Parker David: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12053. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour):It sounds like the National Party has just discovered email. One of the recent speakers from the National Party Paul Goldsmith said that we on the Labour side have not addressed the broader economy enough in the contributions we have made in this debate on Vote Finance. He said that after-tax wages are up. Well the truth is that median wages have gone down. So when he says that after-tax wages have gone up on average that is correct before you take into account GST which paid for the income tax cuts. In truth it is only the rich who have got richer. It is actually not even just the poor who have got poorer; it is middle-income ordinary New Zealanders who are worse off as well proven by the fact that the median wage—the median wage—has gone down in real terms under this Government.In terms of growth we had Paul Goldsmith say that it was 2.4 percent this year but there was a current account deficit of close to 5 percent. So although the New Zealand economy has grown by 2.4 percent it has actually grown at a time when New Zealand’s current account deficit—that is our deficit with the rest of the world—is a lot higher than 2.4 percent; it is very close to 5 percent. We have got rampant house price inflation. We heard from Maggie Barry that there were 50000 new jobs. That is at a time when the Government is breaking its promise about more jobs. You have new jobs but you have also had jobs destroyed in the economy under this Government and its promise at the last election of 170000 more jobs is not being met. Two-thirds of earners get less than the average wage. This Government is not delivering for ordinary New Zealanders.Nowhere is this truer than in respect of power prices which have continued to go up at more than twice the rate of inflation for 15 years. This year they have gone up at about five times the rate of inflation. That is not going to be fixed except by a Labour-led Government which would come in and say: “The pricing model is wrong.” The Government is privatising the value of the public water that is used to power 60 percent of New Zealand’s electricity generation through hydro. The value of that free public water is increasingly being extracted now for private shareholders given the privatisation agenda of this Government.The Labour Government would reform the electricity market in a genuine way that would bring down electricity prices for the average consumer by $230 to $330 perannum and for businesses by 5 percent to 7 percent. There is a cost to that which would be diminution in the valuation of some of those old hydro stations which is falsely high because they are extracting for private benefit the value of the public water resource. The Labour Party says that is not good for the economy and it is not good for everyday New Zealanders and that is why we will change it.I have got time probably for only one final point and that is about this crowing on the other side about returning to surplus. Well the Labour Government would have done that in the coming year as well. We did it for 9 years in a row. We ran surpluses of 6 percent of GDP and paid down net Government debt to zero leaving it amongst the lowest Government debt in the world at the same time as we had very very low unemployment. It is only because of the good stewardship of the prior Clark-Cullen Government that New Zealand had low Government debt. Every one of those surpluses was opposed by National. It called for tax cuts. If we had done that—the same as America had done or the United Kingdom or those European countries—New Zealand would be in the financial doo-doo.Because the last Labour Government was fiscally responsible as we always are and always would be this Government has managed to get back into surplus after five deficits in a row following nine surpluses under the Labour-led Government. That is the truth of that history. The last fiscally irresponsible Government in this country was a National one under Muldoon and no one really seriously believes we have had a fiscally irresponsible Government since then. Growth rates under Labour have averaged 3.7 percent since World War II when statistics were first gathered; they averaged 2.9 percent under National. We need to get this economy growing. We need to get the cost of living under control through lower power prices. We need to deal with housing. And of course we need a balanced Budget which the Labour Government would also achieve. This Government is failing in the promises it makes.