van Velden BrookeBROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise tonight on behalf of the ACT Party to take a call on the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Investment Statement. I just want to give a quick shout out to the ACT Party member Damien Smith who sits on the Finance and Expenditure Committee who couldn't be here tonight—so you'll have to bear with me as I go through the Investment Statement with a little less Irish charm. But I know that if he were here he would love to be giving this speech.The ACT Party welcomes the debate into the Government's books because I don't think we talk enough about our operating budgets and our balance sheets and how much we earn how much we spend how many assets we have and how many liabilities we have. I think for a lot of people it sounds a little dull but it's incredibly important because that is essentially how this Government operates how everything happens in this country how things are borrowed how much debt we have how much money we'll have in the future and importantly how much debt future generations will be paying for bad investments today. This debate only comes around once every four years so having ten minutes every four years is really not enough and we should do this debate far more often because we're squeezing a very important topic into a short amount of time.But if we look at 2018 to now which was the last debate on this topic my how things have changed. You could not predict how things would have changed. Back in 2018 Treasury forecast that net core Crown debt would track downwards. Well that certainly hasn't happened because now debt is higher than it's been in the early 1990s closer to when I was born than now and it is increasing. This is the chance we have to debate the state and value of significant assets and liabilities how they've changed over time how they're forecast to change in at least the next two years and how the changes have looked since the last statement. It's a chance to take stock on the Government's balance sheet. That is not how much money the Government is taking in in tax; that happens in a different debate. And it's not on how much we spend on health and education or on the wasteful spending that the ACT Party finds—there is $6.8 billion that we could cut and if you're more interested in that please head along to the ACT Party's alternative Budget on our website. This is a debate on what the Government owns and what the Government owes so let's take stock of where we are to date.There has been a significant increase in debt. In 2017 19 percent of GDP was debt and now that's gone up to 30 percent of GDP at the end of 2021. That's also forecast to grow to 40 percent in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. Our assets have grown since 2017 by 40 percent and our liabilities have grown by 43 percent but what the Government probably doesn't wish to tell you is that of the growth in assets most of this was in land prices. The biggest beneficiary of inflation and Government borrowing and spending has actually been the Government itself—the biggest beneficiary of the increase in land prices and asset inflation. And the biggest growth in liabilities unfortunately was Government debt and Government borrowing. I think we need to be more honest about the debt because the Government is mortgaging our futures and mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren because that's money that needs to be paid back by somebody at a future date.The Large Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programme that the Reserve Bank and the Government were running had the effect of converting fixed rates of debt to short-term floating debt and making debt-servicing costs more sensitive to changes in interest rates. What that really has meant is that it means that the future is riskier for us than it would have been if we had not done the LSAP programme. We moved from fixed to floating right when interest rates were about to rise and that means according to Treasury that the loss on the balance sheet and the reduction in debt-servicing costs are no longer expected to cancel each other out or offset each other and based on the interest rate expectations the net direct fiscal cost from the LSAP programme was expected to be $5.1 billion—and even that is out of date and it's now around $8 billion. The real question is then: why is it that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand kept doing LSAP despite our economic performances actually being strong by global standards? You know they have set us up for future risk much more risk than we should have had. And there is no such thing as a free lunch. People will have to pay that back and it will be future generations.So that's debt. Now let's turn to some of the assets. The Government owns many many many assets and I think we need to run a ruler over what we own and why. The Treasury secretary says the changes to the balance sheet underscore the need for effective investment discipline and careful consideration of ownership rationale and I couldn't agree more. You know the Government currently has a portfolio of many company assets unlisted companies commercial assets and they've underperformed at their cost of capital. They are far too comfy because the only people that they are accountable to are the Government. That's 10 percent of Government net worth that is not performing well and what that really means is essentially we're putting money into companies where we could have just invested that money somewhere else that was just as risky and maybe had a better return.By contrast some of the company assets that the Government does own that are mixed ownership models have done better so the ACT Party says that we should really subject those same company assets to the same amount of transparency that we have under the mixed ownership model. That would significantly increase the performance like we've seen with the electricity companies so let's list 49 percent of the shares of New Zealand Post KiwiRail Transpower and use those funds to pay down that growing debt. At the same time it would subject those companies to the transparency and accountability that other commercial entities have to be held accountable to. If you're more interested in that please go along to our alternative Budget and have a look in more detail as well.For other assets: we also invest a lot in infrastructure but we don't do a great job. There was the report from Treasury and it said that we actually do a pretty terrible job of investing in infrastructure. We have a historical infrastructure gap of $104 billion. I think the real problem here is that because decisions are being made by politicians they are bad investment decisions. You just have to look at light rail. What a terrible terrible project. You only have to cast your mind back to Bridges' 10 bridges and all of the other political bribes that happen when it gets closer and closer to election time and politicians start pulling out what sort of infrastructure projects they can have in their own towns to get them re-elected and realise that that is not a good model for investment in infrastructure. ACT says we need to do better. We have 30-year infrastructure partnership plans that would strengthen accountability by devolving revenue and responsibility to regional government and allowing for accountability and monitoring to be held by central government. These 30-year plans would allow for that real gap in infrastructure to be closed in New Zealand. These are things that we need to have for a healthy balance sheet.In closing our debt is far far too high. We can solve the problem by sharing some of those assets and companies through a mixed ownership model and get a better dividend for the Government because those companies will perform better. We need to fund infrastructure better. And most importantly we need to get our balance sheets and our books in order. We deserve better as a country. Thank you Mr Speaker.