Goldsmith Paul: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoldsmith Paul: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 12 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15858. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): May I wish you Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson the very best for this year. Thank you for the work that you have done for the country and in this Parliament over a long career. It is my pleasure to speak to this debate that we are having on the Prime Minister’s statement.I look back over the summer. I took my family down to the South Island on a road trip. Since it was wet and freezing most of the time I spent a great deal of time reading. I came across an article inThe Spectator magazine entitled “Joy to the World”. That cheered me up when the rain was coming in horizontally. It made the point that although pessimism sells in the media which deluges us with tales of woe and Armageddon in many ways 2013 was the best year in human history.More wealth is being created than ever before with global GDP rising to around $73 trillion this year and thanks to increasing global trade and surging economies in Asia that wealth globally has never been shared more evenly. So the UN’s 2000 Millennium Development Goal you might recall of halving the number of people living on $1 a day by 2015 was achieved 5 years early. The goal of halving the number of people without access to drinking water by 2015 was achieved last year. China which is home to a fifth of the world’s population has steadily opened its markets to capitalism and international trade over the past three or four decades and it has reduced the number of its people living in poverty from 84 percent to 10 percent today.Yes there are dreadful wars going on in Syria and places like that there are millions still living in poverty and there are economic and environmental challenges but when we step back and take a global view we are living in a remarkable era with the prospect of seeing the end of famine and extreme poverty in the next few decades.What has lain behind that transformation has been the spread of global trade which has followed the progressive opening up of previously closed or heavily protected economies such as India and China. That is why I struggle to understand the logic ofthose particularly amongst the Greens who dedicate themselves to opposing further progress in trade liberalisation such as that being attempted through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is indeed international trade that is lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty as we speak. As a trading nation New Zealand has been a beneficiary of globalisation and stands to benefit much more if current trade talks succeed. In the meantime millions of people have a chance to raise their living standards as they are drawn into the global economy.But of course global competition is always challenging. If we are to continue to prosper in a dynamic and competitive world the next generation of New Zealanders will have to shake off the entitlement mentality that has been allowed to develop over the past few decades in New Zealand. That is a real challenge for us. Will New Zealand and the so-called developed countries be overtaken and left behind? Well we may well be unless we recognise that we do have to continue to work hard and value education and the importance of entrepreneurship and business in our country and in our economy.I thought that the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it pretty well in his speech at Davos a few weeks ago. He said that the global financial crisis “has not changed any of the basic laws of economics … You can’t spend what you haven’t got. No country has ever taxed or subsidised its way to prosperity. You don’t address debt and deficit with yet more debt and deficit. And profit is not a dirty word because success in business is something to be proud of. After all you can’t have strong communities without strong economies to sustain them and you can’t have strong economies without profitable private businesses.” As government gets smaller citizens get bigger and that is what we want. We want empowered citizens. So I wish Mr Abbott and his Government every success in translating those ideas into reality in Australia a country that has done incredibly well over the past few decades but has got its own challenges right now.As our Prime Minister has indicated New Zealand has had 5 years of strong stable sensible government and we have made remarkable progress over that period. The Prime Minister alluded to a lot of those things in his statement. Let us not forget that the current account deficit was almost 9 percent of GDP when we came into office 2008; it is now 4.3 percent. The net external debt had blown out to 84 percent of GDP back in 2008; it is now down to 71 percent. Inflation—Dr David Clark: Worst economic record in 50 years.PAUL GOLDSMITH: —that great theft of the savings of the people who are struggling whom David Clark seeks to represent—was running at 5 percent when Labour was in power; it is now only 1.6 percent and people can trust the value of their money. Mortgage interest rates were averaging 10.9 percent in 2008 and now they are averaging 5.9 percent. Yes they may be going up a little bit this year but they are still a hang of a lot cheaper than they were only 5 years ago when we came into power and that makes a real difference to the living standards and the money that people have in their pockets not just in Epsom where I come from but all around the country.Food prices were going up by 11 percent a year when Labour was last in power; now that figure is only 1.5 percent. Government spending had gone up 50 percent over the 5 years until 2008. It was a runaway train. Now Government spending is under control. The economy had been going backwards for four quarters in 2008. We were at 3.5 percent last year one of the highest rates of growth in the OECD. Most important Treasury was predicting endless years of Government deficits when we came into power. There was no track to getting back to surplus. In 2014-15 we will be back to surplus.This Government has not wavered from its four priorities that were outlined at the start. We are about responsibly managing the Government finances just like New Zealanders expect us to. And there are risks. Why do we have to be cautious? Because internationally the world still remains in economically uncharted waters. Nobody is quite sure what is going to come from tapering and trying to stop the printing of money that has been going on around the world and what that will mean over the next few years. So there are risks and we need to be careful.Secondly we have been concentrating on building a more competitive and productive economy because that is what we need to create jobs and to increase wages. The Business Growth Agenda which the Government has talked about consistently over the last few years is about rebuilding the growth capacity of the economy—lots of little reforms carried out consistently. Steven Joyce and Bill English in particular have been leading that charge. It is about steadily removing the roadblocks that discourage investment in New Zealand.I will run through those six areas again just so people can be reminded of them. It is about keeping open our markets and building strong relationships in order to trade with the world. The free-trade agreement with China which we do congratulate the Labour Government on being involved with—I just hope Labour has not given up on free trade—has been a really great deal for New Zealand. Where would we be without that China trade? I have no idea. The second thing is innovation. The National-led Government is putting a lot of resources into assisting research and development in innovation throughout the private sector and we need to continue to increase private sector investment in research and development to reach international norms if we are going to be a successful economy.Thirdly we need to keep the skills that we need for a successful and innovative trading nation encouraging more of our people into areas like engineeringinformation and communicationstechnology science history and other such subjects such as I discovered. Encouraging more capital to invest in New Zealand is the fourth area. The mixed-ownership programme has been a great success in terms of giving a shot of life to the stock exchange in New Zealand. We need to build on that. Capital investment is core to building competitive industries and sustaining jobs.Fifthly we are about removing red tape and providing certainty to investors particularly in the resources industries which could be so important to the New Zealand economy in the future. And sixthly we need to keep building infrastructure towards a growth-orientated country. In Auckland we are seeing the results of that with very significant investment in the roading infrastructure. We are very much looking forward to the Waterview tunnel opening and that second bypass in the Auckland motorway system which will make a big difference to how we get around.So the first area is getting back to surplus the second is building a productive economy and the third is getting better public services within tight budgets. I think the Government has been very successful at making sure that taxpayers’ money is spent well and actually getting something out of it. I think Bill English was right when he talked about how in the past centre-right Governments have tended to think about smaller government as about just slicing bits off when what we actually need is a bit more demanding than that. It is about community expecting Governments to actually solve a few problems and then move on rather than just continuing to live off that.Finally rebuilding Christchurch is the fourth area that we are focused on. On that basis I am very pleased to be part of this debate. Thank you.