English Bill: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
English Bill: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
[Volume:629;Page:1605] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 The Hon Paul Swain betrays I think Labour’s lack of judgment over the issues that are swirling around David Benson-Pope. If Paul Swain and the Prime Minister think that that issue will go away because they have started throwing some muck at some other MPs then they have completely misjudged where public opinion is and where the opinion of this House is. Mr Swain should understand that the long list of problems now attached to David Benson-Pope and the seriousness of the actions and behaviour he has been involved in mean that he is the issue not the National Party or Rodney Hide—and that is certainly how the public sees it. One teacher was quoted in the  
New Zealand Herald  
today as saying that this issue is “blowing teachers’ minds out there”. The very idea that a Government could tolerate as a senior member of its own ranks someone who has behaved in the way that he did is unacceptable. 
Rodney Hide 
: They excuse him. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well the Government has actually gone further than that at times by saying it never happened. So Mr Swain would do well to take the issue a good deal more seriously than to treat it as playground tit for tat because it does not matter what he says about Gerry Brownlee. What has been said about David Benson-Pope by over a dozen young people who have been willing to come forward and say it publicly is what is in the public mind and that is the issue that Helen Clark must deal with and so far she has chosen not to. In a way I would like to say that that is to the benefit of her political opponents such as myself but I think that a more serious problem arises from her inability to deal with the issue—that is the erosion of the sense of respect for the authority of teachers and for the Government stewardship of public education. 
But that is not the only issue where Labour is suffering from a credibility gap. The other one would have to be economic transformation. One imagines that when someone uses a word like “transformation” something significant something energetic and maybe something new would be happening to the economy. Well that has not been the case at all. Economic transformation appeared as Helen Clark’s slogan early in the tenure of this Government in around 2000 or 2001. It was Labour’s label for the idea that it had something to say and something to do with the burst of economic growth that this country has had. As has been debated in this Chamber many times that growth has had very little to do with the actions and activities of the Labour Government. 
However this Government has spawned a major industry of bureaucracies plans strategies and people monitoring each other measuring counting and speculating—at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the taxpayer. It has made no difference to the economy and Dr Cullen has not set out to try to show that his last 6 years of economic management have made any difference to the economy. 
I just want to pick up two or three areas where the Government needs to get down out of the clouds and get to grips with the realities of microeconomic reform because fundamentally that is what will drive our economy forward. The Labour Government in New Zealand has been untypical. In most other similar countries—Australia Canada to a lesser extent and the UK—Governments have persisted with a constant process of reform to make their economies more competitive. If they are left-wing Governments they have embarked on other programmes like expanding public expenditure growing the numbers of civil servants and having more middle-class welfare. But no Government has given up on the programme of microeconomic reform in the way that this Government has. This Government has fooled itself into thinking that more money will fix every problem.  
 Members can take as an example the roading infrastructure. We have seen a complete debacle from rising star—what is his name? 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: David Parker. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: We have seen a complete debacle from “Rising Star Parker” in the last couple of weeks. A politicised Transit board puts out a plan and the Government realises it is an embarrassment and disowns it but has no alternative proposals about how it will fund a plan it says it is totally committed to. We know because of the environment the Government has created in local government and around Transit that that money will not be spent efficiently. In a sense it does not matter how much it commits to; a significant proportion is bound to be wasted because of the processes that have become so complicated the delays that have become so long and the increasing amount of Government compliance that those who will be building this infrastructure have to deal with. 
Another example is the Department of Corrections. We have seen in the last 2 or 3 months a great deal of public attention to what is going on in our prisons. It is quite clear now that the Labour Government has been totally held hostage to Mr Phil Goff’s rhetoric. Labour has embarked on a programme of sentencing and “lock ‘em up” kind of politics in order to shore up its own constituency but it has had no proper programme for how to deal with the consequences. Then when it has started building the prisons the costs have doubled in a matter of 2 or 3 years. My electorate will be one of the beneficiaries of that. The prison in Milburn will be set up at 300 beds it is bound to end up at 600 beds and at the current rate the Government will spend over half a billion dollars building that prison at Milburn. That will be terrific for the local economy but very bad news for the taxpayer. 
I want to refer also to the issue of education. This is yet another area where the Government is creating a swamp of complexity incompetence and failure while it swans around the country talking about economic transformation. Well we have had transformation in education. The Government has taken an orderly and well-run tertiary sector and turned it into a train wreck of incompetence and public waste. It has taken an adventure in secondary school qualifications and turned it into a dripping sore of lack of public credibility. Dr Cullen has taken on the job of tertiary education Minister. I wish him well. In a sense I feel sorry for him because his significant career as a Minister of Finance is going to fizzle out as he wades into the mess that Steve Maharey left for him and it will take him all the rest of his term in office to fix it. 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: As Steve Maharey makes more mess. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Yes as Steve Maharey makes more mess in TVNZ. He is going to mess up early childhood education. He left a mess in his other portfolio of science and research and certainly in tertiary education. Why is it that everything this man touches crumbles? It is like a reverse Midas touch. 
Dr Cullen has written a Budget Policy Statement with speculative ideas such as KiwiSaver which is minor. The minor ideas take up a bit of media space but the real problem is that the Government has lost its desire its will and its capability to do the fundamental jobs of Government properly and those are to provide public education in a way that is effective for students and cost-effective for the taxpayer; to make sure there is long-run and efficient investment in infrastructure; and to deal properly with the consequences of policies that it has followed for political benefit like the problem that has arisen with prisons. All of these problems will fall in the lap of the Minister of Finance and over the next 2 or 3 years he is going to feel like the roost to which all the chickens have come home. All the built-up problems of overspending micro-management and politicised processes are adding up to the need for him to cut expenditure. They are adding up to public dissatisfaction with services. They are adding up to a credibility problem for the Government in areas that have traditionally been regarded as Labour’s core competence—in particular education. The man who will have to fix it all is Dr Cullen who is tired cranky and worn out with shovelling all the extra bits that Helen Clark and her Ministers leave for him. This Government’s credibility will stand or fall on whether he can do a job that no Minister in Cabinet is capable of doing.