Parker David: General Debate 
Parker David: General Debate 
[Volume:657;Page:6808] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I absolutely agree with the previous speaker Michael Woodhouse that it is appropriate for Government services to be expected to act responsibly with public money and to save money where they can. I do not agree with the member that we should be respectful towards the current Minister of Finance who he says is taking the sharpest edges off the recession. Well that is true only of the Minister of Finance’s personal household where the sharpest edges of the recession were attempted to be blunted by thousands of dollars every week. 
I turn to another thing in respect of the Minister of Finance. He turns up in this House every day and he tries to rewrite history as the previous speaker did by alleging economic mismanagement by the previous Government. The reality is clearly otherwise. We ran Budget surpluses in a time of plenty every one of which was criticised by the National Opposition that called for more unaffordable tax cuts that would have further fuelled the country’s consumption boom and property bubble. We reduced Government debt through the surpluses that the Labour Government ran and the National Opposition criticised from 38 percent of GDP to 17 percent of GDP gross debt and we got net debt down to zero for the first time for over 100 years. Far from mismanaging the economy we did those things. Our rates of growth were the same as Australia’s growth rates. They were higher than the growth rates in the UK the USA and Japan and higher than Europe’s growth rates on average. 
We contrast that with what the National Government is doing. It is making short-term decisions with disastrous long-term effects. We need look no further than the effects in terms of the future funding of superannuation. We all know that the number of people reliant on superannuation will roughly double to about 1 million people in the next few years as a consequence of our ageing population. That causes an increased burden on the funding of superannuation and it is credible that that can only be managed if we have some pre-funding of that obligation through the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. The National Government stopped funding that this year. As a consequence by 2031 when the fund is meant to be being drawn down there will be an estimated $35 billion hole—a $35 billion hole—because the money will not be there to fund superannuation. 
We have Mr Key on record as saying that in order for superannuation to be funded for the increased number of people who will need it in the future we will have to increase the age of entitlement decrease the level of generosity or pre-fund it. This Government has cut the pre-funding but it still runs this myth that it will be able to maintain superannuation in the future. That is a myth. We know that it is causing intergenerational unfairness. The Government is expecting people who are currently young to be funding a great burden of superannuation in the future whereas those people who are currently of working age and who are coming into retirement are not putting their hand in their pocket enough to fund their future superannuation. The Government’s short-term thinking on this issue is arrant nonsense. 
 We see mistakes being made with the emissions trading scheme. All the commentators are now unanimous on that. We have an unprincipled change that does not make economic sense. Emitters are being encouraged to increase their emissions at the cost of either taxpayers or other businesses and this is no more apparent than in agriculture. No one disagrees that agriculture should not have some free allocation. We all agree that that sector needs generous levels of free allocation so that it can continue its current level of output without undue competition from countries that are not pricing emissions. But that is completely different to saying that the sector should be able to increase its emissions at the cost of either taxpayers or other businesses. That is what the Government is doing and it renders the emissions trading scheme ineffective. It has an emissions trading scheme that will not work. 
We have had unanimous views from Brian Fallow Rod Oram and columns in the  
Dominion Post 
—from all except the heavy emitters who want other people to pay their bills. This is another example of short-term policies from the National Party that help big emitters especially in the agricultural sector at the long-term cost of the New Zealand economy and of other participants in agriculture. Notably as a consequence the forestry sector will not be planting trees because it will not be able to compete against the higher land price in dairying. We have seen that sort of short term-ism in the failed decisions of superannuation as well as in the emissions trading scheme.