Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you Mr Speaker. You know when a Government's in trouble don't you? They bring out the big guns in the general debate and they start defending—SPEAKER: Order! Order! Right come on. Let's start as we mean to go on and not start with the second person. I've warned people on this side I've warned the member and one would've thought we'd get two sentences getting it right.ANDREW BAYLY: Well thank you Mr Speaker. So when the Government brings out the big guns in the general debate you know they are in trouble. It's all about defending and defending. When you hear that there's an emergency caucus this morning at 7.30 you also know that the Government is in trouble. Also the mudslinging that's started to occur which is not good to see in Parliament. But those allegations that have been made are scurrilous and they are ill-judged. So I think what this is showing is that we've got a problem with our Minister of Finance. To use Mr Twyford's expression during question time earlier today it doesn't matter how the person slices or dices it; the Minister of Finance has overseen a wholehearted decline in our economy and that is the worrying thing for ordinary New Zealanders.Under the National Government in the last three years we were averaging 3.3 percent GDP growth. Now we're at 2.3 percent and I could almost guarantee that we're at 2 percent at the moment. As the Hon Amy Adams said earlier this is a significant downturn in the economy. It does not sound much in terms of percentage but if you know the value of the economy—and unfortunately the Minister of Finance did not know that question when he was asked by my colleague the Hon Paul Goldsmith the other day—our GDP is roughly $300 billion in New Zealand. If you slice off over a percent you are effectively slicing off $3 billion of activity in New Zealand and that is everything from selling coffee to manufacturing tractor parts. That means for the $3 billion that roughly has been sliced out of the economy the Government has now lost a billion dollars of revenue. That is why Mr Robertson has got a problem tomorrow; because he has lost—taking the original forecast from Treasury—over a billion dollars' worth of expenditure and that is why he has sought a 1 percent cut across the board from all the departments. That is why tomorrow we can almost guarantee that we will see most of the Government agencies seeing a reduction in their allocation. Certainly when you overlay the impact of inflation and population growth the net increase will be much below the per capita or the per population increase and therefore we will be going backwards in most of those departments.The only pressure valve that the Minister has got left is actually playing with the debt figure and where you're right is that we have relatively modest debt figures in New Zealand. But this announcement by the Minister of Finance—that he is going to move to a target from 15 to 25 percent—is a sign of ill-disciplined spending and also a declining economy directly attributed to many of the actions of this Government. That translates into between $15 billion and $17 billion worth of additional debt. We've just had the Reserve Bank Governor in today at the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the first thing he's talking about is financial stability. Well I put it to you that the first thing we should be talking about is the level of Government debt because adding another $15 billion to $17 billion of debt doesn't actually help.So yes we do want to spend stuff on education and all that sort of stuff but what we don't want is to spend our money like the Hon Shane Jones who is out there splashing it around on these projects that will drive little economic growth. They will be a short-term hit to this economy but they will not bring long-lasting projects and benefits to this economy. That is the travesty of the $3 billion that's being spent right now. If it created permanent sustainable jobs and grew our businesses we'd all be in favour of it. But it's not and it won't be and it's an absolute waste of money that should be spent on much more important areas like health and education.