Parker David: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 12 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8418. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 Shall I try that? 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: You can try that. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: The Leader of the Opposition for 5 minutes. Is that working? It is not working. [ 
Interruption 
] Mr Chairperson is that working? I think that was meant to be. That short-lived promotion to the position of Leader of the Opposition was obviously not my calling. It is always amusing to follow John Banks in this House. He stands up and lectures the Opposition on fiscal responsibility when in the last 3 years of his mayoralty he tripled council debt. He tripled the Auckland Council debt. That is even excluding the extra debt that was taken on for the so-called super-city. He tripled council debt. This is the man who cannot even count up his own electoral expenses accurately lecturing us in the Opposition on prudent fiscal management and economic policy. This National Government is propped up by John Banks and it must be a very uncomfortable experience to be propped up by that man low as his standards are. 
We have got high unemployment in New Zealand. We have had 180000 people go to Australia. We had the Government when these statistics came out saying that it cannot reconcile the unemployment benefit with what is happening in the economy on other measures. So the Government says that the household labour force survey overestimates unemployment because there are not that many people on the dole. Well the reason for that is that most working people now need two incomes to survive. When one of those people is made redundant they are not entitled to the unemployment benefit. That is one of the things that we have heard in the manufacturing inquiry that the National Party blocked through select committee but that Opposition parties have held anyway outside of the select committee process with full public submissions. We have heard time and again that people when they lose their jobs in manufacturing are not entitled to the dole because they have one person in the relationship who is still working and so they are unemployed. If you want to look at the true measure of how much work there is in New Zealand look at the total hours worked under the household labour force survey. The total hours worked is down. There is less work in New Zealand than there was last year. Four years into this Government despite the fact that it is spending all these billions of dollars of reinsurance money that is coming in from overseas the number of hours of paid work that is available in New Zealand has decreased. 
This Government is mismanaging so many things—whether it was the Crown guarantee which cost hundreds of millions of dollars extra because the Minister of Finance did not do any supervision of Treasury and Treasury did not check whether there were increases in lending under those guarantees or whether it is Solid Energy where the Government is so hands-off that it ignored the problem until it became one of gigantic proportions. In fact the reason the Government did that was that it did not suit its election agenda. The Government received reports prior to the election showing that Solid Energy was in trouble but it pretended that was not the case because it wanted to take to the election the promise to sell State-owned enterprises including Solid Energy and did not want to acknowledge that under its term in Government it had become a dog. So the Government hid that until after the election. 
The scarcity of decent economic policy can be gauged from the number of people going to Australia the fact that incomes are flat the fact that unemployment is high and the fact that our current account deficit is amongst the worst in the world and not getting better. The fact that the Government has as its central plank of economic policy for this 3 years the sale of State-owned enterprises selling what already exists does not improve economic output one iota. The fact that that is the central part of this Government’s economic agenda for these 3 years shows how bereft of ideas it is. In the last few weeks what has it said? Oh it will look to loan-to-valuation ratios—Labour Party policy. It will look at tidying up Government procurement. It is not going nearly far enough but it is going to do something there—Labour Party policy time and again. I bet in this Budget it is going to do something about a warrant of fitness for homes—Labour Party policy. This party on the National Party side has not—[ 
Interruption 
] Sorry? 
Jan Logie 
: And a Green Party policy. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Labour and Greens. The Greens also agree that that is very sensible yes. Yes we will give some credit to the Greens for that. But the National Party—the johnny-come-latelys to those ideas the visionless party on the other side of this Chamber—has got no decent policy to lift us out of this problem. Exports are not increasing and the current account deficit is getting worse.