Guy Nathan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Guy Nathan: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:645;Page:14131] 
NATHAN GUY (National) 
: 
 We have just heard from Mr Anderton the Minister of Agriculture. He stood up here and waved his finger around but he did not really address any of the issues in the Prime Minister’s speech today. Right now the country is suffering under a crippling drought and I want to know why that Minister has been involved with a regime where there has been no tax relief for our primary sector. That Minister has been involved in passing measures in this place that have increased compliance costs and have affected local government and the primary sector. The list goes on and on. So my hand goes out to rural New Zealand which right now is suffering a crippling drought. I was pleased to see today that there was some rainfall over New Zealand but still it will take more than a few millimetres of rain to get the sheep industry out of the dire situation it is in at the moment. 
This evening I want to address the Prime Minister’s statement made today. After 45 minutes it was still bereft of ideas. Labour is languishing behind in the polls and the Prime Minister got up and delivered what is National Party policy. The Government is turbocharging the community sector and all those voluntary groups that John Key announced last year. Then Dr Cullen said it was Tory charity but now we see the Prime Minister almost word for word adopting the National Party policy that was announced last year. 
We also heard Miss Clark talking about tax cuts in election year. We all know that Dr Cullen’s ideology is completely opposed to any reduction in tax at all. I could see Mr Scrooge sitting over there today when the Prime Minister was talking about it. He has been hoarding hard-earned taxpayers’ money. He has been sitting on a huge war chest for election year and now he is going to dish it out in 2008. When National proposed a very good tax programme in the 2005 election campaign Dr Cullen said it was unworkable unfair and unaffordable. The surplus has reduced since 2005 but now Dr Cullen is getting worked over in Cabinet and has to deliver tax cuts when he is opposed to them. 
I also want to mention why New Zealanders are leaving for Australia in their droves. Why are 77000 New Zealanders leaving to go overseas? Eight hundred a week are leaving to go to Australia. Let us talk about interest rates. When Dr Cullen came into Government interest rates were about 4.25 percent. Under Labour now interest rates are 8 percent. It is no wonder people are leaving. Interest rates have doubled under this term of the Labour Government. We all know why people are leaving to go to Australia. It is not because of the climate; it is because their wages are up by a third and they pay less tax. So under a National Government—if we are fortunate enough to get in at this election—people can expect us not to squander the economic good times and not to let people head over to Australia and not return. We will lift wages. We will get us back into the top half of the OECD—a failed promise by the Prime Minister. When she came into office she said she would get us into the top half of the OECD and we are languishing near the bottom. 
National will have a programme of realistic tax reduction and will not deliver it just in an election year. We will not hoard all that cash. We will give hard-working New Zealanders the right incentives to get ahead. There will not be more of the nanny State and more compulsion which we see from the other side. We will also lift the programme of infrastructure so we can actually release the gridlock that motorists sit in. We can actually get smarter and we have been talking about public-private partnerships to fund the shortfalls. 
Now because Labour is not doing so well in the Auckland area at the moment and Government members want to come out with more carrots we see that a $2.3 billion tunnel is planned to go through Helen Clark’s electorate. The Government will set up a quango to have a look at public-private partnerships. The Government has been opposed to this right through its term—it is in its ninth year now—and suddenly it is talking about it. That has to be the way forward to fund projects dear to my heart like Transmission Gully. 
Let us look to the future. How will we get our economy spinning and keep our people in New Zealand? Voters will have to look to a National Government to deliver that. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Tell us how you’re going to do it. 
NATHAN GUY 
: I say to Mr Cosgrove who keeps chipping in like a little rooster—and I look forward to his contribution—that under this Labour Government one in five people are leaving the education system unable to read and write. So we have poor numeracy and literacy standards in New Zealand. I look forward to hearing from Mr Cosgrove how he will address that. I will read out a quote today from the Prime Minister whom Clayton Cosgrove is very close to—or is it Mike Moore he is close to—in his leadership bid in 2009 going forward. Here is a quote from the Prime Minister’s 45-minute speech today. When talking about education she said: “We are selling ourselves short. Close to 30 percent are leaving school before they are 17 and 40 percent are failing to get level 2 of NCEA.” That says to me that the Prime Minister has had 8 years to try to address the reasons why we have poor literacy and numeracy standards in our schools. We have a tight labour market we have a skills shortage and we see children slipping through the cracks. 
Today the Prime Minister also mentioned that a major OECD report now shows the extent to which teenage participation in education is falling behind. Well I never! Labour members have had 8 years to work that out and here it is in the Prime Minister’s speech this year. Now they are going to try to do something in election year and it is too late. That says “We’ve stuffed up.” The Labour Party has stuffed it up and it is time for education standards under a National Government. Standards will be reported back to parents so they will know how their children are doing. Fundamentally it is important to get on to this issue with 5 and 7-year-olds to improve our numeracy and literacy. 
I want to talk about the Fresh Start programme for 2008 outlined in John Key’s state of the nation address in Auckland. It was very very well received. We will allow optional training for 16 and 17-year-olds outside of the traditional classroom. Under Helen Clark the Labour Party and the nanny State there is more and more compulsion. They want to see young people kept in school until the age of 18. There will be more and more compulsion under the Labour Government. We have truancy figures that show I think that 31000 pupils are currently truant in New Zealand. So if we drag them kicking and screaming back to school and tell them they have to stay until they are 18 the truancy levels will go up. When we talk to schoolteachers we hear that they do not want those ratbags in school because it will disrupt classrooms. So that went down like a cup of cold sick. 
I move on to John Key’s very very good speech. I want to talk about how well it was received particularly in my patch of Kapiti. We have a very very good programme there called Youth Quest that allows for people to be referred to it by the police. The founder is Paul Fong an ex-Army guy who has given up being a member of the police. He has put his own money into the programme because the Labour Government is not supportive of him and he has had to jump through so many bureaucratic hoops. He is turning round the lives of young boys between the ages of 16 and 18. He is taking them into the bush. They are sweating out drugs and alcohol. He is putting them on the straight and narrow in a 3-month project. He has 21 currently on his waiting list. He can take only nine at a time. These are some of the comments made in our local media. 
Mr Fong endorsed the Fresh Start programme. “The general public knows there is a problem out there and it needs to be sorted. I’m not sure that keeping kids in school until they are 18 is going to work because the ones we deal with who are the higher risk and the ones who are committing most of the crimes clearly say that the education system is not for them. As John Key specifically said it’s not about the boot camp; it’s more about the mentorship and the follow-up afterwards. I totally agree that it’s integral to any programme to have those male role models for those boys to look up to.” So there is a programme that is working in our area. 
John Key has hit the button there. We have had a heinous month of crimes in New Zealand. Helen Clark got up and said that youth crime is going down but violent crime is going up. People will turn to a National Government to sort out law and order to sort out education and to provide a good tax incentive going forward for hard-working Kiwis in order to stop them going over to Australia in their droves.