Brownlee GerryGENERAL DEBATEHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business.It's well-known that a Government starts to lose touch in connection with the people it represents when the Ministers from that Government start to believe their own policy rhetoric and ignore the consequences of their policy and today from the Prime Minister through we have seen Minister after Minister denying the reality of the consequences of their policies and referring totally to the rhetoric that they've been banging on about for over 18 months now. Next Thursday we are going to be presented with a Budget that will be entitled the Wellbeing Budget. Well I predict there'll be very little wellbeing in it for many New Zealanders at all.One of the great leaders of the Labour Party was Norman Kirk a man who was respected on all sides of the House for his care his compassion and his commitment to bettering New Zealanders. He had five things that he said his Government and successive Governments should be tested against. They were: housing education health security and of course the opportunity to work. Going through all of those there are fails in those five.Rt Hon Winston Peters: That's four.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Well there's the former primary teacher—no longer one because he couldn't count to five—sitting over there. Those are the things that a Government gets tested on.Let's just look at where things are at the moment. We've just heard the health Minister this afternoon trying to defend the abandoning of targets for elective surgery—trying to explain that in actual fact New Zealanders are better off although there are thousands fewer elective surgeries occurring in this country today. If one were to compare that much reduced figure with population stats it would look even worse but of course we can't do that because the Government have abandoned any hope of having a reasonable census document that might give that information so necessary to test their policies.We also have the Government crowing about something like KiwiBuild—the opportunity for New Zealanders to get into houses. Well the reality is that all the KiwiBuild houses are being purchased on special housing area land—purchased by the Government. The ones that the developers can't sell the ones that the 25000 new first-home buyers in New Zealand weren't prepared to buy—the Government's buying them. The Bank of Phil Twyford" is turning up to bankroll the various developers around the country. They were all put in place by a National Government and those people getting into those houses—the 25000 last year—were calling on the Home Start grant the $20000 contribution to their purchase from a National Government. Not one new initiative from the Labour Government beyond the paltry 70 KiwiBuild houses they've managed to build in nearly 18 months.Let's look at the job market in New Zealand. Just 18 months ago there were 10000 new jobs being created in the economy every single month. That's now down to 600 and no wonder the number of people on the job seekers—we used to honestly call that the "unemployed" group of New Zealanders. That number now—the "job seekers"—is 11000 higher than it was just 18 months ago and growing by the day but you have got Grant Robertson over there telling us that the economy is humming along at a huge rate and if it's not it's not their fault; it's somehow a problem of the international environment. There is too much of this blame going on too much referencing to the sort of rhetoric that we are seeing from these Ministers about what they were so good at in the past.Let's look at education. Has there ever been a time where there's been so much disruption to education in New Zealand? Never. Not ever. Has there ever been a time when there has been so much expectation created by Government only to have it whipped out from beneath those whom they claim they're there to insist on the wellbeing for? Let's be very clear: the fees-free policy is a failure. Fewer students are going to university tertiary training and—I have to tell the Prime Minister—into vocational training as well as a result of that policy. That's not working but we get this rhetoric all the time about how good the Labour Government is for education. I'm leaving New Zealand First out of it because I know that they don't have as much influence as they like to claim.Then there is the issue of security. Time won't let me say it but apparently of 1800 new police there are less than 20 percent of that so far and on a population basis closure of 24-hour police stations. Bad news for New Zealanders."