Goldsmith Paul; Rurawhe AdrianHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's my pleasure to stand and speak on this bill. I up until about an hour or so ago didn't have this spokespersonship and so it's been an interesting afternoon. I'd like to start by I suppose acknowledging my predecessor in the role Amy Adams who today has announced her impending retirement from politics. She will have had 12 years and made a massive contribution over many years to New Zealand's politics in her many roles in Cabinet and through the time in Opposition. Over the past 18 months she's worked hard to hold this Government to account for its spending decisions and its taxing decisions. We'll be opposing this bill primarily on the grounds that it relates to some of the Supplementary Estimates that have been added to this bill which are a reflection of very poor Government decision-making over the past few months; not all—some. I'll take the House through this over the next little while but the point I'd make first up as the Minister said is that these are issues that we work together constructively on and that is indeed the case. I've taken up the role as finance spokesperson and am very keen to work constructively in support of this Government where it makes suitable decisions and where it's working in the interests of all New Zealanders to grow our economy. I'll also be very focused on holding them to account where things go wrong. We're seeing plenty of examples of this because when we look at what this bill is about it's about ensuring that we've got an extra $150 million that we've spent that we haven't budgeted for for the gun buyback for example and an extra couple of hundred million for dealing with the Mycoplasma bovis incident. The point that that shows is that there's always something unexpected turning up in Government—anything. There's always something unexpected that you don't plan for when you do your annual Budget. The previous National Government had of course a couple of colossal examples of that with the Canterbury earthquakes which sent us from being in a position where we could have got ourselves back into surplus to suddenly having an $18 billion deficit in one year. Then of course you have the global financial crisis which is another thing where it came along out of the blue and all of a sudden the accounts that the Government had made for the Budget suddenly no longer step up. So it reinforces the importance of having well-disciplined and thought through Government policies in the Budget every year and that unfortunately is not what we're seeing from this Government. What we're seeing so far is pretty much a bog-standard left-wing Government where you come in and say We're going to take the economy for granted and just assume that it doesn't matter what additional costs and uncertainty that we add to business; business is there to continue to be milked and the economy will just keep clipping along". That doesn't happen and we've seen that in this Government in this country at a time when we have got historically high terms of trade where the prices that New Zealand exporters are getting for their products with the exception of wool are at historic highs and we should be booming as a country. When you go around the regions as Mr Jones does on a regular basis you go to Hawke's Bay and places like that and you see that all the mayors will tell you "I can't remember a time when the prices that we've been getting for our goods have been so high". So at a time when New Zealand should be booming in fact what we're seeing is the economy slowing dramatically. As the Governor of the Reserve Bank said a couple of months ago there's been a "sharp decline" in the New Zealand economy. So that's one path. At the same time the Government is rapidly increasing its spending up to $3.8 billion of new spending this time. We were spending back in 2015 for example a billion dollars. So they've almost quadrupled the amount of new spending. So on the one hand you've got a slowing economy; on the other hand you've got rapidly increasing spending and New Zealanders can work out what's going to happen as a result of that. They can work out well where does all the money come from? Well it's going to come from extra taxes somewhere down the line or increased borrowing and that's what worries New Zealanders and it's why there's such low levels of confidence and such concern out there. So given that when you have a bill like this which reminds you that anything can come out of the blue in the economy and you can suddenly be hit by massive unexpected expenditures and if you're not budgeting well you're not keeping within your means and if you're not disciplined about how you spend then you quickly run into trouble. So this Government when it came into power less than 20 months ago inherited an amazing set of books with surpluses out as far as the eye could see getting bigger and bigger. Already we're only in the second year of this Government and its second Budget and when we look at the forecasts for next year the surplus is wafer thin. Wafer thin zero point—what is the surplus presumed for 2019? As a percentage of GDP it's very small indeed. Hon Willie Jackson: What is it? Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well I'm trying to find it. It's so small I can't see it—so small I can't see it. Here we go: 0.4 percent of GDP for 2020. Now we can see when we consider this bill if you've got a projected surplus of 0.4 percent of GDP then there's a very high chance we'll be back in deficit in no time at all. So you've come in you've inherited an economy that was booming at nearly 4 percent with surpluses as far as the eye can see and within 20 months you have halved the growth and we're looking at potential deficits within a year or two's time. So that is an indictment on the economic management of this Government and it's something we'll be holding them to account on. It's one thing just to say you want to spend more; you actually also need to focus on how the wealth is created and accept that Government policies have a real influence upon that. So if we look at some of the other things that have been done by this bill which as I again explain—the purpose of this bill the primary purpose with the Supplementary Estimates is to say that this time last year the Government brought in a Budget they said this is what we're going to spend this is what we're going to bring in and this is what we're going to spend for this year. But by the end of the year they figured out actually there's a whole bunch of things that they had to spend that they didn't plan for. So this bill makes those expenditures legal. So one of things that we're changing is the extra $167 million for job seekers—for benefits. Well what an astounding thing. So when this Government came in they inherited an economy that was creating 10000 jobs a month—10000 new jobs a month. We've got Willie Jackson in charge of employment and under his stewardship of the portfolio we've gone from 10000 jobs a month to negative—we're losing jobs. We lost 4000 jobs in the last three months. We've got Shane Jones over there who's been given $3 billion in a job creation scheme and he's spending all that money to destroy jobs. You've got half a billion dollars devoted to forestry where you convert land that's currently used for sheep and beef farming and convert two-thirds of it into native forestry destroying jobs in the process. So we get to spend half a billion dollars to destroy jobs. It's very strange. Then the jobs that actually do need to be done to plant the trees—he wants to bring people from Melanesia to do those jobs so it's very hard to work out how that system works in terms of getting value for money. But the upshot of it all is that notwithstanding the record high export prices we've got and the huge job creation we had in the previous Government we're now having to spend an extra $67 million on job seekers—on benefits—because benefits have increased. One explanation for it apart from the poor economic management is the fact that one thing the Government have done in the welfare space is remove sanctions and obligations on people in order to get back to doing work which I think the average New Zealander struggles to understand. Then we've got an extra $50 million shifting the underspend in the free fees area for universities which is another frankly fiasco from this Government. They came in they said that they were going to spend $2.8 billion on tertiary education in order to increase the access to tertiary education for New Zealanders and then lo and behold they found out that fewer New Zealanders were going. That is I suppose one of the most dramatic examples of where this Government seem to think that they can achieve things merely by announcing that they're going to spend more money on it but actually the delivery of quality outcomes is much much harder. The other famous example of that of course is KiwiBuild where they said they were going to build 100000 new homes over 10 years and they've completely given up. Poor old Phil Twyford should be shifted on on Thursday. Nobody's quite sure if he will be but in any normal Government that lack of delivery would be curtains. So this bill should be making the Government think very carefully about—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The member's time has expired. Before I call the Hon Willie Jackson can I just remind members—I didn't interrupt the member. But when members are speaking I remind members to use the correct honorifics and the correct titles and full names even in interjection."