Mackey Moana: Budget Debate 
Mackey Moana: Budget Debate 
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MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am happy to take a call in this Budget debate but I do so with a sense of disappointment. This was a Budget that could have delivered a strategy for jobs for New Zealanders. This was a Budget that could have sought to protect the jobs out there that are under threat now and to create new jobs. This was a Budget that in some ways could have seen our current economic conditions as being an opportunity as much as a difficulty. This was a Budget that failed on every single one of those points. Although the House may debate these things robustly from time to time the fact is that at the end of the day everyone in here wants New Zealand to do well; no one in here likes to see pouring through his or her office doors the people who are losing their jobs and who do not know why the Government is not doing anything to help them. We had really hoped that we would see a Budget that finally showed us this Government’s strategy for jobs in New Zealand and we did not get that. 
This Budget has almost become a Budget about the non - tax cuts. I pick up the point that my colleague Sue Moroney made when she spoke earlier which was that Labour voted for the legislation to repeal National’s tax cuts because we are consistent. We said during the election campaign that they were unaffordable and we were told we were scaremongering. After the election when those tax cuts were being rammed through this House under urgency we said that they were unaffordable and we were told by National then that we were scaremongering. Five months later we found ourselves in this House under urgency again putting through legislation to remove the tax cuts that we said were unaffordable. We were again told we were scaremongering because we said they were unaffordable. 
National members might like to reflect that our issue is with the fact that National knew during the election campaign that it could not afford the tax cuts but it promised them anyway because it wanted to win the election. We do not believe that that is the way a political party should conduct itself. We believe that political parties should be honest during a campaign and tell people what they can afford. We also believe that a Government should not make its No. 1 promise the first thing that it repeals within 5 months of enacting legislation on it. 
The other big aspect of this Budget was the stopping of the contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. It is extraordinary that after listening to the National Government—especially the previous National speaker—it would seem that we did not realise that apparently money is not the issue when it comes to funding superannuation. National does not think it is the issue at all. If we had known that the Government does not need money in order to fund superannuation it would have been made a lot easier for us a long time ago! 
I am afraid that I take issue with being lectured to by National about the rate of and age of entitlement to superannuation. I think that National needs to look very closely at its own recent history. Its own former Minister of Finance cut New Zealand superannuation and when that member was in Opposition he said it was too generous. Now the National members get up to start lecturing us on how great New Zealand superannuation is. Well we know that because we always provided it and we never lowered the age of entitlement. We do not need to be lectured to by a party that has absolutely no track record on protecting superannuation. All that National has done is to find a back-door way to cut superannuation. It has said that the entitlement will continue but by the way it will not pay for it any more. So for National members to sit there and tell us seriously that they are not cutting entitlements to superannuation in the future despite the fact that they are cutting the funding for it is completely ridiculous. Oh Mr Quinn is very quiet now! The normally very verbal Mr Quinn is very quiet now. This issue will have a serious impact on local economies. 
I want to pick up on the issue of Tairawhiti Polytechnic which has found out that it has had $2 million cut from its budget. Now this polytechnic has undergone serious restructuring. It made a lot of hard calls and had to make a lot of staff redundant whilst it streamlined what it did and decided how it would become relevant to the community and more viable. Tairawhiti Polytechnic found out last week with no warning that $2 million was being cut from its budget. This is a small provincial polytech in the Minister of Education’s own electorate. It is a small rural polytechnic that is needed by its community and is now being made unviable. That is a legacy of this Budget. 
In my remaining time I want to focus on two areas in particular. The first area that I want to focus on is housing. This really was a non-Budget for housing. The Minister of Housing’s own press release basically pointed out that there were some increases in the Housing Innovation Funding and increases in the Rural Housing Programme which are good Labour programmes. So we are glad to see that National has gone from opposing those programmes when it was in Opposition to supporting them now. That is fantastic. But where is the Gateway Housing scheme? Where is the centrepiece of the new Minister’s affordable housing plan? It is not there; it is not in the Budget. 
I feel a little sorry for the Minister Phil Heatley on this issue. I have likened him to a cuckoo: he has been jumping around from nest to nest claiming it as his own even though someone else had built it. He jumped on to the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill and said it was his bill even though Labour did all the work on it. He jumped over on to the Unit Titles Bill and said it was his bill. 
