Street Maryan: Appropriation (2009/10 Supplementary Estimates) Bill Imprest Supply (First for 2010/11) Bill — Second Readings 
Street Maryan: Appropriation (2009/10 Supplementary Estimates) Bill Imprest Supply (First for 2010/11) Bill — Second Readings 
[Volume:664;Page:11903] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to speak in the supplementary estimates debate. I will come to the previous member’s speech in a moment. This Budget and the supplementary estimates represent a Budget in search of a purpose. If this Budget and these supplementary estimates were an essay I would probably give it a C-. I would give it a C- because it fills out the form it follows the form and it is written by somebody who knows how to write an essay but it is completely lacking in coherence direction plan or in any kind of insight or foresight. It certainly lacks flair. It is pedestrian at best and it is damning for the nation at worst. 
This is not an adequate Budget. This is the Government’s second Budget and it is lacking in any proactive responses to the economic crisis. That group of people opposite know that this is not a Budget that will repair anything that is striking at the heart of New Zealand’s growth and prosperity. It lacks any proactive response to the economic crisis to the global recession or to unemployment in New Zealand. 
There are problems with a society that drifts further and further apart internally where inequality is exacerbated and not addressed and where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Where those gaps increase and are not closed there are problems of social dissonance that begin to match the problems of economic difference. That is well catalogued by people cleverer than me and that is something that this Government seems not to have taken into account at any stage in the development and the drafting of this Budget. Under this Budget the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. In a few years it will be entirely obvious that the roots of the social dissonance that will be created by the increasing gap between the rich and poor should be sheeted home to this Budget. Instead the panacea offered in these appropriations is the same mantra that the National Party has been offering forever—tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts. That is in this term and it will be followed by asset sales in the next term if the Government is given a chance to do that. Let us hope the 80 percent of people in New Zealand who are clearly opposed to the sale of State assets will remember when it comes to the ballot box next year that this Government will sell State assets as quickly as it possibly can. 
The Government has only two prongs to its economic development programme in the Budget: one is tax cuts and the other is asset sales—not now because the public are not quite ready for it but we will soften them up for asset sales. The Government will do tax cuts now and asset sales later. But those tax cuts are a swindle. Inflation of nearly 6 percent—the 5.9 percent that Treasury has predicted—will gobble up any dollars that people on low and middle incomes will receive from tax cuts. 
The tax cuts are also unfair. One-third of the tax cuts goes to the top 5 percent of earners and 15 percent goes to 1 percent of the top earners. That is grossly distortionary and it represents an impoverished old-fashioned and backward way of thinking which says that if we give the rich more wealth will trickle down eventually to reach those who are less well off. Well since it was first posited in the 1970s that has never worked as a way of maintaining social services improving opportunity and closing gaps between the haves and have-nots and it will not work this time either. Those on the average income will get something in the order of $15 net a week after the GST increase. John Key will get $218 net a week after these tax cuts. People on the minimum wage will get something in the order of $3 and with that they will have to accommodate and absorb increases in power prices accident compensation levies and supermarket prices because of the increase in GST. 
Although the National Party’s hoardings up and down the country in 2008 promised it there is no bright prospect for the future for most families. In the area where I live in Nelson 76 percent of people have an income of less than $40000. That means three-quarters of the people in Nelson who have an income of one kind or another earn less than $40000. 
The thing that really disturbs me even more than the impoverished old-fashioned antiquated outmoded and much-maligned orthodoxy that lies behind this Budget is the lack of a plan for growth. This Budget represents a series of lost opportunities. I have said it is old thinking. There is no imagination. There are no ideas in fact about how to move the economy forward. What is required is not just the step change that the Prime Minister keeps talking about. A step change is not adequate. A quantum leap is required in our approach to primary production and the things that we do so well. Yet on the commodities market we remain entirely vulnerable to the exchange rate and to low margins on commodity prices going out into international markets. Where is the investment in skills training and in tertiary education that is required in order to make this economy become a smart economy? 
Of course we are good at producing first-class top-rate primary produce. I see that every day in the region where I live in Nelson. I say to members opposite that what I have also seen recently in Nelson are job cuts in fisheries forestry and most recently in engineering. Those job cuts are real; they are about real families losing jobs. We have a situation in Nelson where both earners in a family are out of a job for the first time in their lives. 
Where is the imagination where is the new policy and where is the quantum leap in this Budget that will get us back into gear? One of the previous speakers talked about the fact that a lot of our businesses are small businesses and that is true but she neglected to identify the impact of the increase in GST on small businesses. She ought to get around more and talk to small-business owners about how they are feeling about the increase in GST and how the pressure is on them to absorb it. 
There are no new ideas in this Budget. It is impoverished thinking. It is not adequate for the times and it will not move us one jot towards the kind of smart economy we require. Thank you.