Norman Russel: Budget Statement — Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Budget Statement — Budget Debate[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17914. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green): This is the “Cabinet club Budget”. The Minister of Finance has delivered the “Cabinet club Budget” on behalf of the National Government. This is the Budget of the 1 percent by the 1 percent for the 1 percent. The wealthiest 1 percent in our country owns 16 percent of the wealth. This “Cabinet club Budget” will make sure that the 1 percent get given even more. But 50 percent of everyday New Zealanders own only a tiny 5 percent of all the wealth in our country. This “Cabinet club Budget” will make sure that they get even less. That is how the Cabinet club works. The “Cabinet club Budget” says to the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders: “You are excluded from the Cabinet club. This is not a Budget for you.” But the “Cabinet club Budget” is a Budget for the polluters. If a corporation pollutes a river then the “Cabinet club Budget” will subsidise that pollution. If a corporation pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions then the “Cabinet club Budget” will subsidise that pollution. If a corporation wants to mine a park or it wants to mine in the spawning ground of blue whales then the “Cabinet club Budget” will subsidise that mining.This is a Budget for those who have the ear of the Prime Minister. The vast majority of New Zealanders who hoped that the Government might stand up for them—well those people are not welcome to be members of the Cabinet club. Just because ordinary New Zealanders are excluded from the Cabinet club that does not mean that they do not have a role. You see ordinary New Zealanders are welcome to pay the bills at the Cabinet club; in fact they are required to. When the members of the Cabinet club gave themselves a $5 billion tax cut they added $5 billion to the Government’s debt and it is ordinary New Zealanders—yes Mr Prime Minister ordinary New Zealanders; everyday New Zealanders who did not get the tax cut and who are not in the Cabinet club—who are the ones who have to pay back the $5 billion debt plus interest. Think of it as their way to be part of National’s Cabinet club.The Green Party believes it is time to take our country out of the hands of the National Party’s exclusive Cabinet club. It is time to steer our country away from debt and borrowing and to build a healthier more sustainable economy that puts our people and our environment at the heart of our economic management. We can have a smarter fairer more inclusive and more sustainable economy but sadly this exclusive “Cabinet club Budget” does not deliver one.I will tell you what the legacy of this National Government will be. The legacy of this Government will be 30 percent of children living in poverty its legacy will be a 50 percent increase in net greenhouse gas emissions and its legacy will be debt mountains and mountains and mountains of debt—fiscal debt economic debt social debtenvironmental debt. When John Key became Prime Minister in 2008 Government debt was $14 billion. Today that figure has soared to $61 billion and the Budget projects that it will increase to $63.6 billion by mid-2015. That is money that our children and our grandchildren will have to repay plus interest.Let us take a minute to put John Key’s debt into perspective. Government debt now equates to about $13500 for every man woman and child in the country and this Budget pushes that to over $14000 for every person in New Zealand. That is nearly $11000 per person more than when John Key became Prime Minister. The man should get some kind of debt performance bonus. A ball and chain should be awarded to him that he can pass to future generations. John Key has been borrowing money at about $17000 per minute for every minute that he has been Prime Minister including the hours he spends at the Cabinet club—where apparently he is not the Prime Minister but he is none the less building up debt at $17000 a minute while he attends the Cabinet club—and the annual cost of servicing the National Government’s debt has risen by over $1 billion since 2008. That is $1 billion every year that we could be investing in our kids’ health and education or using to clean up and protect our environment.The Government will say that the global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquakes are to blame for this situation but it is the decisions that National made in response to these crises that have made the debt monster even worse. In the middle of a global financial slow-down National gave tax cuts to the wealthiest New Zealanders. This starved the Government of over $5 billion in revenue and now the Government has to borrow to cover that cost. That is the simple truth. Let me be clear: the Government borrows money that we all have to repay in order to pay for big tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. That is wrong. Those tax cuts for the wealthiest have also made New Zealand a more unequal country. The richest 1 percent now owns 16 percent of all the wealth in the country while 50 percent of everyday New Zealanders have just 5 percent of the wealth. If you think about that as a building it is like the top 1 percent having one and a half floors at the top of the building all to themselves while half of the country—1.5 million adults—are crammed into only half of the basement. When I asked the Prime Minister about this yesterday he suggested that the Green Party did not have