Smith Nick: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSmith Nick: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 28 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15563. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): What sort of planet is New Zealand First on when the Government announces additional money to reward lead teachers and expert teachers and New Zealand First describes it as an attack on teachers and makes analogies with dictatorships around the world?Dr Cam Calder: “Planet Winston”.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: It truly is on “Planet Winston”.The contrast today between National Labour and the Greens could not be clearer than from this afternoon’s debate. Prime Minister John Key has set out a clear balanced and affordable plan for our country—a plan that is about balancing our books. It is a plan that is about striving for excellence in education. It is a plan about rebuilding Christchurch and about growing businesses and more jobs. It is about reducing crime and improved road safety. It is about making houses more affordable.Denis O’Rourke: And you haven’t done that either.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: It is about a First World health system. It is about more operations about improving—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I just remind the member Denis O’Rourke that he cannot bring me into the debate. You cannot say “you” because it refers to the Speaker.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: It is about better health care for our country. And it is about sensible practical environmental policies which I also want to talk about as Minister of Conservation.Labour’s latest leader’s speech shows that Labour has learnt absolutely nothing from its big spending its big taxing and its anti-growth time in Government. In that Labour leader’s address I did not hear a single sentence about how we might grow the economy. You see the members opposite are all about spending our wealth rather thanthe focus on how we created it. I loved Labour’s notion of saving with this dropping of the dopey idea of removing the GST on food and removing the $5000 tax-free zone saying “Oh we’ve saved $1.5 billion that we can now spend on the baby bonus.” Well this is like me telling my wife that I have decided not to buy the thousand dollar flash suit but I am going to spend the thousand dollars on some fancy Gucci shoes—Hon Maurice Williamson: And that you’d saved it.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Yes that is right—and that I have saved it.I also fret when Labour now tells us that families are in poverty if they are earning less than $150000 a year. We are going to have a baby bonus for a very fertile member like Jami-Lee Ross who is expanding his family. Jami-Lee Ross is a wonderful father but I am sorry members on this side of the House do not think that we need a baby bonus for backbench members of Parliament—actually aspiring backbench members of Parliament. We are on track for a surplus by the slimmest of margins and we certainly do not need handouts of that sort. We will go straight back into deficit and debt—the pattern of Labour Governments.Let me challenge Labour’s claim that this Government has done nothing for those families that are doing it tough. Well let me take Labour members through it. This Government has a very proud record. Take warm and dry homes—in 2013 we completed our programme of insulating every single State house.Denis O’Rourke: It was the Greens’ idea not National’s.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Every one of those 69000 State houses. For the benefit of New Zealand First that was not part of the confidence and supply agreement from 2008 in respect of the Greens; that was about another programme and that was for 300000 homes that we have insulated. Let us ask the question: in the boom economic times in the 9 years in which Labour had its hands on the purse strings how many homes did it insulate? Very very few. That is less than 2 percent of what this Government has done in far tougher times and Labour members have the gall to say it is they who have a monopoly on caring.Let us go to another area—child immunisation rates. What were the child immunisation rates when we came into Government? They were less than 80 percent. They were comparable with those in Third World countries. And do you know what? We now have child immunisation rates of above 95 percent. And do you know what I really celebrate? Pacific Island and Māori rates of immunisation are now above even European levels and are some of the best having gone from some of the worst in the world. I congratulate Tony Ryall and the health team on what they have done in that space.Let us take the Government’s latest efforts on rheumatic fever—giving families priority for State housing to address that. The strategy that we have worked on together with the Māori Party addressing that Third World disease is part of our programme for dealing with disadvantage. Every member in this House would know that it is a good principal and a quality teacher who are the real breaker of poverty—the real breaker of poverty—and that is why this Government is backing the incentives for improving the quality of our teachers and the quality of our school leadership. You see there is not a monopoly on caring in this House. What there is over there is a party that is hell-bent on giving a handout when we on this side are hell-bent on giving a hand up and that will long be the case.I want to talk about housing. Let us first get the record straight. All of the measures of housing affordability show that houses today are more affordable than what they were after 9 years of the Labour Government. The truth is that house prices doubled during Labour’s time interest rates were over 10 percent when we came into Government and that had a really tough impact on New Zealanders aspiring to owntheir own home. We have got a programme last year that we have really been getting momentum on: freeing up land supply with that Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Act. We have already through that legislation approved 15000 new sections in the city of Auckland and we now have work under way on accords with Christchurch Wellington the Bay of Plenty and other communities.We have got a bill before the House dealing with those infrastructure costs. Actually an area that has gone up more than any other part of the cost of the House is those council development charges and we are fixing that. We have got the work progressing on the materials’ cost which is going to be delivering and bearing fruit this year the work on sector productivity and the work that my colleague Maurice Williamson is doing on compliance costs. And if there are any of those initiatives that excite me it is the online building consent service which has huge potential to make a difference.Let us look at the results. Last year—here listen to this—we built more than 20000 new homes. That is the most in more than 5 years. That is evidence that this Government’s housing policies are working. I went back through the statistics. There was a bigger growth in the number of new houses—a bigger growth in the number of new houses—from 2012 to 2013 than in any year in history. But it is more than that. We are committed this year and next year to building a thousand extra State houses in both years—a thousand houses in both years. That is more new State houses in more than a decade and as well as that we are partnering with the community sector to build community houses and we are going to do 300 of those this year. That is the biggest record ever in terms of growth of the community housing sector.The last area I want to cover is the Prime Minister’s speech about conservation and the goals for this Government to create a record number of marine reserves this year—a record number of marine reserves this year. I do have to challenge members of both parties opposite. It was an extraordinary comment. They said that National is allowing deep-sea drilling without any environmental rules. That is the claim they have made. Let us tell the truth—let us tell the truth. The reality is that during the last Labour Government there was deep-sea drilling with absolutely no environmental rules in the exclusive economic zone. It is this Government that has passed that exclusive economic zone legislation and set up the Environmental Protection Authority to ensure that there are checks. With the subantarctic islands with Akaroa with our initiatives on the West Coast and in Kaikōura we are going to be making more progress on marine conservation in any year again furthering the balanced programme this Government has.