Beaumont Carol: Budget Debate 
Beaumont Carol: Budget Debate 
[Volume:654;Page:4205] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 I follow on from our fine deputy leader Annette King who talked earlier about this Budget being a D-grade Budget. It certainly is a D-grade Budget; it is a Budget based on deceiving New Zealanders. 
The tax cuts that were personally guaranteed by John Key have of course been deferred. We support the cancelling of those cuts; we knew they were unaffordable. They were unaffordable when they were promised they were unaffordable when they were rammed through under urgency in December and they were unaffordable when they were implemented in April. Who benefited from those April tax cuts? It was the top 3 percent of earners who took a full third of the available money. Those cuts were not fair and they did not show good economic management. They were not stimulatory and they removed $800 million from Government income. I could call that economic vandalism actually. The crime was not in cancelling those tax cuts but in the deception that created a tax cut plan that was known to be unaffordable. 
We also have the social vandalism of a decade of deferral of contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. National has never been committed to national superannuation and it has shown its true colours here. National does not believe in universal superannuation despite John Key’s guarantees. We all know how good John Key’s guarantees are do we not? Not only has National gutted KiwiSaver as part of its 100 days of action but it has now gutted superannuation as well. 
I want to focus on the areas of education and skills. For someone who was ambitious for New Zealand John Key lacks any ambition in the area of skills development. Focusing on education and skills is particularly important at a time of economic hardship and in doing so economic and social benefits will accrue to individuals families businesses and the economy. Money spent on education and skills is an investment in our people in our economy and in our future. It cannot be treated just as a cost. Some of the cuts to education in the Budget are the worst sorts of short-sighted and damaging actions that could be taken in the current economic environment. Schools Plus has been scrapped. It was supposed to be universal but it has been replaced by five trades academies. Who knows what is happening with the Youth Guarantee? 
Savage cuts have been made to adult and community education. I have found the comments on this issue made by the Minister of Education Anne Tolley to be absolutely appalling. The Minister talked about mosaics and Moroccan cooking. Actually there is nothing wrong with those things in and of themselves but there are a whole lot of very very important issues for people including their level of computer skill and literacy and their ability to challenge domestic violence. Adult education is a means of accessible learning. Obviously the Minister has a complete lack of understanding of the area of adult education. Some of the most important things about adult learning are that it has to be relevant it has to be interesting and it has to attract people especially people who have not previously done well in the education system. In fact there is a whole body of knowledge about literacy learning and embedding that in relevant courses where a person’s interest lies. The dismissive comments made by the Minister about adult and community education were a disgrace. 
Step Up Scholarships which were tertiary awards that specifically targeted students from lower-income families—have been scrapped. Longstanding youth training programmes in areas such as skills enhancement are gone. These programmes targeted young people often Maori and Pacific Islanders who had not done well at school in order to raise their education and skills training levels and to help prepare their way into tertiary education. Industry training bodies apprenticeships and tertiary institutions all face real funding cuts under this Budget. The Budget has been described by commentators in the sector as a body blow to tertiary education. 
In the compulsory education sector I note that private schools which educate fewer than 4 percent of New Zealand children have received $35 million in additional funding whereas the other 96 percent of children received an additional $320 million. Three times more additional funding has gone into private schools than into public schools. The Minister of Labour Kate Wilkinson quoted John Minto; it was quite an unlikely quote from her I thought. I read the article from which the quote was taken and felt that John Minto made a very interesting point about education which was the main point of the article: “This is a disgrace especially when one considers the biggest problem facing education is the long tail of underachievement at schools in our low-income areas.” 
It is not only what is in the Budget that I want to talk about but what is not in the Budget. What specific skills and education initiatives have been put in place to assist those who have lost their jobs or are at risk of losing them? The lack of a plan around jobs and around investing in people is the truly shocking aspect of this Budget. As Rod Oram said National will not commit to skills training and the Budget has starved the tertiary sector. The derisory increase in the tertiary budget will mean less money for teaching salaries and less money for the surge of students who will try to register because they cannot find jobs. In the last quarter 24000 jobs were lost with the number of people who are not in the workforce rising to over 1 million. Some of those at greatest risk are those with low or narrowly focused skill levels. Sadly Maori Pacific Islanders and young people are over-represented in those areas. Maori unemployment has gone up from 9.8 percent to 11.9 percent and Pacific Island unemployment has jumped from 8.7 percent to 13.1 percent. These figures represent people; they are not just statistics. Where is the hope for those people? Where is the plan? 
New Zealand has major skills deficits and technical and literacy skills are two of the key areas. Forty-three percent of adults have literacy skills below the level needed to participate fully in a knowledge economy. A Government with vision would invest substantial resources in training people in order to upskill our workforce. Paying unemployed people to train is a positive investment in the future. Working with businesses to help them retain workers while they are being upskilled has a range of benefits. If we significantly upskilled our workforce we would be positioned to transform our economy by lifting productivity and by having the people with the skills we need in the areas of the economy we need to grow. This will ensure that New Zealand is ready to respond to the economic upswing that will take place. 
Investing in skills and education for people brings many benefits to the individual. These benefits include job opportunities job security improved income greater job satisfaction and greater ability to participate in the wider community. There are similar benefits to families but also in terms of increased family income and having parents who can better support their children’s learning. There are benefits to businesses including having greater productivity. There are benefits to the economy including having greater productivity a higher GDP more innovation and more ability to transform it. There are benefits to our society if we lift income such as having improved health outcomes social cohesion and reduced crime. These are all potential benefits. But we are real laggards in this area. The investment made by similar countries—Australia the US and the UK—in skills development as part of their economic stimulus packages is far greater than ours. 
The Government is not only lacking in ambition and vision; it is arrogant. It is failing to pick up the very positive policy initiatives of the previous Labour Government in this area: Schools Plus the Skills Strategy and the retraining allowance for those who are made redundant or who had been in their jobs for 5 years or more. A number of specific areas could have been considered in this Budget such as increasing equivalent full-time student volumes providing subsidies for fees and providing training allowances. The Government could have looked at some short-term variations in the area of industry training by lowering the industry co-payment requirement or in some cases by raising the standard training measure levels. 
From those on the other side of the House there is a whole lot of rhetoric about productivity. We know there is a need to do something. We need to make major structural changes to our economy in order to improve our productivity. One of those structural problems is the skills deficit. It impacts strongly on workplace productivity yet this Budget is silent in the area of skills. As my colleague Darien Fenton said it is not even mentioned. This Government talks a lot about lifting productivity yet it is doing little in the vitally important area of skills development. 
As well as focusing on skills development we need to focus on skills utilisation. This means that people need jobs. They need to be able to put those skills into effect. As already mentioned this Budget has no plan for jobs. Focusing on skills utilisation also means that businesses and the Government must resist the desire to lower wages and conditions of employment.