Groser Tim: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGroser Tim: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 30 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15716. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TIM GROSER (Minister of Trade): No it is not. It is a great pleasure to get up in the first parliamentary debate to support the Prime Minister’s statement and to support this Government. I think we feel very excited about this year. We see new opportunities. We welcome some new faces into Parliament from different parties. And I think we feel that New Zealand is in a very good space.I guess that starts with framing the debate at the opening of this year. So what we have is the Prime Minister’s statement—and I will come to that—and the response ofMr Cunliffe the Leader of the Opposition. I want to start with the opening accusation of Mr Cunliffe when he said that the Prime Minister is “out of touch”. Well I think that is a very interesting charge and I think it is the right question but it does beg the question of who is out of touch.So let us look at this through the framework—not the whole gamut of the Prime Minister’s statement; I am not going to go into the extraordinary progress we have made in for example reducing the crime rate making New Zealanders feel safe in their homes. I will stick to the broader economic framework. Contrary to what Mr Robertson has just said—the other Mr Robertson of course I say to Assistant Speaker Robertson—about a “rock star” economy it is not our phrase. As the Minister of Finance has pointed out it is somebody else’s phrase. It is a bit of an exaggeration except perhaps in relation to looking at other developed economies some of which would indeed probably use that phrase if they were in a position to enjoy statistics like we are enjoying in this country. Let us use the rather more sober statement of the chief economist of the New Zealand Treasury to the Finance and Expenditure Committee just 2 or 3 days ago where he said: “It’s no secret that New Zealand is in an enviable position.”Then we got the Moody’s annual update about New Zealand to its investors—an incredibly positive statement based on what it said were four factors. They were New Zealand’s economic strength—it gave that a high-plus. Institutional strength of this country—it graded that very high-plus. Fiscal strength—very high. The last of the four is interesting—susceptibility to event risk is low. Well I am not quite sure that I would quite agree with that last point because there is a general election coming up at the end of this year. New Zealanders are going to either pick a Government that is going to carry on in the direction underlying Moody’s and other commentators’ assessments of New Zealand or choose a Labour-Green Government that fundamentally thinks New Zealand is in a shocking space is moving in the wrong direction and that will go into a completely different space. So I would not actually agree with Moody’s that our susceptibility to event risk is quite correctly described as low. I think we need to wait and see the verdict of the New Zealand people before we can make a realistic assessment of that.Then we also have this week the ANZ bank’s interesting report under the titleKey Themes for 2014—Beyond the Economic Cycle. How did the ANZ bank put it? It said: “The economic upswing is one thing but the New Zealand economy is also going through a material transition. We’re moving from legacy to opportunity”. Well I think that is exactly right and that is actually framing extremely well the whole strategy of this Government for dealing with a legacy of issues that were extremely taxing: the projection of deficits moving forward for ever massive debt if we did not move and then on the top of that out of left field the global financial crisis and the disastrous Canterbury earthquake. So we have had to deal with that legacy. I think that the Ministers who have had the front-line responsibility for that have done an absolutely outstanding job.It is exactly as the ANZ bank put it: “We’re are now moving from legacy to opportunity”. The whole of the Prime Minister’s statement to the nation is about moving now to opportunity. It is about consolidating the progress that we have made over the course of the last 5½ years. It is about growing from it. It is about developing new ideas—and we have got lots of new ideas. We are so far removed from the caricature of a tired Government as to make it a ludicrous proposition. We are ready to do that but we will maintain the direction that New Zealand is on because we are convinced that this is a good direction for our country.Let us look at the alternative Labour interpretation of where New Zealand sits. This is a dramatically different view and the danger here is that it provides the basis for dramatically different policy directions in the event that the New Zealand people do support its alternative view. We understand Opposition politics—of course we understand that. We understand that a little bit of poetic licence is possible. But utter hogwash is likely to be swept down the political toilet. This is a policy structure that is based on a delusory view of where New Zealand stands. It is trying to create an impression—let me put this in general terms—that New Zealand is going nowhere that New Zealanders are losing hope that New Zealand is going backwards and that this is “a speculator’s paradise” which is the phrase that the Leader of the Opposition used. It is trying to foment dissatisfaction completely ignoring all of the lessons particularly from the last 3 years of Labour’s Government. It is painting a picture of hopelessness. Is this even remotely close to the reality exemplified by those quotations that I used from independent commentators? I do not think it is even remotely in touch with where we are as a country.First of all this proposition that you have got to be a dairy farmer or a homeowner in Christchurch receiving an insurance cheque to have any glimmer of hope is complete and utter nonsense. In the last assessment of regional growth as recently as November last year every single one of the 14 regions of our country is moving forward and 12 out of 14 are experiencing the strongest growth in over a decade. What just a few dairy farmers and people who are receiving insurance cheques? Get real. My advice would be: get in touch with where New Zealand is.Then and I will not go into it yet again—we have had yet another debate on this in question time—there is income equality. The Leader of the Opposition said that “New Zealand has become more and more divided because those in the middle are struggling and because the poor are going backwards.” Well that is just hogwash. Everybody would love to have some more money in their pockets and we are trying to find policies—and I think that we are—to deliver that result. But this idea of hopelessness and people losing confidence is complete nonsense. There is no evidence whatsoever of growing inequality in this country.We have created 53000 new jobs. There was the accusation that wages will need to rise in line with prices. Wages are rising faster than prices. And when we got on to structural economic policy we again got a completely delusory view of where New Zealand sits. The statement was made that we are cutting research and development for our most innovative industries. Examples were given about how we need to stop exporting carcasses and process them here. As Mr Joyce pointed out read the figures. Look at the facts. You are out of touch with where New Zealand is. Only 2 percent of New Zealand carcasses are exported. The rest are all processed in New Zealand. Get in touch with where New Zealand is—not some half-forgotten memory of where we were 40 years ago. Get in touch is my advice to Labour. Get in touch. Cutting research and development? Get in touch with the facts.Hon Annette King: Who cut R and D in their first Budget?Hon TIM GROSER: The Minister of Economic Development has just announced that we spent $1.36 billion on innovation-related expenditure. This is the highest total. The member questions where the private sector is. I would recommend to her that she get hold of one of the Government’s business growth strategy publications on research and development and what she will find very early on—from memory it is on about page 4 or 5—is a very intriguing graph that shows the share of private business expenditure on research and development in a range of OECD countries. And actually in the last few years the growth rate of New Zealand private sector research anddevelopment did not need some dodgy tax haven for tax accountants to try to milk their company reports; it needed sound policies. And actually we are doing very very well.We understand the politics of this—we understand the politics of this. The Green Party has eaten its lunch so it is lurching to the left. I think one of our leaders in this House is out of touch and it is not the Prime Minister; it is Mr Cunliffe.