Delahunty Catherine: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 26 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3988. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Talofa lava Mr Deputy Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou i tēnei pō. Yep the Budget. Yep it happened. Yep we survived. I was looking for the plan. All I still hear is the “mine it to death” plan or “milk it dry” plan. Amidst shaky international economic times we are going to mine it and milk it which is a continuation of the previous Budgets that I have heard but it is a strategy that is not really going to work sorry. There is a group of people missing out. There is definitely a group of people missing out and they are the abandoned generation of people who do not want to mine Aotearoa New Zealand and do not want it milked dry at the expense of their rivers. They have nothing against milk; just not at the expense of their rivers.It is important that we look at the Budget in the context of what is actually happening for the generation of people who are going to have to pay for the decisions we make. If we have 60 percent of our rivers unswimmable because they are full of nitrates and phosphorus we are going to leave that cost with the next generation. If as the Budget did we ignore climate change we are going to leave that cost with another generation. That generation has been out this week attending so-called consultation meetings on climate change etc. which were not reported on or considered seriously by the media or by the Government but they actually spoke for a generation of people who are not going to keep quiet about what is going to happen to them. We as a party are going to stand up for those people because they actually need to have their issues addressed. They should not be carrying the cost of our negligence. The Government is out of touch with their economy and those young people are our future economy.Our present economy is swimming in debt. People cannot have their own home their wages are stagnating and a quarter of our kids are still in poverty. This is not a Budget that will deal with that. This is a Budget that has touchedcleverly on a range of issues but it has lost touch with the every day and it has chosen to build an economy that works for only some of us. There is another way and we do believe that we have got some great ideas for doing it more positively.Looking specifically at the money spend in some of my portfolios in the area of water the Government has put more money in the Budget for more conversation about water. But meanwhile the actual decisions are being made in the courts some in a precautionary manner and some in a business-as-usual manner. All we know and all we can see if you go out to the communities and look at water is that the water is deteriorating.Meanwhile the Government’s supposedly best-practice farm Landcorp is assisting others to continue the conversions from forestry to dairying—despite the extremely serious issues for dairy farmers around the price—and it wants to commodify our water and use it for dairying and then dump the cost from the Upper Waikato conversions on to the Lower Waikato farmers and communities. We are going to have approximately—and this is I am told a conservative estimate—29500 more cows in that catchment. The nitrates will be leaching into the lakes and awa—the rivers—downstream and this Government is going to continue to fund a conversation about that. Actually what it could do is stop Landcorp from being an irresponsible farmer but is it going to do that? Pigs let alone cows will fly on that one.The Government is also giving a subsidy to irrigators with an additional $25 million going to Irrigation New Zealand the Government’s acceleration group to promote some unpopular and destructive dam projects that could add to these pollution statistics and increase the pollution of our beautiful and precious fresh water which we as a Parliament should be protecting. That $25 million is great news for the irrigators but not necessarily great news for the communities so we wonder why the Government is doing that. Why is it subsidising this industry? Who chose irrigation? We are not subsidising an awful lot—this is supposed to be the free market. What has happened? How come these guys cannot manage on their own? How come they need a big handout from the Government? Interesting—interesting who gets subsidised in this Budget. Very interesting.I would also like to touch briefly in my short time on the education appropriation. That was not enough—a 1 percent increase in the operating grant for schools. Last year it was a generous 2 percent which was not anywhere near enough and now it is 1 percent. There are now two new charter schools being promoted without our having a review of the existing models. Many of the existing first four charter schools and then the other nine are not in the best shape but they are a sop to Mr Seymour so they have got to go ahead. Lest we forget this was supposedly about our priority learners such as Māori Pasifika and disabled students. Look closely at what is actually happening at the charter schools and we can see that that is not what is happening. We are not making a game-changer for those students.So we are pretty disappointed with this Budget. We are concerned about the abandoned generation and we will keep talking about what else we can do better.