Shaw James: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 11 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1471. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green):The Prime Minister talked a lot about business in his speech. The National Party sees itself as the party of business. National Party members tell us that they are good for business and good for the economy. If you go to the National Party website and you look at National’s values you will find—actually you will mostly find pictures of John Key. But if you increase the font size and you squint real hard you will find a list of National’s values. One of them is competitive enterprise and reward for achievement. As we all know our Prime Minister embodies these values of enterprise and achievement. He is the transubstantiation of these values—enterprise and achievement made flesh—which is presumably why his image features so heavily on the values page of the National Party website. He made his fortune at Merrill Lynch becoming one of its senior executives and mastering the secrets of negotiation and wealth creation that made Merrill Lynch one of the most successful profitable companies in the world right up until it went bankrupt crashing the global economy and costing taxpayers in the United States $5.8 billion worth of bailout money. Mr Key of course had left Merrill Lynch by then so he cannot be blamed for that. He had come back to New Zealand to put those values of commercial enterprise that he learnt there back at the service of the economy where he now runs New Zealand like a business and wields his wealth creation and negotiation skills on behalf of the taxpayer.I would like to give you some examples of the Prime Minister’s business acumen. The full brilliance of the Prime Minister’s business plan regarding Skycity is not quite clear to me yet. What I do understand is that he overrode an open tender process in which a series of companies were competing to negotiate a deal with a casino company giving them a law change worth tens of millions of dollars to build a free convention centre that the taxpayer will now have to pay several hundred million dollars for. I am led to believe that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Economic Development even let Skycity draft the terms of the contract. Now that is negotiation!We already know about the partial privatisation of the energy sector. The Government sold $7 billion worth of assets for $4.7 billion and spent $640 million doing so. That might sound pretty bad to the business illiterate—those who do not understand high finance. I mean if you had a house that was worth $700000 and you paid $64000 to a real estate agent and they sold it for $470000 you probably would not be very happy. But the Prime Minister understands that the partial privatisation was about growing the New Zealand economy and building our capital markets. That is why money from the cost of this sale went to good Kiwi companies like Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs Group. The shares which by the end of the sales process the Government was literally giving away went to Kiwi mums and dads like the Weinbergs of South Carolina.Then there is South Canterbury Finance. For an entire year before this company went bankrupt Treasury warned the Prime Minister that the company was insolvent and that it was in breach of the Government guarantee agreement. But like all great business people the Prime Minister knows that it is sometimes wise to wait until the right moment to act so he did nothing and when South Canterbury Finance went bankrupt he struck. Unfortunately he struck $1.7 billion of taxpayer money off the Government’s balance sheet.The Prime Minister knows that you have to spend money to make money which is why this Government has spent something like $1 billion on corporate welfare since it came to power in 2008. More and more businesses in New Zealand know that the best way to make money is not to add value or to deliver a product or service that is better than their competitors. The way to make money is to hire lobbyists. Get the Government to change the law for you or just write you a cheque. This is crony capitalism. It is the antithesis of free open and transparent markets in which businesses compete on merit rather than on political connections. National claims to stand for competitive enterprise and achievement. Hiring a lobbyist is not competitive enterprise and getting a payout from the taxpayer is not an achievement. So this year the Greens will be providing an alternative to the Government’s so-called Business Growth Agenda and I look forward to promoting that in this House.