Hughes Gareth: Imprest Supply DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Imprest Supply Debate[Sitting date: 06 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12398. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Third ReadingGARETH HUGHES (Green):Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker.Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. I understand that Parliamentary Service is currently investigating the future of the Parliament TV broadcast. I mean one idea is that we could have a worm or some sort of vote ticker. I think you would have seen that go backwards very very fast after that contribution from the member Tau Henare. I think what the public of New Zealandheard there was a whole bunch of partisan politics petty point-scoring and personal attacks. I do not think the Kiwis want to hear that when we are talking about the economy. They want to hear about ideas and a vision. They want to have a sense that we are going forward not this petty personal politics of the member. I think it has lost him a whole bunch of votes. So there is one idea to kick off this debate this morning.I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2013/14 Estimates) Bill and the second reading of the Imprest Supply (Second for 2013/14) Bill. Obviously it is a tremendously important debate to our country and to our Parliament. We are talking about the nature of the Budget a significant tool that the Government and the country use as part of our economic future. Right now you can read in all the papers and you can see in the international media the economic challenges New Zealand faces today. When you look at the issue of contaminated whey products and other dairy-based products and the $13 billion worth of our dairy exports around the world we have got to be paying attention. Obviously we need to be doing the basics first which is protecting the health and safety of and providing good information to New Zealand and domestic consumers. But I think it does put in stark relief the risks to brand New Zealand to “100% Pure New Zealand” which obviously the Chinese media has very strongly critiqued and of course the economic dependency that New Zealand has on this one industry. In this debate I want to touch on some of those broad-based economic issues facing us that you can see consistently through the Fonterra dairy dependency we have in New Zealand.In this debate I want to touch on three things. The first is the Green Party’s vision for our economy our plan for the New Zealand economy which is to deliver a smart Green economy lift our kids out of poverty and clean up our waterways and our environments. We can have all three of those things. Secondly I want to touch on the range of Green Party contributions to show the broad brush of positive contributions the Greens have brought to this particular debate and to look at two areas that I am passionate about which are seeing cleaner smarter cheaper energy for New Zealanders and a thriving information and communications technology sector.It is pretty good to be standing here this week after that 5 percent rise for the Green Party in the poll we saw over the weekend. It is pretty good to be standing here because we are an optimistic party. We are a positive party. We are not playing those petty partisan point-scoring political games. We are getting on with proposing plans. We are out there proposing plans that are resonating with New Zealanders. We are offering them trust which I think is in some decline when you look at the Government benches. We are offering real solutions. We are not playing games. This is important. This is the future of New Zealanders. It is about jobs. It is about the quality of life. It is about the standard of living. It is about whether Kiwi kids have shoes and jackets to go to school in. It is about whether you can actually swim in a waterway. If you look at the latest data you just cannot have that iconic Kiwi experience of being able to go for a swim in a New Zealand stream or creek in many of our rivers and streams and that is wrong. It goes against our core Kiwi values. So it is important that we address these issues.We have got some significant structural economic challenges facing our country. It is more than just the surplus which is how the Government has been putting this economic debate. What we have seen is a decline in economic competitiveness relative to other nations. We have seen growing debt and growing numbers of Kiwis out of work. Over the last 60 years we have seen New Zealand steadily decline down those OECD rankings. And we are not seeing the solutions. We are running as fast as we can just to keep up and to stay where we are but still we keep slipping backwards. We work some of the longest hours in the OECD yet we are still slipping backwards vis-à-vis other countries. Sure you can point to Australia as the Government benches are doing but there the Australian Government has actually woken up to the fact that the miningboom is over. The plan to have just an extracted commodity - based economy supplying China is not a winner for Australia and that is why it is trying to diversify away from it.It is an important debate because we are talking about real issues like the structural health of our economy and the future of New Zealanders. We have got real solutions to those challenges. When you look at the sectors we should be supporting we want to see a thriving information and communications technology sector. We believe that we have got a huge opportunity in clean energy. That is what the experts say. When you look around the world net international capital investment outstripped all