Power Simon: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Power Simon: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 16 June 2004. Volume:618;Page:13651. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 I must say it is very odd for the member who is resuming her seat to finish her Budget speech by saying that the party she belongs to is really not a joke. The Labour Party says it is really not a joke as one of its members finishes one of the more powerful contributions to this Budget debate. What a flop this Budget was! New Zealanders all around the place are asking us about the Budget and saying they do not know anything about it. At the Feilding sales farmers have been coming up to me and asking when the Budget is due and I have been telling the local folk not to worry because the Government is about to spend $21 million on telling them what it did—or tried to do. I have told people they will get a postcard very shortly in their mailbox with a nice smiling picture of Helen Clark and Trevor Mallard on the front telling them— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No I won’t be on it. 
SIMON POWER 
: No I say to the Minister I would not be on it either. This is an absolute flop of a Budget and the Government is spending $21 million on publicity. This Budget was to be the circuit-breaker. It was to be thing that would make the difference between Labour languishing in the polls behind the leadership of Don Brash and projecting itself back into the game. What happened? Nothing! Not a blip! There was not one single response in the polls—not even a blip on the landscape. 
This Budget has been a complete flop. There was $6 billion at stake by way of a surplus and for the fifth year I have sat and listened to a Budget in which not one word of thanks went to the people who provided that surplus. The farmers and exporters of New Zealand did not get one word of thanks from Michael Cullen. I have sat on the Opposition side of the House and listened for the fifth time to that Minister of Finance deliver a Budget without even having the courtesy to thank the hard-working farmers and exporters who provided the Minister with the ability to redistribute their taxation dollars in what is clearly an attempt to buy support. The hard-working farmers of New Zealand actually provide wealth jobs and boosts to the economy unlike the 19000 extra State-sector public servants we see piled into the Wellington area. The State sector is now the biggest commercial tenant in Wellington and there are 19000 more people in the Public Service Association. What is more there are 324 peoplein the Tertiary Education Commission and the Ministry of Education is overflowing with people. The Ministry of Health is overflowing with bureaucrats. I tell members that we need fewer grey suits in Wellington and more people who will go out and create wealth and jobs and make a real contribution to this economy. 
 I turn now to defence where I want to make some comments about the recent deployment of Kiwi troops to Afghanistan. I was absolutely appalled to read on the front page of last Saturday’s  
Dominion Post 
 that: “Kiwi troops were rushed to Afghanistan not knowing what their job was and had poor maps equipment training and communications.” The report went on to state: “From the start it was not clear what the mission was.” The report stated further—and this is the most telling comment in the article—“Political decisions were made before all options were explored.” We all know what that means. It means that those troops were deployed in order to cover up for the complete debacle the Prime Minister got this country into by her rash statements about US presidents and what could or would have occurred had another particular candidate won the presidential election. But the newspaper report also went on to state that there were problems with reconnaissance planning communications logistics training and equipment— that coming from a Prime Minister who is quite happy to parade around the world to attend commemorative wreath-laying ceremonies willy-nilly but who is not even getting in behind and resourcing the people who allow those types of commemorations to occur in the first place. This Budget showed a reduction in capital spending and in respect of defence spending. The Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister should back up their world travel and their commemoration-attending rhetoric by properly resourcing our defence forces before they are deployed to cover up for messes that the Prime Minister had made in her own foreign policy gaffes. 
One fascinating thing did come out of this Budget and it was that the days of the so-called triangulation of the political landscape in New Zealand are all over. What the Budget did was to realign the Labour Party back to its roots as a party of redistribution. It is a party that churns taxpayers’ own money and then pretends to hand it back to them as if it were a gift from the Government. It is interesting that 60 percent of the people polled in this country preferred a taxation cut rather than Michael Cullen writing out a cheque on their own money and giving it back to them in a way that makes them feel particularly reliant on the Government. In fact Budget day was a sad day for the Government. On the night of the Budget Government members returned to this House after the  
Holmes 
 poll had shown that only 20 percent of New Zealanders believed that the Budget was a success—only one in five. That just happens to coincide with the number of families that actually got anything out of the Budget—about 20 percent about one in five. The other four out of five families or 80 percent said there was nothing in the Budget for them. They said they just happened to be the people who had provided the taxation income that produced the money for Michael Cullen to splash around. 
National is about aspiration ambition and less government. It is not about more government or about having 19000 more bureaucrats in Wellington. The National Party is about letting people get on with their lives not about creating middle-class welfare dependency. If the Government did believe so passionately in its Working for Families package why did it wait? Why did it not simply just put the package in place and get on with it? Members on the Opposition side of the House of course saw the same thing with the 4 weeks’ annual leave provision as well. There is no conviction behind those policy statements from members on the Government benches. All that the Government is doing is creating an environment whereby an election would trigger those policies coming into effect. We on the Opposition side of the House say that is cheap cynical politics. If Government members had the courage of their convictions those packages would be coming into place in year one not over 4 years or in 2007. What happened to the target of the Minister of Education and the Prime Minister to have New Zealand back in the top half of the OECD? That has gone; it is finished. That is the end of that. Apparently we cannot win elections by promising to return to the top half of the OECD as Dr Cullen has found out. So what did he do? He decided he would use the hard-earned taxation dollars of the agricultural and farming exporters of this country to redistribute some wealth around the place and buy off some more votes over a 4-year period after the 2005 election. 
What does the Budget really mean? My colleague John Key has done some outstanding work in revealing to the New Zealand public exactly what is going on. A family on $38000 will get a net income of $42860 compared with a family on a gross income of $60000 which will net $45236 and end up with only $2300 more in the pocket than the family on $38000. That begs the question of what the point is of working harder. What is the point of being more ambitious? What is the point of having aspirations to better oneself and one’s family if this Government cripples one at the first hurdle by saying that there will be no benefit in working hard? This Budget is a flop. The Government’s policies are flopping in the polls. National will be ready in 2005.