Norman Russel William: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Norman Russel William: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:661;Page:9462] 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Green Party’s vision for Aotearoa New Zealand is one of prosperity without growth in resource use or waste. In fact it is a vision of prosperity with declining resource use and waste and declining inequality. We believe the Government should approach the raising and the spending of money with this aim in mind. On the revenue side taxes should be structured to not only raise the money the Government needs but also move our economy in a green direction by taxing resources and waste. The Government’s books would be in a much healthier position by potentially billions of dollars if there were a levy on the commercial use of water and a levy on the production of greenhouse gases. At the same time by increasing the price of water and carbon the market would direct our economy to use water and carbon more efficiently. A country that uses water wisely will prosper in the 21st century as water becomes scarce globally—likewise for carbon. Sadly the Government is doing neither of those things. There is no price on water for irrigation which is the biggest user and there is a scant price on carbon as the emissions trading scheme is too weak. We miss out on the revenue that resource rentals could raise and we lock in our economy to investments that use water and carbon inefficiently. 
The one bright spot on the revenue side in the Government’s accounts is catching the banks’ attempt to steal $2.2 billion from the taxpayer. The banks got caught but suffered no penalties. I ask members to think about that. It is possibly the biggest theft of public money in New Zealand history. The banks got caught and had to pay it back which helped the revenue side of the Government’s accounts but there were no penalties. No one was sent to jail. In fact some of the people who advised the banks were appointed to the Tax Working Group. 
On the spending side our accounts are weighed down by the ghosts of years past. The dramatic increase in inequality in the 1980s and 1990s has left our budget with huge legacy spending due to high crime and violence a high prison population high spending on social services and preventable illness and an education system that is struggling to teach kids who are dragged back by poverty. Inequality is really really expensive on the public purse and we are living with that legacy and paying taxes through the nose to pay for the downstream effects of the Rogernomics experiment. 
Also on the spending side we are throwing vast amounts of treasure at new motorways—literally tens of billions of dollars. It makes the spending on buses trains cycling and walking look like peanuts. It is Joyce’s think big project with the inevitable production of white elephants. Clearly Labour and National do not read the reports from the International Energy Agency that warns Governments that the era of cheap oil is over. I suggest that one way for the Government to save money is to stop paying for the International Energy Agency reports because clearly no one in the Government is reading them. 
Then there is the small question of our accounting framework for those accounts. When we consume natural capital by mining minerals to buy consumer goods are we really richer? Our national accounts certainly say so as GDP increases but if we start selling off parts of our house in order to buy flat-screen TVs are we actually richer? Of course not; we are simply consuming our capital. That is exactly what we are doing with our minerals. We are simply consuming the natural capital today that we will never have again. I ask members how much better our books would be today if we had invested a good proportion of the returns of the Maui gas field in a gas fund whose dividends would now be helping our chronic current account deficit and the Budget deficit. Norway turned a good chunk of its North Sea oil—its natural capital—into financial capital in the form of the giant half-trillion-dollar Norway Pension Fund while New Zealand and the United Kingdom simply consumed their mineral resources and now we have nothing to show for it except a few mothballed Think Big plants. Thinking long term to ensure prosperity is the Green way and we encourage all parties in this House to steal our ideas instead of stealing the next generation’s inheritance.