Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): This Budget has been delivered in the context of a global health crisis unlike any I certainly have seen in my lifetime. I think we all wish to congratulate New Zealanders for their sacrifices and to feel some gratitude that we are coming through the first stages of this health crisis better than many other countries around the world. However what this Budget lays bare in the forecasts that are set out in its pages is just how severe the economic impact on New Zealanders is and what it will be.What these documents show us is that the economy is forecast to have contracted 4.7 percent this year. So that's not just an economy that's stopped growing; that is an economy that has shrunk and got smaller. It's very easy to get lost in the numbers of the Budget and to think Well that's interesting" and economists can analyse them but a shrinking economy means dreams that are thwarted. It means businesses that are closed down. It means people who have lost their part-time job who have had their hours reduced and who have had their pay reduced. We are seeing that impact in our communities and it hurts. The question that this Budget raises is how long that pain will continue; this Budget certainly does not answer the question of how that pain will be treated.The Budget also forecasts a peak of 9.8 percent in unemployment and that of course is one in 10 New Zealanders who wish to work who are ready to work and who are able to work and have had the training are unable to find a job. Many of those people of course will be young people. They will be people straight out of university or straight out of school eager to get a start in life and they will find it very very difficult to get a job. So the human toll in this Budget is severe.And of course the numbers set out here by Treasury—it is important to note—have been described by some external economists as "wildly optimistic". There are still scenarios in which that unemployment rate gets worse and stays worse for a lot longer. If we are to believe that we're going to bounce out of this as fast as Treasury are currently predicting we have to be prepared to believe that 189000 jobs will be created in the next two years. I simply do not see the plan inside these Budget documents that would deliver job growth on a scale of that sort. Why is that? Because yes the Government can create some jobs it can employ people it can do conservation schemes it can do things with the Government departments that it owns—and those are all potentially worthy initiatives—but ultimately the key place of employment growth in our economy has been and should continue to be into the future New Zealand businesses.In this country the vast majority of those businesses are small and medium sized business. Typically they're family-owned. I want to tell you about what is happening for those businesses in our community because I don't see their pain being adequately addressed in this Budget. It's actually the swimming teacher or the dance teacher or the karate teacher who owns their own business who has children who come to have their lessons each week and you can't charge for fees anymore because the lessons aren't happening—members on the other side of the House are laughing; I hope not at people who have lost their income and are unable to sustain their families anymore because I don't find it very funny—but actually that person has found that their livelihood the business that they have created they may no longer be able to sustain because they can no longer pay the lease on the building where they do those lessons they can no longer do the advertising for that business.Or it's the restaurant that struggled through bad weeks and bad months but hasn't been able to stay open through successive months. It's the tour guide whose job was something they created for themselves with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit they were the person who met the tourists off the cruise boat and toured them around the great sights of the city here in Wellington and now don't have that job to do. And it is the young couple who took their savings and bought a motel because they thought "This will be the way that we create some more earning for ourselves and our future and create security." and now there is no one coming through those motel doors. Yes the wage subsidy will help for the next few weeks but what certainty do that couple have in the future? What does this Budget say to them about what the opportunity will be in the future? It doesn't lay out a plan; it is simply not here. They have no idea what the future holds. That lack of certainty and that anxiety is leading to people making decisions to let people go and to reduce their businesses up and down the country.I want to take a moment to also talk about housing because the previous speaker in this debate Julie Anne Genter talked about how this Budget delivered 8000 houses. I think it's about time that members on the other side of the House learnt the meaning of the word "delivery" because "delivery" doesn't mean that there's a line in a press release that says "We will do something". Delivery doesn't mean "We've put a big number next to something and we've said we're prepared to spend a whole lot of money on it." because if that were true then everyone in New Zealand would believe that KiwiBuild's being delivered but you know KiwiBuild hasn't been delivered because meanwhile while these people on the other side of the House spent hours in the last campaign going up and down the country telling us they'd build 100000 houses they haven't. So we on this side of the House question the commitment to 8000 houses not because it's not a good idea—building more houses is a great idea; certainly our country needs more houses—but we question this Government's ability to deliver it because yet again we don't see the kind of detailed plans that are necessary to make something like this happen. We see it throughout this Budget: the unallocated billions that are there that we're meant to believe will stimulate the economy effectively but with no plan spelt out for how that will be.The apprenticeship fund—again who would argue with the idea of investing money in apprentices and skills training at a time of unemployment and economic crisis? No one would argue with that but what we will question is where the plan is to actually deliver that and actually make it happen.So this is a Budget that leaves New Zealand uncertain. Yes it addresses some of the immediate crisis and yes it does some good things but at the centre of it is a gaping hole where what New Zealanders needed was a plan set out that gave them the aspiration and the hope they need at a time of terrible global uncertainty. Thank you Mr Speaker."