Robertson Grant: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Robertson Grant: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:12701] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 When we look at Vote Economic Development we are looking for a plan to grow the economy. For the benefit of my National colleagues opposite I will give them a definition of the word “plan” because it is quite clear that they do not have any understanding of it. The 
 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language  
tells us that a plan is “A scheme programme or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of an objective:”. 
Let us look at National’s plan. We can see the objective. We know the objective is to close the wage gap with Australia by 2025. It does not matter that the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand increased in the 1990s from 18.9 percent to 28.4 percent and that it has basically stayed steady since then. Let us think about what happened in the 1990s. It was the period of the Employment Contracts Act. We now see coming from National an economic plan that is based on attacking workers’ rights and cutting conditions in the workplace. That is the substance of the plan as we have heard it so far from John Key and National and historically in terms of economic development that attack is what caused the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand to grow. 
Part of National’s scheme or programme to try to reach that objective was the 2025 Taskforce. Half a million dollars was spent and the report was trashed on the first day. In fact it was trashed before the first day. National Ministers were desperately spinning against their former leader Don Brash saying that his ideas were not their ideas. Don Brash overspent spending the taskforce’s whole budget in the first year but National ignored that. He blew the budget but National did not want to know about it. 
In terms of an actual plan for economic development we have seen the Job Summit which gave us the cycleway. Cycleways are in and of themselves terrific but in terms of a step change for economic development they are useless. Almost no jobs have come from it and it is certainly not a step change plan for the economy. 
We also heard about mining which brings us to the essence of National’s economic development plan. This was going to be the step change. It was going to be what gets us there in the future. Instead there was a screeching of tyres as Gerry Brownlee was rolled by the rest of Cabinet. He has gone; there is no plan for mining and no plan for jobs. It is kicking the tyres and it is trickle-down economics when what New Zealand needs is not a kicking of the tyres but some fuel put in the engine. And what puts fuel in the engine of economic development more than anything else is skills and innovation. 
Skills and innovation have been abandoned in Vote Economic Development. There is no Skills Strategy. The current Government likes to belittle the idea of a strategy. The Skills Strategy was a combined effort by Business New Zealand the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and the Government to plan for having a skilled workforce in New Zealand. Since National has been in Government we have heard absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Skills Strategy or about skills. The only contribution that we hear from the National Government in terms of skills is about cutting money from adult and community education cutting money from intensive literacy and numeracy funds and cutting money from polytechnics. There will be $70 million coming out of the polytechnic sector over the next couple of years. Those are the places where we get skilled New Zealanders from. That area is the engine room of economic development and it is being completely abandoned by this Government—completely left alone. 
The Government is not prepared to plan for the long term; it is looking only for the photo opportunities. There is no plan for economic development. If we want to look across to Australia and look at the role of skills in developing that economy we see that Australia has a plan to increase the number of people with degrees to 40 percent of the population. It is currently at 31 percent. Our percentage is in the 20s and it is going down. We have no plan to catch up to Australia and grow wages because we have no plan to do the things that will grow wages like creating a skilled workforce and creating a productive work environment. We have none of that coming from this Government. We have no plan coming from this Government in the area of economic development. 
If all we can get is poll-driven U-turns on mining and a lack of vision for investing in a new economy with new jobs and technology and making the best of our skill base and our productive workforce then we will go nowhere. Unfortunately that is what we are seeing from this Government. 
When it comes to the question of innovation Mr Brownlee and others like to say that they have renamed a few things and rebranded the odd idea. That is not enough. If we want proper economic development in this country we need a plan that harnesses skills and productivity.