Turei Metiria: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
Turei Metiria: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:655;Page:4521] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 It has been reported today that some 1000 New Zealanders are joining the dole queue each week. The official unemployment rate in this country has more than doubled in the past year. We have seen major job losses in areas like the manufacturing agriculture forestry and fishing industries which are key productive industries in this country. We have also seen as we expected a major increase in the unemployment level of young New Zealanders; in particular those aged between 15 and 24. This recession is having an impact similar to that of the late 1980s and early 1990s when unemployment rose sharply and viciously leaving ordinary working people without incomes and homes and being treated by the then National Government as if they were without dignity. We are heading that way again with some projecting 20 percent unemployment among young people again under a National Government with no heart and no plan. 
Today in question time the Prime Minister was asked specifically about his plans to protect and create jobs for New Zealanders. He treated the questions about unemployment with contempt choosing instead to treat unemployment as a side issue so that he could crow about his latest polling. Polling is not a plan. It will not create jobs protect families or see us through to the long-term economic sustainability and stability that this country needs. The Prime Minister had no plans and indeed many of the ideas that he proffered this afternoon have already proven to have failed. 
The Job Summit which was lauded at the time as the great hope for new and innovative ideas has failed to produce anything like enough real solutions. It is true that one idea from the summit was successful: the Green Party’s home insulation fund. It was funded to over $300 million in the Budget and will create 2000 new jobs from the programme and protect 700 existing jobs thereby protecting and creating 2700 jobs in total. The Prime Minister might not have any plans and I do not believe he should feel that it is a problem to admit he does not have any plans and that his solutions have failed. But it is a problem if the Prime Minister continues to ignore the solutions that are on the table to protect New Zealanders into the future. 
This Budget desperately needed to address three key issues for our communities. We need to create jobs now through wise infrastructure investments we need to invest now in our communities and our people to create the environment for longer-term sustainable economic stability and we must provide New Zealand families with real income relief right now. 
The Green Party and our Green New Deal—The Green Stimulus Package have solutions that will contribute to all three key goals. Our home insulation fund is one such solution and we will see the benefits of those 2000 extra jobs rolling out over the next year or two. But we have other solutions that we have proffered for this Government. The Greens have calculated that investment of $600 million dollars in the clean-up and protection of our waterways—mainly through the planting and fencing of the banks of waterways—would create over 2000 jobs directly and about 4500 new jobs indirectly. It would have the added invaluable economic return of cleaning and protecting our clean green image on which our tourism is so heavily dependent thereby enhancing our primary production market access restoring tourism opportunities like trout fishing and reducing the dollar and human cost to local communities and farmers of flooding and drought. Those are key solutions to protect the environment and our economy and to create jobs. 
The current waiting list for Housing New Zealand Corporation houses is around 10000 families and rising and it will continue to rise as unemployment kicks in and more and more families lose their homes. Yet half the residential construction capacity is idle in this country. New residential consents have fallen by half since June 2007 which means that about 6000 new homes per year are not being built. That situation is devastating the construction sector. Investing $500 million in the first year and $750 million in years two and three in the building of new homes would give us something like 6000 new State houses for our families. That investment would save 10500 full-time direct jobs and create 18000 new full-time jobs in total across the economy. That would be an investment to keep our families warm dry and housed and to create further jobs across our whole economy. 
Because new road construction is highly capital investment intensive not a lot of new jobs are created for the amount spent. Motorways are the least jobs-intensive of transport projects and make us much more dependent on oil with higher greenhouse gas emissions. Our stimulus package spend creates 40 percent more jobs for every $1 million spent than the equivalent spend on new motorways. Forty percent more jobs could be created. A raft of other transport projects would employ far more people make our cities more liveable improve our transport choices reduce our carbon emissions and make us less oil dependent. They are key solutions to protect the environment keep our families well and create jobs. 
Our solution is to shift the low-quality spend that this Government will make—the $1 billion low-quality spending on motorways—into a range of transport projects: rebuilding and upgrading railway stations and bus exchanges so that people are kept safe warm and dry in them; integrated ticketing; and increasing cycle lanes and walking paths particularly for the many hundreds of thousands of children who want to cycle to school safely thereby reducing emissions reducing cost to their families increasing community safety and creating jobs all through the same solution. 
The Crown loan programme is another example. The lack of sufficient Crown loan funding over recent years has meant that hospital and other efficiency upgrades have not occurred. The savings to our hospitals from efficiency upgrades would go directly into front-line health services. For example $25 million loaned per year for 3 years would create 390 full-time direct jobs multiplied to 874 full-time jobs across the economy. By the same logic the same investment in energy efficiency in Government assets like schools prisons and other Government buildings would continue to build on that job creation thereby protecting the community protecting the environment and creating jobs. 
We need to invest in our communities and our people to create an environment for long-term economic stability. One core means for this is in education. We know that young people will suffer the most from unemployment so we must invest in their future by enabling greater access to educational opportunities. But instead this Government has slashed education funding particularly across the community and adult education sector. We have had a reduction of funding to universities of over $22 million per annum cuts in funding to regional polytechs without any kind of mechanism for other technical institutes and polytechnics or tertiary education organisations to take up the students and about a 50 percent cut in adult and community education funding thereby cutting jobs as well as reducing access to retraining that is so desperately needed. 
The Tertiary Education Union recently described how the Australian Budget put $7 billion extra into tertiary education to deal with the recession in the long term. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: We’re not Australian. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: I say to whoever it was who just interjected that the New Zealand Government could have provided about $1 billion in the 2009 Budget for tertiary education as a per capita response that would be a similar investment into our communities and our people when they need it most. Did the Government do that? No it did not. It cut funding massively thereby reducing the ability of our young people to get access to the education they will desperately need because they will not have the jobs to go to and restricting the ability of older workers to be able to retrain in order to prepare for the time after the recession when we need that long-term stability and economic sustainability. 
We need to provide relief for families who are suffering right now from high credit card and mortgage rates because the banks are benefiting from the cuts in the official cash rate and are not passing on those benefits to our communities. The Green Party has called for an inquiry into that issue because New Zealand families are entitled to have their elected representatives investigate the institutions that are preventing them from being able to get access to the benefits from the official cash rate cuts. New Zealand families are entitled to have their elected representatives stand up for them and say that they must benefit too.