Joyce Steven: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeJoyce Steven: General Debate[Sitting date: 25 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11251. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. This week is of course Budget week 2016. By this time tomorrow Bill English will have delivered his eighth Budget and it will be a fine Budget indeed. By tomorrow afternoon he will have almost reached the number of Budgets that he has children.As a public service in Budget week I thought it would be appropriate for me to go in search of an alternative budget from the Opposition. It has been saying a lot over the last few weeks and I thought it would be helpful to draw it together into a cogent narrative as to what the alternative budget would be in 2016. [Interruption] I think we could start. There would have to be a budget story and I was thinking it would probably say there was a crisis. I think it would be a crisis because it has indeed been a crisis for the Opposition every year since this Government has been in office. Manufacturing exports the regions Christchurch housing milk prices fresh fruit and vegetables too many people leaving too many people arriving—these are the crises that the Labour Opposition has been seeking to deal with in its budgets and I am sure it will come up with one tomorrow in the alternative budget.The Opposition will also need some statistics. Unfortunately those members are not proving to be particularly good at statistics. For example on Sunday Andrew Little went out and said that New Zealand households’ share of GDP has dropped dramatically—except that he was wrong. He was wrong. If you look at households’ share of GDP it is higher under this Government than it was under Labour. Then of course in his latest today the Labour Party is talking about homeownership. It is saying that homeownership is dropping under this Government. Well here is an interesting statistic: according to Statistics New Zealand homeownership in New Zealand has actually risen slightly over the last 5 years. So that is rather fascinating. But that is OK; they will move on.Labour members cannot do statistics; they will have to talk about maybe tax. There is an interesting subject because presumably Labour must have a coherent position on tax. That would be a good thing. After all in 2014 when Andrew Little became Leader of the Opposition he took the capital gains tax off the table. He cited it as “the reason people didn’t vote for us.” Well not to be put off his plan finance spokesman Grant Robertson this week slapped it back on the table. “We need to look at a range of options.” says Robertson. “A capital gains tax clearly has to be one of those options.” Well he obviously has not told Mr Little.But then what about personal tax? Well on Monday Grant Robertson said Labour is planning to announce tax increases before the next election to help fund its spending plans. That is what he said. When asked what Labour’s tax increase for the top rate of personal tax would be—I think it was on ZB—Andrew Little said it would not be as high as 39c in the dollar. That is what Andrew Little said. But Annette King and I were on the radio this morning and she was asked about tax and said: “We’ve made no decisions on tax.” This is about as consistent as Phil Twyford on the metropolitan urban limit: “That’s what we’ll do but that’s all right. We don’t know what we are doing on tax except we know we are putting it up in the alternative budget.”What about spending? What is the plan with spending? Well it is interesting. I have not had time to go back through all the press releases so I have just done the Labour and Green press releases from the past few days. So what do we need? We need half a billion dollars for the police. Right OK. We need 26 weeks’ paid parental leave by April 2018; anything less is not good enough. For the Greens it is a billion dollars nearly to electrify rail between Auckland Hamilton and Tauranga.Then there is the health budget. The health budget is an interesting one. Robertson says it needs to be at least $600 million according to the Greens and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions it needs to be nearly $700 million and according to Andrew Little there needs to be $1.7 billion. Then there is conservation funding. The Greens want a lot more money in conservation. And then of course Bill English has to stop disciplining Housing New Zealand. So that is another couple of hundred million. On top of that there is the KiwiBuild programme which is billions and billions of dollars.So all we know is what we have always known: the alternative budget is: tax more spend bucketloads and send the country down the road to rack and ruin. And that is why tomorrow this Government gets to deliver its eighth Budget.