ambition for a more prosperous country. Well Mr Prime Minister we have huge ambition for New Zealand but unlike the Government our ambition is for all New Zealanders not just the 1 percent. John Key’s ambition is to enrich the 1 percent and he is achieving his targets. The NBR Rich List of the 100 or so richest New Zealanders—they have increased their wealth by about 50 percent under National. Great job Prime Minister for the 1 percent. We can see who you work for.Today Bill English announced that he hopes to achieve a surplus by June 2015 a surplus as thin as the ice that Judith Collins has been skating on. But the question is this: who is paying for the surplus? Well Rio Tinto is not paying for the surplus. It received a $30 million Government handout despite making a $3.7 billion profit. Of course Skycity is not paying for the surplus either. Following a dinner with the Prime Minister next thing it got new gambling laws that will see it further profiting off the human misery of Auckland’s problem gamblers. Warner Bros is not paying for the surplus either. It got its publicly funded tax breaks and employment law changes from the star-struck groupies of the front bench of National. And Anadarko and the mining companies are not paying for the surpluses either. They continue to get big Government subsidies while paying some of the smallest mining royalty rates in the world.So if the wealthiest corporations are not paying for the surplus who is? I will tell you. It is the people of Christchurch—still waiting for their homes to be repaired their roads to be fixed and their flooded neighbourhoods to be safe and dry. They are paying for the surplus and it is our children who turn up to school with empty bellies sick andnot ready to learn who are paying for the surplus. There is nothing in this Budget for poor kids. Paid parental leave although welcome will make no difference to the three out of five children living in poverty whose parents do not have a job. It is the young first-home buyers struggling to repay their student debt while being locked out of the housing market who are paying for the surplus. And it is our environment that is also funding this faux surplus as 50 percent of our rivers and lakes are too polluted now to swim in. Our kāka and our rock wren are paying for the costs of this mythical surplus too along with the other threatened native birds that live in Victoria Forest Park which National has opened up for mining.The Department of Conservation is having its budget decreased once again with a $16 billion cut in real terms while the funds set aside for protecting our iconic wildlife and our most treasured natural heritage have been cut by $7 million. Our health system will pay for the surplus with significant real cuts in the health funding budget in the 3 years ahead. Likewise education has significant real cuts over the next 3 years. National is paying for the surplus out of health and education funding. It is cutting funding in health and education in order to pay for this faux surplus. Our people and our environment are paying for this surplus not National’s Cabinet club mates.The Green Party believes that all our children should have equal rights to the opportunities that this country offers them—opportunities built on the hard graft of generations that came before us. Previous generations built up our power assets but when John Key got into office he sold our power assets making sure that 99 percent of our kids would lose the dividends from those assets while 1 percent would gain from them immeasurably. Almost all New Zealand children paid for the surplus and that is not right. John Key and Bill English appear to have a pathological commitment to saddling our younger generation of New Zealanders with a lifetime of debt and of deficit of opportunity and I say to young New Zealanders: “Don’t accept it.” At this year’s election let us build an inclusive green economy with opportunities for all not just for members of the exclusive Cabinet club.If the news is bad for the Government books then the outlook for household budgets is even worse. The average power bill has risen by $361 a year under National and if that is not bad enough incomes in Ōtara and some of the poorest places in New Zealand have dropped in real terms by 20 percent under the Government. Families are really really struggling. The truth is that the so-called competitive power market has failed in the same way that the housing market failed our families and National’s response is more of the same.If this had been our Budget we would have introduced our electricity reforms to decrease power prices green our power generation and improve the overall efficiency of the energy sector. If this had been our Budget the Green Party would have introduced NZ Power as part of a smart solution to transition our energy sector into the modern world. If this had been our Budget we would have rolled out clean energy like our solar homes initiative so that families can create their own electricity and reduce their dependence on the power companies. I am talking about giving families real energy freedom. Under our initiative families and households will get low-cost loans to pay for solar power installation which they can repay through their rates—enjoying free sustainable power for decades.The Government has done nothing to ease skyrocketing house prices and that is a tragedy for young Kiwis trying to get into the housing market. If this had been our Budget the Green Party would have introduced a capital gains tax on property other than the family