Tolley Anne: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Tolley Anne: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 30 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7621. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Police) 
: 
 I am very proud to be a part of a can-do Government. It is not afraid of working hard and it is certainly a Government that has rolled up its sleeves and has been working hard for New Zealanders through some of the toughest times; through some of the toughest times that people of my generation my children’s generation and hopefully my grandchildren’s generation will ever experience. 
Yes we have borrowed as a Government. We have borrowed a lot of money but we borrowed that money to protect some of the most vulnerable in our communities during that economic crisis. We talked about it taking the edge off the crisis for those vulnerable New Zealanders. We used that money to lift the minimum wage each year. We used that money to fund free tertiary study for kids who had fallen out of school under what we called the Youth Guarantee. We wanted to give them the opportunity to be kept off the streets off the dole and in education. We used that money to fund trades academies and service academies to help keep kids in school. 
Not only did we use that money to help all of those people in our community but also we introduced national standards to make sure that schools and parents had good information so that they could intervene early when their kids were not learning to read and write and do maths. I refer to the speaker before me Pita Sharples who talked about the importance of education to young Maori New Zealanders and how if we are to lift the economic performance of this country that is an enormous section of our community that needs to lift its educational standards so that it can gain qualifications and take its full place in our community. 
We also introduced things like the 90-day trial not only to make sure that employers could take a chance on employing someone but also to give people who would not normally during a deep economic crisis have the opportunity to get their first job to get that first step on the ladder. The Department of Corrections of course relies on that when it is talking to employers about giving ex-prisoners a go. It allows them to make a choice. 
We introduced time limits on Resource Management Act consents for large projects so that we could get some of these large projects off the books out of the courts and actually happening in New Zealand. We funded during that time of deep economic crisis multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects that supported thousands and thousands of jobs. 
One of those of course is the roads of national significance which in my electorate the Labour list member continues to misrepresent and speak against in the local newspaper. Of course what that member Labour and the Greens do not understand is that those roads of national significance are not all in Auckland. In fact there is a very important one that runs through Tauranga that all the local governments in my electorate—that is the Whakatane District Council the Opotiki District Council and the Gisborne District Council—supported because they knew how important it was for them to get their freight to either the Port of Tauranga or the Port of Auckland. Seventy percent of Gisborne’s freight actually goes north despite what some of the rail enthusiasts would have us believe—70 percent of Gisborne’s freight goes north to the Port of Auckland or the Port of Tauranga. 
Of course we have done a lot more despite the very unbalanced economy we inherited from that wastrel Labour Government the global financial crisis and our own New Zealand recession and of course the Canterbury earthquakes and the large destruction of our second-largest city. We are a Government that rolls up its sleeves and does what needs to be done to build a brighter future for New Zealand. 
But wait there is more. Yesterday the PM laid out this Government’s plans for 2013. He talked of the four priorities of this Government. The first is the responsible management of our finances. This Government understands that it actually is not its money. It is actually the money of hard-working New Zealanders so the Government has a responsibility to manage that responsibly; to make sure that when it spends that money it is spending it effectively and efficiently—something that the other side of the House does not understand. There are no quick fixes for this economy and there are no silver bullets. 
One of the things this Government has done and has done successfully is pull back the out-of-control spending by the Government that the previous Labour Government went crazy on. It lost control of Government spending. Even today when you hear the Labour members talking about what they are going to do it is all about spending more money. Their answer to anything is to throw more money at it. Well this Government has had to stop doing that. It has had to pull back on Government expenditure because like every other New Zealand household it has had to have a look at its own budget and it has had to cut back on the frivolous ineffective inefficient spending in order to pay the bills. 
The second priority for this Government is one of the most important for the future and that is boosting skills and supporting jobs. We had young people getting National Certificate of Educational Achievement credits getting to the end of their high school years and finding they were fully qualified but with no career path. They had not taken the right subjects so they had to actually go backwards and restudy subjects in order to get into tertiary education and get their qualifications before they could ever consider a job. What we did was we got industry education and career experts around the table and developed five vocational pathways that will help lead young New Zealanders down a path that will lead to a qualification that they need for a job. 
We are funding over 4000 places in trades and service academies. Again I look at my own electorate where there are kids right at the top of the East Coast who get to the school bus by 6 o’clock on a Friday morning. Some of them have travelled for three-quarters of an hour prior to that to reach that point. They travel down to Gisborne for their daily session at the polytech and they are lucky to be home by 8 o’clock at night. Their parents say that they are better students today they are engaged in learning they have a clear expectation of what they want to do with their lives and they are working hard and being successful. That is what trades academies are doing for youngsters throughout New Zealand. Gisborne Girls High School has one of the most successful service academies in the country. We pay it for 20 students; it has 29 enrolled and a waiting list of over 50. These are practical sensible things that this Government has done to make sure that young people have the opportunities they need to get the skills they need to take their part in our communities. The recent announcements around apprentices expand that number of opportunities. 
Finally can I talk about the third priority which is delivering on our public services. The public have a right to expect high-quality public services. They have a right to expect that when they send their kids down the road to the local school they will actually learn to read write and do maths. They have the expectations—rightly so—that their kids will get a qualification that they can turn up at their local hospital and be seen in the emergency department in a reasonable time and of course that they can get their hip operations and their cataracts done at their local hospital as well. They can reasonably expect to feel safe in their homes. Crime rates are the lowest they have been for 30 years. The fourth priority is rebuilding Christchurch. That is important. We heard today that we are delivering on that. I am proud to be part of a can-do Government.