Williamson Maurice: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 22 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18275. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): It is a split call and because it is only 5 minutes my intention is to focus on only one issue and that is the issue of Bill English and his six Budgets. Budget 2014 did not just happen; Budget 2014 was the result of 6 long hard-working years to get the country to where it is. It is quite clear that when we came into office the world was about to go through the most catastrophic global financial crisis that it has had ever since the Great Depression.Members on the other side and members of the Post Primary Teachers Association and the teachers union are often going on—I actually think quite rightly—about how you cannot judge a teacher just by the results of their classes because if they happen to be teaching a decile 10 class with rich parents and lots of resources it is a lot easier than if they are teaching a decile 1 class where the kids do not have those resources. I hearabout that all the time from the other side. That same comparison works with finance Ministers. If they are preparing Budgets when there are times of abundance and surplus and world growth as Michael Cullen had—no wonder he was able to produce such surpluses he did not know what to do with them. He had to set up things like the Cullen fund because the world was just growing.But New Zealanders know that in 2008 a global financial crisis hit the world and countries much bigger than us much stronger than us took a battering. Go to Europe and have a look at its big economies that just had their guts ripped out from them. My credit today goes to a finance Minister of a very small economy of only 4 million people who took a look at the future and said: “We are going to have to do some amazing amazing accounting work to keep our books in balance and to finally get some surplus.” He said he was not going to do the harsh “Let us put all the pain and suffering back onto the people of New Zealand.” so he took the rough edges off it he got under way with his first Budget in 2009 and the sixth Budget in 2014 is a resulting culmination of that.But it was not even that easy. He only just got going into that 6-year cycle when along came the biggest disaster this country has ever had called the Canterbury earthquakes. Billions of dollars of damage was done to the economy on top of the global financial crisis. The good news is—and I say it is really good news—that the vast bulk of the voting public out there understand the circumstances that the National Government has had to work under to get us to where we are. They understand that the pain could have been way more severe but Bill English’s prudent fiscal management cut the rough edges off it. They know when they look across the Ditch to Australia just what an appallingly managed economy can look like and they see the pain and the suffering that is going on. And now the time has come for them to make a decision about the future.I have told this House many times and I will say it to members again: elections are not won and lost on 457 different items; they are lost and won on one major split. Is it “Is the Government tired and clapped out and is it time for it to go?” or is it “Don’t put it all at risk because this lot have done a good job.”? I have been around this place a long time. I have seen when those “time for a change” tsunamis come. I saw one come in for Labour in 1990 and no matter what it did it got wiped out. Trevor Mallard went Phil Goff went Annette King went—it just wiped them out. I have been on the receiving end of one in 1999 under Jenny Shipley. No matter what we did we got wiped out. But do I detect anything like a “time for a change” move out there? No I do not. In fact there is not even the embryo of a “time for a change” move but there is a huge concern about the “Don’t put it all at risk.”Bill English has delivered to this National-led Government the most amazing set of six Budgets and put us in a spectacularly good position for the future. The general public of this country will thank him for many years to come for being the best ever Minister of Finance under the worst possible conditions he could have ever experienced.