Key John: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Key John: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11848] 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 I want to go back to the document that I quoted in my earlier speech  
Issues for Economic Growth: the Next 12 Months and Beyond 
 a document that the National Party managed to get under the Official Information Act. Contained in that document are a number of statements that the Minister of Finance would not like to be made known in the public arena. I say that because in the Crown accounts the Government has allocated more spending over the next decade to fix the roading problems around New Zealand. At best the Government’s effort could be described as pathetic—absolutely pathetic. There will be $500 million - odd over the course of about 10 years and the rest of it will come from New Zealanders paying an increase in petrol tax—despite the fact that the Government is babysitting a huge surplus. I want to quote from this document which was “in confidence” to the Minister of Finance: “The Auckland transport situation is critical.” It is absolutely critical. The report goes on to discuss not only the lack of funding but also the complete disaster that the Resource Management Act is and why the situation cannot be fixed. The Minister would be well served to spend some time in Auckland and to go and talk to companies like Beca Carter Hollings and Ferner which will tell him quite clearly that the Land Transport Management Act has completely failed to deliver a better solution. 
I ask him to reflect on the actions of the Auckland Regional Council last Thursday when it decided to co-opt every councillor on the Auckland Regional Council on to the Auckland Regional Land Transport Committee which meant there were another 15 councillors on the committee. There are now 32 people on the committee. It is a complete joke and if anybody thinks that we will fix Auckland’s transport problems with a lack of funding from a Minister who does not want to listen with a Resource Management Act that is not designed to fix the problem and with an Auckland Regional Council that simply wants to bog down the process then he or she is frankly in la-la land. It is a great shame because the problem is costing Auckland over a billion dollars a year. The Minister should have been addressing it but we know that he will not address it in any great way in Budget 2004 because he will be attempting to buy a few more votes. 
Before people become a little too excited I want to highlight one simple issue. Last week the Minister came down to the Chamber and told people that hard-working families in New Zealand on the latest OECD measurement would be improving from ninth to third position because he would be delivering $2000 per household—or those were the numbers we backed out and he agreed with the  
Dominion Post 
 journalist. What he forgot to tell the people of New Zealand was that he would not be delivering that until 2008. If Gordon Copeland in United Future thinks that the Minister is about to deliver anything really good for hard-working families in New Zealand then he needs to have a look in the Crown accounts and see exactly how much has been allocated in Budget 2004. The Prime Minister shakes her head but the truth is that there will be very little indeed. Money will come but it will come later on down the track and that is despite the fact that since this Government has been in office it has put up no fewer than 15 taxes and has raised the amount of tax taken from hard-working families and businesses by a billion dollars a year. 
That is the truth of it. This Government knows how to put up taxes it knows how to slow the entrepreneurial spirit and it knows how to spend other people’s money but what it does not know how to do is how to grow the economy. That is why we are no longer allowed to talk about when New Zealand will be back in the top half of the OECD. That is why John Whitehead at Treasury has had to break into print in  
Issues for Economic Growth: the Next 12 Months and Beyond 
. That is why that document cannot define when we will be back in the top half of the OECD—because we will not be back. There are pages and pages and pages about the problems with Government policy—everything from infrastructure to energy to taxation. Pick one and it is in here but not one of those issues is being addressed by this Government. It will set up another working productivity group and it will put a little more money into the growth and innovation framework but around its ears the economy is imploding. 
The Minister went to a slap-up Labour Party function a couple of weeks ago on Saturday night and told the people there: “We’re in for some bad times because if you think the polls are bad now they will get worse. The economy is slowing down and there is nothing we can do about it because our policies will not deliver a higher standard of living for New Zealand. If you want that vote National.”