Guy Nathan: Address in Reply 
Guy Nathan: Address in Reply 
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NATHAN GUY (National—Otaki) 
: 
 Mr Deputy Speaker can I congratulate you on your position and indeed Mr Speaker Lockwood Smith and the Assistant Speakers Eric Roy and Rick Barker. Indeed it is a privilege to be in this Parliament sitting on this side of the House. I also need to acknowledge the fantastic maiden speeches and maiden statements that have been delivered in the House in this term. There was a very high quality of speeches right across the House. 
I want to talk about the fantastic result in this election and how John Key is progressing extremely well as our Prime Minister through difficult economic times. In record time he has pulled together a very stable Government with the support of the ACT Party the Maori Party and United Future. I believe that it will be a long-serving and very stable arrangement as we go forward. Of course there will be times when we will have disagreements but that is part of our democracy and we have some tough decisions to make going forward. 
But the biggest issue in 2009 is indeed the economy and that is why the Prime Minister has taken the steps he has taken in recent times to take the sharpest edge off the economy to try to protect jobs and to try indeed to get us out of this recession which I believe we were in in 2008 but many people did not realise it. I believe that with the packages that have been announced over the last couple of months we will track out of the recession a lot more quickly. I will talk a little about those packages and also about what a privilege it is to be representing the people of Horowhenua and Kapiti in the Otaki electorate and the fantastic result those people gave me to enable me to serve as the Otaki MP in this House—a huge honour. In fact we had the highest voter turn-out in the whole of the country which just goes to show what a close contest it was out there in the Otaki electorate. 
I alluded before to the packages that will take the sharpest edge off the recession. They include the tax cuts that will be rolling out on 1 April. They will put more money in people’s pockets. The ReStart package will help those people the most vulnerable who may in fact lose their jobs. The announcement made by the Prime Minister of $480 million for small and medium sized enterprises will help those small businesses. Indeed in my electorate there are 7700 of them and they employ about 20000 people. The package that has just been rolled out in our infrastructure announcements made yesterday of $500 million across about 4¼ years will also help to kick-start our economy. 
One of the important things is the reform of the Resource Management Act. It has allowed vexatious and frivolous objections that have slowed down projects of national significance. There are about 100 clause changes and they will help to streamline and speed up this process. I am excited about that initiative because I believe that it will also help us get through this economic recession. It will create more jobs. It is important that we get started on some of these big projects rather than the process taking as long as it does now. Transit openly told a select committee just a couple of years ago that it takes as long now to get resource consent as it does to build about 1 kilometre of road and most times that can take up to 3 years. 
We also have important initiatives around law and order which Chris Tremain the previous speaker has so rightly just spoken about. Those initiatives will be really important in allowing our communities to be safer. 
It is interesting when we sit on this side of the House and move around Parliament to see the different factions currently in the Labour Party all starting to form up and jostle for different leadership bids as we progress to the next election. Indeed we have Mr Cunliffe’s camp there talking about how they do not actually have a plan for the economy now but they will deliver it for the next election. We are interested to see who will run in the Mt Albert by-election. Will it be Phil Twyford? Will young Darren Hughes head up north to run in Mt Albert? We also have the different camps for Jones Horomia and Cosgrove. We are interested to see who will come into Parliament over the next few months from the list. The water cooler conversations have already started amongst Labour Party members. They are not very settled at all. We are waiting to see whether Phil Goff will survive the 90-day probation period.