Anderton Jim: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Anderton Jim: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:670;Page:16510] 
Hon JIM ANDERTON (Leader—Progressive) 
: 
 Mr Key told the House today that a society should be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. By any measurement the young seriously disabled children in conductive education programmes across New Zealand must be counted as amongst the most vulnerable of New Zealand and despite promises to the contrary by Mr Key himself the funding for those conductive education programmes has been cut by 30 percent this year and will be entirely ended by the year 2014. If members wanted a measurement of the most vulnerable kids in New Zealand those kids would be it and the National Government has completely ended their funding in spite of pleas from all over the country about how successful and important those programmes are. 
The front-page headline in the Christchurch  
Press  
from the weekend asks “Does this look like the road to recovery?”. The obvious answer is that it does not. In my electorate office area of Selwyn village every single business on the opposite side of the road has left its premises. Nothing has changed or been done since 4 September and the only answer we get from our urgent inquiries is that the council is talking to the owner who I understand lives in Taiwan. Those talks have been going on for 5 months and not one single action has been taken except to cordon off the whole area and every single business has gone. All the businesses on the other side of the street—except mine which happens to be funded by Parliamentary Service—are at risk as we speak. 
If we fast-forward the headline “Does this look like the road to recovery?” to New Zealand’s economic recovery how do John Key’s words about an aspirational Government and heroic television appearances pledging progress and prosperity match up with the same kind of rhetoric we saw night after night on television at the time of the earthquake in Christchurch? Again the obvious answer is about the same: lots of hype and no action. 
Here are the problems that the Prime Minister should have talked about this afternoon. After more than 2 years in Government economic growth has stopped. Any so-called recovery has stalled. Unemployment is going up not down. The co-leader of the Maori Party has a very short memory as to the reduction in unemployment for Maori around New Zealand in the 9 years of the Labour-led Government: it went from 28 percent to 4 percent. I would have thought that was something to be celebrated not to be castigated for. Jobs are being lost not created. The cost of living is increasing but incomes are not keeping pace particularly for low-middle income New Zealanders. 
What is the Prime Minister’s strategy to tackle these problems? He does not have one. He has had all summer—in Hawaii even—yet he comes to this House with a plan to just muddle through. It is a shopping list that will not create jobs will not lift incomes and will not help. His economic policy consists of asset sales. That is not an economic policy; it is a surrender of the sovereignty of New Zealand. Not one new job will be created by selling off the people’s ownership of power companies. But every one of us will be paying the new overseas owners higher prices for power. We know this because we have seen it all before. John Key was not in New Zealand for most of the 1980s and 1990s; he was helping speculate against the New Zealand dollar on the international market. But I was here and I heard all of the arguments for asset sales last time around. The arguments for asset sales were fatally flawed then and they are just as fatally flawed now. I walked out on the then Government caucus because asset sales were a bad idea and the idea has not got any better. That is why we had to buy the assets back. 
We had to buy back the rail system because National privatised it for less than the price of the wooden sleepers. The rail system was an integral part of the transport system and it had been wrecked by overseas owners who disinvested and saw it ruined. We had to buy back Air New Zealand because it was privatised into the capable hands of private owners who sent it bankrupt. We were in danger of not getting our planes back from wherever they were because they were leased and we could not pay the rentals on them. That is how bad privatisation got for our most strategic industry. 
We had to start a new bank because the foreign owners of our entire banking industry sucked New Zealand’s banking industry dry. They closed 1300 branches and they increased fees and their own profits. These profits were shipped overseas at the rate of $1300 million a year. How do we get a better level of indebtedness and a level of ownership of our own country if we are exporting all our money to overseas owners? If anyone can square that circle I would like to know what the answer is. I have not seen one single rational explanation. Why would selling our power companies be any different? Why would the new foreign owners suddenly discover the virtue of charity over shareholder profit? Why would the assets not fall into foreign ownership just like the last lot which were going to be kept for Kiwi mums and dads? If I ever hear “Kiwi mums and dads” again I think I will scream into the television set. Kiwi mums and dads? Get a life! The first thing that happens is that the overseas buyers turn up with a bit better offer for the Kiwi mums and dads who sell the shares which are then owned by overseas companies quick smart. If anyone thinks that owning 49 percent of a company does not give one some right to a say in how the company is run they must be dreaming. 
The same tired old lines from the past are being trotted out and the same promises that will be made this time will fail exactly the same as they did last time. I am here to bear witness that the same mistakes are being proposed as were made last time a Government paid for tax cuts by selling off public assets. I was told—and we all were—that if we sold $19 billion worth of assets debt would be ended: it would be a new nirvana. New Zealand ended up owing more money after we sold the assets than we did before we sold them. How does that work? Now we talk about the indebtedness of New Zealand. Let us talk about the indebtedness of the whole of New Zealand not just the public debt. If anyone is to be thanked for the public debt being in a position where we can borrow money in a recession it is former Minister of Finance Michael Cullen not Bill English or the National Government. 
The only thing that has restrained the rapaciousness of the power companies in the last 10 years is the hold that the Government has on board appointments. The fact that the Government will potentially give that control away and have no control over power prices should be a scary fact for all New Zealanders. When the power companies are sold and the boards are free to do what they like even worse is what they have to do by law which is actually to cede to the minority interests of shareholders before any other interests. If that does not ring alarm bells in somebody’s head I do not what would. Those companies will have to protect those shareholders’ interests in terms of earning as much money as they possibly can from monopoly interests which actually ironically are served if they make less power available because they can charge more for it. How bright does one have to be to figure that one out? I do not know—it does not seem to have occurred to anyone on the other side of the House. 
I said in last year’s Budget debate that a few things would happen in New Zealand. Let us look at what I said and what has happened. I said that the average New Zealander would not be better off because if people are not on high incomes this Government will not help them. That is exactly what has happened. People who are on average or below-average incomes which is the majority of New Zealanders are worse off now than they were a year ago. I said that unemployment would be higher and it is. Unemployment is higher today than it was when National took office. It is higher than it was last December. We were going to stop all New Zealanders going to Australia yet more people are going to Australia than ever before. We cannot even get people to fix the buildings in Christchurch because they can earn more in Australia. Where is John Key now? I tell John to come back. All is forgiven if he can actually prove that he can fix that one. The Government has stopped even pretending it has any idea where the new jobs will come from. 
What happened to John Key’s bike trail? That was going to fix everything with 4000 jobs. Nothing the Prime Minister said today will increase exports; nothing he said today will boost investment in research and development or help productivity. Last year I said that the gap between rich and poor would increase. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to work out that if the Prime Minister gets $1000 a week in tax cuts and the poor people in New Zealand get nothing from tax cuts the income and wealth gap between rich and poor actually increases in New Zealand. Surely it is bad enough. 
The Leader of the Opposition has already mentioned what happened in McGehan Close where John Key went in 2008 to pretend he was compassionate about child poverty. The poor kid is now in Child Youth and Family care. John was going to fix all that too. What was announced today that would make her better off? The answer is nothing. A respected professor of epidemiology in New Zealand said last year: “In New Zealand social injustice is killing and maiming our children on a grand scale.” We top the scales in the OECD for rates of whooping cough rheumatic fever pneumonia and other diseases in children. Twenty-eight percent of our children still live in poverty. What do they have to hope for? There is more unemployment more GST more price rises higher rents and a Government that does not care a fig about what happens to 90 percent of New Zealanders as long as the 10 percent at the top are looked after.