Collins JudithHon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Madam Deputy Speaker thank you so much for this opportunity to take a call in this debate. Well that contribution from Fletcher Tabuteau was enlightening. It was enlightening to me because I've always thought He's a nice enough chap. He's the Deputy Leader of the New Zealand First Party. Why is he not a Minister?" And his speech just enlightened me. Actually to call across to the Hon Amy Adams and say he doesn't know her name I have to say says it all really. He doesn't know much. But anyway it's good because he probably doesn't know my name either! And I've gone to all the effort of learning his.First off with any Budget I think it's good to go back to the Hippocratic oath really for doctors' training which is "First do no harm". So did this Budget do some harm? Well it certainly seems to have done a bit of harm because we have been hearing today some excuses from the Government side—Hon Kris Faafoi: Maybe Simon should take heed of that too?Clayton Mitchell: Only Simon's rating.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: —oh please call out; I just love it when they do. When they say "Look the economy is tanking because the world economy is tanking."—the dollar coming down Mr Tabuteau told us was an excellent thing because that means we'll have more money. Well that must be why President Erdogan of Turkey is so thrilled to bits that the lira has tanked in a major way. If a low dollar was the reason for financial success then Mexico would be the richest country in the world not the United States of America. There would be a reason for that. The dollar has been tanking because of the lack of confidence in this Government. Yes there will be some short-term gain by those who are exporting because they will immediately get more New Zealand dollars for their product. The problem is that those New Zealand dollars won't buy them anything more when it comes to anywhere else. So if you're looking at anything where fuel is used—petrol and diesel—not only have we got these massive taxes put on in the Auckland region and also no doubt going to move to the other regions soon but we also have the fact that oil and particularly petrol and diesel go up as soon as the dollar drops. It is almost that day. So what I am seeing around the country and I'm sure that my colleagues have too is that petrol prices and diesel prices have gone up under this Government. And they will continue to go up because they see these particular products as ways that they can grab more money and also because the dollar has been falling.It's interesting also to hear today this contribution from the Government as another excuse for the effect of the Budget that actually the world is going through turmoil and the world economies are. Well that must be why Australia's economy is not tanking these days! Why would that be? Oh probably because they have a sensible Government that's doing its best encouraging resources to be used and encouraging mining. Mining is getting itself back up again in Australia—infrastructure spend taking our carpenters taking our tradespeople being able to pay them what they're worth. And what have we got from this Government? Oh I know we're just going to—what? Nothing really actually. We don't want foreigners we don't want their money—oh we do now because suddenly we've worked out that we can't actually build anything without that money and without these people investing in New Zealand.Why business is very upset with this Government—and bear in mind that this is only a matter of months; it's not even a year since this Government came in—is that they're not being listened to and they're being patronised by people who have never been in business. So they've got a Minister of Finance who's never been in business who's never had to actually go out sell a product be able to look at whether there is a profit in it employ people and put his own money on the line. And you've got a Government full of people like that—people who have worked in places where they've been public servants which is an excellent thing of course but that is all that their experience is in most cases. And they're talking around saying and we had the Prime Minister doing it too "Look business confidence—it's only confidence." Well actually it's that confidence that gives people strangely enough the confidence to go and put a mortgage on their house borrow some money from the bank and go and buy a business. It's also that confidence that gives someone the ability to say to someone who wants a job "I can take you on. I can take you on as an apprentice. I can commit to you for the next so many years because I believe my business is going to be thriving. It will be doing well."At a time when we're supposed to have all these houses being built everywhere why is it that we don't have all these houses being built everywhere any more than there were last year?Maureen Pugh: Why is that?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Why is that? And the answer is that there are no more tradespeople than there were last year. In fact a whole lot have gone to Australia because they can get jobs there because strangely enough their economy is booming and strangely enough ours isn't.And then we have things such as "Is this Government going to back business when things go a bit wrong?" Well I don't think they are. I was very concerned to hear the other day Adrian Orr the Governor of the Reserve Bank talk about hoping and basically crossing fingers and thinking things might be OK. That's not the sort of confidence that people want to hear. And possibly that's because he's telling the truth: that he's not that confident about the New Zealand economy. We're very fortunate that we have a diverse economy that we have a lot of people who sell products overseas that we are actually a very very diverse economy. We don't just sell dairy products; we sell a lot of different other things including tourism. But all of those things actually rely on people who have the courage and the wherewithal to be able to put investments into businesses and to employ people. That's what happens. And all they've seen from this Government is attack after attack after attack on business.The latest one is of course these attacks on business using the unions. I saw today that Pacific Steel Group is now going on strike. Pacific Steel is I think one of only two steel producers now in New Zealand based in Otāhuhu in Auckland. That is actually a really big payer of people. It is an industry that there's not much left of in New Zealand. It is a very valuable industry. We're lucky to have it because if we didn't have that and the Glenbrook steel mill we would have no steel being produced in New Zealand. That means that every piece of steel we get would have to come in from overseas so we would not have this very high quality steel produced with very good efforts around the environment and also health and safety for staff and we would instead simply bring in steel from China and other countries like that where not necessarily all the same care is taken.So why would any union want to bash up one of the very few steel producers left in New Zealand? The answer has to be because they think they can because they have a Government that they know is going to support them. And when was the last time that we saw nurses threatening to strike? I don't think I can recall that in my lifetime. We've got teachers striking tomorrow. A lot of staff in this building are taking some days off some holiday time because they're going to stay home and look after their school-age children. I don't remember this happening in my lifetime.What I do see at the moment is a re-energised union movement which certainly does have a place in a lot of big business but also that re-energised union movement is not necessarily about their workers and that's what worries me. When we have people like the E tū union—I think that's the one that Andrew Little used to run isn't it? Is that the one? Yes I thought it was—running around trying to destroy an industry because they can I am very concerned about why business confidence is dropping.We're hearing about some of the changes coming through with union reps being able to demand and just move into workplaces on to farms into factories and into businesses. No one else can do that. Everyone else has to go through a health and safety induction. Everyone else has to sign in. Everyone else has to get permission except these particular people. And why should that be? Why should that be? The police can't do that. The Search and Surveillance Act doesn't allow that to happen and yet anybody who's a union rep can just go in and do it. I think business is right to be frightened of this Government and they're frightened of this Government not because there is any particular ability over there on the other side in Parliament but because they don't know what they're going to do next; because they believe rightly that this Government has not a clue about the effects of what it's doing and it's all bad."