Seymour DavidHon DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I've got to say if you've ever wondered why the Green Party needs to have two leaders that speech by Marama Davidson was all the evidence you would ever need! It felt like it was written by an ad agency but at the end of it no one had a clue what they were actually selling—platitude after platitude—and that's why they're over there. I hope that they stay over there for the sake of New Zealand for a very very long time.Turning to you Mr Speaker I want to congratulate you again for your election after a long and winding road to today where you are our Speaker and we think you're going to do a very good job. To the other leaders of political parties who have been elected again—the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins; to Chris Luxon Prime Minister along with Nicola Willis; and to the Rt Hon Winston Peters and Shane Jones—congratulations on the results. To Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer congratulations on leading your party back to this place in Parliament.To all of those people who are new to Parliament it is a wonderful institution and it is whatever you make of it. You are given enormous privileges to speak freely and debate but you are given those privileges by the people of New Zealand to do your best for them. I look forward to hearing the maiden statements as we've heard two excellent statements this afternoon. I look forward to hearing as many as I can of what new members are bringing to this House to use those privileges for the betterment of those who have given them to them.I particularly want to acknowledge ACT's MPs—the six of us returning. Nicole McKee now a Minister the Associate Minister of Justice and for Courts is going to fix so much of what has been done wrong in firearms law in particular but is also going to be a formidable opponent of crime in her role making the courts work better and faster for all those people who seek justice in our country. To Karen Chhour who completes an extraordinary journey from being a victim of mistreatment at the hands of the Children and Young Persons Service then the Department of Child Youth and Family Services then Oranga Tamariki to being the Minister for Children in charge with the capacity to do something about it.To Mark Cameron our farmer MP; to Simon Court the only person I know who has applied for complex Resource Management Act consents in this Parliament and who is now in a position to make them a little bit less complex for the people trying to build this country. And to our new MPs: to Todd Stephenson the pocket rocket straight from corporate Australia and fitting in just perfectly in the parliamentary environment we welcome him—and a strong presence for ACT in the lower South Island. To Andrew Hoggard—they say If he walks like a farmer if he talks like a farmer guess what!" He's going to be a fantastic Minister for Biosecurity and for Food Safety and Associate Minister of Agriculture. It's fantastic that those people in rural New Zealand across the three parties of Government have such strong and experienced advocates where they have been neglected for so long.Parmjeet Parmar is coming back to Parliament with a new playing strip! I'm really pleased to have her as an experienced member—and one of the most qualified people to be in this Parliament perhaps in decades with her deep knowledge of science along with her business and broadcasting and political background. Laura Trask someone who runs a business something we haven't heard on the Government side of this House for quite some time. Laura Trask is someone who runs a business as does Cameron Luxton a builder. Cameron Luxton I think it's probably true has built more houses personally than the Government built in the six years that it had! This is the ACT team that I want to congratulate.But in case you think I've forgotten last but most certainly not least is Brooke van Velden my good friend my deputy now the MP from Tāmaki who has just had a whole electorate of people see what we have seen in Brooke for such a long time. I might add that I think Richard Wagstaff has seen a new side of her in the last 48 hours too. I'll just say that if you're going to go on camera and lie about your interactions with Brooke you probably won't be doing it again. Brooke is a formidable politician a formidable intellect and someone with an enormous future that is going to bring about tremendous change in her ministerial portfolios. I believe—and I haven't researched this but from memory—I saw Simon Upton over there before. I believe that Brooke may be the youngest Cabinet Minister in the history of our country certainly in any memory that I have—Hon Paul Goldsmith: Phil Goff.Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Paul Goldsmith—this is why you don't have a historian next door! He says it's Phil Goff. But there you go; she's going to be the best and youngest.I also want to thank those many people outside Parliament who have made possible what just happened: another peaceful transition of power a contest of ideas a battle of words rather than of weapons. There are so many countries where so many people are literally fighting to have the things that we in New Zealand so easily take for granted. And it's often the people who take the practical steps to make it happen. ACT's volunteers—and we seem to have appealed to practical people—put up so many pink signs in some parts of the country that we actually got safety complaints from the local authorities because there was more pink than road signs on large parts of New Zealand's highway network. It's those people who came to streetcorner meetings who came to townhall meetings—Rawiri Waititi: That's what money will do.Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: And I've just heard Rawiri Waititi say "Oh that's what money will do." Well let me tell Rawiri Waititi that a skin for a billboard or a hoarding costs about 30 bucks. It's the volunteer labour of the people who got out and did that. But you wouldn't ask Rawiri Waititi if you wanted to know about hard work would you? We also saw people who attended townhall meetings who came to streetcorner meetings. We had people who argued with their colleagues and their family and persuaded eventually a quarter of a million New Zealanders to trust ACT with their party vote beyond those in the Epsom electorate who I am incredibly grateful to and thank for sending me to this place for a fourth time. It is humbling to be elected by your neighbours to speak on their behalf and what wonderful neighbourhoods they are in the electorate of Epsom.I also want to thank the ACT Party board. They are the head of a great membership of volunteers activists donors—all of those people who give up their time for nothing but the feeling that they have made our democracy possible. Nobody forces any of them to do it. Almost none of them is paid a cent and yet they show up every three years and make our democracy possible.There are also many candidates from all parties who gave it their all and were not returned to Parliament. That is the reality of any contest but I want to say to them that if you've missed out this time it may be that next time is your time or the time after that. Some people stand many times and go on to have tremendous parliamentary careers but your efforts have been noticed and they will contribute to whatever you want to do in a future election.I think the reason that so many people came out and were prepared to work so hard towards ensuring the Government changed is that well frankly they were motivated by the Labour Government and its allies and its potentially allies who made such a hash of New Zealand. If you look at just the raw numbers Grant Robertson as finance Minister was reduced to trying to explain why perhaps a boondoggle might actually be a good thing! I mean it was hard to believe today but that actually happened.You had a Minister of Finance saying "Oh no; boondoggles could be good. Here's the dictionary definition and if I can contort myself enough I might even convince myself." That is Grant Robertson's legacy. but it's also by the plain numbers list. Grant Robertson as Minister of Finance had the job of ensuring that the taxpayers dollar went as far as possible to deliver the services and alleviate the suffering of New Zealanders in a range of areas. And the bottom line is that from 2017 to this year he increased the amount Government spends above inflation above population growth—you know there's no jiggery-pokery here. Per person after inflation he increased expenditure by 30 percent. New Zealand taxpayers need to ask themselves: am I getting 30 percent better real service from Government?In which area might they look for it? They might look in education. Chris Hipkins—it was kind of interesting today. It's almost like he has the most wonderful form of selective amnesia. I listened to him and I thought this can't be the same guy who is predominantly responsible for the state of education today. But he was the Minister of Education for five years. He was responsible for Te Pūkenga. The challenge for this Government laid down today could not be starker. The Programme for International Student Assessment examinations of 15-year-olds in science literacy and mathematics have been tested every three years since the turn of the century and we have just had the worst results ever for New Zealand. The damage that has been done over the past two decades will take another generation to fully turn around. And yet we had not 2500 bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education but 4400. That's the growth under Labour and our results got worse. Our school attendance got worse. So Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins—thick as thieves; in fact taxpayers might say that's exactly what they were—were conniving together to get fewer kids going to school learning less for more money. That's the big problem.Productivity right across the economy was in the tank. You might have thought that all these schemes they had to invest in this and invest in that would somehow make New Zealand more productive. The truth is that if Labour MPs knew how to invest capital they wouldn't be Labour MPs. They'd be rich. The reality is they had no idea how to transform an economy but they inadvertently transformed it to have some of the highest inflation in living memory.I think Grant Robertson and a possible exception—no offence—Adrian Rurawhe were probably the only people in that Labour Government old enough to remember the last time inflation had been as bad as they left it. But that is one of the outcomes of Grant Robertson's unproductive spending spree.But perhaps more than anything the previous Government was elected to solve the problem of housing. It's one of the biggest drivers of the cost of living crisis one of the biggest drivers of poverty and one of the biggest drivers in crime and educational under-attainment—people getting moved as students from uncle to aunty from one term to the next and never settling in one school. The Labour Government was elected more than anything to solve the shortage of housing and build more homes. And how did it go? Well KiwiBuild was so politically and policy-wise disastrous that it almost became unfair to raise it in politics. I mean it was so bad you sort of thought: oh come on go easy on them. You know their Resource Management Act reforms managed to make the resource management law more complicated but with novel terms such as te Oranga o te Taiao which would need to be interpreted in new jurisprudence by the Environment Court by which time we would probably be economically overtaken by Indonesia. Yet that was the Labour Party's idea of how to get more houses built.In just about every area we found a Labour Party that spent more money and made more rules and got worse results. I have to tell you that they returned today so rundown and clapped out that if this Labour Party was a used car it would be illegal to import them to New Zealand. They just don't go any more—Hon Simeon Brown: They hate cars anyway.Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: And they also hate cars anyway the Minister of Transport tells us; it's an excellent point. I raise all of this because we heard from Chris Hipkins a couple of things in his speech. He said that the Government doesn't have a vision; it just wants to delete so much of what the previous Government has done. That second part is true. Three waters—we do want to cancel. Te Pūkenga was a disaster under Chris Hipkins' watch that does need to be unravelled. Fair pay agreements so-called will be gone by Brooke van Velden no matter how eager and quickly the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions are to find out about it.The reason that we want to get rid of these damaging policies like the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act is that Labour's vision was one of central control: centralised politics centralised healthcare centralised three waters—give the Minister for the Environment more power over what is built in your street. That is certainly a vision in Labour and perhaps the Greens