English Bill: Address in Reply 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: Address in Reply 
[Sitting date: 07 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:98. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 At least Labour members are looking a bit thoughtful now because after the 2008 election they all sat there thinking “Haven’t the public made a dreadful mistake? They didn’t really mean to vote us out; they put in that flaky John Key and the National Government.” They sat there puzzling about how the public could have made that mistake. In 2011 they came back after the election and they are thinking “How did the public do it again? How did they make the same mistake again?”.  
You see Labour members still do not understand that it is the public that is right and Labour that is wrong. It is not a mistake that they lost seats and vote share in the last election; it was the deliberate intent of the New Zealand public to send one more message—because the last one had not arrived—that the nasty stale Labour Party was irrelevant. Until they start talking about what matters to New Zealanders instead of what matters to the Labour Party nothing is going to change. I welcome this new thoughtfulness. They are sitting there scratching their heads thinking “How did the public get it wrong again?”. Well the public did not get it wrong; it got it right.  
In listening to the deputy leader of the Labour Party I can only say that I am sure his colleagues hope that he does not disappear as quickly as he did when he became the tertiary education spokesman never to be heard from again. I am told—because I was not aware of this—that apparently he was the health spokesman. Is that not meant to be one of Labour’s strongest issues? Apparently he was the health spokesman; well he disappeared quickly from that. Now he is the environment spokesman. I just say to Labour that the Greens do it a lot better. They do it a lot better. The way they think about the environment and the economy is more sensible and more sophisticated—well more sophisticated but not that sensible—than what Labour will ever come up with.  
With the old arrogance of the Labour Party the deputy leader is saying there is a balance between the economy and the environment as if that is some new idea. No one has thought of that before! Well if he comes to my electorate to see people who would never think of voting Labour but vote National he will see that they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money finding exactly that balance and changing their farming practices trying to find that balance.  
They know what Labour means when it says a balance between the environment and the economy. It means bigger government making more rules taking more tax and borrowing more money. That is actually what that means whereas what they will get from this Government is strong support for the competitive export economy. That is one of the priorities of the Government through this term of office. Our first priority is to get back to surplus—to manage the Government finances prudently to get back to surplus by 2014-15. To continue the process of rebuilding New Zealand’s international competitiveness is our second priority. The third one is to deliver better public services and the final one is to rebuild Christchurch.  
I want to refer to the need to continue rebuilding the competitive economy. I think few New Zealanders understand just how damaging the custodianship of the previous Labour Government was—to be fair they were part of a movement across developed economies around the world—where our export sector actually shrank in the first decade of this century. Even though the world economy was growing faster than ever our ability to earn income by selling to that world actually shrank. However our ability to spend what we were not earning grew fantastically well. The gap of course was filled by borrowing. A more competitive economy has to be about the movement of resources—that is people and capital—into the tradable sector.  
We want to see in the next 5 years something we did not see in the last 10 years and that is job growth in the export sector. Today there are hardly any more jobs in the export sector than there were 10 years ago so very little of the job growth of the last 10 years actually occurred in the income earning side of our economy. The prospects for that are pretty good as long as Government gets behind and pushes hard. Those prospects are good because the markets into which we are selling increasingly are growing reasonably fast and our export sector has become remarkably resilient.  
In this context I want to pay a particular tribute to the manufacturing sector which in recent years has continued to grow when for instance the Australian manufacturing sector has been shrinking. That is because they have worked out how to be adept fast-moving adaptable organisations finding their niche in a very competitive world.  
The Government will be focusing on this rebalancing of the economy. The sources of growth over the next few years I think are reasonably clear now. Our continued high export prices are actually as high as they have been since the late 1960s and if those prices can hold up even somewhere near where they are now that will continue to add wealth and jobs to the New Zealand economy.  
Another source of growth will be the Christchurch rebuild. There is roughly $20 billion that needs to be spent in Christchurch; only $2 billion has been spent so far. It is already having an impact on New Zealanders’ incomes. We see in the labour market figures coming out today the growth in construction wages in Christchurch of around 8 percent in the last year—more than double the average wage increase across the rest of the economy. Of course we will have to watch out for inflationary effects of a wage blowout but there will be thousands of new jobs and huge investment going on in Christchurch. Whatever discussions they might be having among themselves about their local council they have shown remarkable resilience and persistence about the recovery of that city.  
I want to make a few remarks about another of the Government’s objectives and that is to deliver better public services. I think the Public Service has now understood that this is not just a passing phase of fiscal restraint; it is now permanent. It will never go back to the days it enjoyed in the first decade of this century when because of the economic situation it had money pouring in the door. I want to pay tribute here to the leadership of the Public Service. Across Government departments they have got to grips with the new reality and worked with the Government through a considered process of getting ready for significant change. Some of them have already executed significant change. Almost all of them are planning significant change in the delivery of public services.  
The Government will be focusing very strongly on ensuring that the service to the public is the same or better as we reduce the costs of delivering that service. But it will be a challenge. Over the next 3 or 4 years most Government departments will get no new money. So we would not want to underestimate the challenges and the discussion—vigorous discussion I am sure—that is going to flow from the Government’s ambition to deliver better public services despite the fact that the budget is very tight.  
The Prime Minister set out the objectives for the Government in his state of the nation speech. We expect to get on with that agenda in this Parliament and through Cabinet and we also expect that the New Zealand public have had to in a pragmatic frame of mind go through their own process of making change in their households and their businesses because of the economic circumstances. They can look forward to reasonable and moderate growth over the next few years the opportunity for wage increases and better incomes—many of them have not had wage increases in recent years—and a Government that is strongly supportive of their aspirations and is willing to do the hard work now necessary to fulfil those aspirations in a world where it has become a lot more difficult than it was in the last 10 years.