Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Mr Deputy Speaker greetings to you to the House and to the people of New Zealand particularly to my constituents in the Epsom electorate and particularly to the parties to my immediate left and right—the parties that make up the current Government. We have heard a lot today but I would just like to remind the House of one thing and that is MMP. Now I did not vote for MMP—mainly because I was in standard 3 at the time—but MMP is a reality and it requires coalition Governments. And everything that has been discussed today can only happen if you are able to assemble a majority in this House.What are some of the options? Well you could have a Labour-Green coalition but if today's speeches were not enough to put you off that the fact of the matter is that when they launched their state of the nation speeches—Winston Peters criticised the National Party for not talking about housing in Auckland—Labour and the Greens did not have any policy whatsoever and judging on the quality of the policy they usually put up that is probably a good thing.Winston Peters thinks that he is going to be at the fulcrum in the centre of any future Government. He believes that his time has come because it has come elsewhere. Well I will give you a prediction: I think New Zealanders are going to get a little bit tired of self-congratulation and imported politics from New Zealand First. And why would they want him back? This is a guy who has been in Cabinet three times and has been fired by every single one of his Prime Ministers. He has been voted out of two electorates and is about to be voted out of a third because when I have been up North people say one thing about him: We never see him." New Zealand can do better than handing the balance of power to New Zealand's Trump movement—which is opposed to trade which is opposed to openness and which is opposed to rational dialogue—and these days that sadly includes the Labour Party and the Greens which are running the xenophobic lines as hard as anyone ever has.For 5 years the Act Party has had only one MP and by stark contrast to that rhetoric it is extraordinary what we have achieved with one member of Parliament. No. 1 is that we have kept those people over there—we have allowed the stability of public policy and we have allowed rational orthodox economic policy under which people can build their lives their homes their families and their businesses and the country can prosper.We have also had a few projects of our own because it is a tragedy that in New Zealand in 2017 we have one of the most unequal education systems in the developed world. We have not just carped on about it; we have actually done something about it. We have said that people like Raewyn Tīpene from Whangarei who observed that 86 percent of Māori boys in Whangarei were failing NCEA level 1 and not getting one NCEA qualification—we have said to people like Raewyn Tīpene that we do not think that is good enough either. We have let her set up her own school where guess what more than 86 percent of students are getting not just NCEA level 1 but level 2 and on their way to university entrance.I would like to thank the Māori Party for its staunch advocacy of partnership schools kura hourua along with National because this day—the first day of school for many schools in New Zealand this year—we have one thousand - plus students who have taken the option of going to a school of choice and they have chosen a partnership school kura hourua. This is a new option set up by the fabulous educational entrepreneurs who are bringing the kids who most need it new options.That is one of the things that the ACT Party can achieve with just one MP but it is also an existential crisis for the Labour Party. It is trying to court Willie Jackson who knows that were it not for this ACT Party policy he would not have one of his most prized projects—he would not have Te Kura Māori o Waatea.So where is the Labour Party on this issue? Is it backing the kids who have been left out—the kids whom Peter Fraser was talking about when he said that every New Zealander would be extended to the best of their abilities? Or is the Labour Party backing the public sector union representatives who are heavily packing the selection meetings of Labour Party MPs?Hon Annette King: Ha!DAVID SEYMOUR: And there is Annette King scoffing but she knows exactly how it works even though she secretly wishes it were not so. That is the challenge for the Labour Party but it is not a challenge for this side of the House where we are innovating education and making the world a better place for the kids who need it most.I have stood alone in this Parliament prepared to put a member's bill in the ballot for an issue that 75 percent of New Zealanders believe should be addressed. That is the question of what choices people should have at the end of their lives. At present the choices that are allowed are gruesome and barbaric purely because we in this House have not had the gumption to grasp the nettle and take on that issue. That is another example of the initiative that just one ACT MP can take.But what could ACT do if only we had a little bit more support? The answer for people who think that ACT has not done enough because we do not have enough support is very simple: on 23 September vote for us. Here are one or two things that we might fix—and fix with Bill English—that John Key neglected. One of them that has been raised roundly in the House is the housing market. In my state of the nation speech a little bit earlier which was in Auckland I did raise this issue.The fact of the matter is that the Labour Party has a big problem on the housing issue—the fact of the matter is that the problem emerged when it was in power. Labour can criticise National for doing nothing about it but that is exactly what it did itself. Nobody can credibly believe that a Labour Party in 2017 and beyond is going to be any better at fixing the housing crisis than it was when it caused it in the first place.If we are going to be serious we know that National will not solve it either because it has had 9 years. It is very simple: it is because it is inherently a conservative party. It is not a right-wing party; it is a party that has been in Government five times and each time has preserved the policies bequeathed to it by the preceding Labour Government. That is just yin and yang; that is the rhythm of New Zealand politics.If you want to reform the housing market then what you have got to do is fundamentally reform land-use planning not just tinker. That means taking urban areas with more than 100000 people out of the Resource Management Act and replacing it with fit for purpose urban planning legislation. It is wrong that we use the same regulations that we require to protect places like Fiordland the Bay of Islands Coromandel to protect a paddock with a horse in it somewhere in Henderson.We need to change the way that we fund infrastructure. It is not right that central government has $80 billion and local government has $10 billion and the biggest constraints on housing supply is infrastructure and one of the biggest cost drivers for Government is a shortage of housing. Here is another issue that we could be fixing with a bit more gumption.Everybody under 100—at least everyone under 40 at least everybody younger than Gerry Brownlee—knows that they are not going to get superannuation at 65 because it is just not sustainable. Treasury puts out reports every year telling us this and if the Government was serious it would either tell Treasury that its long-term fiscal outlooks are rubbish and stop paying it to publish them every 4 years and put Treasury out of its misery or it would take it seriously. I think the ACT Party stands alone in this House in saying that we must look into our future and confront such long-term challenges instead of simply kicking the can down the road.We need to expand the partnership school kura hourua programme. It is not good enough that schools can be punished for doing just about everything to do with their inputs to do with their administration to do with their finances—they can have a commissioner put in—but they can fail generations of students year after year after year and there is no consequence for that. We must expand the partnership school kura hourua policy to failing State schools give them performance standards and give them the flexibility to achieve them for the sake of our children.We need to get smarter on crime. The National Party's announcement that by 2021 we will have the same ratio of police to citizens that we had in 2009 is hardly inspiring stuff and I look forward to talking about new ideas for getting smarter on crime at our party conference on 25 February.But finally I return to the fact that we live under MMP. If we are going to have stable government that also reforms a Government with Bill English as Prime Minister but dealing to the issues that John Key neglected for too long then we need a much stronger more powerful and emboldened ACT Party. Thank you."