Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): Budgets are about priorities they are about hope for the future and laying foundations for the future and they are about what Governments are prepared to tolerate in terms of failure. This Budget fails on each score.This weekend I met Ed Lee. He is a man who lives with cystic fibrosis. He has accessed through his own money Trikafta a miracle drug which has transformed his life and Ed instead of sitting back and saying My life is transformed and on to the next thing." has said "Actually I'm concerned to see more people access this drug." So I said to Ed "What did the Budget deliver?" and he said "Oh well there's been a lot of talk about increased Pharmac funding but I've done the numbers and it barely keeps up with population growth let alone the increasing costs of medicines due to COVID-19. It just takes us backwards to standstill." So I said to Ed "Well health's hard. Government's hard. Where could that money be reprioritised from?" and Ed and I discussed the $400 million - plus that this Labour Government has prioritised for a health restructure for shuffling around the way things are organised and for centralising control over our health management system. I think that if you really prioritise things you can spend things on the things that change lives not just reorganising. But for this Government centralising and doing bureaucratic change is more important than doing the things that change lives. So there's a sense of their priorities.But the second thing that Budgets should be about is turning around over the long term those issues which hold us back as a society. I think you can judge a Government by what it's prepared to tolerate and in this Budget—and I'm glad that Carmel Sepuloni is in the House because she is the Minister in charge of this. What this Budget shows is that she is prepared to tolerate not just this year or next year but for the next several years thousands of New Zealanders living in motels—thousands of New Zealand families raising their children in motels.When Labour came into office they were spending approximately $100000 a day on emergency housing and they said that was far too much. Well in this very Budget it shows us that next year Labour is going to be spending more than $750 million on motel rooms and that that number will continue into the future. Millions and millions of dollars—still even in 2024 $275 million on motel rooms and why is that? Well it's because Labour's housing policies have failed. They promised New Zealand 100000 KiwiBuild houses—Hon Damien O'Connor: National sold houses.NICOLA WILLIS: Damien O'Connor says "It's because you sold houses." Well is he aware that his Government has sold hundreds of houses and has demolished hundreds of houses in the same policy that has continued? Actually this is about a failure. The problem is that they are prepared to tolerate it into the future. They have no plan to turn it around they have no plan to change it; they're simply going to put up with it.What I said at the beginning of my speech is that Budgets are also about laying the foundations for the future. They are about giving people hope that things are going to get better and that's where this Budget is most lacking because what we need to see in a time of uncertainty in a time where industries have been turned upside down when New Zealanders' lives have been altered and where the global landscape is changing is a plan for economic growth. We need to see a plan for creating more jobs a plan for ensuring that the number of beneficiaries on the benefit for more than a year doesn't keep increasing as it has under Labour. What we need to see is New Zealanders having more options for higher-paying jobs. We need to see investment in our industries that are going to grow. But instead this Budget lacks this. It is a standstill Budget when what we need is a foundation for the future.This is a Government that has its priorities wrong and that is centralising and spending money on bureaucracy instead of medicines to save lives it is a Budget that has given up on the thousands of New Zealanders whose housing problems it said it would solve and it's a Government that is standing still. New Zealand deserves better. Every child in this country should be growing up knowing this economy is going to get better and better; this Budget doesn't deliver it."