Fenton Darien: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 29 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2618. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 Talofa lava Mr Speaker. Thank you very much for the opportunity to have a call on Budget 2012. I think there is one thing we do agree with the Government on which is that Governments are about choices and priorities. This side of the House just thinks National has got its choices and priorities all wrong. Labour’s view is that the Budget is about people rather than people being about the Budget. You know that side of the House thinks that the people serve the economy not the other way round.  
Budgets are where the rubber hits the road and this Government has got it so wrong. Its priorities are wrong and it shows: the worst growth in 50 years more than 50000 New Zealanders leaving our shores a 52 percent increase in unemployment and nearly more than 50000 people on benefits under this Government. It has been in power for only 3 years and a bit and what a track record. John Key has consistently overpromised and under-delivered. This year is no exception. Last year he promised 170000 jobs. Where are they? Where are the jobs? This year the estimate has gone down. It has been cut by 16000 and we are still waiting to see the jobs from last year. Last year he promised 4 percent growth. What has happened to that? That is now a 2.6 percent projection. He said that exports were rising. The latest statistics show that exports fell almost $800 million or 17 percent in the last year. Last year he promised real growth in wages. This year we see it peak at just 1.6 percent and declining.  
One of the most disappointing things about this Budget is the lack of focus on jobs and wages. The Government’s recipe is to tinker and hope and it is all going to come right in the end. It reminds me of Mr Micawber. Remember him? Mr Micawber from  
David Copperfield 
 who was famous for saying: “Something will turn up.” Let us remember that Mr Micawber spent quite a lot of time in the debtors’ prison actually and perhaps the Government should think about that too.  
Let us talk about jobs because the Government has been talking about jobs—or the last speaker Mark Mitchell certainly did. Jobs from Australia: let us be honest about why those jobs are coming from Australia. They are coming from Australia because we have got a low-wage economy. They are coming from Australia because Mr English thinks low wages are a competitive advantage. Let us talk about  
The Hobbit 
 jobs: 400 jobs at Weta Digital are coming from overseas. How is that helping New Zealand? Four hundred jobs—high-skilled high-tech jobs. Of course we will not have the teachers in the intermediate schools to even give those kids a hope. Even the Royal New Zealand Ballet is now looking to bring in people from overseas. For goodness sake! What about jobs?  
This is the truth about this Government’s job recipe. The truth is as we all know that people are just giving up because this is a no hope Budget and they are heading overseas. Turning paper boys and paper girls upside down to get the money out of their pockets and robbing the pockets of older people for small change are the best ideas that the Government has been able to come up with and this zero Budget will do nothing for low and middle income earners and their families. On the things that matter that will really make a difference to those people things like growth in the economy jobs incomes and exports this Budget offers nothing. The only idea this Government has is asset sales and we all know how that is going down in the community: a big fat bleurgh.  
You know the tragedy about this though—and it is playing out in almost every family in New Zealand—is that people are realising that there is no hope under this National Government. Over the weekend there was a new baby born in my family—he was born to my nephew—which is something to celebrate but this is a child whom I will probably never see. He was born in Vienna; he will be an Austrian citizen. The next generation of my family now live in Australia in Geneva and in San Francisco and I cannot tell you how sad that makes me as a proud New Zealander knowing that there are some of our family who will just not come home while we have this kind of Budget and this kind of no hope Budget.  
The Government has made choices that make things worse. Let us talk about the tax cuts it gave to the rich. It has not apologised for that. It has put the country in a bind and it should apologise for that because following that it hit lower-income families with a rise in GST— 
Hon Maryan Street 
: And the paper boys.  
DARIEN FENTON 
: —and the paper boys—and it has increased the minimum wage by paltry amounts. It keeps going back to failed ideas. We have heard some of the Government members today say that Labour had the cheek to oppose the 90-day trial period. I heard the Minister of Labour sort of shrieking her way through her speech making outrageous claims that nobody can substantiate about how the 90-day trial period has created all these jobs. Is that the best the Government can do? No actually it is not because National does not understand how you get better wages and productivity and decent work in this country. It is a narrow vision and what we are going to see is more of it. That is what we are going to see: more employment law changes ahead particularly around collective bargaining and that is the one thing standing between raw managerial power and respect and fair treatment for workers. It will undermine collective bargaining. It is another thing that helps lift wages across the board protect job conditions for all workers and reduce inequality.  
I would like the Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson to front up to those rest home workers whom our very brave human rights commissioner talked about on the weekend. I would really like her to do that and to tell the commissioner why they should be worse off because she is going to make changes to the labour law. Tell it to the cleaners who gathered last week to launch the Living Wage campaign along with 50 community organisations including faith-based organisations that reminded us that we have a moral duty in this country to love thy neighbour to look out for one another. But this Government does not do that. It does not do that. What did John Key say? He does not understand what a living wage is.  
I am really looking forward to hearing what happens to the Minister of Labour when she goes off to the International Labour Organization conference next week where they are actually going to be talking about fundamental principles and rights at work like collective bargaining and like freedom of association. I think she can expect a pasting and she deserves it. In fact all of the ideas all of the things that she has put forward in the paper that Cabinet has signed off have been criticised by the Department of Labour and they have been criticised by the International Labour Organization. We will be a pariah in the international community after 10 years of being a leader and being able to hold our heads high about the way we treat workers.  
The one thing I will support in this Budget is the increase in health and safety even though we know it has been reprioritised from other areas. It is not new money. But I would also add to that and say that it is not going to solve the problem because the Government does not believe in worker involvement in health and safety. It does not believe that workers are intelligent or trustworthy enough to be able to contribute their ideas about their own health and safety and how improvements can be made.  
Kate Wilkinson puts all of her confidence and money into a chief executive officer forum—again you know where the bosses are essentially deciding what is good for workers. She has let the Pike River families down—in fact John Key has let them down—with the cut in the Budget on that. She has cut the role of workers in health and safety. The Government has made workplaces more unsafe with the 90-day trial period and if those members do not believe me go and talk to a young worker at a workplace on a 90-day trial and ask them how safe they feel raising a health and safety issue. The Government can cry crocodile tears about health and safety but it has no idea—no idea—about what this means. Bit by bit this Government plans to gut our employment relations framework so the protections that workers in New Zealand have will be gone. This is a “zero ideas Budget”. It is short-sighted it is petty it is nasty and worst of all it is going to mean we see more of our children crossing the Ditch and heading overseas.