home to relieve the pressure on the housing market. If this had been our Budget we would have introduced our Home for Life package which would have put homeownership within the reach of tens of thousands of Kiwi families. We think thatrenters also need a right to good quality housing and the protection of stable tenancies. These smart green ideas address the very real day-to-day household cost pressures on everyday New Zealanders not just those of John Key’s Cabinet club.There is nothing in this Budget that will propel the New Zealand economy into the 21st century by creating good green jobs and protecting our environment. Creating economic prosperity without trashing our environment and our climate is the single biggest economic and environmental challenge of our time and the potential gains from a low-carbon high-tech economy are too significant to be ignored. There is a glaring gap in today’s Budget where the plan for a cleaner smarter economy should be. In Government the Green Party will create a smarter fairer economy that will deliver prosperity for everyone—one that creates jobs reduces inequality and protects our environment. It is triple bottom-line accounting which is missing from the National Party’s old-school Cabinet club thinking.The estimated potential market share of the global green economy available to New Zealand is up to $22 billion annually. To put this economic opportunity into perspective that figure of $22 billion is double our current export earnings from dairy. Imagine having a truly diversified economy that makes us twice as much money as dairy does employs more people in diverse occupations and does not pollute our waterways. It is a win-win model that through its actions in its previous Budgets National has repeatedly rejected.Instead National has overseen a dangerous simplification of the New Zealand economy. Our economic simplification in dairying is at the exclusion of job opportunities in cleantech and other industries. As the Budget documents state manufactured exports are falling and the current account deficit is widening. The singular focus on low - value-added commodity exports specifically milk powder and raw logs has exposed the whole economy to the risk associated with a single product single market approach. Of course we have been here before. Exporting agricultural products to the UK worked well for a while but once it joined the EU we were without a buyer. At that time our strategy was to diversify yet here we are again with an economy overly almost singularly focused on dairy into one market—this time China. I agree with the concerns raised by experts that we have too many eggs in the China basket and we need a more diversified export base. Any downturn in the Chinese economy will disproportionately damage ours. This is not a smart way to run a modern economy.All the evidence shows that New Zealand is uniquely placed to seize the opportunities arising from the global shift towards clean energy. In 2011 the world invested US$280 billion in renewable energy and the global market for clean technologies is valued at more than US$5 trillion. We already have expertise in wind and geothermal energy technology and our “clean green” brand holds real economic value. The opportunities are there and the Green Party will seize them 100 percent with open arms. But building a green economy requires new institutions to help drive us there. That is why the Green Party announced the Green Investment Bank this week—to accelerate New Zealand’s transition to a smarter greener economy. The bank will help innovative low-carbon projects and proposals to get finance so they can get off the ground. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the clean technology sector could be worth between $7.7 billion and $22 billion to New Zealand by 2015 with the right focus and the right investment. Despite this and the fact that the cleantech sector is taking off overseas National keeps funnelling money into carbon-intensive industries like coalmining oil drilling and industrial dairying. The Green Investment Bank will direct investment into the clean profitable investments of tomorrow. It is just one of a suite ofannouncements the Green Party has announced to make sure we have our economy heading in the right direction for a high-tech low-carbon economy.The Greens are committed to changing the old way of doing things in order to build a smarter fairer cleaner world for all of us. This election is our opportunity to embark on that journey to take the destiny of our country out of the hands of the exclusive Cabinet club and put it into the hands of all New Zealanders. It is the journey we must take to ensure that our kids can stay here and work rather than move overseas to get the good jobs that they want. It is our journey towards an inclusive green economy where women and men are paid fairly and earn enough to lead good lives and offer the opportunity of great futures to their children. It is the journey that will see our rivers and lakes sparkling once more. It is the journey that will ensure that our forest parks echo with the haunting calls of the kōkako rather than the deafening din of mining rigs. It is the journey towards a stable climate and a prosperous planet for us and our children. Together we can build an inclusive green economy for all of us. At this year’s election let us end the exclusive Cabinet club let us put an end to the exclusive Cabinet club economy and the exclusive “Cabinet club Budget” and let us build a smarter greener economy for the benefit of all New Zealanders.