English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
English Bill: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4143] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I am wondering why in the Treasury estimates the Government pays for its policy advice because it certainly does not take any. I will give just one example. A couple of years ago the Minister of Education on the prompting of Treasury initiated a value-for-money review. I have had the privilege as Opposition spokesman on education of spending the last 6 months trying to track down exactly what happened in the value-for-money review. Yesterday I finally got the conclusive letter from the Minister of Education who said that he was not going to give me any of the pieces of paper because he regarded it as “ongoing work”. 
Parliament is appropriating millions of dollars to fund policy advice from Treasury. In every major expenditure area that Treasury advice is questioning the value of the spending of taxpayers’ dollars because Treasury officials see more evidence of the waste than we do. In just the last week we have had a report on law and order showing the extent of the cost and the feebleness of the Government’s efforts to deal with it. Treasury has raised fundamental issues about the lack of productivity growth in the health system. The patients have not had all the extra money; the system has all the extra money and does not have much else to show for it. In education the Government has clearly turned itself inside out with concern about the enormous waste that has gone on in the tertiary sector. So why does the Government keep paying for policy advice—not all of which is accurate but most of which is sound—that it never takes? 
Dr Cullen has managed to persuade himself if no one else that he is what he calls a “fiscal conservative”. I guess in the Labour Cabinet he is a fiscal conservative in that he has an interest in at least counting the money as it flows out. Other Ministers like Steve Maharey do not even care about counting it and that became quite clear in the tertiary education debacle last year. So in that sense Dr Cullen is conservative; he likes to count the money. But he has done almost nothing about establishing value for taxpayers’ dollars. We will see time and time again endless examples from the Opposition where clearly there has been no focus on value. 
I will give another example from the education sector. Five years ago the tertiary education system cost $40 million to run. That sounds like a lot of money and it is. It is a lot of student allowances a lot of operations and a lot of extra students who could be at university. There was $40 million spent to run the Wellington machine to oversee the tertiary education system. Five years later it costs $140 million to run the tertiary education system—an extra $100 million. That number has so many zeros that most people cannot imagine it. Five years ago it cost $40 million today it costs an extra $100 million so it now costs $140 million to run the tertiary education system—and it is worse. Its institutions are in worse shape its revenue outlook is in worse shape but a few bits of it are working better. 
The Minister in the chair Mita Ririnui should tell us why we are paying for that advice. He should also tell us Treasury’s response to the Ministry of Social Development social report. Any Government can fail according to the yardstick of its opponents but once a Government fails according to its own yardstick it is in serious trouble. There is no doubt that the Labour Party meant what it said back in 1999 and 2000—that is that it would bring in a range of policies to deal with inequality of incomes across New Zealand. In fact it was one of the major themes of its 1999 election campaign. But the Ministry of Social Development report from a Government agency has said that things have become worse for the very groups that Labour targeted saying they should get better. There was $934 million spent on the closing the gaps programmes. The Government changed the name but it did not take the money back. It has now spent the $934 million and it is stuck with the verdict of its own social agency—whose analysis I would have to say is patchy at best but sometimes useful—that inequality has become worse. The Government will talk about Working for Families as being the best way—