and Te Pāti Māori's eyes because their vision is about politicians doing things. It's not that we don't have a vision; it's just that we have a different vision from the point of view of the New Zealanders who have to live in this country and are trying to make a difference in their own lives and the lives of those that they care about.That's why this Government will be strongly committed—more committed than any Government in history—to dealing to the red tape and regulation that wastes people's time going through compliance activities that add nothing to the public welfare but dramatically impoverish people and eventually all of us in their private welfare. If we want to raise productivity we must spend more time producing and less time complying with rules that don't make sense. And I'm proud to be the first Minister for Regulation with a Ministry for Regulation and a Regulatory Standards Bill setting out the principles of how you make laws that do make sense and then go through the enormous stock of out-of-date rules and regulations that waste our time and money. That is what I call a vision. But it's a vision of empowerment for ordinary people not a vision of meddling for the few politicians and the not so few bureaucrats that Labour hired. Our vision is that people get to spend more of their own money. You see as I mentioned the Labour Party spent like drunken sailors and were about as effective at getting useful things done. The previous Labour Government has given us a massive fiscal headache and sadly that is pain that in different ways will be shared by all New Zealanders. But I have great confidence in Nicola Willis along with Chris Bishop and Shane Jones and myself as Associate Finance Ministers to get this ship back on course.I'm pleased to see that 2017 baselines for the number of public servants will be a starting point for getting costs under control. Because you don't just have to pay these people; they then get bored and make you jump through extra hoops which further damages our productivity. And just as that could be a lose-lose removing unnecessary expenditure and activity is a win-win and that's a vision for everyday New Zealanders.When it comes to crime it is time to call time on the experiment of Labour. That is if only we are kind to criminals they'll be kind back. Now I can understand—I like to be kind too but it's a little bit harder when you meet the victims when you go to liquor stores when you go to dairies when you go to retailers when you talk to storeowners who keep a boutique fashion place that they're afraid to lock up at 6 o'clock in winter because it's dark then and they don't know who's going to be around and they heard what happened to one of their colleagues in the alley just a few weeks back—something the police are still investigating. I'm sorry but these stories are real and they're not from some place where people think there's a lot of crime. They're from places where people would otherwise think there wasn't a lot of crime in central Auckland.This Government is going to increase prison capacity. This Government is going to give the courts and the police options for young offenders. This Government is going to make sure that if you attack someone in a sole-charge workplace or a workplace attached to their dwelling house then that's an aggravating factor or if you're a member of a gang you're going away for longer because being kind to crims hasn't worked. It's time to put them back in their place and that is behind bars. We talked about education and I think we have an excellent education Minister and an excellent commitment to shift the way that education policy is done. You see for far too long we have had an education policy that is driven by a burgeoning ministry that meddles endlessly in the inputs. They'll tell you how to teach. They'll tell you what shape the classrooms should be—hint: it's three classrooms joined together with lots of beanbags. They'll tell you what to teach—hint: it's usually politically motivated. But they don't actually ask the hard questions like: how many kids showed up to school yesterday how many of them are passing and how many of them are prepared for the modern workplace to be citizens in the most knowledge-rich century that humans will ever exist in? Well this Government is going to flip that switch. We're going to empower educators to actually be in charge of their schools with their cellphones safely away and then demand that the kids show up and the results are achieved. The Labour Party has said that there isn't a lot of vision. Well I can tell the Labour Party that I know a few parents and I know a few kids and actually the vision of being enabled to navigate the 21st century with the basic skills that these guys neglected—that's a vision. If only we had had that vision six years ago and had started earlier there'd be far fewer kids who have been sent out into the world cruelly without the basic skills to navigate that world. The purist version of demanding results and giving flexibility and empowerment to educators is partnership schools kura hourua colloquially known as charter schools which will be back and better and bigger than ever—teacher unions you can hear that. We have an excellent Minister of Health not only because he's a doctor but he's also a seriously passionate and good guy. We are going to see a healthcare system that is not focused on the vision of reorganising the wiring diagram in Wellington but instead on a Ministry of Health and a health system that treats all New Zealanders equally based on need using good data—not lazy and bigoted discrimination based on race—and that focuses on ensuring that the patients are getting the results not that administrators are happy or that the health system is doing right by identity politics. We're also going to see Pharmac dragged into the modern age with an attitude that is friendly to those people going through difficult times and in need of pharmaceuticals so that they can get by and we're going to see their funding model reflect the impacts of funding on the rest of the Government's books. Immigration: we're a nation of immigrants. We're going to lift the cap on recognised seasonal employers so we don't have the constant interjurisdictional fights over who has quota to have people to get the work done. We're going to redeem a promissory note made to thousands or in fact hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders that this is a country that wants you and if you come here and if you cover their costs you can bring your parents. I was speaking to a woman not so long