Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour): We knew National's tax cut plan didn't add up and now the country is paying the price. Those tax cuts proposed in the election were reckless; they did not add up. They did not answer questions posed to them including by many excellent journalists at Newshub. Lloyd Burr followed Christopher Luxon for two whole weeks asking him to explain the tax cuts and he couldn't. Nicola Willis couldn't account for how she was going to make the books balance. Rebecca Wright took Chris Luxon to task for 20 minutes pre-election and all she got was bloviation back.These are reckless reckless cuts from a Government who never intended to be able to deliver. And post-election that's why we've seen the scope of the Public Service cuts grow to include non-departmental expenditure. And for the people listening at home that means the things that Government pays to others to deliver the services that they depend on. It includes housing services and it also includes the education buildings. Pre-election we were told not to worry about this because Nicola Willis said Ministers would be going through line by line to find savings and instances of wasteful spending as if the Ministers in that Government were financial whiz-kids. But post-election it's a different story. There's no line by line; it's just blanket cuts. Responsibility is sheeted to the CEOs instead and we see that these are untargeted cuts as well.Let me give you the example of Customs. The hard-working people in Customs have been asked to take voluntary redundancy. Now that is the definition of an untargeted cut. There's no looking across the service to see whether there could be spending. It's totally unstrategic from the point of view of developing the organisation or making sure there are the services New Zealanders need to keep drugs out to allow visitors to come through our border in an efficient and safe way and to keep out the meth that is a scourge on our society. They're just going to have untargeted cuts. People will be asked to take voluntary redundancy. There is no example of waste that I have heard put forward in Customs by the Government; it's just cuts.These cuts are to services that New Zealanders need and depend upon. They are across education they are across the courts they are done by public servants who are some of the most committed people I have ever met. I was very proud to work with New Zealand public servants in the COVID19 response. I saw them behave in a way that was absolutely professional working overnight and on weekends to come and save our country in a time of crisis. They are dedicated and yet just this question time we had David Seymour call them bureaucrats. Public servants shouldn't be the soft target in this Government's war on Wellington. They are people who serve our country every day and incredibly well.You've got to ask why. Why is this Government doing it? I wonder that a lot. I think my colleague Megan Woods touched on the answer there. Maybe there's an ideology to shrink the State but I think there's more to it than that. These cuts create the opportunity for private profiteering off public services don't they? They create the opportunity for others to come in and contract for services that could be delivered in the public interest instead. And that contracting out has happened multiple times whenever there have been Governments formed by the National Party. They're manufacturing the conditions to allow public services to be hocked off so that the legions of lobbyists that are circling the Beehive have more opportunities to make money.Public services working across education have led to the building of 2000 new classrooms during the last Government. The education secretary at select committee said that work and that programme would not be possible without people employed to do that work. These cuts will be to the sorts of things that New Zealanders need to have their rights upheld in court to have their kids go to classrooms to have their roads built—all of these things are opportunities that we have to develop public services for the good of the people and not to allow them to be opportunities for others to profit. We will all be poorer as a country if these cuts go ahead. Well the National Party and the Government have options. They can come clean about the fact that their fiscal plan never added up and they can stop using this as an opportunity to make our country all the poorer.