Macindoe Tim: General Debate 
Macindoe Tim: General Debate 
[Volume:674;Page:20264] 
TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West) 
: 
 How predictable but utterly farcical it was that yet another Labour member would suggest this afternoon that only that discredited party has a coherent plan for restoring this nation’s health and securing long-term economic growth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Absolutely no one is fooled by the suggestion and members opposite rightly look sheepish when they trot it out. 
Mr Cunliffe’s prescription is a mixture of pie-in-the-sky unreality and head-in-the-sand ignorance of the challenges we face. Only that member could achieve such an anatomical absurdity. When Michael Cullen left office nearly 3 years ago he boasted that he was bequeathing a decade of deficits to his successors. After squandering a decade of the most favourable economic conditions that have existed in my lifetime Labour’s legacy was to promote middle-class welfare increase Government spending at twice the rate of revenue encourage an explosion in bureaucracy at the expense of the delivery of front-line services and make a raft of promises and commitments that it had neither the ability nor the intention to fund. 
Despite the recession and the severity of the Canterbury earthquakes in just under 3 years under the stewardship of John Key and Bill English we have improved the outlook markedly. The Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Trade have already highlighted most of those gains. Most of us agree that we want to attract talented expatriate New Zealanders home—[ 
Interruption 
]—and when Mr Nash is offshore in the next 3 years he will probably be hoping we will find a way to bring him home too. No one pretends that it is easy to achieve that but nothing in Labour’s prescription announced to date will do anything but exacerbate the problem. 
Which of these Labour policies will bring our talented young people home: more taxes for responsible investors? 
Hon Members 
: No! 
TIM MACINDOE 
: Higher incomes that will hit those who are currently earning good incomes in New York London or Sydney? 
Hon Members 
: No! 
TIM MACINDOE 
: The prospect of greater borrowing offshore and a bigger deficit compromising our international credit rating? 
Hon Members 
: No! 
TIM MACINDOE 
: Or more Government spending on feel-good schemes while the debt reaches record levels and future generations are left to mop up? 
Hon Members 
: No! 
TIM MACINDOE 
: Of course the answer is no. It is absolute madness. Distorting the tax system by introducing ineffective exemptions and layers of complexity will provide no significant benefits to taxpayers and consumers but it will add greatly to the administrative costs of businesses and the bureaucracy of administering our tax system. 
Although a number of people in my city would like to see more Government spending for a particular programme or pet project—and that is fair enough we all would from time to time—not one of my constituents has told me that Labour’s prescription of new taxes irresponsible spending and more Government borrowing is the answer. Not one person has told me that. Only Labour members of the New Zealand Parliament can be oblivious to the international economic situation at present: the American debt crisis and the experiences of Ireland Greece Portugal and so on. 
Fortunately the New Zealand public are much more aware of those challenges and better informed about the National-led Government’s focused and effective programme to avoid those circumstances which would be utterly devastating for our country. The choice for voters on 26 November will be between a Government that is well led by a Prime Minister who commands widespread respect and support for his vision his talent and his experience; and a divided and demoralised Opposition whose members stand behind their ineffective leader at the moment only because none of them wants to take on the poisoned chalice this close to the election. 
There is no doubt that later this afternoon and tonight Labour members will again waste the time of the House with pointless contributions in support of one of their own measures that no party in this House opposes as they have done on every members’ day for months. Those tactics speak volumes about their lack of focus and purpose and their complete disconnection from the things that matter to New Zealand and they illustrate the total lack of fitness of the Labour Opposition to return to Government. 
Meanwhile we on this side of the House have been applying ourselves to the issues that do matter to New Zealanders with considerable success. In my electorate of Hamilton West three-quarters of taxpayers now pay an income tax rate of no more than 17.5 percent. That is a fantastic result. We have seen 100000 homes insulated so far under the Government’s efficiency programme—[ 
Interruption 
]—not just in Hamilton but around the country. Around the country we have seen $1.4 billion spent on early childhood education—the highest spend ever.