Tremain Chris: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Tremain Chris: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 15 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4398. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon CHRIS TREMAIN (Minister of Internal Affairs) 
: 
 It is an exciting time to be in Government I have to say—an exciting time. I think that the opportunities that are ahead of this nation are unprecedented and certainly unprecedented in my lifetime. I am privileged to be part of a Government that is taking up those opportunities with both hands and going forward. 
 When I talk about those opportunities firstly I ask members to just think about where we sit in the globe at the moment. It is just an unprecedented position. We are on the precipice of major trading nations that are growing ahead of many other nations around the world. Secondly we are close to those nations. And thirdly those growing middle classes want our export products. They want our high-value exports. So we are in a wonderful position in that regard. What is great is to be on this side of the House at this point in time and to be part of a team that is making a huge contribution in that regard—a huge contribution. 
When we came into Government at the start of this term we had four major objectives—four key priorities. The first was to rebuild Christchurch. What have we done? We delivered a central business district rebuild plan just a couple of weeks ago. The second key objective was to responsibly manage the books. We saw a Budget that will bring us back to surplus by 2014-15 and not take Government debt any higher than 28 percent. We have committed to delivering better public services. The Prime Minister in that regard has rolled out 10 key result areas and we heard just a couple of them from the Minister of Education Hekia Parata such as focusing on getting 85 percent of our kids to National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2 and 95 percent of our kids into early childhood education. These are the things that will make a difference. 
But what is exciting about today is that fourth priority area where we have committed to building a productive and competitive economy and I have got to hand it today to Ministers Tim Groser Steven Joyce and Bill English who are out in the Hutt Valley launching the  
Building Export Markets 
 report on the new Business Growth Agenda. That is part of the agenda that we are taking forth—part of six key parts of the agenda—with export markets being the first one that is being launched. The others are innovation skilled and safe workplaces capital markets natural resources and infrastructure. 
These are initiatives that set the progress of this Government and what I hear from the other side of the House is: “Where’s the plan?”. “Where’s the plan?”. This is a progress report and if you turn to the back of the document you can see that we hold ourselves accountable. We are bringing together all the streams of work that we are doing here. We are actually holding ourselves accountable through all the initiatives that we are implementing as we speak to drive a better future for this country. It is absolutely fantastic. But where I want to focus on— 
Kris Faafoi 
: Where’s the cycleway in that book? 
Hon CHRIS TREMAIN 
: I am glad you have brought up the cycleway. That is something I definitely want to focus on. One of the key initiatives within this export markets initiative is tourism and tourism is our second-biggest industry. It is a wonderful industry that has continued to grow through the global financial crisis and we are seeing significant changes in this. New markets are expanding into Asia. There is the Chinese market. If you look at the agenda here in terms of the increasing value from tourism you see that we have got a focus on increasing value from that Chinese market because we know there are going to be a lot more tourists coming from China. We need to understand how we can look after them better and actually improve the value added through that market. 
On top of that we have got a major focus here on investing in major events. Major events are a huge revenue earner for this country and we are investing in that. That is pulled together in the work stream: $10 million there. There are things like the World Masters Games coming in 2017 and the FIFA U-20 World Cup in 2015. They are a huge opportunity to bring export dollars into our market. 
The cycleway—I am glad the Opposition has mentioned that because they love the cycleway over there. I have to say I am passionate about the cycleway and you can hold me to account anytime you want on the cycleway. We have got 18 rides that we are rolling out. We have clearly seen from the Otago Central Rail Trail what value that cycleway can add. It has taken 10 years for that cycleway to build to the level it is at. It will take time for each of the cycle trails to build value but there are genuine businesses that are being built around each of those cycle trails. There are people who are coming to cycle not only from around the country but from around the world. It is an exciting proposition and opportunity for this nation—an exciting opportunity. 
On top of this we have investment in Maori tourism and I think that is a wonderful opportunity in this country growing on from what is available in Rotorua and bringing that stream of tourism and offering it throughout the country. I think we can really do a big—