Parker David: Address in Reply 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Address in Reply 
[Sitting date: 14 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:323. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I could spend 10 minutes deconstructing the arguments around the State-owned enterprise sales. They are just ridiculous. This idea that New Zealand will somehow become wealthier by changing who owns what already exists is an absolute nonsense. I will leave that to others of my colleagues.  
This is the Address in Reply debate which is the first formal set of speeches after the election. I suppose I should start by saying congratulations to the National Party and its colleagues in Government. You have won the Treasury benches again but I would note that New Zealanders are very fair-minded and in my lifetime there has never been a one-term Government—indeed except once. That was when the then sitting Prime Minister Norman Kirk died in office.  
So the fact that National has won a second term should not be seen as some great endorsement of the National Government. Indeed to achieve that National has gobbled up all of its coalition partners. All of them are either at 1 percent or lower if you round them. The Maori Party got slightly more than 1 percent but closer to 1 percent than 2 percent. The ACT Party is decimated. It is here only because of John Banks. Its vote has collapsed to 1 percent. Why? There was this litany of disasters around the ACT Party. It was seen by the electorate to be bankrupt.  
What happened? Well we had the perk-buster Rodney Hide busted for perks. We had the ultimate act of hypocrisy of David Garrett having railed against shorter sentences and name suppression being found out to have sought name suppression and a discharge without conviction for his earlier passport fraud. We then had the takeover of the ACT Party from outside its ranks by John Banks and Don Brash. Despite the endorsement that we had of this cosy little deal with Paul Goldsmith for the National Party saying: “Please don’t vote for me; vote for John Banks.”—that was essentially his campaign—it looked like Paul Goldsmith was still going to win.  
So what did they do? They had this tea party and within the tea party were planted seeds of discontent in the minds of the media and wider New Zealand that the Prime Minister was not quite all the smiles good nature and goodwill that he had previously pretended were his making. In the tea party we saw this act of political engineering. In fact someone said to me it was an act of political pornography where they went and they showed themselves off to 30 or 40 cameras. But the problem is when you agree to be a centrefold in an act of political pornography you lose your right to privacy. So New Zealanders and the media started to look askance at the Prime Minister when he called in the police. He had the temerity to say that the police had the time to inquire into this because the police had lower burglary rates. Well we know that around New Zealand there are lots of uninvestigated burglaries and other crimes but the Prime Minister used an arm of the State. The media were under attack by the police who were called in by the Prime Minister to witch-hunt as a consequence of this tape which was taken at this public event.  
Since then following the election we have had the Prime Minister saying that the rosy promises he was making just a few weeks ago he now no longer will be held to. That was the first act of the Prime Minister in this new Government backed up by the Prime Minister saying that he went to the election with the Government’s own forecast but now he is coming back weeks later and saying it is going to be even worse than that. As a consequence of that we have now seen in the  
Sunday Star-Times 
 in the weekend a slow decline in the popularity of the Prime Minister because this forever telling people “It’s rosy it’s rosy it’s rosy.” and then saying “Oh look it’s all too hard; it’s not going to be that good.” is starting to wear thin with middle-class New Zealanders. They are tired of waiting for this nirvana which never arrives but which is forever promised by the Prime Minister.  
In the last term of Government we had Bill English saying that all that went wrong was the fault of the Labour Government. The Labour Government was blamed for increasing Government debt. Let us have a look at those figures. Does history bear that out to be true? Well in 1999 New Zealand’s gross Government debt was 35 percent of GDP. That is when the Labour Government came to office. By the time we left office we had reduced that figure to 17 percent of GDP—an incredible decrease in Government debt. Every one of those Budget surpluses that the Labour Party ran under Michael Cullen was opposed by National.  
Net debt went down even further and depending on the measure it was either zero percent or 5 percent of GDP. It went down because the Government was investing in assets like State-owned enterprises and Air New Zealand and was pre-funding superannuation. We were building up the assets of the Government at the same time that we were reducing Government debt.  
Since that time Government debt has increased—up from 17 percent of GDP to in 2011 36 percent of GDP. Where does it go from here? Can the National Party members tell me whether it gets better or worse from here? Silence! Well I can tell you that National in its own Treasury forecasts show that that debt continues to increase and by 2014 the end of this parliamentary term Government debt is projected to increase by another $16 billion—$16 billon more of Government debt.  
Now if there was some hope in terms of some of the structural imbalances in the economy being unwound and New Zealand making economic progress by then then maybe New Zealanders would forgive that. But the reason that middle-class New Zealanders are starting to go off the Government was amply illustrated by Steven Joyce when he answered on behalf of the Minister of Finance in the House today. The question the Government asked of itself—the first question—was to Mr Joyce on behalf of the Minister of Finance and asked what progress the Government is making in implementing its economic growth agenda. Well you would think on that basis that there was good news there but the reality is—and we explored this in our questions—that New Zealand’s structural economic problems remain so much so that if this Government was still in office in 2016 by which time it would have been in office for 8 years what would be happening to New Zealand? Well in that eighth year and in the years prior New Zealand gets poorer because every year New Zealand runs a current account deficit and we effectively import more goods and services and pay more interest out overseas than we earn. And every year we do that—every year that we have a current account deficit—we get poorer because we bridge that gap and we bridge that gap through more borrowing.  
So what happens? This year the current account deficit is projected to be $5 billion. Bill English pretends that the Government has changed structural imbalances in our economy to improve exports. Well you would think if that was the case then that balance would get better but it does not. Every year from here the current account deficit is projected to get higher so much so that by 2016 the current account deficit is projected to be $17 billion in that year alone—$17 billion of current account deficit which can be bridged in only one of two ways: selling more of our assets which the Government is big on whether it is land sales or State-owned enterprise sales or borrowing more money which the Government is also big on.  
So what does that mean in terms of New Zealand’s balance sheet? Well our balance sheet is measured by what we call our net liabilities and again it is bad news. By 2016 New Zealand’s net international liabilities relative to now—not years past but now; the Government is responsible for now and it has been in power for 3 years—increase by 10 percent of GDP. New Zealand’s net international liabilities go up from $140 billion now—it is already a big number—to $200 billion in 2016.  
The Government responds and says “Oh we have got a 120-point plan.” You look through that plan and about most of those things it says “Oh we’ve already done that.” In the list are things like investing in transmission infrastructure. That is part of its 120-point plan. Look there is nothing wrong with investing in transmission infrastructure—that is how we get electricity—but it was going to happen anyway; it is not the Government that has changed that. There is nothing substantial in its plan to address the structural imbalances in the economy. Why not? Treasury says it should. The briefing to the incoming Minister from Treasury says according to the  
New Zealand Herald 
 interpretation of it that it was calling for an introduction of a capital gains tax—a Labour Party policy that the Government refuses to adopt despite recommendations from Treasury the OECD the IMF and just about every other country in the world. It recommends changes to savings and it recommends raising the age of superannuation. These are structural changes that only the Government can bring about but this National Government refuses to acknowledge them and we go backwards until 2016 as a consequence.