ago who was a prominent person at a major university—in fact it probably doesn't harm to say that she was running her department. She said "I'm an only child. My mother is in the United Kingdom. If I can't get her here I'm going home and I know that'll have an impact on my career it will have an impact on the university and it will have an impact on my students." Well this Government says that if she's prepared to pay the costs of the healthcare and if she's prepared to guarantee there'll be no costs on the State her mum can have a five-year visitor visa to come in and out of New Zealand as much as she likes and be in this country. Doesn't that restore the faith that new New Zealanders who have come from all over the world have put in this country? That is our objective. There's another group of people who have been a bit marginalised. They're people who own a house and let another New Zealander live in it in return for money. Now I would have said that that was a beautiful example of human cooperation but the Labour Party and allies have been so myopic that they thought that the way to help the people living in the house was to attack the people that owned the house. I think their philosophy is that beatings would continue until morale improves. Well plot twist: morale did not improve. People pulled back from being landlords and tenants were the ones that suffered with record increases in rent over the six years that we've just seen with this Government. Well we're going to say that if it's your house and you want to evict someone you can—that's just how property works—but it has the enormous advantage in that it makes people more willing to let someone else live in a house that they own in the first place and especially someone that they may have some questions or causes for concern about. That to me sounds like the civilised way to go about doing business in New Zealand and it's actually going to help the most disadvantaged tenants when we have no-fault evictions. It's also going to help landlords enormously when the amount of mortgage interest that they can deduct from their tax bill is increased more rapidly than any other party had promised and that is an enormous benefit not only to landlords but also to tenants because they go together. There's another group of New Zealanders who have been neglected for reasons I struggle to fathom: those who go out of their way to give food to other New Zealanders and to about eight times as many people who are our export customers overseas and yet we have seen rural New Zealand—the likes of Andrew Hoggard and Mark Cameron—beaten around the ears as public enemy number one for year after year for having the temerity to use the land to produce food to employ people and to try and feed the world and earn export receipts. Well they now have a Government that actually has some farmers that actually respects farmers and that is going to get rid of the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management 2020 and replace it with something sensible that actually has regard to local conditions. We're going to stop putting significant natural areas (SNAs) where some pimply teenager out of planning school looks at your farm on Google Earth and says "That looks like a bit of biodiversity. You can't have that any more." because if you do that people won't want to do conservation because the pimply teenagers at the local council will take your property rights. So no more SNAs. We're going to have a split-gas approach to methane and other greenhouse gases because we actually do follow the science and the science says that methane has different characteristics from carbon dioxide. Now you're not going to get that from the Green Party who have not elected an MP who has studied science past high school in 12 years. The ACT Party has more scientists than the Green Party has elected probably in its history. But I will watch the maiden statements to see if any of you guys have actually studied science because if you have you'll be the first Green MP that's done that for a very very long time. There's another group of people—licensed firearms owners—scapegoated punished and pushed beyond reason by this previous Government. They were almost blamed for our nation's tragedy in Christchurch. The Government pushed hundreds of thousands of what they deemed the most dangerous firearms into the grey and black market in what may have been one of the stupidest most irresponsible policies that any Government has rushed through this Parliament. But Nicole McKee for 25 years a firearms safety officer is—it's difficult to think of a better person to be in charge of firearms law. Now I feel much safer already and we're going to see clubs and ranges have the most egregious regulations gone. We're going to see a new arms Act and we're going to ask a very basic question that you should ask about any policy which is whether this firearms registry is actually making us safer because there's a good school of thought that it's not. In housing we're going to see the Resource Management Act gone and replaced with a law based on property rights. Speaking of property rights the medium-density residential standard—a folly that invaded the peaceful enjoyment of so many people's property or it would—will become optional with councils required to re-ratify it. We are going to see a constructive debate about what the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi mean and people will get into enormous hysterics about this because you know some people aren't what you'd call intellectual. Those people who aren't so intellectual they tend to be afraid of debate and so they will call you racist and they'll shout you down and they'll try and block the motorway. But those of us who do enjoy the contest of ideas are looking forward to having a discussion about what those principles mean and what the lens through which we view the Treaty from 2023 actually means and I suspect that if they do their study and if they read and they take the time—and some of those people shouting in the background might actually enjoy the discussion and find that it is mana-enhancing for Te Tiriti and Māoridom. But I'm not sure that they're up to it. The challenge—the wero—is now laid down for them. This Government has a vision of empowerment—a vision of New Zealanders as people who are treated alike in dignity regardless of their identity and who have the ability to make a difference in their own lives and in the lives of those that they care about—and with that vision we are all going to be wealthier and happier for it. Thank you Mr Speaker."