Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National) (remote): Thank you Mr Speaker. This is Labour's backwards Budget". It will take New Zealanders backwards. It will take the Government books backwards. It will take our country backwards. It fails to address the underlying drivers of New Zealand's challenges and it fails to provide a pathway back to prosperity and financial security. The biggest economic challenge in New Zealand today is the cost of living crisis yet David Parker in that contribution wouldn't let the words pass his lips. Instead he presented his case for more tax and running out of material decided to talk about his complicated ideas to tinker with the Resource Management Act one day—maybe. The reality in New Zealand is stark. Prices are rising faster than they have in 30 years. Kiwis from all walks of life face rising costs for the bare essentials. Petrol groceries rent their mortgage payments—all are getting more expensive and wages are not keeping up. Prices are rising twice as fast as wages. People are working harder to stay still and many—many—are falling further and further behind.So does this Budget steer a way out of the crisis? No it does not. Contrary to Labour's insistence that inflation is just a visitor from overseas here for a short time and soon to depart in fact this Budget says in black and white that the cost of living crisis is here to stay. The Treasury notes that far from being something to simply blame Russia for inflation is in fact being "driven by strong domestic demand pushing up against constrained supply"—domestic demand. Treasury predicts that inflation will be 6.7 percent this year will persist at 5.2 percent next year and will continue outside of the target range at 3.6 percent in 2024. The cost of living crisis is here to stay. Not in decades has New Zealand seen persistent inflation of this sort. This will have a massive impact on New Zealanders who will have to get used to the corrosive impact of rapidly rising prices for all that they do. Inflation is a robber at everyone's door: savers having the purchasing power of their savings eaten away; families having to make cuts to their living standards just to make things add up. Up and down the country it is already hitting home and it's going to get worse.I visited a budget service with my colleague Simeon Brown in his electorate last week. The good men and women there say their caseload of families needing help has exploded. They now have double-income parents turning up in distress some living in their own homes now struggling to pay the mortgage. Those budget advisers fear how many more people will be entering their doors as cost pressures bite and more and more squeezed middle-income Kiwis have to roll off one fixed-term mortgage and on to a much higher interest rate. The budget advisers talked of rising rents which are up $50 a week in the past year alone; of more and more people being forced out into temporary and transitional accommodation as the State house waiting list soars to the highest on record with 27000 New Zealanders now without a suitable home; and of parents trying to raise their kids in emergency motel accommodation paying hundreds on petrol to get those kids to school so far from their temporary home.New Zealand communities are in a cost of living crisis and what they wanted from this Budget was hope. They wanted a credible pathway out and they wanted reassurance that while the world is in some turmoil they can rely on the New Zealand Government to be careful to be disciplined to be prudent. Instead what did the Minister of Finance offer them? He has responded with the biggest Budget spend-up in New Zealand history. It's worth me stepping through just how big the spending is because we knew it would be the biggest ever at $6 billion but what we didn't expect was the add-ons. You see not content with the spending he'd set aside for himself what the Minister of Finance did was dip into next year's kitty too—that's right. He's added climate change spending COVID spending—a last-minute panic-driven poorly thought-through band-aid payment too—and then he wanted more. These Estimates show he has raided next year's operating allowance and allocated that—$2 billion worth of raiding in fact—and not content with that he's raided 2024's operating allowance as well allocating $400 million from that year's kitty too. Never mind there's the small matter of an election between now and then.So all up the Minister of Finance ended up allocating $9.5 billion a year utterly blowing the $6 billion out of the water. In a time of record high inflation the Labour Government decided to put the money hose on full blast. It's alarming. The Budget documents suggest that the Government's own officials are alarmed too because unlike the members opposite they know there isn't a magic money tree at the bottom of the garden to pay for all of this. This is what the Treasury officials have to say about the raiding of next year's kitty. They say the Government will have $2.5 billion available to meet all other cost pressures and initiatives in next year's Budget but with the possibility of higher than normal cost pressures because of the persistent inflation it may be challenging to meet those costs. So what next? Well the Government could reprioritise existing services—we know how allergic they are to that—they could increase tax or they could increase debt. So what we know is that this Budget puts New Zealand books even further into debt because not content with delaying surplus until 2025 it may now be pushed out further with debt soaring even higher than 40 percent of GDP. So much for leaving a buffer for a rainy day.Inflation and big government spending has big consequences for New Zealanders—just ask anyone with a mortgage. The Reserve Bank has already begun its miserable yet necessary work of hiking interest rates. Mortgage rates have risen eye-wateringly fast. Never before has the Reserve Bank had to hike the official cash rate by 50 basis points twice in a row but that's the new reality. In their Monetary Policy Statement last week the bank described "very high levels of Government spending" and the Reserve Bank Governor acknowledged the upward pressure this spending places on inflation. We are going to see more New Zealand mortgage-holders in financial stress. We are going to see thousands of dollars extracted from household budgets and paid to the bank. We are going to see more and more New Zealanders feeling the cost of living crisis knocking at their door and while the Reserve Bank has its foot on the brake Labour has its foot on the accelerator. It's spraying that money hose around and it's spending more and more. What we needed to see in this Budget was a plan to deal with the structural drivers of inflation to stop adding costs and instead the first move was to lay the architecture for more costs in the form of a jobs tax. That was the bill the Minister of Finance decided to introduce under urgency. We needed to see a plan to unblock bottlenecks by sorting out the mess in immigration. But no no that has not been presented. We needed to see a plan to bring discipline to Government spending to quit prioritising lavish expenditure on projects New Zealanders have not asked for and do not want: hundreds of millions on the Three Waters Review confiscating local government assets; hundreds of millions restructuring the health system even in the wake of a global pandemic with a fatigued health workforce; and hundreds of millions merging Radio New Zealand and TVNZ to solve a problem no one even knows exists.What this Budget fails to do is to get more delivery and value out of existing programmes of expenditure like the $1.9 billion on mental health that failed to deliver one single extra specialist service and to stop the waste—Mr Speaker forgive me I'm remote and so I don't know where I'm at on my timing. Do I have—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): 10 seconds.NICOLA WILLIS: 10 seconds. So what New Zealanders needed to see in this Budget was a plan that would take them forwards and out of the cost of living crisis. Instead they were presented with a Budget that takes New Zealand backwards. New Zealanders deserve better."