Brownlee Gerry: Adjournment — Sittings of the HouseText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrownlee Gerry: Adjournment — Sittings of the House[Sitting date: 11 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15512. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): Mr Speaker I feel obliged to start this afternoon by congratulating you on your year. I think you have had a very very good year stamping your authority on the House. There are always those black moments in anyone’s career and occasionally when one is persuaded by Parliament’s head prefect to take a particular course of action then there can be an expectation that there might be some disappointment somewhere else. But it does not last and I do congratulate you. I wish your family all the best for this coming Christmas season.Mr SPEAKER: Thank you.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: I also want to thank the Clerk of the House for her work this year and for the huge team of people she has working with her servicingselect committees etc. and making the work of Parliament progress very smoothly. Also I would like to thank all of those support staff who have been mentioned by speakers before. I will not rehearse the whole list but they do make a difference to our lives we do appreciate them and we do wish them and their families every good wish over this coming Christmas season.One of the highlights for the year I think—apart from the political things that I will come to in a minute—in terms of Parliament itself has been the maturing of the Business Committee and its ability to have an influence on the way in which Parliament works. I think that we often get into conflicts over bills and that is appropriate—that is a policy debate that we should always have and we should set time aside for it—but this year there have been 144 bills passed. Mr Speaker I do not want to go through the statistics that I know that you are going to talk to the House about later but when you think about that not all of them are opposed by everybody in Opposition.The pleasing thing I think is that we have got to a point where if there are bills that we all agree on and if there are courses of action that we all agree on then we can have parliamentary processes that allow those things to occur. We have processes that allow those bills to progress to get as they should the appropriate scrutiny of the House—most often select committee scrutiny—but to progress none the less. This year saw us use nine occasions where extended hours were granted by the Business Committee and a lot of business was transacted. In particular I think that if it becomes a tradition in the House—and it always takes time for those things to bed in—that Treaty of Waitangi legislation is dealt with in this way then I think that we are on a very very good track. So I want to offer my thanks to all those who are on the Business Committee.At the start of the year the Hon Trevor Mallard occupied the shadow Leader of the House role and I got on very well with him. He is a very hard player. He knows what his team wants to fight and he buys that time very successfully. More recently Grant Robertson coming to the table has seen a continuation of the way in which we can have a discussion about what matters to which party and how time should be allocated.I would hate the public to think that we are doing some sort of a cook-up deal here. We are most certainly not. There is no way in which the Business Committee actually goes about identifying where support lies for particular bills. It is a self-declaration. In that regard I would also very much like to compliment Gareth Hughes for his very positive contribution to making Parliament run smoothly. And Barbara Stewart—we always appreciate your contributions. You have a very gentle way of making us all see common sense and we very much appreciate that. I say to those who are Independent and come to that committee that their influence is also significant as is the quiet influence of Te Ururoa Flavell who always makes sure that his party’s position is well represented.So all I am saying is that I think we have had a year where moving from the new Standing Orders that were promulgated in the year prior we have seen quite a maturing in that body and I hope that it continues for many many decades to come.This year though saw another huge commitment from our Opposition to staying in Opposition. I think that what we saw with the “Labour Idol” approach was a demonstration to all of New Zealand that it did not matter which one of them you chose none of them was up to it. And then of course we have seen a kind of conditional acceptance of David Cunliffe and there is this hope that you see on the faces over on the other side of the House every day—the strained hope that he will not say something stupid that he will not go off the deep end that he will not raise his hands in victory before he has even got off the start line and that he will not start making claims in desperation as Opposition leaders do when they know they are in so much trouble.The difficulty then of course is what is the platform? What is Labour going out to offer New Zealand in 2014? Absolutely nothing. We have got some of the lowest unemployment New Zealand has ever seen. We have got an economy growing at an enormous rate. We have got an education system that is redeveloping itself in a way that I think does give choice particularly to parents and more than that it gives information to parents. Those are the sorts of things that New Zealanders vote on. We are seeing increases in the number of people working on the front lines of law and order and when it comes to health this Government has a record that is completely enviable by any Government that has ever gone before it. In addition to that we have had the very successful divestment of some State assets to provide a future investment fund and this is where the rubber really hits the road. The first point is that New Zealanders still control all of those companies. The second point is that the Government holds on behalf of New Zealanders majority shares in all of those companies. So nothing happens with those companies without that shareholder being satisfied. What it also means is that the reckless days of a Labour Government when tens of thousands of New Zealanders lost their money when any cowboy in town could set themselves up as a finance company offer dodgy prospectuses and take billions of dollars off New Zealanders are gone. They now have some solid blue chips that they can invest in. And just watch what happens to that price. It will rise without a doubt as New Zealanders recognise the value of a secure investment.The real point here though is that there is a $4 billion gap—at least—between what we are able to do as a Government and what our opponents are trying to promise as a Government-in-waiting. The only way that that gap gets filled up is if the hands go into the pockets of the workers of this country and take more out. That is what Labour is going to have to campaign on in 2014. It is going to have to go to hard-working New Zealanders and say: “We can do everything the other side is doing better but you’re going to have to pay much higher taxes much higher charges and bigger costs in your daily life because interest rates will rise and everything else that goes with that.”We are hearing a lot from the Labour Party about the so-called housing crisis in New Zealand.Hon Member: So-called?Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Well I say it is a so-called housing crisis because it is a crisis only as long as it remains unsolved. This Government has moved in partnership with Auckland to create a huge opportunity for developers and a huge opportunity for builders and we have done the same thing in Christchurch and we are seeing those consents coming through. We are seeing a change. Under Nick Smith’s leadership Housing New Zealand is probably in the most innovative phase that it has ever been in under any stewardship prior to Dr Smith’s.So the question is how Labour will fill up the $4 billion gap. The answer is only by tax. How is it going to get its building programme done? Just on that may I say a short word to the building supply companies in New Zealand. Do not push your luck. I have had recent experience of taking some prices for a particular project and I found that the price range and differential can be up to 20 percent. At the high end of that market are the very people who are going out there saying they are seeing an escalation in building costs of 1 to 1.5 percent a month. No Government will sit idly and tolerate that.I do want to conclude by wishing every member of the House a merry Christmas—even those who heckled me so viciously over the last year and Grant Robertson in particular a man who I know feels the cold in my shadow a lot. I want to assure him that if he is inside that shadow and he steps too close there is no way he is going to get warm.Mr Speaker congratulations to you on your year and congratulations to Mary Harris on the way the House has operated. To everyone here I wish you a very peaceful restful and hopefully merry Christmas.