Anderton Jim: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeAnderton Jim: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 09 December 2008. Volume:651;Page:53. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JIM ANDERTON (Leader—Progressive): I would like to begin by congratulating the Government on its achievement in winning the general election and the confidence and trust of many New Zealanders. The responsibility that the public has handed to it is enormous and though I strongly oppose some of the plans it has made for New Zealand as a loyal New Zealander the Government has my very best wishes for success in its stewardship of the economy and our country.I hope that its promises come true. National promised to make significant reductions in crime; it promised that New Zealanders would stop leaving New Zealand to live in other countries; it promised that our wages would equal or surpass the wages of Australians; it promised that it would radically cut taxes on ordinary working families and that it would increase spending on all of our social services—all at the same time.It promised that a National Government would not overtax New Zealanders with fiscal surpluses nor project deficits into the future but it would instead berth the fiscal super-tanker precisely on a low-tax high-spending button every single Budget. The Prime Minister when in Opposition travelled to many disadvantaged streets and promised that we would no longer have pockets of deprivation in our cities where some kids are left behind in poverty. He promised that all our children will be able to read and write because the testing that National would introduce to the education system will make all the difference in the world. He promised us world-class infrastructure the fastest broadband in the world an end to disputes over water allocation instant resourcemanagement decisions and new motorways where today there are only broken dirt tracks.The Prime Minister spent the election campaign travelling to many marginal seats and making solemn pledges of unbudgeted “think big” spend-ups totalling hundreds of millions of dollars. In all those towns and cities they are now waiting patiently expecting him to deliver. I wish the Government good luck with all of that.There was not a single item on that list that I would not wish the Government to succeed in delivering. As promises go they are slightly more ambitious than I would have been however. I would have recommended that promising absolutely everything to absolutely everybody risked disappointing someone sooner or later. However I will be the first to congratulate the Government if it pulls off a significant portion of its stunningly immodest programme.The Government will start its term this week with a swag of legislation. It will not send those new laws to select committees however as democracy and good government would require. This is a Government whose members campaigned in Opposition against what they said then was the end of democracy. In Opposition those members promised a fresh new standard of good government and the Government’s very first act was to throw out those democratic standards it supported in Opposition such as select committee hearings on its proposals.The Government is entitled of course to put in place the policy it has a mandate for. But the Government makes a mistake if it thinks every bill it drafts will be perfect at the outset. Many Governments have done that. So it has started with a defining combination of mediocrity weakness and arrogance. It is too weak to hold public hearings on its laws too insecure in the strength of its ideas to truly believe that they will hold up under scrutiny too arrogant to admit its ideas could be improved and too mediocre to deliver on the promises it has made to New Zealand.Already in the short month since the election we have seen one example of a weak arrogant Government in action—its reaction to the potential Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) budget blowout. I have listened to Ministers bumble through this issue with growing amazement that anyone could enter Government so little prepared for its challenges. Confronted with a change in the actuarial calculations facing ACC Ministers panicked. This is an inexperienced Government that has yet to understand that officials will come to it every month perhaps every week and even on most days demanding more money for something they say faces a crisis. This week it is ACC; next week it will be the hospital system. Will they panic again when district health boards report their annual deficits? They had been reporting them to the Government I was a member of for 9 years.Let me make some predictions. Some defence and information technology projects will suddenly develop cost overruns worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some State-owned enterprises will reduce their profit projections from rosy to deficit levels. They will demand huge capital injections to remain viable. The new biosecurity scare will need tens of millions of dollars to eradicate or control something. The previous Government had plenty of ammunition fired at it by the National Party about that. Every week other mundane crises will come before Cabinet Ministers. Ministers need to be strong enough to deal with them. But what did we get in this ACC episode? Did we get strength? Did we get sophistication? Did we get wisdom that says yes ACC actuarial calculations go up and down? No we saw the sort of arrogance that is already beginning to look like the colour of this Government. There was a massive overreaction. We are to have a ministerial inquiry. We will be having a lot of those if every time there is an overrun in someone’s budget there is a ministerial inquiry.The Government needs to toughen up even at this stage. It needs to toughen up because it cannot have a free lunch with the policy it has promised. It will have to make some hard choices. In 1999 the previous Government was elected with a Crown net debt of over 20 percent of GDP. By last year the net debt had gone. We had positive net financial assets. This National Government wants to blow that again. Treasury will not report its current set of forecasts for Crown debt until after the Government’s new laws have been passed under urgency. In other words the Government will spend the money before it knows whether it has it. That is what National Governments seem to me to always do. They take from the future for the short-term advantage of today.National’s rushed increase in overseas borrowing is not to strengthen our economy. National is not going to fund more research and development. It is going to cut those things. National is not increasing borrowing to invest in higher education standards and it is not increasing borrowing to promote exports as a proportion of GDP. Actually I did not hear the words “exports” “science” or “agriculture” mentioned once in the Speech from the Throne today. That is extraordinary for a National Government. The Government is not increasing overseas borrowing to strengthen our regions or to create more jobs. The increased borrowing is to fund additional personal tax cuts. Those cuts are more generous to the most affluent rather than to those people who are the most vulnerable in a global economic downturn.Someone in the future will have to pay for National’s irresponsibility. When we borrow from overseas to splurge on tax cuts for people who need them the least someone has to pay for it. Someone in the future will pay more tax. Someone in the future will have his or her services cut. The problem is being compounded because National is reducing the ability of Kiwis to create their own nest eggs. The party that used to say it was all about personal responsibility is slashing KiwiSaver to pieces.At the very same time that we need most to strengthen New Zealand for the future the National Government is doing the opposite. It is a mediocre Government with mediocre ideas about how we will meet the challenges that New Zealand faces. How mediocre is it? Well the very first bill the Government announced today is a tax bill. At the centre of that bill is the largest-ever increase in tax on businesses in New Zealand. The very first thing this Government has done is increase tax on innovation. The very first thing it has done is to say that we have too much innovation in New Zealand and we are going to kill it off by taxing it. If I had more time I would expand on that but there will be time during the course of the next week or two.In conclusion I say that there is one area where we have much to do and it is poverty both here in New Zealand and globally. I heard the Government’s pledges in the Speech from the Throne to end the cycle of disadvantage. That is a worthy ambition and I support it. But I listened hard to how it will do it. The cupboard of ideas is as bare as the food cupboards in some of our most disadvantaged homes. I have watched with fascination the speed with which Governments around the world have been able to act to bail out huge companies and banks when they have been in desperate need. They have shown that with goodwill action is possible to help in an emergency. Governments can act to help when it is needed.That leaves a question for all of us in this Parliament. If that can be done for big companies and big banks in times of crisis why cannot we do it for people in crisis? Why cannot we do it for the hundreds of millions of people who do not have enough food to eat who do not have clean water and who cannot have basic medicine? Why cannot we bail them out? New Zealand should be a voice for them internationally and a voice of compelling new ideas that are emerging internationally to solve these global problems. At a time when the global crisis threatens to deepen global poverty and darken even further the skies over the lives of the world’s least privileged we should besaying that if the world could offer crisis help to the strong then we must also offer emergency bail-out to the weakest and the poorest.I call on our Government to work constructively across party lines to see how New Zealand can use our almost unique position in the world as an efficient food producer to make a difference. I will pledge my support for any efforts the Government makes to do just that.