Boscawen John: Budget Statement — Budget Debate 
Boscawen John: Budget Statement — Budget Debate 
[Volume:672;Page:18876] 
JOHN BOSCAWEN (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 New Zealand was once the most prosperous country in the world. However by the 1960s our fortunes had begun to decline and that decline has accelerated over the last 30 years to the point where we are ranked just 26th in the OECD world rankings. We now have a society with major social problems and intergenerational dependency and with no immediate solutions to that. As the Hon Tariana Turia often reminds us welfare dependency has robbed many Maori of self-reliance and dignity. We have an education system that on the one hand generates our best and brightest so they can be snapped up by the world’s leading employers in Europe the US and Australia but that on the other hand fails many students with one child in four leaving school without National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 1. We all know the statistics are much worse for Maori. We have a health system that condemns many people to long waiting lists with only the affluent or the hardest-working able to put themselves through the health system with private medical insurance. 
The founders of the ACT Party—and two of them are in the House this afternoon—saw these problems 18 years ago when the party was formed and they foresaw that without significant structural reform these issues would only get worse. Sadly the fears that they had 18 years ago have come to pass. The last 18 years have been a tragic loss for New Zealand with little difference between the solutions offered by both Labour and National. The Prime Minister confirmed this just yesterday when he confirmed that we are actually poorer today than we were in 2004. 
The Budget presented an opportunity to finally show some real leadership and some real vision for New Zealand but sadly both are lacking in this Budget. For months the Minister of Finance has been warning New Zealanders that we cannot go on borrowing in excess of $30 million a week and that we have to get our house in order and exercise tight restraint so that we can get back into surplus by 2015. What has he delivered? He has delivered little more than a commitment to make a few timid reductions in programmes introduced by the last Labour Government and even then those reductions do not start until 2012. Over the next financial year the Government proposes to borrow over $13000 for every family in the country to add to the thousands of dollars that have been borrowed in the last 3 years. Cutting back spending programmes that recipients have come to enjoy would have required real political courage which like the last Labour Government this Government seems to lack. But someday soon people will realise that the goodies that the Government is handing out are charged back to our children and our grandchildren. 
This Budget provided an opportunity to make comprehensive changes to the way that we offer our social programmes whether it was through providing choice in education greater private sector involvement in the health services or the adoption of the recommendations of the recent social welfare task force. Instead the finance Minister has chosen to fiddle. However whether or not we liked it comprehensive change would have meant the need to make sacrifices across the board. ACT strongly believes that we need to protect the most vulnerable 25 percent but that at a time when the Government is borrowing over $200 a week for every family and will continue to do so for at least the next 12 months the rest of us need to be prepared to make sacrifices. We need to make both short-term and long-term changes. In the short term we need to get rid of wasteful and unnecessary spending and in the long term we need to improve productivity in health education and welfare. 
Today the Minister of Finance announced minor changes in student loans—wow! This is the same man who when in Opposition called interest-free student loans an election bribe of unprecedented proportions. There is no such thing as a free lunch but we now incentivise young 17 18 and 19-year-old students to go out and borrow as much as they can while leaving their holiday earnings in their bank accounts to earn interest. They would be crazy not to do that and in fact they can pay those loans back in terms of devalued dollars—if they pay them back at all. Not only is it unfair for the parents of children in Otara and Porirua to subsidise the children of the better-off who are more likely to go on to tertiary education but we have created a system that incentivises young people to take on debt for courses that they neither need nor use and who are then saddled with debt for the rest of their lives. 
I ask the parents and grandparents of those students whether they really want to see their children and grandchildren permanently emigrate overseas and be condemned to talking to them by Skype each night or whether they would prefer to see their children and grandchildren grow up in a prosperous country whose income levels not only equal but exceed those of Australia and are the envy of the world. It would be a country with low marginal tax rates that incentivised work savings and personal responsibility a country that truly delivered a world-class education system—not just for some New Zealanders but for all New Zealanders—and a country that allowed not just the wealthy but all New Zealanders to have access to a proper health system. 
In the same way that the poor have subsidised those with student loans—if not through the income tax they pay then certainly through GST—the poor have also been net contributors to the very generous KiwiSaver subsidies. Although KiwiSaver has been an undoubted success and the cost blowout is due to that success the poor and disadvantaged are the least able to make the minimum 2 percent contribution that triggers the various taxpayer subsidies. 
The Budget also has forecast a significant increase in the cost of New Zealand superannuation. We would expect that increase to occur as a result of rising incomes and the growing number of New Zealanders reaching the age of 65. That number is set to balloon over the next 15 years to a point where it will no longer be sustainable. Most New Zealanders understand and accept that and certainly those under the age of 55 do. Already other countries are signalling an increase in the age of entitlement as people live longer and the baby-boom bubble works its way through. Australia’s Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard recognises that too and Australia’s pension age is set to increase at the rate of 6 months every 2 years beginning in 2017 and reaching 67 years in 2023. ACT agrees with that approach. However we would not change the age of entitlement for those already 65 or close to being so. We would actually be honest and tell those people who are in their 50s about that now in order to give them the maximum time in which to prepare for that. 
This Budget is a missed opportunity. It was an opportunity to radically transform our growth prospects and to show leadership and courage to the nation. The ACT Party has policies that can transform this nation address our underlying social problems and return our nation to the world leadership position that it had over 50 years ago. ACT will be going out there and telling the story and we will be telling it honestly. We heard less than 15 minutes ago from Russel Norman who talked about a $2 billion subsidy being paid to polluters. But Russel Norman did not tell New Zealanders that we are all paying more for electricity and for petrol to subsidise those who planted forests—forests that were actually planted for the great bulk before 2008. All New Zealanders have to pay for that. We in the ACT Party look forward to taking our policies to the electorate over the next 6 months. I say to the Prime Minister that rather than encouraging people to vote for National or Labour we will tell them to vote for ACT. We in the ACT Party will look forward to taking on both Mr Key and Mr Goff at the hustings. We welcome the election—bring it on!