Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's my privilege to talk around the Epsom electorate where I've been based for a number of years now focused as always on the party vote. I want to talk about three issues that are top of mind. Many local issues have been canvassed across the board and in Auckland obviously you heard a lot about the impact of those dreadful floods at the start of the year but I wanted to highlight three areas. One is crime in the area. I spent a bit of time with the owner of a superette in Parnell on the main road there who had been ram-raided twice and—well smash and grabbed rather than ram-raided. There was a ram raid and then a smash and a grab and $40000 of damage was done in his little shop and $15 worth of chocolate and confectionery were stolen so the conclusion he drew was it was all about the excitement of the smash. But the consequences for him—now the people were caught and he was told that they had been doing this on many other occasions. The frustration on this dairy owner's face and the look of sheer frustration on the face of his wife stuck with me because these are people who are working hard to develop their lives and support their families in this part of Auckland in Parnell trying to make a living and they are being battered and assaulted and having their businesses turned upside down and made frankly unviable by what is widely regarded from their perspective as young criminals facing no consequences for repeated serious crimes. We're not talking about minor crimes. We're not talking about shoplifting; we're talking about stealing a car and smashing it into a building and running off in again more often than not another stolen car and crashing that somewhere else—so tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Now that all flows through to insurance costs and to the cost of the business and the cost that everybody pays. So that is why we think it's so important if you're responding to the real issues on the ground in Epsom and in many other electorates across the country that we deal more effectively with the out-of-control youth crime that we're seeing in our city right here right now. The second issue I want to deal with is the growing pressure that the retail and hospitality sectors particularly—and I'm thinking in terms of Newmarket but also Parnell—are suffering. You walk down the main street of Newmarket which is one of the greatest shopping areas and precincts in Auckland and New Zealand and it has magnificent shops in the big developments. But it also has shop after shop that is empty and boarded up and not trading. A lot of those small businesses and small operators are really struggling under the cost of living pressures that their customers are facing but also there are the costs that have been imposed on those small businesses by what we think has been a rather thoughtless Government which seems to believe that a Government can keep on imposing very significant increases in the minimum wage extra sick leave extra this extra that extra holidays and bring in fair pay agreements and somehow these small family operated businesses out the back of Broadway Street and Teed Street or something like that can just soak up the costs and continue to thrive and that is not the case. Any Government that cares about small-business owners in particular and the flow-on effects on New Zealanders who are just trying to buy things in an effective way needs to be much more disciplined in its approach to adding costs.The third area which was raised with me a couple of times when I was out door-knocking in the rain in Mount Eden last Sunday is the slow irritant of what appears to be a war on motorists in our city in Auckland with this strange desire to make us crawl around at 30 kilometres an hour in modern vehicles that have never been safer and the epidemic of speed bumps everywhere. People just want to get to where they want to go and they don't want to have to crawl around. I suppose the only point is it's a very strange priority of any Government to try to drive the people of Auckland and Epsom crazy by making them go so slow when they've got places to go. So I just wanted to raise those issues around crime and around the pressure in the retail area.