Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. It was very reassuring to hear that speech from Mr Hipkins. I couldn't follow all of it but I'm sure he's trying to bolster what are very lagging and flat feelings across the other side of the House. I see them all; this is the most dysfunctional Government in recent history.It was interesting remember when we learnt that Winston Peters the Deputy Prime Minister had not spoken to the State Services Commissioner the most senior public servant in the two years that he had been in Government because he was suing him and a whole lot of other Government departments. I thought to myself That is a perfect encapsulation of a dysfunctional Government". I wonder exactly what conversations are going on—SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member will resume his seat. That is a matter which is currently before a court and the member will not refer to it again.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Quite right. My apologies Mr Speaker.So I wonder what the conversations between the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister are about at the moment in relation to taking pictures all around the place and in relation to the transparency around funding and of course we've heard that the Prime Minister is too busy to talk to the Deputy Prime Minister about all these things. She's very focused on a whole lot of other things including visiting Mr Elton John. She might well want to get an answer out of Mr Elton John as to who is the horny-backed toad in the Government. My suggestion is that it might be somewhat closer to her in the seating arrangements. Some of Elton's designs certainly line up nicely I think for Winston Peters.You know you can't hold me foreverI didn't sign up with youI'm not a present for your friends to openThis boy's too young to be singing the bluesThese are the messages that she'll be getting through.So here we are. This is a Government of missed opportunities—of missed opportunities—and of slow growth. This is a Government that inherited an economy that was growing at well over 3 percent—nearly 4 percent per annum—under the National Government; it's now slowed to an astonishing 1.6 percent last year according to the predictions of the Reserve Bank.We see Mr Faafoi is very tired. He's so exhausted after being in Government for 2½ years that he needs to step down from being a list MP up in Mana. You just relax. You just rest Mr Faafoi. You'll get your time.So we slowed down to 1.6 percent which is slower than the actual rate of population growth so New Zealanders got poorer—Hon Kris Faafoi: Why are you so boring?Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —last year. Why is that? It's because this Government has been complacent about growth.SPEAKER: Order! Order! It's because it's part of my job but it shouldn't be referred to from there.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you Mr Speaker. This was supposed to be a Government that was about kindness but that wasn't a very kind observation at all. I'm shocked.So the growth was slowed and that means fewer opportunities for Kiwis to get ahead get a job—a satisfying and exciting job—to be able to look after themselves and their families to be able to prepare for their retirement to have that financial stability that they need. That's why a strong growing economy is so important.We've also seen no progress on housing. We've seen the number of people staying in motels increasing rapidly we've seen the number of food parcels going out from Auckland City Council going up very substantially and we've seen rents climbing more than $50 a week—and that's putting real pressure on New Zealand households. This is notwithstanding the fact that this Government came in and promised that they were going to fix it all with KiwiBuild. Right now right here Prime Minister Ardern's bumbling intervention in Ihumātao has meant that more houses have been stopped from being built there than the entire $2 billion KiwiBuild project has delivered so far for this country.Nobody could believe that level of incompetence was possible but that's what has been delivered by this Government in the last two years. Then if we think of infrastructure this Government started this year with a big hiss and a roar.Hon Shane Jones: Yes infrastructure Government—Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: We had Shane Jones quite clearly talking in Parliament about pork—and we all know he's eaten a bit of it over the years—and here we have infrastructure where they've announced $12 billion but what they've effectively announced is that they have abandoned their transport policy. For two years the transport policy of this Government was to come in stop all the roads that National was building and shift away from reducing congestion to mode shift—and New Zealanders tuning in on their crystal sets will be wondering what on earth mode shift is but that is the focus of transport policy under this Government which is to get people out of one mode of transport which is their cars and get them into another mode of transport which is walking or cycling or going on a bus. So if that is the goal of your transport policy—mode shift—then in a certain weird and wonderful logic that anybody who's been trying to get around Auckland CBD in recent times will know having cones everywhere and congestion chaos trouble and strife is actually quite a