SpeechRt Hon DAVID CARTER (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I wanted in my contribution to speak about Vote Finance and Vote Revenue and if time permits I want to make some comments on Vote Statistics. I speak on finance and revenue as a permanent member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I first of all want to comment on what the committee recorded with regards to the economic outlook. So we've just had a contribution by a Labour member saying that the Minister of Finance is looking after the economy. We record in detail in this report that GDP growth now as at June 2019 is 2.4 percent. In the report we note that Treasury suggests GDP growth at the end of June next year will be 3 percent. I say to this House today that will not be achieved and if any Minister or any member on the other side of the Chamber wants to take a bet—I mean with a bottle of New Zealand wine—I'm only too happy to do so. This economy will not achieve 3 percent and it won't happen for two reasons. One I accept is we're facing international headwinds and that is because of the trade issue it's because of the tweets from the President of the United States and his battle with China it's because of the Brexit issue providing uncertainty and finally it's because the Chinese economy is certainly slowing. But that's only one of the reasons for a decline in GDP growth in this country. The other major reason is that business has absolutely no confidence in the current Government and we get successive confidence measures produced by the business community which say that the confidence in the current Government's agenda has never been lower. We've seen it before with the response on monetary policy and the current Governor of the Reserve Bank Adrian Orr now reducing the official cash rate (OCR) to 1 percent. He's out there today—he's quite an interesting governor. It's one that we haven't seen before—very much a sort of in-your-face type of governor and he's out there saying people should be investing. Well I'm sorry to say to Mr Orr and to this committee that just because the Governor of the Reserve Bank drops the OCR to 1 percent—meaning we do have probably the cheapest interest rates you've had certainly in the time that I've been borrowing money in farming businesses—that doesn't mean to say that people will start to invest. They're not doing so because they lack confidence in this Government. The second point I want to make on this report is the absence of the Secretary to the Treasury for our hearing on finance. It has never before happened in my 25 years in this place. The then Secretary to the Treasury did not bother to come to the select committee. Of course at that time we had the issue whereby the Government and the Treasury particularly had left its website open gifting to National a preview of the Budget the week before it was delivered. But Mr Makhlouf then went to the police and claimed criminal activity. He subsequently had to back down because it was incompetence at the Treasury that allowed the Budget to be pre-leaked to the National Party. So I just want to record the disgust really that we didn't have the secretary prepared to front to our select committee. I now move to Vote Revenue and the particular issue I want to focus on is the Government's continuation to look at another tax the vacant land tax. Both the Treasury and IRD have advised the Minister that this will make no difference whatsoever to housing affordability yet the Minister is continuing to investigate this further tax. The question we ask now is: why does he continue to investigate a vacant land tax when what he says it will achieve—an improvement in housing affordability—has been rebutted by both Treasury and the IRD? I suspect we won't get an answer to that question I raised. The final question I just want to raise is in regards to Vote Statistics—a complete and utter shambles—and I understand that the decision is now to proceed with the redraw of electoral boundaries based on this effectively false or fake information. I ask who is making the decision to proceed because they should not be doing so.