Banks John: Financial Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBanks John: Financial Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16256. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JOHN BANKS (Leader—ACT): Bill English is doing a great job. He is a class act amongst Ministers of Finance in the OECD. If you do not accept that then I ask you to invite the Parliamentary Library to give you some significant headline statistics about this country’s economic well-being over these last 5 years where it has come from and where it is at. The quickest way we can secure New Zealand’s future is to live within our means and stop living beyond our means and borrowing the savings of others overseas for today’s consumption. The mind boggles at the post-Cullen leadership of the financial propositions on that side of the House these last 6 years. The mind boggles at the thought of that crowd being on this side of the House pulling thelevers at Treasury over these last 5 years. I put my hand on my heart and say that the only policy that I have heard from the Labour Opposition in recent days around the economic and social well-being of this country is for a baby bonus for people earning just $150000 a year. That is the only public policy proposition that Labour has announced apart from criticising every single cut every single saving and every single turn this Minister of Finance has made these last 5 years.The deficit is down from $7.9 billion in the year ended 30 June 2012 to $4.4 billion this year. But we are still borrowing $110 million every week from the savings of people who do not live in this country. In other words we are putting in hock future generations for our consumption today on silly propositions like giving universal superannuation to 65-year-olds or 66-year-olds. It should be 67-year-olds and I will give you 1.8 billion reasons why it should be elevated over 20 years to 67-year-olds. The 1.8 billion reasons in today’s money is $1.8 billion a year in savings. If we had a reasonable—a reasonable—amount of interest on so-called interest-free student loans then Treasury would gain by $2.2 billion a year and that would stop us from borrowing $110 million per week as we do now.The baby bonus is the kind of poor structural policy thinking that defines this bankrupt Labour Opposition. If there is something that the Labour Party is proposing that will stop us from borrowing more money and stop this country from getting into its members’ hands I want to hear it from them this afternoon. Last year Treasury published its 2013 statement on long-term fiscal policy. It showed that current spending programmes particularly in superannuation and health care are unsustainable without increasing revenue or cutting other expenditure or both. But what do we hear from the Labour Party? It is proposing to increase taxes and have more borrowing. That is what Labour members are proposing if they get themselves to this side of the House. They have got no sensible propositions around investment growth jobs and well-being.Treasury describes our proposed spending programme as fiscally challenging and it is. It is fiscally challenging but let us give credit to this Minister of Finance who I think is one of the best finance Ministers this country has ever had and probably the best in the OECD right now. He has said taihoa on this expenditure. He has said we have to cut our cloth and that is what we have done. We have got through this global crisis with $60 billion worth of debt—$60 billion. It is further evidence that we are spending beyond our means. The Fabians within the New Zealand First Party are just as bad as the Greens and the Labour Party when it comes to fiscal responsibility and bankruptcy around investment growth and jobs. We do not hear anything about that and I want to ask the leader of New Zealand First to tell us exactly what he would propose if he was sitting here come the end of the year.