Collins Judith: Budget Debate 
Collins Judith: Budget Debate 
[Volume:639;Page:9531] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 I look forward to seeing Mr Mark and New Zealand First actually deliver on the doubling of police numbers given that those members are supporting the current Labour Government and their party is quite happy to have the Papakura police station filled up with prisoners. There suddenly are so many more prisoners I tell Mr Mark because there is so much more crime under this Government. That is a pretty simple fact. 
One of the things I want to talk about in relation to this Budget is what it is not going to do. On Sunday I attended a very sad little gathering for a family who is shifting to Australia. This is a family of young people in their 30s with a little child. Both parents are working. One has a trade and the other works in a bank. They are people we should be keeping in this country. They have said that there is nothing in this Budget for them—there is absolutely nothing in this Budget for them. With two incomes and one child and living in Massey in west Auckland they really did not have enough to come and go on. They did not have enough to join up with KiwiSaver. They did not have enough for anything else. So they along with 698 other people this week are shifting permanently to Australia. That is because there is simply nothing in the Budget for them. 
 They were all excited to hear they would get 20 hours free childcare for their child until of course they worked out that their child aged 18 months would not actually be able to get those 20 free hours. In fact the cost of having their child in childcare went up $14 each week; it was not the other way round. They were looking at a cost of $7000 a year to have a little child in childcare. Working full-time as they both do they simply could not manage. What they really would like to have had was a little bit more of their own tax back. They would like their childcare costs to be tax deductible. They would like to get something back—something for themselves. They are the sorts of aspirational people this country should have. Instead they have sold up everything switched their money to Australian dollars and shifted to Australia. And they will do well there. They will do very very well in Australia because the opportunities in that country are better and they will be able to do all the sorts of things we have just been talking about. 
There is nothing wrong with superannuation and many people will in fact sign up to the KiwiSaver scheme. Many of them will be saying that at least they then will get back some of their own tax which is what they really want. They think they may as well get something back. Those people can afford to save. 
But there is nothing in this Budget for those who are really really struggling. There is nothing in this Budget for people who under this Government have seen interest rates go sky-high who bought properties they thought they could afford who have two or three jobs who are doing their very best and who are trying to be good parents as well. There is nothing in this Budget for them. It is all very well for the Government to say that those people benefit from Working for Families. They often do not qualify for Working for Families because their combined incomes put them out of that limit. Unless they stretch themselves and have five or six more children they simply will not qualify for Working for Families. 
This Budget will suit some people but not very many. We have seen no indication that the flow of qualified experienced people going to Australia will stop. It certainly will not stop under a Labour Government. A couple of years ago Don Brash gave a speech in which he talked about the 500 people who were leaving this country every week to go to Australia. Some people thought that figure was a bit high. Now 700 people a week are going and all that Government members can do is to go around saying we need better immigration. Well it is fine to have good immigration but why is our biggest export at the moment New Zealand - trained New Zealand - qualified people who love New Zealand—people who work who save if they can and who have children whom they look after? We are exporting those people when we should be doing something to keep them here. 
Instead this Government is happy to have 1 million New Zealanders living outside New Zealand. We should just look at the proportion: we have a population of 4 million people and 20 percent of New Zealanders live outside New Zealand. What do Australians have? They have a population of 20 million people with only 800000 Australians living outside Australia. That gives us food for thought I think. Australians do not feel they have to leave their country in order to do well. We should not have to be exporting our people. There was a time when it was the other way round—when people were coming to New Zealand. In the 1960s people came from Australia to settle in New Zealand. Now it is the other way round. It is not just about Australia being a bigger market and having bigger opportunities; it is about an attitude that people can do better in that country because the more they work the more they get. 
Productivity is something this country has not addressed. A National Government will have to address it because Labour has had 8 years of Budgets that have all been about dishing out other people’s money—about taking money off people who are productive and rewarding those who choose not to be. 
One of the concerns raised by the Minister of Finance today was the issue about business tax. He said that Labour is giving a business tax cut to some companies. Who will benefit from it? Of those businesses that actually employ people in New Zealand how many are even set up as companies? In fact most business in this country is conducted by sole traders and small partnerships—by mum and dad businesses by small businesses. The reason is that they want to keep compliance costs down. They do not want to be another entity. Most of those businesses in New Zealand that actually are companies end up getting their tax money paid to them as wages or dividends. They have to pay tax at the higher end anyway. So who is really going to benefit from this cut in company tax? Primarily it will be the big companies—the international companies that have branches here. Those companies are more likely to benefit than the little old Kiwi business the mum and dad business. Small-business people will not benefit. 
Instead not only are they told that they will contribute towards their staff members’ superannuation; the Minister of Finance said in the Budget speech that he expects wage rounds to be less now because of that superannuation payment. So he is telling Kiwi workers not to ask for too much in their pay packets because if they ask for too much they will not get it because their employers are having to pay into their superannuation fund. How is that fair? How is that fair to people who are struggling? At the same time the Minister of Finance is quite happy for interest rates to be moving up to around the 10 percent mark. He is quite happy for that to happen and to tell Kiwi parents who have mortgages kids to pay for and everything else to pay for that they have to stop their spending. 
Does he stop his spending? I heard him on  
Agenda 
 on Television One on Saturday saying that we now spend less on welfare because of benefit losses. Utter rubbish! We now spend more on welfare than we have ever spent on it. More money is now spent on welfare under this Government than ever before. About $16 billion is now spent on welfare and that is right up from about $13 billion a couple of years ago. Where does he get off telling everybody that less money is being spent on welfare? No more is being spent. 
One of the other interesting things not in this Budget is the single core benefit. What happened to that? This Government has committed—we presume—millions and millions of dollars’ worth of reports on and investigations into a single core benefit. There are so many reports that the Minister for Social Development and Employment says he cannot count them. He cannot count them because there are so many—obviously more than the number of fingers and toes he has. He is saying that he cannot tell me how many because there are so many of them. Labour has talked about this policy for 20 years. The Minister cannot tell us how much money has been spent on it. What we do know is that today in the House when asked some pretty simple questions such as when is it happening and whether he sticks by Labour’s 2005 policy of having a single core benefit which it went to the election on he could not answer. He talked about anything except the single core benefit. At no stage did I hear him use the term “single core benefit”. Steve Maharey whose baby it was—whose child it was—sat there seething and saying to himself: “I’m fed up with you Judith. I’m fed up with your saying those nasty things about my single core benefit baby.” In fact that poor little baby has been abandoned now like a little orphan on the church steps by Mr Benson-Pope who clearly does not want to support Mr Maharey’s single core benefit any more. 
This Budget is interesting really for what it does not deliver rather than what it does. What it does deliver is 700 more people going to Australia this week.