Tabuteau Fletcher: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTabuteau Fletcher: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2938. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First):Listening to the debate in this House this afternoon has kind of consolidated a lot of my thoughts on this particular Government and I hope I have coined a phrase here: this Government strikes me as being “the media masters of circumstance”. Ms Kuriger Mr Goldsmith and Mr English tell us these wonderful stories. Mr Bishop for example claims that somehow what is essentially zero percent inflation is the Government’s doing and that this highlights excellent Government management. This is either naive or deliberately misleading and Mr Bishop is not naive. Falling international—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member might have attempted to use a device but he did breach the Standing Orders then. He will withdraw the comment. Just stand up and say: “I withdraw.”FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Certainly Mr Chair. I do withdraw that comment and I apologise. Falling international commodity prices—including and especially falling oil prices—is the reason for inflation being so low in this country. This is thanks to for example structural changes in China which means that it is not spending as much as it once did on large infrastructure. The war in Russia and the Ukraine and the political uncertainty there is certainly something I would suggest that this Government not claim as being beneficial to New Zealand.The Minister himself described the poor and unfortunate circumstances in Australia and several members have claimed that New Zealanders coming home—people voting with their feet—is an indication of the excellent management of the New Zealand economy. I would suggest to you that the unfortunate circumstances in the Australian economy mean that New Zealanders are simply returning home because that once-golden light—the once-golden economy that existed in Australia—is not there anymore and it is an opportunity to return home. But the Government is claiming that this is again somehow National’s doing. New Zealanders—Northlanders in particular—were certainly not voting for this Government in the Northland by-election and I would have thought that would have painted a very clear picture for this Government to stand up and listen. National continues to sell stories that are edited. In fact take the dairy industry. The Government is relying on hard-working dairy farmers who have had such a wonderful run of it and who are hard-working and innovative and are competing in an international framework. This Government claims their success as its own and implies that it is the Government’s doing.This Government needs to take account of the true economic position that it has taken this country into. We have got a $7.4 billion current account trade deficit. Interestingly we have 2645 entities which generated $89.4 billion in revenue. But then they spent $92.2 billion leaving in return a large gap of $2.9 billion. Not only is this over 40 percent of gross domestic product but it is a sight of a lot more than what the Government is beating its chest over. It was quoted that the strategy for returning to surplus is based on expenditure restraint—something that another Government was criticised for earlier—and this means that spending will fall below 30 percent of GDP during the coming 4 years down from a peak of essentially 35 percent. Only in March did the Minister of Finance say that. But any homeowner or business owner can tell you what this means in the long term which is that it is actually a recipe for disaster. You cannot simply cut expenditure and hope that it will solve all your problems. Balancing a Budget which this Government has not actually been able to do in its time here and creating a surplus by cutting expenditure is not a solution to New Zealand’s problems.Although the Government may have $256.1 billion worth of assets for example it has $175.3 billion worth of liabilities. And just as an aside New Zealanders still wonder why some of those highest-earning assets in terms of profits generated were sold off. It just makes no sense. If we view the Crown as a company that kind of gearing ratio of more than 50 percent would be considered high. This Government in the widest sense sits at 61 percent and I am worried—as every New Zealand should be—because that raises a big question over the financial management that this Government claims to be expert at.