the investment in fossil fuels and nuclear generation. For electricity generation it went into renewables—things like hydro solar and wind. This is where we have got a niche. It is a $23 billion opportunity according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is about exporting clean energy and exporting information and communications technology. It is about being a niche in cleantech. This is where we should be looking. It is what the late Professor Paul Callaghan was talking about. New Zealand needs to focus on its strengths and its niches.Instead what we see is this extracted commodities - based vision from the Government which is all about digging more holes for coal and mining which fewer and fewer people are investing in and wanting to buy internationally and trying to cram more cows on to our paddocks with all the risks we have seen so starkly this week. While we are talking about addressing some of these challenges we need to be looking at that massive current account deficit but we also have to be addressing the environmental deficit which has been growing more and more under the National Government and we need to be approaching the social deficit. What I heard from Jan Logie was that the top 5 percent of New Zealanders own 50 percent of the wealth in our country. We are not seeing ordinary Kiwis getting ahead. National is not working for ordinary New Zealanders.When you look across all the Green contributions in this debate I think you have seen a very strong argument a positive argument from the Green Party. Dr Russel Norman talked about his plan to structurally balance the economy through things like a comprehensive tax on capital gains excluding the family home; broadening the legislative mandate of the Reserve Bank to try to keep that Kiwi dollar under control supporting Kiwi exporters in the productive economy; and then you see the capital market reform including supporting Kiwibank. You see some good contributions there. Kevin Hague talked about health and how we should be planning for the future not just for the short-term plan that Mr Ryall has. Catherine Delahunty talked about the priorities that the Government has got wrong in education and its wasting those precious education dollars on ideologically driven policy. Metiria Turei talked about child poverty and the Greens’ package of solutions from the in-work tax credit through to better housing for Kiwi kids currently growing up in poverty. We know there are more than 200000 of them. Ken Graham talked about the Greens’ plan for global sustainability. We saw Eugenie Sage talking about the Greens’ plan for “100% Pure New Zealand” actually paying lip-service not making it this marketing slogan that is being drawn in the international media and being called “a festering sore” by the State-run Chinese media. It is about that Kiwi value of being able to go for a swim in your stream or river.Dave Clendon talked about the Greens’ prioritisation of spending in the justice system. Holly Walker talked about the Greens’ solutions for housing in terms of building more State houses in terms of supporting Kiwis into ownership and thirdly about making sure those rental properties across the country—and I have seen many of these cold damp unhealthy rental properties—are healthy and are safe. What we need is a minimum standard for our rental houses. Steffan Browning talked about thebiosecurity risks facing our agricultural sector. I talked about our vision for cleaner cheaper smarter energy in New Zealand. Julie Anne Genter talked about the Greens’ plan to dig some holes. The Government always says that the Greens are against digging holes as if digging holes is a bad thing. Actually there are a few holes we would like to dig. One of them is in central Auckland down in the central business district. We want to build a central business district rail loop to transform the Auckland public transport network to empower the Auckland central business district and to transform our biggest city’s economy. We have canvassed a range of positive solutions.In terms of information and communications technology we had massive growth there but the Government is not taking advantage of the potential. It is delaying things like the copyright review which would empower and drive economic development. It is doing things like making rules for Chorus. All New Zealanders will be paying for the subsidies on its copper-based prices. We need a second internet cable because although there is some good investment from the Government in ultra-fast broadband what we risk is having an ultra-fast intranet. We need to have more international connections so that Kiwis can work in New Zealand. Under National what we see is that the main export of New Zealand is skilled Kiwis. What we need to do is have a richer New Zealand with a positive plan going forward and with kids out of poverty. We need a safer cleaner New Zealand where entrepreneurs and Kiwis want to come back to New Zealand where Kiwis can do their work in smart high-tech niches as Professor Callaghan was urging us to do where Kiwis want to move back to New Zealand but can still participate in the global economy and the global culture. This is the Greens’ plan for the economy. It is a smarter economy that focuses on our strengths. It is a cleaner economy so we can have quality of life for New Zealanders and that valuable “100% Pure New Zealand” brand.Ultimately we are not playing those partisan politics games that you have heard in this debate from the other parties. What we are doing is putting forward a positive vision and when you look at the polls it is resonating with New Zealanders. Thank you. Kia ora.