English Bill: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeEnglish Bill: General Debate[Sitting date: 04 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13245. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister): If there is a moment of truth about asset sales it will be the three Labour candidates out on the road campaigning for the leadership because they make one simple effective promise: that they will borrow $5 billion to $7 billion from foreign bankers and buy the Government shares back—that they can buy them back. That is the true test of leadership. I think that they will fail that test. I do not believe for a moment that David Parker believes what he said. What Labour is hoping is that National will complete the asset sales so that Labour members do not have to go out and say “We will borrow $5 billion to $7 billion from foreign bankers to fulfil all the nutty promises our leaders are making out on the campaign trail.”The fact that that is the issue today tells you that Labour has not had a new idea since 1994 when Mike Moore left the leadership. I have listened a little bit—as much as I can stand it—to the three leadership candidates out there. What it tells us is that the cream of Labour’s crop is stale completely unimaginative and utterly disconnected from economic reality.The worst bit of it is the complacency. Labour Party members believe that National has done such a good job of getting the economy back on its feet that they can now go like a P-crazed Santa Claus throwing lollies to the natives. That is what their leadership candidates are doing. They clearly believe that all of the hard work has been done. They clearly believe that now that we are going up the competitiveness rankings and now that we are ahead of Australia we can put our feet up as a country and go on a lolly scramble. Well they are wrong.What it shows is they do not understand what has happened in this economy in the last 6 or 7 years. They do not understand how hard normal working New Zealanders have had to try to adapt to a changing world—to change the way their households work the way their workplaces work and the way their lives work—so that they can have more jobs and better incomes.The list of promises from the Labour candidates looks like some kind of leftovers from their candidate selection in the seat ofSydenham in the mid-1960s except they have got some new words. They are “smart regional innovative strategic planning partnerships”—whatever they are—“with local government”. It just goes on and on. The main feature of it is that they now believe they can legislate wealth and incomes in New Zealand. Cheap houses by legislation cheap electricity by legislation and higher incomes by legislation.The people in those audiences know I think that that is a hoax. They would like to think that that could be the way it is and they like to see these fresh-faced young keen prospective Labour leaders Cunliffe and Robertson. They like to think that those young men aspire to just pass a law to make us all wealthier. But in the back of their minds they are thinking “That chap Jones—he’s better than I thought.” ThatWoman’s Weekly reader—he knows what happens in the real world while the rest of them are readingFabian Society monographs repeating leftovers from the 1930s Communist Party in the UK. Shane Jones is the dark horse coming through and I hope he does because he has got a few ideas.The other striking thing about that contest is that nothing is being said about social policy. The reforming Labour Party the socially aware carers in the Labour Party—and their leadership contestants have nothing to say about health education welfare or justice. The reason is that this Government is doing such a good job of changing oursocial policy and the lives of disadvantaged New Zealanders for the better that Labour Party members cannot even bring themselves to criticise it. Even if they have no new ideas and even if they are still peddling 1960s policies could their leadership contenders at least bother criticising National’s social policy?