Street Maryan: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 18 August 2010. Volume:665;Page:13236. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 For the last year or so it has become increasingly apparent to all who watch that the Government has no plan for jobs and growth in New Zealand. The only consistent theme in the Government’s activities has been an inability to join any dots an inability to recognise how one policy might impact on another and how a cohesive plan might get New Zealand out of where we are now and into growth job creation higher skills and higher wages as a result. 
Connecting those dots seems to be beyond this Government Let me give a couple of examples. Let us consider the portfolio of the member who has just resumed his seat Steven Joyce. The failure to increase the negotiated caps on student numbers at universities and polytechnics impacts on the pathway towards a high-skill high-wage high-productivity New Zealand. If we want a high-skill economy we need highly skilled workers. 




I say to Mr Joyce that there are no new students. Mr Joyce is funding only the ones who are already there. There are no new places. So there is no plan there are no skills and there are no more places for students. Turning students away means there will be no improvement in skills. Let me join the dots for the Minister for Tertiary Education. No improvement in skills means that there are no improvements in productivity. No improvement in productivity means that there are no improvements in profits and no improvement in profits means that there are no improvements in wages. So can that Minister not simply join that series of dots and call it a plan? 
There is no skills strategy. The Minister of Education celebrated the fact that nine trades academies will open across this country but with a bit more vision and a bit more sense of a plan there could have been the equivalent in every high school and polytech in this country. So what has the Minister got? She has a saving of $13 million in adult and community education and that is what she has to celebrate—cuts to second-chance education and the chance of upskilling. 
Another example of where the Government does not have a plan is the idea—a very old idea of the National Party—that we whip anybody who is on a benefit and we tell them they have to get back into work. That is fine for an old-fashioned Tory party mantra but how does it work when there are no jobs? How does it work when nearly 20000 more people have become unemployed in the last quarter? When 2700 people queue up for 150 jobs it is patently obvious that this Government has no plan to create jobs no plan to upskill the workforce and no plan to improve this economy. 
The mining fiasco was meant to be the cure-all the Shangri-La. The nirvana of economic policies was to mine the innards out of this country and dig a hole. Yet somehow the Minister of Tourism who also happens to be the Prime Minister could not join the dots between tourism and a cycleway on Dun Mountain in Nelson and prospecting for silver on Dun Mountain. That man could not even join the dots within his own head let alone join the dots between Cabinet portfolios. 
There is no plan. There is no way to join any of the critical elements into a plan that could develop this country provide jobs and move the economy forward. We have lost the language of step change. In fact exporters said that it was not a step change that was needed; it was a quantum leap in this economy’s performance by adding value to our exports. So one of the great initiatives in this six-point plan is to improve free-trade agreements—not the Government’s idea but Labour’s