Clark David: Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 15 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:18032. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): I think the short call by the member opposite is indicative of the vision of this Government. Not only was it limited but it was also late. The member Kate Wilkinson stood and said that it was a real pleasure to take a call on this bill the Budget Measures (Miscellaneous Fiscal Matters) Bill this morning. I hate to inform the member that it is indeed nearly 1 o’clock. The member is of course behind the times. She is from that party opposite that is always following always playing catch-up and always trying to catch up with where Labour is at in terms of policies that have vision for New Zealanders—for those New Zealanders who want to get ahead. We are working with New Zealanders. We are determined to work with New Zealanders to deliver policies that have vision that have purpose rather than the scattergun backward-looking approaches that we see this Government pushing.This bill removes cheque duty. That is one of the things that it does. I have to say that all those years of waiting for a surplus just to splash out on removing cheque duty is rather a delicious irony. It really does speak to the backward-looking view of this Government. It is still obsessed with the old cheques. I know that I do not own a cheque book. I look around this House and there will be members who do and members who do not but really it is a small and diminishing part of the Budget.Iain Lees-Galloway: John Banks gets them.Dr DAVID CLARK: John Banks takes a lot of cheques says a member in front of me and he is probably right but I do not know whether he will be doing that much longer though for reasons that we cannot discuss in this House. Cheque duty is being canned but unfortunately New Zealanders are left with a credit card bill of about $58 billion from this Government’s borrowing—$58 billion—and we know that credit cards attract greater interest than cheques. So here we are with a Government opposite that has borrowed more money than Robert Muldoon did presenting its vision to the world: cancelling the fee on cheques. That sums it up aside from the belated catch-up of the member discovering that the afternoon has arrived and the yardarm has moved on.Dr Cam Calder: Don’t mention it.Dr DAVID CLARK: We will not mention the yardarm too much in respect of those members opposite. They were busy last night. This Budget is unfortunately as I have said backward-looking and scattergun but we think that it is a lost opportunity more than anything else because it lacks aspiration and because the Government is facing higher unemployment numbers than when it took office at the height of the global financial crisis—and unemployment is still higher in New Zealand. It is a lost opportunity because real median wages are lower than when it took office because this Government has overseen the highest gap between rich and poor in recorded history in New Zealand and because middle New Zealand struggles and continues to struggle under this Government. It is a Government that has failed to raise those real median wages. It is a Government that has overseen interest rates rising but has no plan—noplan—to help New Zealanders into their first homes. There is nothing in this Budget for them. The $3500 estimated to be saved from the housing tariff is insignificant in the context of the $200000 increase in house prices in Auckland over the last few years. It is a fraction of 1 percent as my colleague Phil Twyford pointed out earlier.This is a visionless Budget. We know that the Government has got to surplus of course through a series of fudging attempts: first through keeping artificially high ACC levies—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!Dr DAVID CLARK: Another is through transport spending—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!Dr DAVID CLARK: —being couched as a loan and so on but that has been all to produce cheque duty reductions. This is the big vision from the Government that we are being told right now. It is not interested in housing it is not interested in jobs and it is not interested in wages; instead we are here under urgency passing legislation to remove cheque duty. So ladies and gentlemen at home I am informed that this might save you up to a dollar a year.Iain Lees-Galloway: No 35c.Dr DAVID CLARK: Oh 35c a year. My apologies—35c per year this may save you at home.Moana Mackey: Don’t oversell it.Dr DAVID CLARK: I should not oversell this policy. And there will be some people for whom that 35c does make a difference but it is not the same kind of difference that would be made from having the kinds of policies that Labour is proposing to bring in when in Government such as universal KiwiSaver and the ability to use monetary policy to make sure that interest rates are kept low whilst having the money that is used to do that going into savings rather than into offshore banks.