Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Can I start by acknowledging our friends from the Lions tour in the gallery. It was good to see your friends on Saturday night at Eden Park and we welcome you to our Parliament. I am here to speak to the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill unlike many members of this House who have not actually spoken to that bill in their contributions and I have been thinking about why it might be that many members have struggled with that. Here is the bill that we are actually speaking about. It is a doorstopper. This bill the supplementary estimates bill is about all of the mistakes that the Government made in the Budget last year. It is about all of the things it got wrong and is having to fix up now. That is what it is about and I think the challenge for many speakers in the debate today is about trying to cram this into only 5 or 10 minutes but none the less I am going to do my very best with that. I want to start by talking about what we have seen in the Supplementary Estimates in respect of revenue a portfolio dear to my heart. Relatively recently the National Government has had a new harder-working revenue Minister who is really cracking the whip on things but what the Supplementary Estimates reveal is that there are a whole lot of things that have actually gone wrong in the revenue area and have had to be fixed up in this document. One of the things that stood out for me is the fact that the investigations budget was underspent by $2.7 million. It was underspent by $2.7 million in the same year that that Government—that Government itself—has conceded that multinational corporations are ripping New Zealand taxpayers off to the tune of $300 million a year. So at the same time as we need to be going after the big guys we are cutting back on the investigations budget in this very document. Alongside that we have cut back by $15 million on the information we give to New Zealand taxpayers about their obligations making it harder for them to know the right amount of tax for them to pay. That just shows the wrong priorities of this Government. Flicking through a few of the other areas that have not already been canvassed in the excellent speeches by my Labour colleagues I want to turn to courts. I was reminded of this because of course the Deputy Speaker who was previously in the Chair was a very good and very active former Minister for Courts. If you went down Lambton Quay today I do not think that anyone would even know who the current Minister for Courts is and that is probably lucky. It is probably lucky because if you look in this document the Supplementary Estimates there is a shocking figure. It is that the impairment for fines that should have been paid to the Government was supposed to be $12 million in the Budget last year but that has rocketed by over 100 percent and is now up to $29 million. That is an absolute blowout an absolute stuff-up and an absolute example of governmental incompetence in this document which Government Ministers are about to vote through. We flick on a few pages later and we find out why. We find out why. It is because the Government slashed the amount of money to spend on courts and fines collection. Well it does not take a genius to work out that when you reduce the amount you spend on fines collection you might get fewer fines coming in and that is exactly what is happening in this document which those Government members are about to vote for. Where is the accountability for that? Once again they are the wrong priorities. Urban cycleways—the pet project and probably the best achievement of the previous National Prime Minister John Key. It did not really change the world or the economy but it was a pretty good sort of niche project. What do the Supplementary Estimates tell us? We were supposed to spend $43 million on that project to build more urban cycleways but because of poor planning we managed to spend only $27 million of that. That was one of this Government's hallmark projects and it could not even deliver that properly over the last year and so we have had to adjust that in the supplementary estimates. The most shocking thing I have seen actually in the Supplementary Estimates really speaks to us about what this Government is getting wrong. It was a question I asked in the Finance and Expenditure Committee about the changes in the number of people receiving hardship assistance. These are the people who are really really doing it hard and who need help from the Government. This tells us how well this Government is doing at helping those in need which those members constantly stand up and boast about. It tells us that last year 5000 more people needed special benefit and it tells us that 102000 more special needs grants had to be paid last year which is up from 489000 to 592000. That is a sign of people being left behind despite what this Government has said. In his contribution before Mr Bishop accused the Labour Party of talking too much about vision and aspiration. Well we are guilty as charged on that front. We have vision for a country in which we spend less on prisons not more. We are guilty of having a vision for a country in which we have decent homes for all New Zealanders and decent incomes for every New Zealand householder—good health and good education not tax cuts for the wealthy. We oppose this bill and the Budget and we will deliver a much better one next year. Thank you.