English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:12690] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 There is no doubt that if Labour wants vision values and evidence-based policy it has found its man. There is no doubt about that. I can just hear that speech about equality rolling off Mr Cunliffe’s lips at the next Labour Party meetings up and down the country where three Labour members get in a phone box and there is not quite enough room for the spokesman on finance. 
Hon David Carter 
: There won’t be enough for his head. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: There will not be. I ask the member if he really felt as concerned as that about the families that he met in Kelston why he did not fix it when he was in the Government. After 9 years of growth huge increases in the housing budget and endless rhetoric about caring about everybody the end result of almost a decade of Labour in power is that he has finally found the homeless families in his electorate. After 9 years in power he has finally found those homeless families. The member will be pleased to know that as part of these estimates the Government will do something about those families. It has been told by the Housing New Zealand Corporation that 30 percent of its stock is in the wrong place is the wrong size or is in too poor a condition to put those families in. That is what is left after 9 years of vision values and evidence-based policy. That is the result after 9 years. 
There are a lot of stages an Opposition has to go through but I will tell the Committee that the one that is still well ahead of Labour—Labour has not got there yet—is the stage when Labour accepts that the voters were right and that it was wrong. When the Opposition members have been addressing these estimates we have heard all about the policies that were perfect and that still would be. No doubt the Prime Minister who was perfect and who still would be if she had been in this chair during the estimates— 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: They want her back. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Of course they do. But they do not need her back because she is busy texting from New York to tell— 
Hon David Carter 
: No they’ve got Mr Cunliffe instead. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Yes that is right; they have found their man today. But those members have to admit that the voters were right and they were wrong and we do not hear that. Today they have had an opportunity. There has been a lot of discussion about the direction for New Zealand but Labour members still cannot admit that they were wrong and the voters were right. The voters were right to change the Government simply because they wanted a Government that understood where the economy was going and what would actually lift incomes for New Zealanders. 
As has been discussed in a number of debates in this Chamber the Government through the appropriations and these estimates is addressing some pretty fundamental difficulties that were left behind by the previous Government. Probably the one that I find that New Zealanders most readily understand is that the enthusiasm for spending vastly outran our interest in earning so the non-tradables sector grew by 10 percentage points of GDP from 2004 and the tradables sector actually shrank by 15 percent. If we look back over decades we can see that it has never been so far out of balance. We have never become so blind to the need to earn a living from the world so that we can pay for the children who do not have shoes or who are living in a garage. 
As they are finding out in other countries where debt has got out of control and where people have lost their interest in living within their means the results will be pretty harsh. If we were in the UK or the US we would be seeing the complete shutdown of public services and a major reform of welfare all of which can be pretty difficult for the most vulnerable. In fact the lesson of what is happening in those countries is that it is when times get tough and are badly managed that we get the biggest impact on inequality and the worst impact on those at the bottom of the heap. People on reasonable incomes can ride out a recession; people who lose their jobs find it pretty difficult. So the Government’s plan to turn round this economy has now been running for a couple of years and what has been satisfying about it I have to say is that the plan that was signed up to in 2008 by the Government has been able to be continued for so long and so successfully.