Parker David: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
[Sitting date: 02 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1866. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I would like to start with a quote from the newspaper in New Zealand that has the widest circulation. It is not very old; in fact it was only from Sunday. The  
Sunday Star-Times 
 on 29 April states: “The government is fast shredding its credibility as a sound manager of the economy. Each expedient deal it strikes erodes its integrity and political capital.” I am going to repeat that again: “Each expedient deal it strikes erodes its integrity and political capital.”—and I want to come back to the issue of integrity if I have time during this speech. That was from Rod Oram. Rod Oram I think is a pretty considered person. I know that the National Party does not agree with him but plenty of people do.  
The last time I quoted Rod Oram here I heard a cry from the other side that he was a person who was some sort of Labour Party lackey which I am sure he would find insulting because he is not. So I was interested to see whether there were any other commentaries that were of similar effect. The Hon Annette King passed me something from  
Management 
 magazine—management.co.nz—which in March had an opinion piece on leadership. In respect of John Key it said this: “Key seems to have a strong personal following. He could probably sell his vision if he had one and if he believed it … The fact that he doesn’t suggests a leadership strategy based more on expedience than inspiration.”  
I think those two comments from the media are illustrative of the fact that the public are waking up to the fact that under this Government its economic mismanagement is responsible for the facts that the economy is failing to thrive as it should and that the Government continually fails to meet its own projections—not just the projections of Opposition parties or other financial commentators but its own projections. Every time it falls off them. As a consequence in the last Budget Policy Statement we saw the Minister of Finance saying that the revenues are a billion dollars down roughly compared with where they were at the time of the election in the pre-election fiscal update. As a consequence he says we are going to get a zero Budget or near to it. Well a zero Budget is what you get when the economy is failing. There are no excuses now for the Government. We are 4 years into its reign—4 years. The excuse of the Canterbury earthquakes becomes less and less relevant and indeed that information was largely before the Government at the time when the pre-election fiscal update was prepared.  
We know that National’s economic strategy is not working and yet we have the Prime Minister yesterday in his pre-Budget speech delivering a speech titled “Sticking to a Plan That’s Working”. I thought that was rather an amusing statement given how things are not going to plan. If National’s plan is working why is it that we have got record numbers of New Zealanders heading to Australia? It is higher than ever before month upon month upon month. Why are they heading there? Because rather than the Government bridging the wage gap with Australia that wage gap has grown. I know the Government likes to spin the statistics and use different measures of the wage disparity between New Zealand and Australia so I have looked at all of them. Picking the best of them for the Government that wage gap has grown by $19 a week since the Government was elected in 2008. That is one of the reasons why they are going to Australia.  
What else is going wrong? We had a report out from the IMF. The International Monetary Fund looks at the performance of economies around the world. Its report in April had the forecast for different countries in the world and how they were going in the world. Are countries paying their way in the world? There was only one country worse than New Zealand in the advanced economies and that was Greece. I think this should be of concern to New Zealanders because it is proof that another of the Government’s promises to rebalance the economy has not been kept.  
New Zealanders are leaving for Australia in greater numbers than before and those left behind are getting sick of the short-term unprincipled fixes that do not fix the economic malaise that we are suffering under. Labour would not sell our assets. The Budget Policy Statement for the first time laid bare the consequences of that on the Government deficit. I have been critical before of Treasury being the lapdog of the Government on this and I will say it happily again in this House—not happily; I will say it in the House because I think it is an outrage that Treasury let the Government book the proceeds of sales from the State-owned enterprises but did not show the drop in income in the books which is a consequence of no longer getting the full dividends and profits from those companies. We had a lack of transparency on that during the election but the Budget Policy Statement makes that clear for the first time. If the sale of the State-owned assets proceeds despite the overwhelming opposition from the vast majority of New Zealanders if the Government still proceeds with those sales what happens? The Government deficit gets worse. By how much? Treasury says that in 2016 the Government deficit will be worse by $94 million per annum. That is but one of the decisions that this Government is making that make the economic outlook of this country worse than it would otherwise be.  
We have had prices going up since National was elected four times as fast as wages. After we had our last zero Budget what happened? We had a credit downgrade and that credit downgrade leads me to another issue. The Government had said that it was going to avoid credit downgrades but the other issue there which for me showed a lack of principle in the Government is that the Prime Minister misrepresented the comments of the rating agencies in respect of Opposition parties. He tried to say—until he was caught out by the rating agencies speaking up and saying it was not true what he was saying—that the downgrade would have been worse under Opposition parties’ policies. In fact they said that was not the case. They also emphasised that it is not Government debt that is the primary problem in New Zealand; it is total New Zealand debt our net international liabilities which continues to get worse.  
You do not have to be a brain surgeon to follow the trend in the deficit. It was $18 billion last year it is $13 billion this year in the forthcoming year it will be about $9 billion the year after that it will be half of that $9 billion and in the next year it will be overcome. The Government is trying to set up New Zealanders to think that that is economic success and that if it achieves a balancing of the Budget as we would have in the 2014-15 year—as we would have—that somehow is economic success. It is not because every year into the future New Zealand is getting poorer New Zealanders’ incomes are not rising and they cannot meet their bills in the way that they ought to be able to because the underlying economy is not thriving.  
That lack of principle that showed up in respect of misrepresentation of the credit downgrades of New Zealand has had a number of sequels of unprincipled behaviour. We had the tea tapes where the Prime Minister called in the police against the media during the election and at the end of it when he was not willing to go to court and have his position exposed under cross-examination he deemed Mr Ambrose guilty— 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: No he didn’t. The police did. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: He did. Those were his words. Oh the Minister of the Police says it was the police. Goodness the Minister of Police thinks it is fair for her and the Prime Minister to deem people guilty. It is a pity National members do not apply the same standards to John Banks. What a double standard. It is a pity they do not apply the same standards to the disreputable conduct of the Prime Minister in appointing Mr McElrea to the Broadcasting Commission also known as New Zealand On Air. It is a pity they do not apply the same standards to themselves for insider deals for the likes of more pokie machines at the casino. It is a pity they do not stand up and do what they said they would do on the Crafar farms where they said they were going to tighten up the law and notwithstanding the fact that the Overseas Investment Office says there would be no increase in exports and no increase in production they are pushing that sale through in a joint venture with the Government through Landcorp. What a lack of principle.  
This Budget Policy Statement shows that the economic performance of the Government is lacking. People are starting to wake up to that. The lack of a plan for the economy is hurting people. Asset sales land sales and shonky deals on pokie machines are no substitute for a plan to grow the economy. Changing who owns what already exists be it power companies or land does not improve the output of our economy. The Labour Party agenda which is for education science more savings growth and tax reform is the Budget that New Zealand needs not what we have got currently.