Goodhew Jo: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Goodhew Jo: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Advance Copy - Subject to minor change before inclusion in Bound Volume.] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Rangitata) 
: 
 The constituents in the Rangitata electorate have already realised that 2011 will be a big year for New Zealand and not just because of the Rugby World Cup. It will also be a big year because decisions will be made that will have a big impact on our economy our prosperity as a country our health our safety and the future for today’s job seekers for tertiary secondary and primary students and even for those who are younger than that. This year will be a year of stark contrasts. 
This year the National Government—led by popular hard-working pragmatic real person John Key—will need to pull out all the stops to prevent New Zealand heading for at best a mediocre future and at worst a similar fate to countries such as Spain Greece Portugal and Ireland—those countries with very high foreign indebtedness. This year the National Government will try to improve our economic performance in order to get the books back in order because continuing to borrow $300 million a week and then gifting that debt to our children is not OK. We have had to borrow to blunt the sharp edges of the recession but now is the time to get the books back in order. 
I send out a warning to the Labour Opposition: New Zealanders are far from stupid. They knew when they had had enough of the nanny State and the arrogant Clark era. New Zealanders knew that we enjoyed economic golden weather for 9 years under Labour but only now are New Zealanders realising how hard it is to climb out of recession when so much of Labour’s legacy—and it is not a case of no plan; this is about Labour’s legacy I say to Mr Darren Hughes—is economy-sapping unproductive and promotes dependency on the State. That is what Labour left us. Labour spent way too much time on calculating how to spend money to create a culture where the voters depended on the Government’s largesse but New Zealanders saw through that in November 2008. 
Unfortunately we hear the same claptrap now over the fiscally prudent announcement to raise the minimum wage by 2 percent to $13 an hour. Labour tells us it should be higher; even the Greens are telling us it should be higher. Guess what! We wish it was higher too but the trade-off for a $15-an-hour minimum wage would be almost 6000 jobs lost. Labour’s rhetoric is simply an endless promise to spend without an admission that to spend more than National is doing now simply means borrowing more—more than $300 million a week. 
While I am on the subject of promises to spend lots of dosh let us look at the borrow-and-hope Phil Goff and his Labour spendthrifts. Phil Goff’s state of the nation speech revealed two things. The first of these was a decidedly unrealistic sense of the challenges facing New Zealand and the genesis role that his party actually played in creating those challenges. The second was a staggering $1.3 billion promise to make the first $5000 of annual income tax-free. I have a message from my constituents for Phil Goff: my constituents just love that policy. The students who work in the holidays say thank you for thinking of them. The part-time workers whose partners are on really high incomes say thank you very much to Mr Goff for thinking of them. The kids who work in their parents’ businesses say thank you for thinking of them. But I have a question for Phil Goff: are they really the people he meant this policy to help? It is not the way he talks about it anyway. It is yet another stunning example of Labour throwing a dart at the dartboard of vote-catcher ideas without any thought of targets or of what a policy should actually achieve. Since that speech Labour’s interim leader has promised another $400 million for early childhood education—but more about that soon. 
Last year Labour promised to take GST off mangoes raspberries bok choy boysenberries and peas and carrots—as long as they are not frozen. That was at a cost of $250 million a year. Added to that is a whopping $2 billion a year on the Superannuation Fund so this temporary Labour leader has amassed more than $5 billion a year in promised extra expenditure. But New Zealanders are not dopey; they know we cannot afford that. If we venture down that track then we are assured of worse than negative watch from Standard and Poor’s. So maybe we need to remind Labour that a downgrade means paying higher interest rates in return for all of that. I tell the spendthrift Labourites to explain that to New Zealanders. 
While I am on that thread there is another woeful example of chucking buckets of money at a sector without analysing whether it really truly improves the lot of New Zealanders who really need Government assistance. National is spending the most money ever—$1.4 billion—on early childhood education but we are actually targeting projects to markedly improve participation in it. That is a far cry from the ill-targeted Government policy under Labour that would have seen 1000 early childhood education centres close because they could not meet the mandated 80 percent registered teachers. That was going to be a whole lot of kids who would have been out of luck was it not? In my electorate some centres face choices as to how they will have to tighten their belts but many are unaffected by National’s policy change to fund only up to 80 percent of a centre’s teachers being registered teachers. Some centres are actually nowhere near the 80 percent; some have a mix of qualified and unqualified staff or qualified and training teachers. 
The public should also get their heads around the thought that quality staff is really important but the children attending the centres are aged 0 to 5 years so a mix of education and childcare is what happens in those places. Surely there is a role for those who are trained in childcare as well as registered teachers. A mixture of skills— 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: Jo this is about our children. 
JO GOODHEW 
: Well childcare is very important—very important I say to Ms Chadwick. A mix of skills and qualifications can still mean there is quality early childhood education. What is wrong with registered nurses working alongside nurse assistants and enrolled nurses or lawyers working alongside law clerks and interns? I can think of many examples of groups of people who have different skill sets working together to complement each other’s skills. So Labour should just quit the slogans and admit that its focus was never on maximising participation in early childhood education but that National’s actually is. 
I mentioned at the beginning of my contribution this evening that there will be a stark contrast between the offerings to voters on 26 November. On one hand we have a National Government that knows that building a brighter future will entail determination and some tough calls. National’s vision is for stronger Government accounts where we will move away from the debt-fuelled consumption and Government spending towards savings investment and exports. This vision is in stark contrast to recent proclamations from Labour spokespeople which in effect add up to massive job losses and all for the sake of Labour Party ideology. Without the 90-day trial period 13000 New Zealanders would not have had the opportunity of a job. Labour’s unrealistic time frames for clean air would have seen thousands of job losses in industry as industry was penalised for domestic polluters who were not meeting the deadlines. 
Charles Chauvel 
: So you’ll kill 500 people instead? 
JO GOODHEW 
: Mr Chauvel needs to remember that failure to meet a deadline certainly does not save any lives. Hello? Wake up! As I have already said had the minimum wage been raised to $15 an hour it would have resulted in 6000 job losses. When we add to that more than $5 billion worth of promises under Labour ideology we would have increased debt increased taxes and higher unemployment. Is that what New Zealanders want? I think not. 
National is taking significant steps to alter the environment in which New Zealand’s businesses exist to allow them and therefore our economy to grow. What does it mean when the economy grows? It means more money for health more money for welfare more money for education and more jobs. It also means more money to spend on safety and law and order. We are building world-class infrastructure to help businesses compete. We are building skills and knowledge for future-proof jobs. We are helping exporters to produce more valuable products more efficiently and to sell those goods for a higher price. We are giving businesses confidence and certainty so they can invest in new businesses take on more workers and pay them more. What a stark contrast this is to the borrow promise and hope approach from the spendthrift Labour Party. 
The National Government plans to address all the reasons that New Zealand is not as productive as healthy as wealthy or as safe as we aspire to be. We have the guts and determination to tackle the hard issues like a bloated Public Service that grew like Topsy under Labour at the expense of front-line services. New Zealanders instinctively know that if the biggest business in town is the Government we will never build ourselves a brighter future. In Rangitata and around the rest of the country the question will be about which political parties have the ability and the courage to build a brighter future for New Zealand and which political parties will try to buy a brighter future for only themselves.