SpeechMATT KING (National—Northland): Oh it's a pleasure to speak on the Rebuilding Together Budget. I call it the borrow and hope with no plan Budget". They're going to borrow eye-watering amounts of money—eye-watering amounts: $50 billion to $100 billion worth of debt. That is serious debt. Now to borrow that kind of money they're actually going to print money. This is what they're doing. The Reserve Bank is buying the debt of the Government. So this is called quantitative easing in other parts of the world and it has never been done in the history of our country—it's never been done. Even during the depths of the global financial crisis we did not engage in quantitative easing but this is what this Government is doing. If you continue on that path we're going to be like Zimbabwe—inflation through the roof. So we all agree—[Interruption] You laugh. That's exactly what we're doing—we're printing money. That is exactly—the Greens laugh. They probably don't understand about that but they actually called for that a couple of terms ago—they called for this money printing—and it was boo-hooed by the rest of the parliamentary colleagues then. But that's what we're doing now.So I'll give them credit—I'll give the Government a bit of credit. They have done a good job of fighting the health crisis I'll give you that—in part. They shut the castle but they left the drawbridge down and the gates open. So there was no Trojan horse needed because the virus just came in through the border. Now I remember in the early stages of lockdown you walked around the streets—and you see pictures of the streets like an Armageddon movie: no one around—and it was it was eerie in fact. But at the same time that that was happening travellers were coming in through our borders and they were not locked down. They were given a brochure or a pamphlet and told to self-quarantine or self-isolate. What a joke. Someone coming here as a tourist is not going to go and spend a couple of weeks in a motel in self-quarantine. They're not going to do that. They're the highest-risk people those travellers and this is what this Government expected. So no quarantining and no testing—what a no-brainer. Why was that happening? I questioned that. I put a post up on Facebook. I could not believe that they were not even testing at the border and they were not even quarantining. So we've got these impregnable borders of sea and they were just letting them in. Go hard and early—that's another myth. You say it often enough; it doesn't become true. They did not go hard and early. A little bit like the nine years of neglect: they say it often enough; doesn't make it true. So the reason I can describe why they weren't going hard and early was because days before we locked down the Pasifika Festival was going to be held and the Christchurch memorial ceremonies were going to be held and they were only put off at the last minute. So we were not going hard and early.The Prime Minister said if we did nothing we were going to have 80000 deaths—80000 deaths is what they scared the hell out of us with. That modelling has been thoroughly discredited. We were never going to have 80000 deaths. But you know to be fair we were going to suffer some deaths and the actions of locking down we agreed with and we supported that that we had to do that. But you know what? They didn't even have enough personal protective equipment. We had private individuals chartering planes to bring it in. In the early days we had 10s and 20s for tests in a day. I can remember them standing up and saying "We've tested a dozen people today." I mean that was incredible. Even my daughter she got really sick and had all the symptoms of COVID-19—the sickest I've actually ever seen her. I was very worried about her. She went along and tried to get a test. She had all the symptoms of COVID-19 and that was denied. They said "Nah you haven't been overseas. We're not going to give you a test." You know what? Australia shut their economy down but they didn't shut it down to the extent we did. They've still carried on. Construction's still carried on. You can still get a haircut. You can still get takeaways. And you know what? Their results are remarkably the same. The same death rates the same recovery rates as ours—remarkably similar. But the Government don't like to talk about that. I can remember also some of the decisions that were made about not having greengrocers and butchers open yet in my town of Kaikohe we had five dairies open with people coming and going and two supermarkets but the greengrocer and the butcher couldn't open. I mean these decisions were like incredible. But that just shows me that this Government has no business nous and I can see it when I look across the House there. There's only a handful of them that have ever run a business before so they don't know that the pain is palpable. People are suffering out there. It is painful.We acknowledge that austerity doesn't work but we've got to get back to business and I've being calling it all along—we've got to get back to level 1 get back to business and try and save some jobs and save some businesses. A "borrow and hope Budget"—they've got no plan."