be a bit of a bias in the way that the fund was operating.So we asked him some questions about that—got no answers. One of the most fundamental questions we asked was: is this actually $1 billion that you're spending as you talk about—is it new money? It turns out in the Budget figures that actually a quarter of the $1 billion is not new money at all; it is what the previous Government were doing. So it's actually $750 million new funding for the provinces. But even worse it turned out that of that $750 million actually $250 million - odd of it was funding for forestry over 10 years. So it's not actually $1 billion that's being spent next year. A quarter of that is existing spending and a quarter of the rest of it is actually going to be spread over 10 years.We asked some basic questions about how that money is going to be spent and he didn't answer refused to answer and fudged. We all know in this House that that Minister has a very strange approach to answering a question. He speaks in complete gibberish most of the time. Today in the House he was talking about planting seeds and impregnating things and I didn't know what he was talking about but that's how he operates. So we haven't got any clear answers about exactly how much money we're spending in the Provincial Growth Fund and it's a disgrace."