O'Connor Damien: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 30 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10593. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): There were three points in the speech that has just been made by the Minister Amy Adams. There are two points of agreement and one of clarification. Firstly she said that every day the difference between the parties on that side and this side becomes clearer and I say “Thank God for that.” New Zealanders are not that stupid. They know that that side has delivered empty promises of 170000 new jobs and promises of prosperity—for whom?The second thing—and I will agree with her—is that the Government thinks that it will reach surplus in 2014-15. That may be the case but the question is for whom. It will not be for the average Kiwi I can tell you that but for your greedy wealthy mates—Mr Assistant Speaker not yours but National’s. The third point is the outrageous exaggeration that we would have incurred $100 billion in debt for this country.Bill English admitted in the House today that the National Government will incur a debt of $61 billion for this country—$61 billion—under his current plan. The previous speaker Amy Adams also made great claims about how the Government had rebalanced and done great things for the productive sector and what the Resource Management Act is going to do. I will quote Business and Economic Research Ltd: “Growth in the non-tradeable or inward-facing side of the economy has outstripped the tradeable sector which has not really grown at all over the past four years.” Those are the facts. The National Government—the wonderful champion of the farming and productive sectors—has done absolutely nothing to assist with their growth and development. Those facts speak for themselves. The tradable sector is the sector that Bill English said when he came in in 2009 he was going to rebalance the economy to benefit and in fact in 2010—I think a colleague in the House today said—he mentioned rebalancing so many times in his Budget speech. He does not mention it now because the only rebalancing that is being done under the National Government is to tip the table in favour of all those people who have wealth and who have privilege. It is not even possible for the crumbs to fall up the table to those poor people who do not have any capital. It has not just been hands-off; it has been hands-on in favour of the wealthy. This Budget does absolutely nothing to rebalance the economy either in favour of the tradable sector or in a way that helps the average hard-working Kiwi.We have a two-speed economy. We have an economy for the haves and another economy for the have-nots. We have had tax cuts for the rich from the first Budget of the National Government and we had GST imposed on the poor. On every single thing they spend money on they have paid more GST and more tax. The wealthy on the other hand can siphon off money into areas where GST is not incurred—that one single advantage. We have had increased opportunities for people importing into this country under the high dollar and we have had increasing barriers and hurdles and challenges for anyone exporting. Where Mr English is the help for the tradable sector in that area? We have had increasing profits for home speculators and decreasing opportunities for the average New Zealander to buy a home. Well we had in the last Budget some token movement the Government says in favour of those people struggling to buy a home. We know that it simply will not work. You need to build houses on the ground not simply make it harder for people coming in at the bottom end to buy a house. That is what the Government has done with the new deposit ratios.The National Party says it has plans. In fact the previous speaker Amy Adams said a wonderful thing about spending on infrastructure. Well there are roading plans for projects of National Party significance but they are all around the cities not out in the rural areas and we had no further funding in that area from this Budget. Ask the regional council chairs and the mayors in the South Island what they think about the current system of allocating funding for roading. They are being squeezed. They know that the productive areas of Southland out on the West Coast and in Canterbury are not getting the funding for roading that they should do.We have got in education a determination by a pig-headed Government to put in place National Party standards. Well the Government sold it very quietly as “national standards” but they are National Party standards. The parents out there who think that kindly thought that they are getting some equal opportunity to measure their child against someone from another island or another school or whatever north to south eastto west have simply been hoodwinked once again. We have seen recently—and there are delays I understand in publishing the first outcomes of the National Party standards in education—what we call “moderation”e-asTTle and now a new PaCT tool. If you talk to principals in your electorate—andthere might be a few over there who do—they are horrified with the manipulation of the National Party standards in education which will undermine the goodwill the high quality and the commitment in education that have driven our system to be one of the best in the world. It is stupidity.We need a Government with a plan. What we have got at the moment is a Minister of Finance and a Prime Minister who think they are steering the economy in the right direction. Well the analogy I use is of putting someone in a trolley cart at the top of a hill—we put them up there with zero Government debt—giving them the ropes and letting gravity take the trolley downhill. Mr English thinks that steering around the corners is achieving the goal. The fact is that we need a Government that drives the economy not just steers it. That is what Labour will do. In driving an economy we will be utilising more technology than a trolley cart not relying solely on gravity to take us forward and not thinking that just steering around the corners is going to deliver the benefits to this country into the future. We need someone driving—someone who can brake can accelerate can overcome the hurdles can compensate for the inevitable challenges that are thrown up in front of this country in an economic sense. But Bill English thinks that the market and gravity will take this country to where it needs to go. It will not. That is why we have a plan. The National Party has never had a plan. It relies on the market and it relies on its mates to deliver it the best outcomes. The only thing the National Government has done for the tradable sector or the trading sector is increase the turnover on the New Zealand Exchange by allowing firstly Fonterra units and by then putting our assets on to the New Zealand Exchange so that traders can make a small profit and a small fortune.The tradable sector that needs help is the farmers out there. What did this Budget do for them? Well in biosecurity we saw a cut of $6 million to front-line services. People have not picked up on this yet but they will because in the agribusiness sector biosecurity has been identified time and time again as the No. 1 threat to our economy to our biodiversity to every single part of our economy that relies on tourism and relies on primary production and indeed to protecting our biodiversity. This Government has just cut the funding to biosecurity. It has done well to try to bury that in the Budget but it will become apparent. Its first Budget cut was $2 million and then it has tried to make that up by the restructuring of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry into the Ministry for Primary Industries cutting out a few people in policy and saying that all is well. Last week exposed the flaws and the problems within the Ministry for Primary Industries. The next weeks will expose the flaws in biosecurity because this Government has cut the funding.The Novopay debacle has put the joint system of computer control and information sharing—the Joint Border Management System—on hold. The Government has even mucked up that. But front-line biosecurity systems have been cut because of this Budget and our economy is at risk. There are 1.5 million tonnes of palm kernel coming into this country every year from countries where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic. Mark my words this Government has failed in the area of biosecurity. It has failed to protect primary producers up and down this country. We are sitting on a knife edge. If we do not keep out some of those pests and diseases this economy will collapse and it will be the National Government that will be responsible for that.