Barker Rick: Budget Debate 
Barker Rick: Budget Debate 
[Volume:618;Page:13586] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Minister for Courts) 
: 
 I have listened to Budgets being delivered over many years. I first became interested in politics as my grandfather and his mates sat around an old valve radio listening to Budgets being delivered and wondering whether they had hedged enough alcohol and tobacco before the various Ministers of Finance put up their price. It used to strike me as being extraordinary how when the excise duty on alcohol and tobacco increased my grandfather and his mates would smoke and drink all night and think they had been so fabulous in cheating the tax people out of their revenue. I thought that what they did was to their loss and that they should have saved the alcohol and tobacco to drink and smoke at a more leisurely rate. However that is the contradiction some people show in their approach to Budgets. 
I have listened to Budgets since I was about 7 or 8 years old. Many of them have been National Budgets and many were Labour Budgets. I recall the “mother of all Budgets”—and was it hyped up! In all the years that I have listened to Budgets that was the worst Budget I have ever heard. The then National Government decided it would take an axe a chainsaw or any other destructive piece of machinery it could to the fabric of New Zealand families in this country. It chopped into benefits and to my amazement as I went around Hastings campaigning for the first time to get elected in 1993 one of the shop owners said to me he did not believe he would ever say this to a budding politician let alone to a Labour politician but he thought that the benefit cuts were wrong. He said that the closure of the Whakatu and subsequently of the Tomoana freezing works did less damage to his till takings than the benefit cuts. He said he did not think he had had anything to do with beneficiaries in his shop but the benefit cuts implemented by the then National Government did more damage to his business than he would have believed possible. But that was not the end of it. The National Party then decided it would chop into families’ support even more by introducing commercial rents for State house tenants. I had queues of people coming to see me in my electorate office devastated at the damage that that did to their family income. That Budget would have to be the worst Budget I ever heard being delivered. 
This Budget would be the best Budget I have ever heard being delivered. It is at the absolute opposite end of the spectrum from “the mother of all Budgets”. Michael Cullen has set out a plan in this Budget to do more to help families in this country than I have ever heard in any other Budget in my lifetime. In my opinion this Budget is the complete opposite of the “mother of all Budgets” which was oversold and in some ways under-delivered. In constrast this Budget has been undersold and over-delivered. It will do much more for families than I can ever recall other Budgets doing in my life. It has at its heart the very words that are essentially Labour’s: it is about hope opportunity security fairness and families. All of us attend family functions whether they are barbeques Christmas functions or whatever else they may be. The members of the National Party on the Opposition side of the House seem to think that families are households because after the Budget was delivered they said that it affected so many families which they measured by household. It is a typical Tory attitude to say that a household equals a family; that is how small-minded they are. But on the Government side of the House we are all-embracing. We know that families are not just about households. Families include grandparents great-grandparents uncles aunts sisters mothers-in-law brothers-in law cousins nephews second cousins and third cousins and when they get together at Christmas and have barbeques they all gather together. 
When we have those family occasions we recognise that the people who are the most harassed and hard done by are the families with kids not just because they have kids but because they are under pressure financially. Those are the people who are starting out in their lives and trying to get together a house and the household goods they need. There are kids and mum may be working some hours and dad some hours but they are under pressure in every way. We all try to help those in our extended families who have young children. We help them with a load of wood here something else there and so on because they are struggling to make ends meet. We all know it to be a fact that if ever there is a deserving group in our community that needs to be looked after it is low and middle income families. Those are the people who have the responsibility of bringing up the next generation. Those are the people the next generation and their grandkids who will look after us as we get older—when we are in rest homes if we ever get there. Those people are bringing up the generation of the future and we as a society should be doing our utmost to make sure that the people who are to look after the next generation have the wherewithal to give it the best possible opportunities. That is obviously what we have to be doing. 
 I find it extraordinary that the National and ACT parties can come along here to the House and say that we should give taxation cuts across the board knowing that the bulk of that money would go to high-income earners and that the struggling families at the bottom would get next to nothing out of it. Why would they want to do that? It is obvious. That is what makes the Government side of the House Labour and the Opposition side of the House Tory. We look after families in this country and we have done in my view an outstanding job of that. I do not have to go through all the figures again—Michael Cullen has done them—but if there is one thing that is at the heart of this Budget it is looking after families and the kids who will be our future. If we did not give families the resources to look after their kids we would not be looking after our future. We have done that. 
But we have done much more than that. I will speak about an area that I have been fortunate enough to have some responsibility for as the Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment working with Steve Maharey who I think has done a fantastic job on this Budget’s development and policy. I have been fortunate to be working with Steve Maharey and the Ministry of Social Development in terms of Work and Income. One of the great things that we have done is to reduce the level of unemployment in this country. When we went through the 1990s—the nasty nineties—under the then National Government unemployment was skyrocketing out of control. Parents everywhere were desperate about what their kids would do when they left school. They had to go on to tertiary education whether they liked it or not because that was the only opportunity they had—or they went and registered for the dole. Young people were on the dole and they sat there and did nothing. 
Hon Judith Tizard 
: Apprenticeships. 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: There used to be apprenticeships but that National Government and the dead hand of Bill Birch smashed the apprenticeship system so that there were no apprenticeships. We all said that that would create a skills shortage in this country in the future but those National Party MPs had their ears painted on and could not hear good advice. They still do not hear good advice. 
Darren Hughes 
: Not much has changed. 
Hon RICK BARKER 
: The member is exactly right. What we have done in Work and Income and Ministry of Social Development policy have been fantastic. We have cut the number of people on the unemployment benefit by half. It is extraordinary that we were looking at a figure—depending on how it was counted—of approximately 150000. We are now down to fewer than 70000 people on the unemployment benefit and that is in just 5 short years. 
We have reduced unemployment in a number of ways. We have introduced training for young people—the apprenticeship is back; we have over 7000 people in apprenticeships. We have much much more going into occupational training and we are putting more resources into helping people to get into employment. The previous regime used to have people turn up to Work and Income and describe their barriers to employment. They would describe what their barriers to employment were—they had tatts they had fallen out of school or they had this or that. If they were not depressed before they started they certainly were depressed when they finished the process. Labour has turned that around by asking what we can do to help people to get into employment and has put the support processes in there. As a consequence we have the lowest rate of unemployment in 18 years. That is giving people hope and opportunity. It is giving hope to young people that when they leave school they have the prospect of getting a job. I am proud to say that the proportion of young people who are on the unemployment benefit today has dropped significantly. Not only has it dropped in absolute numbers but whereas it used to be that a third of the people on the dole were young people that figure is now less than a quarter. We have made great gains in that area. We have helped in the areas of housing and education—we have kept tertiary education costs down and we have improved people’s access to the student allowance. 
This Budget goes on from that and in all sorts of ways it helps families and people to have hope for and opportunity in the future. This Budget is so complex and diverse in its areas that people are still getting to grips with it—even the Opposition spokesperson John Key still has not got his head around how complex this Budget is. He is still asking questions in the House because he does not know the exact extent to which this Budget will influence the future of this country. This is a fantastic Labour Budget. It is aimed exactly at where the money needs to go—to young families who are starting out and who are looking after tomorrow’s generation. I am very proud to be a Labour member of Parliament as we pass this Budget. I think as we look back on it we will see that this will be one of the finest Budgets this country has passed in a century.