Sage Eugenie: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 21 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18214. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): That was an interesting contribution from Nick Smith. There are a couple of initiatives like the free doctors visits and prescriptions for children under 13 that the Green Party supports but this Budget is not a prudent Budget because it is about debt. It is about fiscal debt social debt and environmental debt. When National came into power the Government debt was $14 billion. How much is it now? It is $61 billion. That is $13500 for every New Zealander—an increase of $11000 for every person in New Zealand since 2008. So John Key’s Government may achieve a small surplus but it has been profligate in its borrowing and it is burdening present and future generations with the cost of repaying that debt. That debt means that we have $1 billion in interest costs every year and that is $1 billion that we cannot spend on health on education or on the environment like conservation. There is also a major problem in the Government’s spending priorities because it is skewing some of the spending in the natural resource area towards ripping off the environment. In this Budget National found an extra $40 million to subsidise more irrigation and more pollution of our rivers and lakes but it could not find a single dollar more to properly protect our wild landscapes and our species like themōhua thekākā and our threatened native bats.Those species are faced this year with a plague of rats and stoats and yet National could not find a single dollar extra to avoid that threat. We had the Minister of Conservation trumpeting the Department of Conservation’s programme to increase predator control over another 600000 hectares to tackle the mast year. That is the heavy seeding in our beech forests which is followed by an increase in rat and mice numbers and then an increase in stoats which then turn on our birds. Yet is there a dollar in this Budget to help control those rats and stoats—that pest plague? No. There is $40 million for more subsidies for water pollution but not a single dollar more—in fact there has been a cut of nearly $5 million—in the funding for the Department of Conservation’s Natural Heritage Management System which is the programme where we get pest control done and where we get work done for our threatened species. It is the department that is going to have to scrimp and save. It is going to have to reduce its other work in order to tackle this predator plague. There is not a single dollar extra for conservation.If this had been a Green Budget we would have had a Government that looked after all New Zealanders not just the top 2 percent. We would not have had the tax cuts for the wealthy that have deprived the Government of billions of dollars of revenue. We would have invested in conservation to protect our public lands because we know that investing in conservation protects our “100% Pure New Zealand” image. It protects that $13 billion worth of brand that is so essential to the marketing of our primary produce and to bringing tourists here. It is an essential investment too because it helps to sustain ecosystem services like clean air and water; it helps to sustain our quality of life and the places where we can go kayaking where we can go tramping and where we can go walking; and it is spending that creates extra jobs in the regions. A Green Budget would invest in protecting those wild landscapes.Instead in this Budget the Government is spending on very risky ventures. By putting an extra $40 million into the Crown Irrigation Fund the Government is signalling to the people of Hawke’s Bay and the Hawke’s Bay Regional Investment Co. that it is likely to be spending on that very grandiose dam scheme atRuataniwha. It is doing that despite the fact that there are no obvious private investors for that scheme—TrustPower has pulled outNgāiTahu has pulled out—and there is a very low likelihood of getting good commercial returns. So what is the Hawke’s Bay Regional Investment Co. doing? It is looking to the Crown Irrigation Fund for a big handout to subsidise that scheme and plug the giant hole in its funding.So the Green Party knows that if we are going to have a prosperous economy we need to have an environment that we invest in not one that we rip off through subsidies. Our initiatives like the Green Investment Bank that was announced last week would seek to change the direction of our economy to put it on a much more sustainable footing in order to capture a slice of that trillion-dollar global market in renewables. A Green Budget would be about having a more sustainable course for our future not about investing in industries that pollute and destroy our environment.Julie Anne Genter: Mr Speaker—