good thing from the point of view of the transport planners because that encourages people to mode shift out of their car and on to public transport out of sheer frustration that they can't get anywhere. The transport policy of this Government for the first two years was to stop building all the roads that we were building and to fluff about trying to decide what to do about a light rail project that they promised and two years later they still haven't worked out what the purpose of it is: whether it's to go to the airport or to be an urban transport renewal thing through Dominion Road. After two years they realised that that transport policy was a completely and utterly hopeless and unpopular transport policy and they've abandoned it and they've adopted our transport policy. But the only problem is that they've wasted 2½ years in the process and it's a little bit like the old lawnmower back home—very easy to turn off but a devil of a thing to start again. So they've turned off all those infrastructure programmes. They said: "We can't do that. We're not going to do this. We're not going to build the road north out of Tauranga. We're not going to build a road. We're going to put it all off for 10 15 years." And suddenly two years later they decided "Oh actually maybe we will. OK yes we will. We are going to do it after all. We've changed our mind. We've realised that the Greens are nutters. We shouldn't be following them. We're going to do all the National Party roads." But the problem is that many of the people that were going to build the roads have subsequently gone elsewhere. They've got so frustrated after two years of mucking around that they've focused on Australia where there's hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure being spent and so yep we'll get them all back again but it will take a long time. There'll be a lot of fluffing around and there'll be a high level of scepticism in the infrastructure space. So that's what they've done. They've achieved a slower economy. They've made no progress on housing. In fact they've gone backwards: more houses lost more houses lost at Ihumātao than have been built under KiwiBuild and they've gone nowhere on transport. So I guess that's why they call it the blues as Mr Elton would say. Then on top of that we're going to be back in deficit this year. Can you believe that? So a Government that inherited massive surpluses after a prudent Government led by John Key and Bill English and Steven Joyce—big surpluses billions of dollars. So they've been unable to increase Government spending by 8 percent last year four times the rate of inflation and yet within three years they are projected to be back in deficit. That frankly is a disgrace but it also is a real concern for New Zealanders because you know we're all just seeing right here right now the potential impacts of something like coronavirus which is having a real impact on particularly the tourism sector but also forestry also international education. These are the things that you can't predict. Nobody would have predicted this would have been something we were talking about this month. But it comes out of left field. That's why you have a surplus. That's why you have some flexibility in the financial account—so you can handle things that you're not expecting. Drought is the other one. All our friends up in Northland and Auckland and the Waikato are really short of water at the moment. The farming community—the production is dropping. Production is dropping. There's been all sorts of announcements from the Provincial Growth Fund about all sorts of things. The only problem with the Provincial Growth Fund is that Shane Jones is great at making announcements and he's world class at putting out press statements but the money doesn't flow very quickly and there's lots of faffing around.Hon Shane Jones: That's changing.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: That's changing? Well it would be good to know if we can get before the end of the three-year term whether they will have made any progress at all and I doubt it very much. So we've got those short-term challenges around coronavirus and drought and that is why any good prudent economic manager would have a decent surplus available so that they could do what they need to do to get New Zealanders through. Yesterday we had Simon Bridges announcing our economic plan which is a very robust and strong one with a focus on getting New Zealand's growth rate per person back to the top half of the OECD and in fact the top 10. We're going to be reducing that income gap between Australia and New Zealand so that more New Zealanders feel that they can reach their potential at home rather than going overseas and one of things that people quite often forget about is when the previous National Government came in we were losing the equivalent of a Westpac Stadium of New Zealanders to Australia every year. We managed to turn that around within nine years—nine years of great progress—so that more Aussies were coming back here than going the other way around. Sadly those figures are turned around again and that is one of the simplest measures of the success of a Government. We've gone from a successful prosperous outward-looking dynamic economy to one that's sputtering along when we've got so many opportunities before us. We need a decent Government to do that job and we'll get that in seven months' time. Thank you."