SpeechBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'd first like to thank members opposite enormously not for the bill—the bill is in need of much attention—but for their absolute kindness—[Interruption]—because they've given me an opportunity to speak. And thank you Mr whip I'll stop there and I'll get to the bill instead.I'd like to start—it's been a point made by a number of members on this side. The part of the problem as we go through this and the supplementaries of the Supplementary Estimates is that so much of the spending is either poorly defined or as we have seen poorly delivered. The most obvious one to deal with is non-departmental other expenses Business Support Subsidy Covid-19": $15.2 billion—what New Zealanders would have said pre-COVID was an eye-wateringly large number but when the Government is talking about borrowing an extra $140 billion that puts that into some level of stark relief at least. But it draws our attention to what was it to be spent on what was it spent on and is there any left for it to be spent in perhaps some areas that have been overlooked. The most obvious one of course which we supported and don't resile from is the wage subsidy but let's not mischaracterise what the wage subsidy actually is. It is not strictly speaking a business support. It is first and foremost an indirect means to channel wage payments to workers affected by the lockdown that the Government imposed. So while they like to herald it as supporting businesses that's not what that share of the $15 billion does. It merely gives them an indirect way to pay some wages for staff members who have been impacted because they either couldn't work or have reduced hours and were suffering under those lockdown conditions. Now we supported that; we still do. It was absolutely important and remains important that businesses that were suffering significant revenue loss under the COVID conditions were assisted to keep their employees because the alternative was equally stark and that was simply that those employees would have had to have been let go. The State and taxpayer would still have had to pick up a chunk of money because of course they would have gone straight on to the jobseeker benefit. So the idea that we could move relatively quickly from the health crisis into an economic crisis but to seek a pathway to recovery that this side has got far better credentials to deal with than that side meant that it was a very good idea indeed to help to ensure that those employees would be able to be retained such that a business would be able to switch from pure survival to at least the beginning of a recovery quite quickly. So we supported the Government when they announced that. It has turned into a large amount of money—most of but not all of that $15 billion. But something that is very relevant and is certainly not covered in the detail—there is no detail—here in this bill is what appears to be an ideological blind spot for the Government in deciding what to do with the $15 billion. That is while they like to talk about the wage subsidy as a business support—and I've already said it's not actually that—they have been unable to find themselves capable of actually providing direct financial support to those businesses. They've got the money but they find themselves unable to provide that direct financial support. In the very first instances businesses were calling for assistance in meeting those bills. I'm talking about expenditure of the money that we're agreeing post fact that the Government could spend. A criticism has been that they actually didn't know what to spend it on and what they have spent it on hasn't been as well targeted as it could have been. One of the areas they could have and should have been targeting were those other costs that businesses sustain outside of their wage bill. Early parts of the calls were for assistance with their leases—the fact that they were still having to pay a portion of rent and in too many cases 100 percent of the rent. I even heard one actually—we had one specific example—where a constituent in Ōhāriu came to me. He owns a building in Hawke's Bay. It sits on land that is effectively owned by the Government and administered by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). LINZ were silent on whether they would give him any rent relief on that land. The Government was calling for landlords to do the right thing and to treat businesses fairly and he couldn't get an answer out of LINZ that they were prepared—the Government was actually prepared—to step up and play a similar line with him. That was a real world example.So there was a lot of call for businesses to get support in a very direct financial way for those expenses that they still faced outside of the wage bill. In effect it fell on deaf ears because although the Government had the $15 billion—and more in other areas of this bill—they simply couldn't bring themselves to give direct cash support to businesses. That speaks a lot for the ideology of the other side which quite frankly just thinks that anyone making a profit is taking a profit at the expense of someone else—either their workers through wages or from their customers. We on the other side this side know very differently. But that blind spot has actually threatened a lot of the jobs that the Government has spent over $10 billion seeking they say to save—it's actually threatened so many of them. The wage subsidy is going to expire and without that direct assistance that they had the money to give to businesses far too many jobs will still disappear because they weren't prepared to use some of this money to ensure the business survived and not just that the wages—or at least a subsidised amount of the wage bill—was paid for. That is a huge opportunity lost and tens of thousands of workers are going to discover that in coming weeks. I'm not sure they'll be too grateful once they get to that point.What did they do? Well we saw the Government promising to underwrite loans and being prepared to do that through the allocation of finance or money. But what happened? Well they were going to take 80 percent of the risk and banks would take 20 percent of the risk and the banks responded and said it's not good enough; it still doesn't meet the criteria for us to make loans under these uncertain economic conditions. So what happens? About $80 million—about $80 million—is all they got—$80 million. Actually banks lent a lot more we found out. The Bankers' Association gave us a bit of a presentation last week. The banks actually lent billions during the period but only $80 million through that business finance guarantee scheme. It was a flawed scheme cobbled together because we have a Government that just was unwilling to take much of the money that it had allocated itself—and which Parliament appropriated which Parliament agreed to but which it was just absolutely resistant to using to provide some direct financial assistance to businesses. What did they do? Oh we'll give you some consulting services because the thing that every businesses needed in this COVID state was for some bureaucrat or consultant in Wellington to come and tell them how to run their business better—just what they needed; just what they needed. In the middle of this great uncertainty—and it's still uncertain times—in the middle of that hellish uncertainty heading into level 4 the last thing they needed was some clipboard warrior who charges $2500 a day coming in to tell them how they could do better. But that's what the Government thinks businesses in New Zealand needed and that's what would help small businesses so they were prepared to spend a little bit of this money on that. But actually they weren't prepared to put their money where their mouth is and actually provide the direct assistance that businesses needed and still need in many cases and which would have given a greater level of certainty—admittedly in uncertain times; but a greater level of confidence—that the jobs that were being protected through the wage subsidy would still exist because the business would still exist when that wage subsidy expires. Instead we have a situation where in the tens of billions—or over $10 billion—has been paid on a wage subsidy much needed at the time but which at the end of may well see tens of thousands of jobs which could have been saved through direct assistance to the businesses go away because too many businesses that could have survived with assistance will instead go under. This has been poorly targeted spending—some of it good but much of it bad.DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call—oh I call Stuart Smith."