Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to be talking today and I just want to start out by saying that I listened to the deputy leader of the Labour Party the Hon Kelvin Davis talk about something really really important today: Matariki. Basically we were talking about another holiday and I thought that that was the most important thing that the Minister could talk about with all the goings on in New Zealand at the moment. Firstly I want to talk about something that I think is actually much more important. I want to talk about the business community the lifeblood of New Zealand in terms of driving this economy forward funding the wasteful spending that that Government has embarked upon over the last six years. What I wanted to bring to the attention of the House is a raft of very important surveys that have come out—three very important surveys—and what they paint is a poor picture. They paint a dreadful picture of the ordinary mum and dad out there who are trying to live trying to create a business and trying to earn a wage who are supporting their employees and working alongside them and how difficult things have become. But don't worry we've got the saviour we've got the business specialists we've got the business owner—not. We have got the new Minister for Small Business the Hon Ginny Andersen because I know she's absolutely razor-focused on this issue. I just did notice though that since she has become the Minister she's issued two press releases—one relating to fog cannons and one relating to the flood victims—but she has taken no Cabinet papers at all since she's become the Minister for Small Business. Look these surveys paint a dreadful picture as I said: 70 percent of business owners now believe that the economy is going to get worse—70 percent; that's a staggering amount of people—and a lot of it's due to slowing sales. That means—read another term—there is a cost of living crisis which means that anyone on New Zealand has less money now to go out and buy stuff in the shops and go and buy things for their family because they have less money. Of course this is all leading to this dramatic loss in business confidence. Again 70 percent believe that things are going to get worse and that is really bad metrics because when business owners lose confidence what do they do? They stop investing they stop new buying new plant and they stop hiring new people. Worse than that if they think it's going to get worse—which they will under Labour—they will start firing staff and that is the worst outcome that we could have in New Zealand. Of course what are the issues that they highlight? Well a shortage of skilled staff—of course we've heard about that. In every business I go to what is the issue? The first issue is I can't get enough staff." But of course it's rising inflation it's rising fuel and transport costs and it's rising interest costs. Why has that happened? Why are our interest rates going up? It's because we've had a Government that just loves spending money and wasting money and of course the Reserve Bank Governor who has said it outright explicitly—he's had to raise the official cash rate the Reserve Bank rate because the Government can't control itself. So what does all this mean going forward? It is a time where business owners have had to now stretch deep into their own pockets to fund their own businesses and of course many of them are now turning to their credit cards. This is one of the things that came out in the surveys. Of course credit cards are really expensive. Forty percent of small and medium-sized enterprises have said that they have been unsuccessful in getting further credit from their banks over the last 12 months—that's a staggeringly high figure—and so they are financially strained. That is the worst thing and with interest rates driving up that's when you need money because your interest cost on your debt is going to mean that you've got to find more revenue to cover those costs. All of that means that we have got a problem in our business sector and it's not surprising that 40 percent or two out of five business owners have said that they have got mental illness and a staggering one out of five have self-diagnosed that they've been depressed at some point in time. That's not the country that we want. That's not the environment we want for our business owners because they're the lifeblood force of our economy."