Hutchison Paul: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Hutchison Paul: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:645;Page:14218] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 I support the motion of John Key which moves this House has no confidence in the Helen Clark - led Government. It has failed to make significant improvement in the areas of real importance to New Zealanders because it lacks ambition because it is tired and because it is bereft of ideas. Only tonight on national TV it was fantastic to see what Labour claimed was a new idea: its affordable house scheme about which the TV show pointed out that each of these affordable houses would cost $300000 and have to be backed up by a salary of at least $70000. I understand that this was the fourth time that this particular initiative had been announced. This sad Labour Government has lost touch with the people who put it into power and under its lead our country has become a story of lost opportunities. Labour has squandered New Zealander’s economic inheritance by failing to build strong foundations for the future. 
 I will dwell for just a little while on an area that I think is of huge importance—and apparently so does the Prime Minister—and that is the area where there has been an absolute failure to build on the infrastructure in science research and development and technology. Last year the Government commissioned a report in this area. The report noted that up and down the country the infrastructure in science had run down over a period of 8 and 9 years to the tune that it would need about $400 million in order to be able to get it to where it was some 8 or 9 years earlier. 
What really is of great concern and has vividly impressed itself on my mind is the Prime Minister Helen Clark’s Speech from the Throne in 2005 when she said that science and innovation were critical to driving New Zealand’s economy. In the very next Budget where did the new money go? The amount of $2.5 billion went into programmes that would only cement in intergenerational welfare dependency—$2.5 billion into that area—and only $17 million into science and research and development which is the area that Prime Minister Clark said was critical to driving New Zealand’s economy. So what is the real record of Labour over the last 8 to 9 years in science and research and development? I guess we can see it through the measurement that is agreed on by the OECD: investment as a percentage of GDP has diminished steadily from 1998 down to 2008 where it falls at about 0.54 percent well below the OECD average. In fact the advice to the incoming Minister of Research Science and Technology in 2007 stated that the current agreement with the Minister of Finance is “well short of the level required to move towards the Government’s agreed target of the OECD average.” So it is well below the amount required to move even towards the Government’s agreed target. 
It is also important to consider what has happened to the governance in the area of research and development under Labour and we can look only at the Crown research institutes which are one of the Government’s major investments. Here a report was done—an assessment—of the Crown research institutes between 1992 when they were formed under National and 2002. It showed an increase in equity over the years when National was the custodian of 106 percent but over the last 5 years there has basically been no growth in equity in some of our major science institutions. This is something that has gone absolutely wrong under this Labour Government. So when Helen Clark in her 9th year of Government says she plans major initiatives in research and development that will—as she said yesterday—drive our economy it certainly has a very very hollow ring about it. After all she walked away from the Catching the Knowledge Wave talks back in 2001 and 2002. The Prime Minister has basically presided over the area of research and development in which New Zealand has wound down—an area that she calls critical. In fact her rhetoric is absolutely diametrically opposed to her record. 
There are many questions Kiwis really want answers to. One question is why after 8 years of Labour are we paying the second-highest interest rates in the developed world? There is no doubt that when Labour came into Government interest rates were in the order of 4.3 percent; now they have almost doubled to 8.3 percent. That is affecting hundreds and thousands of ordinary New Zealanders and it will get worse over the next few months. If one also looks at economic growth another parameter that is of vital importance one sees that when Labour came into office in 1999 economic growth was 4.6 percent; it has now dwindled down to between 2 and 3 percent. This explains the reason why under Labour the gap between our wages and the wages in Australia and other parts of the world has grown bigger and bigger and why we see those 35000 New Zealanders go across the Ditch every year. But perhaps even more concerning than that figure is the fact that 10 times as many New Zealand graduates leave New Zealand permanently to live overseas than Australian graduates leave Australia. That must be of great worry and that is the legacy of this Labour Government. 
One of the other questions on the mind of so many New Zealanders is why the health system has not improved when billions of extra dollars have been poured into it. I remember vividly Annette King in 1998 saying that a waiting list of 89000 was criminal. She said that to Bill English. She said that a waiting list of 89000 was criminal. Well today the waiting list stands at about 150000 and that is after Labour has culled tens of thousands of individuals off that waiting list. It is a national disgrace. Today thousands of people with ordinary simple conditions such as hernias haemorrhoids varicose veins and gall bladders cannot get treatment any more. They do not even get on the waiting lists. The difficulty is that when one hears about the records from Christchurch Hospital one finds that a person with an acute gall bladder condition will come in and that person will be turned around given some pain relief and antibiotics. The patient gets worse to a critical stage when he or she will come in once again. Then the morbidity is twice as bad the recovery period is twice as long and of course the cost to New Zealand and the health service is much more significant. 
There is no doubt that unlike Labour National understands why Kiwis are demanding change. They are demanding change because they think it is time for a Government that says no to mediocrity and expects more for New Zealand. Certainly this includes the youth guarantee scheme that John Key announced a few weeks ago that ensures that our education system will deliver real opportunity to young people. Only on Friday I had a young 15-year-old come into my Pukekohe office who had got on a very prestigious course in motor sports. He was 15 years old. He had been told that if he did the course he would get a job and more opportunities in higher education. But he could not go to that job because he was 10 weeks short of 16. The letter came back from the Ministry of Education saying: “No you can’t go.” It is a disgrace and it is a disgrace that National will fix.