Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of ACT to contribute to this Budget Policy Statement and I have to tell you Madam Speaker as a short musical interlude while I was listening to the previous speaker I was thinking of the great Kiwi band The Feelers and their contribution Space Cadet": Space cadet or space boyOne and the sameSand castle or sand toyThey're all just games.Now I can't think why I might've thought of the song "Space Cadet" while listening to Julie Anne Genter speak. I guess it's just one of those mysteries. But it is worth having a discussion about this bold Budget Policy Statement. This is how the Government sets out its intentions around what its Budget will look like. And it's one of the things in the Public Finance Act that I think is worthwhile—that the Government actually has to say what its intentions are. But what's interesting is that this Government made its own changes. It said it would bring in Wellbeing Budgets. So before we get to the money or the economy or to the fact that people are finding it pretty hard to make ends meet with too much week left at the end of the money we get to talk about this wellbeing stuff that the Labour Party so importantly put into the Budget. And one of the things that they said was that they would not just consider GDP; they'd consider all measures until they got obsessed with just one measure which was COVID-19 and everyone else's wellbeing be damned. And there's some interesting things in the document I'm holding here. The survey showed a growing polarisation regarding trust in the Government between 2020 and 2022 with an increasing number of people having either very low or very high levels of trust and a roughly corresponding decrease in those with moderate levels of distrust. Well this Government talks about wellbeing and talks about social cohesion but it's now measuring its own policies and its one-size-fits-all imposition running roughshod over people's lives has actually led to a lot of people distrusting the Government. And their daily podium announcements have created a cult of personality that is not good for our democracy. And the Labour Party know that's true because they have dumped their leader and their new leader is doing everything he can to distance himself from the Ardern era of the Labour Party on a daily basis dumping policies. We even saw a Minister go overboard today.But there is a very important point here—the way the Government acted through COVID-19: one-size-fits-all close the border leak information on pregnant women sheltering with the Taliban refusing to apologise stop paying home carers if they're not vaccinated even though there's no public health effect as they're staying in the home anyway. All that this Government did was so divisive and it's showing up in their Wellbeing Budget. It also gives a series of wellbeing objectives. It says that there should be a just transition supporting New Zealand's transition to a climate-resilient sustainable and low-emissions economy. How has that gone? Well first of all climate emissions have flat-lined under this Government. So that's a fail. But what about adaptation? What about preparing for the extremes of weather that come with climate change? Well that is clearly a fail. We need to invest more in constructive policies to adapt to climate change and that's why ACT's been saying for years that half the GST on construction should be shared with the local councils to pay for the infrastructure. Brooke van Velden's got a bill before the House to be debated on that and just today from the Taxpayers' Union Curia poll we see that 70 percent of New Zealanders think it's a good idea to share half the GST on construction with the local council to get that resilience going. So the Government has failed in its stated objective. ACT has the ideas that could help get us there.Number two is physical and mental wellbeing supporting improved health outcomes for all New Zealanders. I mean this would be quite funny if it wasn't so serious. This is a Government where 52 percent of people in MidCentral wait more than six hours to get into A & E. Now this is a Government that actually stopped publishing the figures on mental health. This is a Government where mental health has never been worse in part because of their COVID response and their incompetence at organising anything. This is a Government that tried to blow up the healthcare system and restructure it in the middle of a supposedly one-in-100-year health crisis. I mean they are failing in physical and mental wellbeing—that's their second go. The future of work—now this is quite amusing. It talks about equipping New Zealanders and enabling New Zealander businesses to benefit from new technologies and lift productivity and wages through innovation. First of all productivity has been flat-lined but second you've got fair pay agreements you've got the war on immigration and you've got extra regulations and employment law other than fair pay agreements. You've got endless bureaucracy and compliance costs and uncertainty along with record inflation and rising interest rates and none of these things are helping productivity or equipping New Zealand firms. What would help would be to adopt ACT's immigration policy and accept we're a nation of immigrants and Kiwi firms won't compete with their competitors around the world successfully when a business in say Denver Colorado can access 340 million American workers and a New Zealand firm in Christchurch can access 5 million workers unless we are open to immigration.It then goes on to talk about lifting Māori and Pacific people's incomes skills and opportunities including though access to affordable safe and stable housing. Well the way this Government approached COVID with its monetary policy with its shutting the border with its shutting down construction shutting down manufacturing housing has never been further out of reach of the poorest New Zealanders. We saw record rents today. It's gone up 175 bucks from 400 to 575. That's the median rent under Labour according to TradeMe.They've also said they're going to make housing more affordable. We've never had housing more unaffordable first through high values and now we've got high mortgage rates as well. And so who is at the bottom of that pile and who is most disadvantaged? Well I'm sorry to say that it's a statistical truth—it's Māori and Pacific New Zealanders. So they've failed at that. Then here's Jacinda Ardern's signature—child wellbeing; reducing child poverty. Well there's some good news there. Five years of Jacinda Ardern and child poverty went from about 13 percent to about 12 percent roughly. We're talking about material hardship—kids that don't have the shoes and the food to get up and go to school with a good school bag and a packed lunch and a warm jacket to put on. That's what material hardship's about measuring. It's moved slightly so in the farewell to Jacinda Ardern there was a slight improvement but nothing like the transformation that this Labour Government promised. So this Budget by its own measures has already failed. The wellbeing objectives this Government set have all failed and yet it is ACT that has the ideas to fund the building of infrastructure to get the homes built to get education that is local and run by communities for communities like charter schools that get kids to actually want to attend and go along and hold the schools accountable for doing it. It's the ACT Party that has the initiative. It's Karen Chhour who has the initiative—a bill in this House to remove section 7AA so we say a kid's physical and mental safety is more important than the Treaty of Waitangi. To that kid at that stage of life? Absolutely and it's the ACT Party that is taking the initiative ironically to achieve Labour's Budget goals better than them.And then we get to the money. This is a Budget that is not just about wellbeing. One of the things that helps with wellbeing is actually being able to afford to pay your bills. And hasn't it been a revelation in the last week when we have seen from Grant Robertson that he has been at the very least a little bit economical with the truth. I wish he was economical with Government spending but he's been economical with the truth because he's been saying for a long time that wages are keeping up with inflation. In fact he's been saying wages are ahead of inflation. And I thought that'll be really good for the pensioners and the superannuitants for the beneficiaries and for the people on student allowances because the amount of money they get is indexed to the average wage. So they are going to be looked after just fine and then—uh oh!—the Government is going to index pensions and benefits to inflation. Why? Because average wages haven't kept up with inflation. So in that one move the Government has admitted that wages aren't keeping up with inflation. So they've been telling porkies and the next thing they've done is they've said "Well superannuitants beneficiaries people on student allowances they'll be looked after. Their income will keep up with inflation." But those people who work hard every day wake up make the kids' lunches and get them off to school go into work slam an instant coffee stare at the screen and get through the day before picking up their kids to go home and do it all again every day day after day after day—those are the people whose wages after tax are falling behind inflation. And unlike people that get their money from the Government those people who work for their money are paying more tax and they've got less left at the end of the week because this is a Government that has a massive spending problem and thinks it can buy its way to another election. It's created massive inflation along the way and it has failed its own wellbeing targets before you start to talk about money. This is a Government that has discovered the great problem with socialism—they're running out of other people's money they've run out of ideas and this October it's important that they run out of power so that ACT and our friends in National can fix this country and realise that Kiwi Dream again."