Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair. It was good to hear the contribution from the Minister for Economic Development previously. I was interested in hearing his plan for economic development in New Zealand and it does seem to focus primarily on taxing speculators and tax credits for R & D. That latter one—you could argue about the wisdom of that but that is one thing I suppose. Taxing speculators is hardly I would have thought a comprehensive plan for economic development in New Zealand. And we haven't seen much else.Of course the main driver of productivity growth is investment—people making a decision to buy new plant machinery hire new people start a new business and take a risk and that's how you get growth and investment in the economy. So where is that investment going to come from? Well we've heard a lot about the regional growth fund and good luck to Minister Jones—who's here in the chair—going around the country handing out bits of money. So we'll be watching carefully. If you spend $3 billion over the next 18 months as he's suggested he wants to do in order to have the runs on the board prior to the next election—and that's nothing to do with politics but that seems to be the timing that we're focused on. If you're going to spend $3 billion it's actually harder than it looks to do that effectively. So we hope he'll be focused on being effective in that spending.But what about the rest of the investment? A lot of investment has been going into the regions over the past few years in road transport and transport investment across the country. We're going to be seeing in the next few minutes the release of the Government's transport strategy. It will be interesting to see whether more is going into the regions than was planned by the previous Government or less. My guess is it may well be less that's going in.And then if we look at the question of private sector investment well of course last year about $3 billion of private foreign investment came into this country and the question mark this year is whether any will be coming in after this new Government has put up the go away" sign when it comes to foreign investment with their proposed changes to overseas investment.Then if we look at domestic investment well the main driver of investment in the economy is confidence in the business community that they have some transparency and predictability around the rules. So when they see all the uncertainty around the industrial relations framework when they see all the uncertainty around the tax policy in this country and what they're going to be taxed on it's not surprising that there is a lack of confidence in the business community and falling levels of confidence.So I wouldn't be at all surprised if we look at the regions of this country whether there will actually be less investment overall next year and the year after as a result of this Government's policies notwithstanding the efforts made by the regional development Minister and the regional growth fund. That won't make up for the lost foreign investment that we're seeing the lost private sector domestic investment we're seeing because of uncertainty in this economy.We see Minister Jones going around the country attacking New Zealand companies. Lots of people can argue about the merits of that. My only plea is that he would spend more time focused on that quite difficult task of spending $3 billion effectively in the regional growth fund and ensuring that the New Zealand taxpayers are actually getting good value for money out of that money. You certainly could spend $3 billion and you're going to buy something and there will be some useful projects. We on this side of the House will support those useful projects. But we'll also be pretty determined to see that there is no waste in that spending and that there is clear process so that people can understand why this particular group gets $6 million and this one who's in the same industry and has the same New Zealanders working in that industry doesn't get the $6 million. Trying to understand the process and the rigour around that process is something that we're very keen to get our heads around so that all New Zealanders can have confidence.But taking a step back to the broader economic development story we want to see greater clarity from this Government as to what their economic development strategy is beyond taxing speculators—because that seems to be the crux of what Mr Parker is talking about—and secondary to that going from a system of grants such as we had under Callaghan Innovation where New Zealanders know what they're putting into R & D and into R & D tax credits where you've got no idea how much it's costing the economy."