Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Well thank you Madam Chair. This debate as the Minister of Finance has said is one that obliges us to cast our minds back prior to the events that have dominated everything for the last couple of months in terms of the economy. The Minister has just said that we went in strong and the point that we would make is that the facts don't really back that up entirely. In fact the GDP growth of the country had slowed to 1.8 percent year on year in the December 2019 quarter. It is worth remembering that. The Government had inherited two years ago an economy that was growing rapidly over 3 percent—it had been nearly 4 percent in 2016—and there has been a sharp slow-down in growth prior to what happened with the COVID crisis.The other thing of course is he's very proud—and naturally all New Zealanders are proud—that Moody's came out this morning and said we've got the Aaa rating. That's something that New Zealanders should be proud of and it's something that is the result of the successive efforts of many Governments to keep debt at relatively low levels.I'm sure the Minister would acknowledge the work of the previous National Government which came through the period of the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes where we increased borrowing by $50 billion through that period and yet managed to turn that around in a short period of time to get our debt under control and to run Government surpluses—again with the efforts of all New Zealanders focused on careful spending and actually growing the economy.So that's the inheritance but of course what matters now is not so much what the inheritance was but it's what's the future way out. So what we had prior to COVID as a result of the policies outlined in all the financial reviews of the Government departments and all the Government decisions that were made that led to a slowing economy and the evaporation of the surplus—because the Government inherited massive surpluses when they came in two years ago and before this COVID-19 crisis hit New Zealand it was projected that we'd be back in deficit already.Before we look at today's events let's just contemplate some of the big Government policies that were the focus of Government attention. People might—it's almost sort of a funny thing to—remember KiwiBuild which was the key plank of this Government's effort prior to COVID-19. They were going to build all these 100000 houses and then they had to admit that they had failed completely in that. Then there was the infrastructure. We started off this year with $12 billion that was promised to be spent on transport infrastructure in this country which was an admission that two years into Government this Government had not actually made any progress on infrastructure because they'd come in and Phil Twyford—and Julie Anne Genter who was focused on not giving in to the car fascists"—had changed and thrown out most of the projects that the previous Government had laid down—thrown them all out put them on to the fire—to be replaced with the slow tram down Dominion Road that Phil Twyford still talks about. Two years later they realised that nothing had actually happened—that the slow tram still was on the drawing books and nobody had worked out what the purpose of it was yet—and nothing had been done to make real progress in moving people around. So two years into Government they adopted pretty much a truncated list of National's transport plans. So I would be interested to hear from the Government Minister as to why it took them two years to figure out that the National Party transport projects were the ones to follow up.And then the other big one was the Provincial Growth Fund. Again I'd be very interested to hear from the Minister as to how many jobs—new jobs; new full-time jobs—had actually been generated so far out of the nearly $2 billion allocated for the Provincial Growth Fund. Who knows what's happened to those jobs in the last month or so but prior to that just how many jobs had been created. It was very difficult to get any answers out of Shane Jones on that topic.So there's a couple of questions for the Minister first up."