Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. It's been a very interesting debate. I want to pick up on the Minister's question. What's the counterfactual if the Government hadn't signed a guarantee for the Reserve Bank to print $53 billion which it ultimately loaned to guess who the Government. Well what that did was it reduced the Government's cost of borrowing by a full percentage point. Some people think A percentage point that's not much." Well when the Government borrowed $80 billion through the course of COVID a percent is a lot of money.The Government has put New Zealand so much further into debt because it has insisted on spending so much more money. It is now spending $127 billion a year; before COVID $87 billion. And can the Minister ever explain what New Zealanders are getting for an extra $40 billion that they weren't getting when he was the finance Minister in 2019? I bet he could never explain that. So on the one hand "COVID was fabulously managed and COVID's over now and everything is good." on the other hand it is now costing $40 billion to deliver the same stuff. Arguably if you talk to people in health or education or any Government service today—at question time we heard the Defence Force has half of their people thinking of leaving. Arguably things have got worse. So what was the counterfactual on the Reserve Bank printing all that money and pushing down the Government's interest rate? Well the counterfactual is that the Government would have had to be honest with the New Zealand people and say "This money that we're borrowing has real cost to future generations because interest rates will rise and that's when you'll see how much it cost." And people would have seen in the 2020 election quite how much debt this Government was putting New Zealand into and quite what the effect on future generations would be and we would have had a much more sceptical view of this Government's handling of COVID if we saw the real cost. But did we see that? No. That's the counterfactual. What actually happened is that we saw a Government that signed a deal with the Reserve Bank— the Minister says it should be independent—to print $53 billion that was loaned to the Government that reduced the Government's interest rate. As a result this Government was able to borrow and spend and pretend that there was no tomorrow. Except tomorrow has come—it's called today. And today we see rising interest costs: $4 billion or $5 billion a year forecast in these Estimates. Just paying the interest on the debt as those interest rates rise—that's what the Finance and Expenditure Committee's report says. We see a tougher and tougher time for families who are now competing for resources with the State sector. That $127 billion sucked up by the Government in this Budget means the Reserve Bank is finally free to raise interest rates and as it raises those interest rates and every single person's mortgage rate—and if you are renting you see it through your landlord's mortgage rate—all of a sudden you see the real costs of this Government's response. So what was the counterfactual? An honest Government that didn't mess with the Reserve Bank that didn't mess with interest rates that faced the real cost and that was honest with the people. But here's the other counterfactual: that people would have looked at what this Government was up to and said "The real cost of this borrowing will go on for generations. The real cost of this borrowing will be inflation. The real cost of this borrowing will show up at the checkout at the petrol pump and my rent and everything else I buy for years to come. And I'm not so sure that Labour's doing such a good job." Those are the facts. Well I think that there was a better way and actually ACT was saying it consistently in the select committee to the Reserve Bank Governor in the House and in the public to the media—we were saying "This borrowing will come back to bite us. We are going to be in trouble because this Government has distorted monetary policy; they've lowered the interest rates artificially. And when all of that money sloshing around comes back to bite us it'll do it in the form of inflation and rising interest rates." as we see now. So when this finance Minister stands up and says "Oh we just had to print $53 billion. We just had to borrow $76 billion." There was no counterfactual. The counterfactual was some honesty. And the only problem with that scenario is that it would have had political implications for the Labour Party. Well guess what! They didn't fix it; they just delayed it because those implications are coming home to roost. Didn't we see it as recently as Monday night? Thank you Madam Chair."