Dunne Peter: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDunne Peter: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 28 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15548. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future): I commend my colleague the Hon John Banks for his candour for his courage and for his plain speaking in the House this afternoon. It is a timely reminder to all of us as this parliamentary year starts about why we are here. Whatever our political perspective or our philosophies my colleague’s speech has reminded us that ultimately the challenge all of us face and the responsibility we accept is to try to do good for our fellow New Zealanders through our service in this House to make sure that every child gets the best start in life and that it is more than just a slogan to make sure that families are valued as the cornerstone of our society and to make sure that from good strong families vibrant communities grow. They will be diverse. They will be different. While we hold amongst our differences the collective view that that is what we are about our responsibility is to focus on the issues and to make sure that we make the best fist of what we have got in order to achieve those goals for the people we represent.And it is in that vein that I welcome our two new members who were sworn in today. I congratulate them on their election to this Parliament I wish them well for the time they are here and I look forward to the contribution they will make. If I can offer one word of advice it is that when I first became a member of Parliament many years ago an elderly predecessor in my seat the Rt Hon Sir John Marshall befriended me and gave me the advice that when you work on your maiden speech do it from the perspective that every few years it is worth re-reading again to see whether you still hold true to the values you expressed in that speech. And use that opportunity not just to tell the electorate at large about you and what you stand for but to anchor your philosophy for the time you will be a member of Parliament. So I wish both those colleagues well.Let me turn to the Prime Minister’s statement and say how delighted I was both at the announcement late last year and the reaffirmation in the statement today that the Transmission Gully motorway north of Wellington is to proceed this year. That has been a critical part of the confidence and supply agreement between United Future and National it has been part of the Wellington agenda since about 1939 to have a coherent northern access and egress constructed as an alternative to what was then the goat track of Ngauranga Gorge and it has been something that Wellingtonians for generations have held out there as some mystical thing that might one day appear all the time having the sinking feeling in their stomachs that it will never happen. That yin and yang if you like of hope and missed opportunity was given a very confident stamp of approval by the Prime Minister before Christmas and the people of the Wellington region look forward with confidence to the commencement of work on this long-overdue project during this year and will be casting their eyes very widely at other political parties to see what their intentions are with regard to its continuation and its development and its completion within the time frame that has been set out.As recent events—as recent as last Monday—showed in this region we are vulnerable to a major seismic event and in that eventuality our ability to get in and out of this place with any form of efficiency or rapidity will be severely compromised by the lack of an alternative to the existing access and egress points so it is a vital part of our safety and our transport network and it will be very much welcomed by the people of this region.Over the last few days the political debate for 2014 has started to take shape around the issue of what is the best way of delivering what looks like being a period of Government surplus to the benefit of the families of New Zealand. I am not going to play politics with some of the solutions that have been proposed because I think there ismerit in all of them but there are also fish-hooks in all of them as well. The critical point is this: the Government already spends billions of dollars in assistance and support in various forms for the families of New Zealand. The Working for Families tax credit scheme is the obvious example. The changes made to personal tax rates particularly the bottom two steps in recent years is another. We have paid parental leave. We have various other forms of assistance. If one was to tally up the quantum one would see that it is a very large figure but the questions that the current debate gives rise to are whether these entitlements are properly and efficiently structured whether there are too many anomalies and uncertainties that will be perpetuated by the types of changes now being proposed and whether there are alternatives for the delivery of the goal which I do not think there is any great disagreement about seeking to achieve.I note interestingly enough that in Mr Cunliffe’s statement yesterday he positioned his policy around the figure of a household income of $150000 per annum. Yet there is already legislation before this House the Taxation (Income-sharing Tax Credit) Bill that allows households with a joint income of up to $140000 to split their income for tax purposes. The principal argument that has been raised against that has been that the benefit is delivered to those too far up the income scale—those earning up to $140000 as a household income. But now it seems acceptable to pay $60 per child a week to families earning up to $150000. I think that highlights some of the dichotomy that I am speaking about. It would seem to me that a far more logical approach which would be not only more efficient in its distribution but actually less costly long term would be to proceed with the income-sharing legislation to restructure the Working for Families tax credits so that the principal benefit was delivered to families who fall below about the $70000 household income mark who are those who would currently benefit least from a change to income sharing. We could then use the additional finance that would be saved by that move to extend paid parental leave certainly to 26 weeks and beyond that ultimately to 52 weeks. We could then look at moving out from there to take some of the antenatal moves that were announced by the Labour Party yesterday as being in its policy extend those and more coherently fund them. And then we could look also at the issue of both the provision of medicines and also early childhood education. We could then put together an overall integrated package using to maximum impact the totality of the funding currently available and getting around the situation that we have at the moment and its inevitable consequence of a targeted approach if you like.But if we take the Labour Party example as just one example of this problem we see that at up to $150000 you are OK but at $150001 you fall off the cliff. I am not blaming the Labour Party particularly for that but it is always that issue when you come to drawing the line. I think that what we have with the measures that Labour proposed yesterday with the measures that were in the Prime Minister’s state of the nation speech last week about education and with some of the measures that the Greens proposed at the weekend—although I think they were largely in our policy 3 years ago—is that if we put them altogether we have the capacity utilising the finance that is available to bring out a coherent rational workable scheme that benefits those whom we seek to assist and there does not seem to be too much disagreement about who those audiences are but which also removes a number of the boundary traps the poverty traps or even those effective high marginal tax rates that cut in when some of these changes occur. So I hope that the debate this year is not about my auction versus your auction or my bribe versus your bribe but about using the totality of measures that have been proposed to bring forward a constructive proposition from which all New Zealand families will benefit in the future and that the timely reminder given to the House by my colleague the member for Epsom just a few moments ago is one that stays in our mindsthroughout the year and is one we all seek to do our very best to deliver upon alleviating the conditions that that member so eloquently described.I say to members in conclusion that it is great to be back this year. I hope that everyone enjoys the challenges of the year that lie ahead and may they all get the desserts that they deserve come a certain event later in the year.