Parker David: General Debate 
Parker David: General Debate 
[Volume:665;Page:12757] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 If we were in Government one thing we would reverse is the movement of the wage gap with Australia which is going the wrong way. We would try to reverse that. 
Nicky Wagner 
: You had 9 years. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Actually if the member looks at the statistics she will see that we reduced the wage gap. It is amateur hour at the moment on the Government benches. One mistake after another has been made by the Minister for Economic Development and the Government’s poll-driven politics are coming apart at the seams. 
What have we seen in the last 2 weeks? We have seen the Government at last being pilloried by the media for the vacuous nature of its promise to catch up with Australian wages by 2025. Why is it being pilloried? It is because all of a sudden—we have heard all of these metaphors relating to horses from the previous speaker Phil Heatley—the stable is empty for the National Government when it comes to policy ideas that will bridge the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia. 
Let no one forget that the big mantra at the last election from the National Party was that it would close the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia. National members said that they would do it by 2025. We were always suspicious that that estimate was flaky because in 2025 those members will no longer be in this House. They will no longer be in Government. In my lifetime there has never been a 15-year Government. In democracy there is a change inside of 15 years so those members will not be here to be held accountable in 2025 as to whether they have achieved that target. 
This country deserves milestones against which the Government can be judged. Do we have any? We have none that this Government will commit to. Gerry Brownlee even admitted at a select committee a few weeks ago that the Government has none and that it intends to have none. That is why the Opposition has been asking the Government what its plan is. We have heard all sorts of insignificant ideas that have come to nothing. Some of them are good worthy things such as a cycleway. Who disagrees with a cycleway? But it will not bridge the gap between New Zealand and Australia. Neither will the next cloud that the Prime Minister hops on. Let us not forget that it was his deputy leader Bill English who said that John Key is a man who hops from cloud to cloud. Bill English said that at a National Party conference. It was taped by someone and to his embarrassment it was played back publicly. He said that John Key just flits from cloud to cloud and we know that it is true. 
John Key’s next idea after the Job Summit which did not produce anything was that we would somehow have Chinese investment in New Zealand broadband. We know that that will not happen. That will not happen. New Zealand has to pay for its own broadband. Even if the Chinese paid for it we would be paying them the profit stream. 
What was John Key’s next idea? We were to become a financial services hub for the world. The big difference between New Zealand and Australia is savings and depth of capital markets; it was never mining. Australia has far better savings than New Zealand and has bigger and deeper capital markets. If any country has the chance of being a financial services hub it is Australia not New Zealand. That is a great ambition but when we asked the Minister for Economic Development whether he had brought forward any Cabinet papers he said that Ministers are still talking about it—that is there has been effectively no progress on that one either. 
Then we had the doozy of them all: the step change that was going to come from mining in national parks. Mr Brownlee was forced to back down on that. The Government did not just scale back that ambition; it abandoned it completely. Two points can be made in respect of that. It was never going to be the step change in the New Zealand economy. According to analysts the difference between the New Zealand and the Australian economies that arises from mining is around 10 percent. He never had a plan for the other 90 percent and he now does not even have a plan for that 10 percent. It is amateur hour. 
Then Mr Brownlee came to question time. The Leader of the House was ill-prepared for questions. He could not answer the question as to what the gap is between New Zealand and Australian wages. He could not even estimate it and he could not tell us whether it was going up or going down. Actually he did tell us that. He told us that it was going down when plainly it is going up. Even on the Government’s own massaged figures where it adjusts the official statistics and tries to introduce purchase price parity the gap has still gone up by 14 percent since the election. The reality is that using official statistics the gap has gone up by over $50 per week. It is amateur hour on the National benches.