Clark David: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2948. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North):This is the Government of gerrymandering “John-mandering” and “Joyce-mandering”. It is a Government that is failing to achieve its own export goals as it meddles in the economy looks after its mates and fails to produce a vision for New Zealand’s future that can take the country forward. We have seen Rod Oram’s column on the weekend drawing attention to the Government’s failure to achieve its own target of having 40 percent of our GDP being exports. The Government started at 30 percent and it is going backwards rapidly. It wanted to achieve 40 percent by 2025. Now having admitted failure on its path to that target it is talking about revising the target downward. That is how desperate this Government gets. When it fails to achieve targets it starts wanting to revise them downwards.This is a Government that is out of touch and out of ideas. The dairy price drop has hit it hard and it will hit the dairy industry hard but this Government has got to stop blaming the dairy farmers every time the economy gets tough. That is what they do over there on the Government benches. The members blame the dairy farmers every time the going gets tough for them. Well it is not the dairy farmers’ fault. The dairy farmers take on the risk every day and they do it because they have got skin in the game and because they believe in their businesses. But this Government has failed to diversify the economy so we lurch from one commodity price boom to the next.The dairy price has dropped an astonishing 51 percent since February last year and that leaves our economy vulnerable because this Government has failed to diversify. It is shifting our product mix from value to volume. By its own admission it has changed the statistics that it uses to measure our export success away from the value of the products we are selling to the sheer volume. Probably it was doing that in an attempt to make itself look good but it has got egg on its face now.Of course the challenge for this Government is that it is not going to achieve that target and now that it is trying to dress it up and the public knows that it is trying to dress it up it has got to try to introduce another spin-doctoring effort. Of course it has the ministry for it. The Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment is struggling to battle “Team Joyce” in the office of the Minister who so often meddles with its business and its best advice. The ministry has 50 spin doctors sitting there across the road; there is $5 million worth of salaries sitting with the spin doctors across the road. And it probably needs it to be honest because this Government has meddled so much in its affairs that it is very difficult for the ministry to achieve the targets the Government has set—that 40 percent of GDP.Asked whether it was achievable the chief executive said it was an aspirational and ambitious target that is useful to aim for. But he could not say that the ministry has full confidence it can be achieved as so many factors are beyond the Government’s control. This is a Government that has cheapened the word “aspiration”. In this Government’s eyes it now means unachievable and that shows a Government that is out of ideas. It is thick on spin and low on solutions. In fact Steven Joyce used to be considered the “Minister for Everything” and now we see that he has the reverse Midas touch. He used to be the man with the pitch. He used to be the pinch-hitter—the man with the pitch. Now everything he touches turns to a shemozzle. That is a man who has got no ideas and sees our economy going down the gurgler.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Come back.Dr DAVID CLARK: I come back to many of the examples of this behaviour in respect of the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment and in respect of economic development with Skycity being the most infamous of them all. It is where the Minister met behind closed doors with one of the bidders for the convention centre—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!Dr DAVID CLARK: Mr Chair this was covered in the annual review. As you will understand questions were certainly raised about the probity of that and in the words of the Auditor-General the deal being neither transparent nor even-handed. It was certainly something that came up in the annual review and that particular dirty deal—the Skycity deal for the convention centre—is an indictment on the National Government. That deal was supposed to produce by an independent report 18 net jobs for the economy. That was when it was still an international convention centre. Of course it has been scaled back. It may no longer produce 18 net jobs for the economy. The Government needs to front up and tell us how that has changed with time.Of course this is the Government that brought us Oravida. It is the Government of disgraced MPs teapot tapes and the Government Communications Security Bureau. It is a Government that is failing to meet the promise it set itself of higher standards.