Hughes Gareth: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 31 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11508. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I remember my first Budget day in this place. It was about 6 years ago and I was staggered as the parliamentary messengers rolled in boxes and boxes of official Budget documentation. It probably sat in the corner of the office for about a year. A few years later they turned up and—I guess they were a bit more innovative—they brought in memory sticks for all the Budget documents and in 2016 all the documents were finally delivered to us online. So I guess Parliament has probably saved a small forest of trees which is good but the question I would like to ask in this contribution in the Budget debate is: does the Budget see the forest for the trees? Even though we have got this huge deluge of information and screeds and screeds of papers and forecasts and reports and models it still treats people communities and the environment as if they do not count.The problem is that the Budget and our complex economy is simplified into a few narrow measures like operating surplus much like how our national success is measured primarily through GDP. It is kind of like a doctor measuring the health of their patient simply by looking at the contents of their wallet. This Budget measures gross domestic product but it ignores quality of life. The Budget forecasts a carbon price but it ignores the price of carbon pollution. The health budget focuses more on sickness than on actual wellness or health. National’s Budget is full of numbers but you cannot measure the cost of the Government’s decisions. John Key is liberal when it comes to funding flags but conservative when it comes to funding conservation and tragically a species like the Māui’s dolphin gets given zero cost when it comes to accounting in the Budget. It counts the number of people in work but ignores the quality of the work and the personal satisfaction of the workers or their precarious insecurity.It is a world that simply exists only on paper. It ignores the real world where a child in Whangarei is unable to get the special support they need to do well in school a family in Canterbury avoids swimming in their favourite river because they are scared of their kids getting sick if they put their heads under water or a mother in South Auckland tucks her kids into bed at night in the back of a car. The Budget is the headline act of the year’s political theatre and it is a classic case of reporting the cost of everything but knowing the value of nothing.I agree with the pundits that it was a boring Budget. It was a political Budget to set up tax cuts for next year; it was a short-term Budget that advocates responsibility to future generations of political leaders; and I would agree that it was obscene that this Government spent an extra half a billion dollars on the military and the spies and not a single State house is going to get built as a result. It was farcical that this was pitched as an innovation Budget when we see real-term cuts to tertiary education and it is idiotic to be spending money on cleaning up polluted waterways at the same time as you are spending more money subsidising to pollute them.There is an alternative though—one that treats people communities and the environment as if they counted. The Green Party has been leading the charge for decades on genuine progress indicators; measuring the whole not just a few narrow subsets—measuring what is important. The example I like to give is that once upon a time this was one of the richest countries in the world. We had full employment free education and a caring State. We did not leave people begging on the streets or sleeping in cars. Now Kiwis work some of the longest hours for some of the lowest wages and pay some of the highest costs of living in the developed world. We see a whole generation locked out of homeownership but these failures are ignored as long as GDP goes up by a few percent.They say that you cannot manage what you do not measure and until we start to measure the things that are important like the quality of life like communities and like swimmable rivers we are going to continue to encourage smoke-and-mirrors Budgets—moving money around to achieve a few narrow objectives.A Green Budget would be a Budget for all. I have a vision that we can care about having a richer New Zealand not just a wealthier 1 percent and today in the hall next door we saw the beginnings of it. We saw history in the making and a new Government in the making when Andrew Little Annette King Metiria Turei and James Shaw agreed to commit to working together to change the Government. Next year we can see a new Government govern in the national interest not just in the National Party’s interest. There is a new Government-in-waiting ready to deliver good jobs share the economic gains with everyone and not just National’s corporate mates and invest in people and education—a Government with values not prepared for kids to go hungry at school or for families to sleep in garages. With New Zealanders’ support National’s eighth Budget could well be its last.