Goff Phil: Appropriation (2010/11 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Appropriation (2010/11 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate 
[Sitting date: 03 August 2010. Volume:665;Page:12895. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 When Bill English got to his feet and began to decry the runaway spending habits and the bad culture of the Public Service I thought that at last we were hearing a mea culpa. He is paid the highest housing allowance of any beneficiary in the country; he is paid thousands of dollars to live in his own home. If it started off as a bitter speech we can understand why. He is the man who took National to 21 percent in the 2001 election—21 percent. Worst of all he was a leader doing his best who was stabbed in the back by his own current party leader who had promised to support him the night before the party ballot and instead gave his support to Don Brash. It is no wonder that Bill English is a bitter man in the House. 
But I do not want to waste time on Mr English; I want to talk about what National promised New Zealanders. John Key said that the fundamental purpose of his Government was to narrow the wage gap with Australia. On any measure the Key-led National Government has failed in that purpose. The media showed that the wage gap with Australia had increased by $40 a week since John Key was elected Prime Minister. John Key came into the House and said that was untrue and had not happened. He tabled a document of the best-massaged figures he could provide and it showed that the wage gap had grown by $23 a week. But then—and this is what I objected to most—from Mr Brownlee and Mr Key there was the dishonesty of trying to disguise figures that represented the reality that New Zealand workers are much worse off. 
Mr Key and Mr Brownlee proudly became the joint holders of the title of “Wallies of the week” in the  
Dominion Post 
 last Saturday. Let us hear what the  
Dominion Post 
 had to say: “[Gerry] Brownlee for so brazenly claiming that the wage gap with Australia has shrunk under National when by any measure it had grown”. But wait there is an even better award for John Key. He was joint “Wally of the week” “for thinking anyone would be fooled by his inept attempt to manipulate the statistics to support his Minister.” They are the “Wallies of the week”. 
Well New Zealanders are not so easily taken in. They know they are not better off they know wages are not increasing at the rate of prices and they know the wage gap with Australia is growing wider and accelerating by the day. We got that information from Statistics New Zealand which today stated that the wage increase in the last year was 1.6 percent. Well inflation went up by higher than that amount. Every New Zealander going through the supermarket checkout knows that when John Key tells them that they are better off it is not true. 
What else did we find? We found that the wage increases in New Zealand in the year ended June grew at half the rate of the wage increases in Australia—half the rate. Most of all we learnt that the wage increase under this National Government in the last year was as reported by Statistics New Zealand well under half of what Labour gave workers in its last year of office. That is where the truth lies. 
Mr English can talk as much as he likes about Labour’s legacy; Labour’s legacy was a country with one of the lowest rates of unemployment in the world where wage increases were consistently above price increases and where people were better off in their workplace in the social policies that were being pursued and in their living standards. Mr English made a half-hearted attempt to say what his plan was. Well I hold up the real plan taken off the National website today. It is the policy statement  
2010 Budget: Building The Recovery 
. What does the policy say? It is a blank piece of paper. Oh no it has a copyright on it. But this sheet of paper is as blank as the ideas and the plan that National has to address the problems of this country. There is no plan. 
Mining in a national park or a protected conservation area is not a plan. John Key Kate Wilkinson and Gerry Brownlee told the House at the start of this session that that was their big plan for step change. They were going to dig up our national parks. Ask anyone in New Zealand and they will tell members that it was a load of nonsense economically and a load of nonsense environmentally. Now those members have slunk away from that policy with their tails between their legs. John Key denies that he ever had anything to do with it. But the truth is that 6 months was wasted during which this Government should have had a plan to lift New Zealand wages and employment rates and close the wage gap. 
I asked the Prime Minister in the House today whether he had the courage of his convictions and would stand by the promise that he had made to set benchmarks for progress towards the objective of closing the wage gap with Australia by 2025. The answer was no. There was no courage of convictions. We know that the promise to close the wage gap with Australia was simply empty electoral rhetoric. There is no plan we are not catching up and it is getting worse. The wage gap is growing. For the first time in more than a decade we have a higher unemployment rate than in Australia. Under John Key’s watch we have a higher unemployment rate than in Australia. 
When challenged this afternoon in question time as to whether he would predict that the employment gap with Australia would narrow he declined to make the prediction. I will tell members why. The Ministry of Social Development statistics already show that our dole queues are growing bigger while the Australians are cutting down their unemployment rate. The projection this week is that will continue. 
We do not have to be rocket scientists to know what New Zealand needs. It is pretty clear how we can move forward and Labour has put this into its plan. Labour’s plan is about upskilling the workforce because we know we need more apprentices not fewer. We know there is a looming skills shortage but this Government is doing absolutely nothing about it. We know we need more people with tertiary education but the Government is locking out an unprecedented 5000 people. We know we need to achieve better in education. National standards do not achieve anything; they just measure achievement. What achieves better standards is better early childhood education but that is what the Government is cutting. 
We know we need more savings because if we save more we invest own and control our own country. Why then did National cut KiwiSaver when the Australians were expanding their scheme? Why did the National Government cut the money that was going into the Cullen fund so that baby boomers could contribute towards their own retirement? We have fewer savings because of what the Government is doing. Government members can whine all they like about being tenants in their own country but they are causing that situation because they do not have a plan for savings. 
We know we need to invest in a smart economy. We will not catch up with Australia by making workers worse off by cutting their entitlements and cutting their wages. We will catch up with Australia and do well through a smarter economy smart technology and a highly educated highly paid and highly skilled workforce. This Government is not going in the right direction; it is going in the wrong direction.