Hide Rodney: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Hide Rodney: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:670;Page:16506] 
Hon RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I wish everyone in the House a happy New Year. First of all I express ACT’s support for the John Key - led Government and the Maori Party’s role in Government. I say further that like the great many New Zealanders in this great country of ours we think that we are very lucky to have John Key as Prime Minister at this time. 
Why is that? It is because John Key knows a simple thing. He knows that a country like a family and like a business cannot spend a dollar until it has earned a dollar. That is precisely the situation that New Zealand confronts. It is also the case that unlike many politicians John Key has some real-world experience in the area of business and making a dollar. I say that we are lucky at this time to have the Prime Minister that we have. Before the previous election the ACT Party promised the people of New Zealand that we would support National and we made that promise again on election night. The ACT Party has been true to its word. 
But there is a lot more that we have to do as a country and as a Government. We have to work much harder to get jobs for our young people in this country and to provide them with opportunities. We have to do much more to lift wages in this country so that we can enjoy the standard of living that we aspire to. It is especially important to point this out with an election coming up. 
It is also ACT’s role to tell it like it is. I know that Labour members want to live in fairyland but let me make this point. The country is broke; there is no other way to say it. The Government is borrowing $300 million a week. Let me explain what that means. It means $200 a week for every household in New Zealand. For every family in New Zealand the Government alone is borrowing $200 a week. Debt is set to triple in the next 5 years. 
What is Mr Goff’s solution? It is to spend more. Mr Goff needs to give—and he owes—an explanation to the people of New Zealand and indeed to the Labour Party about where the money is coming from. If we want to see what can happen in New Zealand if we do not reverse that borrowing we can just look at the economic and social chaos in Ireland in Italy in Greece and in Spain. 
It is also ACT’s role to be part of the solution in terms of addressing this nation’s problems and that means working with the National-led Government. I am proud to say that under MMP we have a Prime Minister who has had the confidence in election year to set the election date already at 26 November. That shows the trust and stability that John Key has in the support parties. He knows that we can continue to deliver good centre-right policies. 
It is also the ACT Party’s job to be bold to be courageous to nudge National along towards doing the right thing and to stick to its principles. We support the mixed-ownership model that National has announced but it is not enough. We cannot indefinitely sell assets and hope to cure our problem of borrowing $300 million a week. Like a household like a business and like a family we have to get spending under control. That is why the ACT Party will be bringing to Parliament measures to get spending under control this year and to take the squeeze off families and off businesses. The ACT Party believes that the Government has to live within a budget just as everyone else in New Zealand has to. 
We need to do so much better for business in this country. Business is being squeezed. Business is where the jobs come from where the wealth comes from and where the wages come from but businesses are being squeezed by red tape high taxes and Government debt. What is the ACT Party doing? ACT is bringing to the House the Regulatory Reform Bill which will update 13 separate Acts in order to reduce compliance costs and the Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill which will eliminate 31 Acts and will include an executive order to eliminate 206 redundant regulations. 
All that is good but it is not enough. We need to do much much more. That is why the ACT Party has been working with National and the Maori Party on a Regulatory Responsibility Bill to set a higher standard for ourselves in terms of bringing ever more legislation to this Parliament. 
I think it is important that we do much much better on the economic front. I think it is important that the Government gets its spending under control. But for the future we all have to do much better for education. Recently I was at a function where the Prime Minister announced a statistic that was truly horrific. It was so horrific that I had to get it checked and I found that it was true. It showed that last week 60000 New Zealand children started school and on present statistics 12000 of those students will leave school unable to read and to write at a level sufficient for the workplace. That is 20 percent of new entrants—20 percent. 
What horrified me was that for Maori horrifically and sadly that figure was one in two. On present statistics 50 percent of Maori students turning up to school aged 5 will have years and years at school but will leave without the ability to read and write sufficiently to enter the workforce. If one wants to know the cause of crime I think that is a big issue. If one wants to know the cause of poverty and of disparity that is a big one. I say that I am proud—and the ACT Party is proud—to be working with the National Government with the Maori Party and with teachers and professionals up and down New Zealand to get a better result for those kids and our country. I believe that the parties that want to deny the facts should hang their heads in shame because they are letting down our kids. 
It will be a great year for the country. We look forward to continuing to contribute to the solution and to not being part of the problem that the previous Labour Government left us.