Curran Clare: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Curran Clare: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:670;Page:16524] 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 John Key’s vision is dull. It has no substance. There is no other way to put it: he is out of touch with real New Zealanders who are struggling to cope with skyrocketing power petrol and grocery bills. He does not have any new ideas. The ideas he has had are questionable in terms of whether they can be delivered on and whether he is committed to delivering on them. After more than 2 years in Government the pressure is now on John Key and National to deliver a stronger economy and once all the spin and promises are stripped away they will be judged on their results. John Key’s speech to Parliament today spelt out National’s plan for the year and I heard no plan to grow jobs in the economy or help families under financial pressure. National’s big idea is to sell our most valuable public assets to the highest bidder which means that more and more of our wealth will go offshore. Only Labour will stop asset sales. 
Labour has a plan for a strong export economy a fairer tax system and strong public services. We will introduce a tax-free zone to help middle and lower income families with the rising cost of living and we know that it is jobs that matter. 
What do New Zealanders want? They want certainty of incomes and direction not more of the same. They want to know where we are headed as a nation and they want to know that we have a plan involving jobs for them now and securing jobs of the future for their kids—good jobs with a future. I recently asked people in my electorate in Dunedin South to tell me their three biggest issues and they told me that those issues were the rising cost of living the cost of electricity and rising inequalities. It does not sound like a step change; it sounds more like a step backwards. What will National do? It will provide 25c an hour extra for the vulnerable it will make more cuts to services and it will sell our energy companies so that electricity prices will go up even further. 
John Key talked today about the fact that New Zealand needs world-class infrastructure to ensure that our workers and businesses can compete as efficiently and productively as possible. He said that broadband is the revolutionary technology of our country and that the Government wants New Zealanders up and down the country to have access to ultra-fast services at an affordable price. Well I agree with him. But will we get it? It does not look like it. The ultra-fast broadband policy was No. 2 in John Key’s top 10 pledges before the 2008 election. He gave his personal guarantee to deliver ultra-fast broadband fibre to 75 percent of New Zealand homes for $1.5 billion. People thought that sounded good but wondered whether they would get it and just how committed the Government is to ultra-fast broadband. A recent  
Dominion Post  
article quoted from a Cabinet paper that was released under the Official Information Act under great duress. The paper said that the ultra-fast broadband roll-out would proceed in three or four phases but then it said: “The roll-out could halt before the third phase—the widespread deployment of fibre across suburbs—if factors such as a lack of demand made the project too financially risky.” Too risky? Does that mean that the poorer parts of New Zealand might not get ultra-fast broadband? Does it mean that the more remote parts of New Zealand will not get rural fibre? Does it mean that the Government is not really committed to its election pledge? What is the Government’s plan then? What is its vision? Is it to deliver on the biggest commitment that it made before the election? 
Well I am not even sure the Government will do that. Yesterday Steven Joyce announced that the Government was negotiating a $300 million contract for rural broadband with a consortium of Telecom and Vodafone which are the two biggest players in the telecommunications scene. They are the incumbents. National’s decision is to negotiate rural broadband contracts with the incumbent providers which have repeatedly failed rural customers. This is not being anti-Telecom or anti-Vodafone; they are important companies in our telecommunications industry. But the industry is evolving fast. It is rapidly merging with the broadcasting industry with new technologies. The Internet is the future. 
There has been an outcry about yesterday’s decision. Federated Farmers National’s mate has questioned whether there will be a step change and has suggested the policy is not ambitious enough or competitive enough. Conor English Bill’s brother who works for Federated Farmers said: “If you’ve got two incumbents and they’re just going to get bigger then naturally that does raise competition concerns.” So there are big concerns from Federated Farmers about this issue. 
A couple of weeks ago Selwyn Pellett from the Productive Economy Council wrote about the long-term consequences of asset sales. Labour has learnt that lesson. He wrote about the sale of Telecom which saw a dividend stream flow out of this country that could have seen broadband infrastructure in place a decade ago. Labour tried to do something about that. He said that Telecom’s monopolistic pricing effectively became a foreign tax on all New Zealanders and a handbrake on economic development. Now we are proposing to hand over our newest and most important piece of infrastructure to Telecom and Vodafone not only in rural areas but likely in urban areas too. Let them have a role but do not give them a monopoly. There are innovative solutions available to deliver broadband faster to the 800000 rural New Zealanders who are crying out for it. They are people like the man who contacted me last year from Winchester near Timaru. He had moved there from Auckland. He now needs to move back north for personal and health reasons but he cannot sell his home. Why? Because he cannot get broadband. The response from Telecom and the Minister for Communications and Information Technology was that he would have to wait 5 or 6 years. Winchester is not remote. FX Networks already runs fibre straight down State Highway 1 right near his house. That company was part of a bid for rural broadband that committed to delivering a fourth-generation wireless network in 2 years with better speeds and at a lower cost. That man cancelled his life insurance. He was told by the local National MP to go on a benefit. How innovative was that? There has been too much secrecy not enough transparency and too many questions about this particularly important infrastructure. There is no evidence of a wider plan about what the Government will do with broadband. 
Labour wants New Zealanders to have ultra-fast broadband but broadband is just part of what is needed to deliver a digital transformation strategy for this country. We need a digital vision and a concrete digital agenda. Under this Government and this Minister we do not have either. Instead there is the absence of a cohesive regulatory environment to enable New Zealand to take advantage of broadband investment the destruction of New Zealand - developed content the lack of a clearly articulated vision for New Zealand as a 21st century digital economy and the failure of our education system to equip young Kiwis with the digital skills needed to transform this economy. 
The way the Government spends its money is important. How can we provide New Zealanders and our children with the knowledge that we can have sustainable jobs and industries? The Government as the biggest purchaser of goods and services has the capacity and the responsibility to develop domestic industry from the way we spend our money. This Government is committed to big deals that cut out local suppliers at lowest cost. We have seen it in this Government’s approach to spending $500 million of taxpayers’ money on building trains for Auckland. The objective is a lowest-cost bid which is unlikely to see that money spent inside New Zealand to sustain and build our rail engineering industry. That is despite the Prime Minister’s claim that National will build the financial durability of KiwiRail. It is a joke. National’s reluctant commitment to KiwiRail is the sign of a Government that would prefer to see more heavy freight on our roads than on rail. 
I want to talk about how the Government spends its money on information and communications technology. Members might be surprised to learn that the information and communications technology industry in this country contributes $20 billion a year to our economy. It is worth $5 billion in exports a year and is second only to the dairy sector. It employs around 40000 people and invests on average around 9 percent of revenue in research and development. It attracts $2 billion worth of Government procurement which is 7 percent of all Government procurement. It is on the precipice of vast opportunities with ultra-fast broadband and rural broadband. These are the industries of the future and finding skilled workers is that industry’s biggest challenge. But what does the Government say? It says: “It’s not our problem. We’re not investing in training. That’s the industry’s responsibility.” So what is this Government’s responsibility? What is its plan? People need to know that they can trust their elected representatives to have their best interests at heart and to have a plan. That is not using the tired-old strategies from the past but some new ideas some innovative solutions that build confidence in our local industries and create jobs for the future for our kids. We are not a corporation I say to Mr Key. We are a country.