Paul Quinn 
: You said this about 2 weeks ago! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: It is because it is important I say to Mr Quinn. Mr Heatley jumped on to that bill and said it was his bill even though Labour did all the work on it. He jumped on to the Tamaki Transformation Programme and said it was his programme even though Labour did all the work on it. 
I think Phil Heatley has been struggling to find a nest of his own. This Budget was very difficult for Phil Heatley. He talked about the State housing upgrades but Bill English has taken the credit for that as the Minister for Infrastructure. So Phil Heatley had that little nest and he was supplanted in it by Bill English. Then Phil Heatley talked a little about the home insulation project but the Green Party has jumped into that nest and taken that from him. So the only nest that was available to the new Minister was the Gateway Housing project. Where is it in this Budget? It is not there. The central plank of National’s affordable housing policy in the election campaign is not funded; it is not there. 
While I am talking about the Tamaki Transformation Programme I must say we had a big song and dance by the Minister in the House in question time about the funding for that project. Where is that in the Budget? There is just a note saying that the Tamaki Transformation Programme will be funded out of existing baselines that it may need more money in the future and that the Government does not know whether that programme will get it. 
So the poor Minister of Housing Mr Phil Heatley is jumping from nest to nest desperately trying to find something new that he can actually claim as his own rather than just a reheated Labour policy that he has adopted because he cannot get any money to do anything else. This has been a sad Budget for housing. 
I do want to point out to the Minister that he needs to be very careful when he jumps up and down and talks about Labour having been bad on housing. When it comes to State housing he might want to go back and actually look at the deferred maintenance Budget that was there when Labour came into office given that he has made such a big deal about deferred maintenance. When Labour previously came into Government we inherited a huge deferred maintenance Budget. We inherited a State housing stock that was 14000 State houses down from the number there had been because the National Government had sold them. 
Jo Goodhew 
: And you didn’t leave a deferred maintenance problem? 
MOANA MACKEY 
: We inherited a huge deferred maintenance problem. We also inherited State housing tenants who were paying market rentals. I ask the member to remember that in the 1999 election campaign because National had managed the recession so incredibly badly we had to campaign on the basis of raising the top personal tax rate in order to be able to afford to do what we wanted to do. We had to come in and we had to do maintenance. We had to build houses and we had to build in income-related State house rentals. I think the National Government might want to be very very careful when it starts to throw rocks around on State housing because what it may find is that we made great strides under the previous Government. Although I am pleased that like cuckoos in the nest National members have jumped into our nest and adopted all our housing policies we will be keeping a very close eye on them. They have been less than honest with the public. 
I want to touch on the funding of research science and technology because it was one of the really big losers in the Budget. Paul Quinn announced earlier that it has been allocated $750 million in the Budget. I do not know where he got that from because we found out that despite the Government’s claims of there being substantial extra funding of $128 million in fact the extra funding was only $25 million over 4 years. That does not even take into account the cutting of the Fast Forward Fund and the abolition of Labour’s research and development tax credits. Today the Minister got up and answered my questions in the House and kept mentioning the Marsden Fund the health research fund and the Crown Research Institute Capability Fund all of which are good but all of which are being funded by cutting everything else in the science sector and by cutting out the very policies that were going to enable our innovative companies to grow and enable our scientists to actually have long-term stable funding for the first time in this country. I remind members that the Prime Minister John Key pledged during the election campaign a guarantee to this sector of funding of $315 million over 3 years to be paid for by the cutting of the research and development tax credit. Well the sector has an extra $25 million allocated over 4 years. That is a broken promise to the science sector to the research and development sector and to all the innovative companies in New Zealand. 
If we look at the Fast Forward Fund we see that National’s replacement for it is a lot smaller than that fund was. The main point was that that fund provided long-term stable funding for the science sector. It knew that it had that money there—nearly a billion dollars from the Government matched dollar for dollar by industry—to last for 10 to 15 years. It could not be touched by the Government; it could not be dipped into to pay for other things. Now the sector has to come cap in hand every year for a year-by-year appropriation and what is the bet that next year the appropriation will not be there?