Dalziel Lianne: Budget Debate 
Dalziel Lianne: Budget Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:16381] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Minister of Commerce) 
: 
 An extraordinary point of order was raised by the shadow Leader of the House last week. It commented on the fact that the Opposition had politely listened to the reading of the Budget speech and that many of us on the Government benches had interjected on the Leader of the Opposition. The fact that we wanted to know how much the Opposition was putting on the table for its tax cut package should not have taken that member or any other member of the National Party by surprise. After all John Key promised north of $50 a week to all taxpayers on the Monday and by Thursday we were not sure what National was promising. So we challenged John Key to show people the colour of his money. I will come back to that in a minute. 
It was extraordinary that the shadow Leader of the House thought there was something unfair about staying silent during a prepared speech when interjections cannot be properly responded to. This of course is a matter of protocol and is mentioned in the Standing Orders. If that member thinks that that was hard then I want him and all other National members to think about how hard it was for us as brand new MPs to be told that we had to politely listen to the first Budget we got to listen to when we were elected into this House when that Budget speech was presented by Ruth Richardson who had described it herself as the “mother of all Budgets”. 
Let us just remind ourselves what we had to listen to in that speech by Ruth Richardson. We had to listen to a competitive market process being introduced into our health system with a funder/provider split the ending of health workforce planning—that was a good idea was it not; let the market decide what the health needs are for the workforce of the health system—cash registers in our hospitals which were charging for prescriptions; the list goes on in respect of health. In education we had the diversion of funds from our public schools to private schools. We had bulk funding of schools. The student loan scheme was introduced. We had the transfer of fees to the university and the removal of the low-income fee rate. Essentially everyone had to borrow to pay for fees. In housing we had the introduction of market rents and we had the massive sell-off of over 13000 State houses which led to an extremely difficult time for this Government—we are building houses as fast as we can. We had market rents for community groups as well which previously had to pay peppercorn rents. Then we had the situation with accident compensation where the insurance principles were written into brand new legislation—basically a rewriting of the scheme that had been introduced back in 1974. Then ultimately we had the privatisation agenda exposed as part of that process. And that was after the benefit cuts legislation and the Employment Contracts Bill had been introduced into the House just before Christmas. 
We thought it was very harsh that we were ordered to sit there and listen to a Government that thought that market discipline should be applied to health education housing and accident compensation—everything that underpins the social wage. But the Government of the day did not understand the concept of a social wage at all. I have to say that it was very hard to stay quiet in the face of an onslaught of a Government that had the absolute power that first past the post had delivered to it. I thought to myself that that was why they wanted to get rid of MMP. They wanted to go back to a system that actually enabled them to have absolute power. If anyone thinks that that is unrelated to that first Budget we sat through then I think they should think again. If anyone thinks that it is unrelated to what the Nats did in the late 1990s where tax cuts were paid for by cuts to superannuation then they should think again. If anyone thinks that it is unrelated to National’s failure to move the minimum wage in 9 years—except once when it was moved by 87c—then they should think again. 
National does not want to work with other parties; National wants to return to the days when it could do whatever it wanted to do. National wants to deliver to the insurance company that provided significant funding to its campaign. It wants to privatise the Accident Compensation Corporation. I bet that it will call doing that something else but that will be the effect of what it will do. It wants to deliver to the Exclusive Brethren—who are usually in the galleries keeping an eye on their investment—by increasing the funding for exclusive private schools at the expense of funding for public schools and it wants to find another way of introducing bulk funding without calling it that as well. National wants to deliver to a very narrow sector of the business community. It wants the Employment Contracts Act reinstated. It will call it something else but multi-employer collective agreements will be gone. Teachers’ agreements will be gone as well as far as their having national agreements that cover them from one end of the country to the other. Those agreements will be down to individual school agreements—you can bet your bottom dollar on that. The fourth week of annual leave will be put at risk the minimum wage freeze will be back and the denial of employment rights to employees of small to medium sized enterprises and to those in their first 6 months of employment—or maybe their first 12 months of employment—will be back on the agenda again. 
National wants to let employers off the hook for the mandatory contribution to KiwiSaver but the business community view is deeply opposed to that move. There are those of us who actually care about creating some depth in our capital markets and KiwiSaver gives New Zealand a chance to achieve some very ambitious goals in that regard. It is utterly amazing to me to see someone who states that he is ambitious for New Zealand to put that very fundamental ambition on the line. Kate Wilkinson got it right when she said that National was not the party of compulsion and that they intended to get rid of employer contributions as soon as they could. There is no question that National has made up its mind that the employer contributions will go. There is absolutely no question about that because John Key has already put out a statement today where he has made it quite clear that National will maybe hold on to pretty much what is there at the moment— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: 1 percent. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: —which is only 1 percent. That is all employers are required to contribute at this moment in time. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Outrageous! 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: It is an absolute outrage! Those who work in the area of capital markets will be appalled that a party that says that it understands things like that is actually working against them. 
The Opposition does not want us of course to remind the people of New Zealand what it did last time it was in power but in fact all of the things we have talked about are on the table now. What is not on the table is the amount of the tax cuts and I think we need to see that because we need to know what else will be cut; tax cuts do not come for free. We have laid out our hand and it is time for National to do the same. John Key says that he embraces just about everything that Labour does but quite frankly I think he is up to no good. It was not surprising to me— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Slippery! 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: He is as slippery as a snake in wet grass—that is what was said on television last week. I know for a fact that John Key went to National Party meetings last year and told National supporters: “You are not going to like some of the things that I am going to be saying but we must win the election if we are going to introduce the policies that we want to.” He told National supporters that he would be saying things they would not like hearing because National had to win the election and that was why he would be saying those things. 
I believe that Michael Cullen has presented New Zealand with a positive reason to return a Labour-led Government later this year. Can members imagine what condition the New Zealand economy would have been in in facing the global credit crunch the massive increase in the price of crude oil and a crisis in food production leading to higher food prices internationally if we had had a National-led Government at any time within the last 9 years? We have been careful stewards of the economy and that is why we have been able to invest in the social wage invest in education and invest in health housing accident compensation infrastructure broadband roading public transport rail—the list goes on. We have invested in the promotion of arts culture and heritage and in science and research. We have invested in across-the-board tax cuts that are fair and reasonable and that reach the four-prong test that Michael Cullen announced well before the Budget of cuts leading to no greater inequality in our society not exacerbating inflationary pressures not requiring borrowing to fund them and not requiring cuts to the Public Service. That is fair and reasonable and that is what New Zealand gets from a Labour-led Government. It is certainly not something that New Zealanders would get from a National-led Government. It is a wee bit like John Key’s position on the Springbok Tour. Of course he remembers what his position was; he just does not want to say because he will disappoint one side of a debate that ended with the end of apartheid. That is why we cannot trust the Opposition to take the Treasury benches.