Lole-Taylor Asenati: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Lole-Taylor Asenati: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 29 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2597. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Le’aufa’amulia ASENATI LOLE-TAYLOR (NZ First) 
: 
 Talofa lava malo le soifua ma le lagi e mama Mr Speaker. Fa’afetai mo le avanoa. Thank you for the opportunity to speak and to acknowledge Samoan Language Week. [ 
Interruption 
] I hope that the member David Bennett is learning some Samoan this week.  
National’s Budget reforms should be given a theme of money-shuffling. That is what this is all about and that is what this Budget is all about. It is called money-shuffling. The Government’s Budget is simply money-shuffling. Last Thursday we heard how it was taxing the young boys and young girls doing paper deliveries and then on Friday we heard how it was collecting from the senior citizens in their residential care. Sometimes I wonder whether those are what you call “senior moments”—a Government having senior moments.  
As New Zealand First’s spokesperson on social policy and welfare what better area can I begin with than to look at what National has done to enable the welfare reform of Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett. One of the steps National has taken is to cut $155 million from youth services. These services were established with the aim of getting youth and the unemployed into work. Instead what has the Government done? It has gone and cut from there and channelled the money into the new package of welfare reform. Part of this new reform includes $55 million over 4 years fundamentally for Work and Income staff to assist people into jobs. Fancy that! I have trouble understanding how this will be implemented when this reform will not necessarily create new jobs. Does the National Government propose that we get jobs from the air? How will this and how will they assist people in finding jobs when many of these unemployed people need training? 
It is no myth that finding a job in New Zealand is hard. But New Zealanders have a right to know what this reform will do when we are investing $55 million into it. Simply saying that it invests in Work and Income staff and establishing a board to oversee the changes is not enough. New Zealand First has been asking the same question for quite some time: where are the jobs? Where are the jobs? National proposes to create 3000 placements for school-leavers but how long will this last? How long? What we have is a cycle of training up or giving short-term placements to youth in order to ship them off to Australia. We are simply supporting a mass exodus. No doubt our increasing export from New Zealand is qualified students who simply cannot find work here in New Zealand.  
Bill English estimates that unemployment will decrease by 2015 due to an injection of funding into Christchurch and other sectors to create jobs. Yes there is nothing wrong with injecting funding but there is something very wrong in relying too much on the hope that Christchurch will be able to boom back from heavy destruction and resolve our unemployment rates. Maybe Bill English is suggesting that school-leavers will become fund managers for KiwiSaver or auditors for the Inland Revenue Department. I believe that that is what he is looking for. Or does he expect them—