Ogilvy Bernie: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Ogilvy Bernie: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
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BERNIE OGILVY (United Future) 
: 
 Since the Prime Minister’s speech the other day much talk has been going on in the media and in this House about how we are to grow our society our assets and all those things that are predicated on the future. All this has struck everybody as if there is something new about it. The Government in all its offerings suggested at least one way to help to raise our economic standards was to send women out to work. My colleague Judy Turner said in response to that that the State should enhance the family not the other way around—it is not for the family to enhance the Government. I support her view because it has a great deal of common sense associated with it. If the State supports the family—and some of what the Prime Minister was talking about was along those lines—then the policies to support that need to be rolled out. 
United Future has a number of polices that we will roll out during this year which will undergird our family-friendly supportive policies. We do not have a one-policy-solves-all approach as some parties and others have talked about. We have a myriad of policies to cover the great range of possibilities and they are all incentives to promote growth in this country. United Future has policies to encourage growth even from birth and I would like to relate one or two of those to all of us in the House today. United Future says that all children need to be literate not only in the reading and writing sense but also in the sense of how to handle money. They need to be financially literate. They need to learn how to earn and how to create wealth and how to spend it. 
In this country we have a culture based on consumerism and it says that the credit card is money. Our culture has deceiving people into thinking in that way. In fact youth as well as some adults today do not know that there is a difference between an asset and a liability. I was talking to a young man over the summer period and he boldly showed me his shiny new asset which was an old car. Then I had to remind him that it was nothing more than a liability and that he needed to change his mindset. I think that if we start with children learning the difference between those two things we will start to encourage the asset growth and the dynamic that this nation and this economy need. In homes and in schools we need to teach that difference. United Future in a common-sense way is trying to recover the mess that we have had from the voodoo economics passed on to us from the left in the past—from Karl Marx—and from the libertarians on the extreme right. Those economics are basically the same by the way. They are about “all for me and none for you” in the economic sense. It just depends on whom the “me” is. If one is on the left the “me” is the State and there is none for the individual and if one is a libertarian it is “all for me and none for you”. It is the same concept. 
United Future is committed to lower taxes so that people can save and invest more and so that we can increase the productivity of our nation. We also have policies to free our students from the debt culture that has grown up around us. There are I am told some 40000 tertiary students this year all voters and they have been told that if they want to have access to higher education then they will have to go into debt. We feel that that is nothing but a millstone. 
United Future has policies that will turn aspirations into reality and when combined they will help people in this nation—the families and the households—to save to invest and to build assets.