Key John: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKey John: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 October 2007. Volume:642;Page:12225. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JOHN KEY (Leader of the Opposition): It is always better when you get the vein-popper from Phil Goff. It is no more coherent but it is slightly more entertaining which I think is better. One place I can confidently confirm the war is not over is in the Labour Party caucus room. I will tell members something for nothing: those members were a down-in-the-mouth bunch of little puppies yesterday when they walked in there. You see the war is on. It is not about the next 12 months. It does not really matter that Helen Clark is off to the Pacific Islands Forum and then she will be back to send a third of the Cabinet to the guillotine; that does not actually matter. They are fighting over the shape of the caucus post-election when they will be in Opposition and Phil Goff needs his mates in there to get himself in as the leader. That is what he is worried about. He has been waiting waiting waiting for a long time and now he can see it coming coming coming towards him.His mate Steve Maharey did not have a very good last couple of weeks either because in his rush to make hysterical comments he forgot that the private sector built aschool under Labour in 2002 and Labour praised it. While he was at it he ruled out any use of private sector capital in any road construction in New Zealand. So if people live up the Kapiti Coast and use Transmission Gully then this is the message from Labour: it will never come. There will be no Transmission Gully under Labour; it is never coming.This is the big news for today: a surplus of $8.7 billion. Another way of looking at it is that it is the nice big kitty that Helen Clark has decided she will gather and finally dish out in election year. This Government over the last 4 years has collected $35 billion in surpluses. This is the message from Labour: it is OK if the Government takes more surplus and more tax from people than it needs because it is OK as long as the Government is fine so people should not worry. This Government does not care about New Zealanders who are struggling to pay the bills or that prices are going up; none of that matters!Over the last 8 years and for the last 5½ years that I have been in the House I have heard every excuse from Michael Cullen down for why tax cuts are not affordable. You see the reason Labour is on the slide and New Zealanders have given up on it is that they are sick of Michael Cullen’s excuses. Yesterday he came into the House and said that tax cuts were possible if one met the four tests. They were: do not borrow to pay for them do not cut services to pay for them do not implement them in times of inflation and do not do things that make for inequality.Actually there was a fifth one that he forgot to announce: tax cuts can happen only in election year! The only time we can have a tax cut under Labour is in election year. The other little one he forgot about was that Labour will never actually go through with them. The last time Labour promised a tax cut was in 2005 and it never turned up. Labour cannot be trusted on tax cuts and it cannot be trusted on the economy either. The interesting thing is that a while ago Michael Cullen answered a question in the House from Mark Gosche. He said: “I have seen reports of Australia’s experience of introducing large-scale tax cuts earlier this year. The result was higher interest rates and higher mortgage repayments leading to a slump in consumer sentiment.”Well from what I can see that is what we have in New Zealand and we have not actually had a tax cut. That is the point is it not? Labour came in when interest rates were at 5 percent and they are now at 8.25 percent. About a third of New Zealanders will be renegotiating their mortgages in the next couple of months and all they can rely on is Helen Clark’s telling them that it is more important for her Government to build up a kitty than for them to get their own money. That is the message. The message under Labour is that the Government can spend New Zealanders’ money better than they can spend it themselves.That is why the Government spends $1 billion of it a week that is why it has taken $335 billion in the last year and that is why it does not care. New Zealanders are angry because they are sick of working hard and they are sick of paying a lot of taxes. All their taxes are there just to be a political machine that can buy an election for Labour. It is “lolly-nomics”. Next year it will not be anything to do with whether or not tax cuts are affordable; they will arrive because it is an election year.