Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. While everyone's on the topic this afternoon of their favourite electorate we can't let this afternoon go by without mentioning the wonderful electorate of Taranaki - King Country. It is where a large percentage of our GDP comes from in terms of agriculture. But I can't leave out Waitomo at this point in time because as a result of COVID the tourism business there is very sad right now. I'm pleased for the New Zealanders who do support it when they can come to that beautiful part of the country.There's been a lot of talk about positivity on the other side of the House today but all I can see from the angle that I look from is four years of failure and four long years of failure. Because the only thing that this Government has delivered in its four years is bad legislation. I want to talk for a bit about rural because I don't think this Government cares about rural. In fact in the main I don't honestly know that this Government even knows—and many of the Ministers—where rural is.I want to quote a piece out of Minister Wood's recent transport consultation discussion document: good cycling networks can link rural neighbourhoods and destinations serving both the community and the tourists." That just gives me an indication that the Minister and his Government have no idea how rural New Zealand operates. Yes we all like to go for a bike ride on a lovely sunny day. That's fine. But thinking about rural communities going around their businesses on cycles—imagine a large bale. You know this Government's trying to take the services of people who have utes away in a large way. Let's attack the ute owners. Let's put everyone on bicycles and build some cycleways in New Zealand—that'll work! Rural New Zealand will run really well on bicycles!If it wasn't bad enough when the protest happened on the Auckland Harbour Bridge and the Government made that announcement about the Auckland cycling bridge which has gone down like a lead balloon it looked like a very strong reaction to a protest. Even being generous in my thoughts around this if it had been planned for some time it was a very tone-deaf announcement to do it at that time when the Ashburton bridge was out because of floods and people were struggling to get where they needed to go because of those awful floods that hit Canterbury.So in terms of our rural roads there are cones cones and more cones everywhere. But sadly we seem to be driving through cones and the roads are not getting any better because this Government's solution to rural roads seems to be to slow them down—don't fix them; slow them down.Now recently we had what is normally the biggest agricultural event in the Southern Hemisphere. This year Fieldays would have been probably the largest agricultural event in the world over a two-year period. And while trade is important it was interesting that the Minister of Agriculture chose at that time to go overseas and do his trade talks. There must have been a window around which he could have done that which didn't include not coming to Fieldays. After all if you were the agriculture and the rural communities Minister would you not take the opportunity to go out and talk to farmers as much as possible? Unless of course one didn't want to talk to farmers and one didn't want to front up to the announcement that this Government has made about utes because actually utes were the talk of the Fieldays. It was really interesting that post-Fieldays the Prime Minister actually had to go to Canterbury to front up for some extra funding for the flood and who turned up in a ute but the Prime Minister? It's just as well the Prime Minister did turn up in a ute because had she not turned up in a four-wheel drive ute she might have still been stuck and never made her way back to Parliament. So thank heavens for the ute.Also thanks to Grant Robertson who is one person at least over the other side of the House that does get where the money is delivered from in this country. So we want to bring attention to rural. We want the Government to know where it is. It's very important because without rural—without agriculture—in this COVID environment this country would be in a far worse state than it currently is. Thank you."