English Bill: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 30 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7610. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 Mr Speaker it would be curmudgeonly on my part to say that that was probably your worst performance as in the longest question time that I can recall you have had but those issues will be dealt with tomorrow. The Prime Minister set out yesterday his priorities for the year and the Leader of the Opposition attempted to do the same. Well it was a case of something like that movie from many years ago “ 
Honey I Shrunk the House 
”. Three months ago the much-fabled free house from the Government was three bedrooms and a lawn. By yesterday the $300000 house is one bedroom and a lift. That is how much it has shrunk by in that time. And the one that was $300000 is now $500000. That is the promise. Then the Opposition backed it up today with questions from the spokesperson on housing who I think was trying to say that the Government should agree that you can have a four-bedroom house for $480000 because someone is building them in Hobsonville. So hang on it must be able to happen because it is happening. So if it is happening why does the Government need to build 10000 of them? I mean the lack of logic about that policy is so startling I am still not sure I can be right about what she was saying today. 
But let us run through it again. Because someone is building a four-bedroom house in Hobsonville for $480000—which is now what the Opposition is promising the Government will give you a Government house for—the Government should accept that it is a good policy from the Opposition. Well actually what the Government accepts is that if you can build them now—and that is the promise—then that is not a problem. 
Why do we not just let people get on and build them rather than have the Government build them because what will happen if the Government builds them? Well a Labour-Greens Government would do what it did when it was building houses for State house tenants right? So it did not have to worry about the market. It did not have to worry about nasty developers and evil bankers. This is when the wonderful caring Labour Government was in charge. What it left at the end of 9 years of what was meant to be the most caring brilliant intellectual smart housing policy in the world was a housing estate of 69000 houses where by the admission of the Housing New Zealand Corporation one-third of them were the wrong size in the wrong place in poor condition and with no insulation—20000 houses $5 billion worth—and that was when those members were completely in charge. It was a disgrace. It was negligent it was incompetent and it was wasteful of PAYE dollars handed over at the rate of $120 per week by low-wage earners while the Labour Government blew it wasted it on the incompetent management of its own housing estate. Now Labour is saying: “Why doesn’t the Government build all the houses?” because it did such a good job of its own houses. It is pathetic incompetent and worst of all it has left the lowest-income most vulnerable New Zealanders without in many cases reasonable housing. 
Fortunately this Government will have by the middle of this year insulated every State house that the Labour Government left uninsulated with one-third of them rotting and suitable for only demolition because they were the wrong size in the wrong place and going rotten. And Labour says: “Let’s build 100000.” Maybe it will get it right. It had 70000 and it got that mostly wrong so it says: “Let’s do 100000 because we might get it right.” 
I have worked out what those members mean by high-tech Government. We have discussed in here the Greens’ principal political policy tool which is the photocopier—how to get that through the door into the Beehive to print off that money. Well I have found out that there are 3-D photocopiers and the Labour housing policy is the equivalent—the 3-D photocopier will just fix every problem in the economy by manufacturing one-bedroom apartments in high-rise blocks which are the Kiwi dream for people who thought they were voting for a three-bedroom house with a lawn but that is not what they are going to get. What it shows is the Labour Party has thought of nothing new in 5 years in Opposition—nothing at all. Its housing policy is just a worse version of the State housing policy it executed in Government. It is not new. It is just saying: “Let’s try and make the same mistakes on a larger scale.” That is all. What those members should have done was look at the advice that was given to the last Labour Government after 2 years of study by a cross-departmental agency thing which came down to the point of saying: “The Government should deal with constraints on supply. Don’t go ahead and subsidise the bad practice of councils developers land bankers and everyone else who does too well out of housing.” So we are just following the advice that the previous Government got in the middle of 2008. I recommend Labour goes back and looks at that advice because actually it is good advice. But what Labour has done is go back further. 
I listened for some new economic ideas. The Leader of the Opposition went back and he read the speech Helen Clark gave in 2001 at the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference. He said: “Let’s stop milking cows. Let’s do some high-tech stuff.” Well actually I invite him to go and visit a cowshed and see what is there these days. What it shows is a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives the New Zealand economy which is a deep refined culture of the very broad knowledge of how to turn our biological and production advantages into profitable exporting and jobs. If there is anything that is old hat it is clichés from 2001 about how New Zealanders are too dumb and are doing a whole lot of stupid things and about asking why they are not doing software. That is the sum total of Labour’s thinking in the 13 years since the knowledge wave. We know where the knowledge wave ended up—on a beach actually. The thing simply ran out because it had no credibility with anyone in the real world. 
So I would say to the Leader of the Opposition that if he wants to sound new then he should come up with something new not something from Helen Clark’s 2001 Catching the Knowledge Wave speech—cheap slogans but worse than that they show a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world has changed. The bit that did not really fit was saying: “We’ve had a global financial crisis so what I’m going to do is give the same speech as the Labour Government gave when the world economy was having the best decade it had ever had and we’re going to have the same housing policy that didn’t work then.” That is the new Labour Party. 
As one of its friends pointed out it is the only political party they know of whose health spokesperson has as their main initiative legislation that is about licensing our doctors to kill people. Would you go into a hospital run by Maryan Street? That is how shallow the thinking is. There is not one single new idea on health welfare or education which are meant to be the Labour heartland issues. It is an Opposition that does not understand how the world has changed.