Hipkins Chris: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4173. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):The current Government’s Budget has the byline “A plan that’s working”. Most New Zealanders will be asking “Working for whom?” because it is certainly not working for the vast bulk of New Zealanders who go out work hard every day try to get ahead and get pushed back down by the current National Government. It is certainly not working for future generations of New Zealanders who are going to inherit mountains of debt—the highest mountain of debt that any Government has ever clocked up in New Zealand’s history. It is not working for that same generation who cannot get a foot on the property ladder because this Government has done nothing about runaway house prices. It costs nearly a million dollars to buy a house in Auckland and it will top that figure very soon. This Government is not doing anything for the future generations who are burdened by student loan debt.It is not doing anything for the future generations of New Zealanders who are seeing the funding for early childhood education frozen for the entire duration of this Government. What does it mean when it is frozen? It means that in real terms it is going backwards. It means that those early childhood centres are getting less money now than they did when this Government came into office. It means that schools which are seeing their funding eroding away are not able to deliver the curriculum that they want to and that they are required to. It means that we are seeing schools cancelling for example field trips or experiential learning so practical experiences in the classroom are being pushed aside because schools simply do not have the resources they do not have the time and they cannot afford to deliver the curriculum as it is intended to be delivered. That is what is happening under this National Government.It is not a plan that is working for all of those people. It is not a plan that is working for the New Zealand Police which is seeing its funding cut. There is a lot more to come on that. It is not a plan that is working for regional New Zealand which sees jobs disappearing which sees its roads deteriorating and which sees its public services being diminished or disappearing altogether. This is not a plan that is working for the vast bulk of New Zealanders.Of course it is a plan that is working for the merchant banks which now get the opportunity to step in and deal with people with mental health problems. Merrill Lynch is lining up to deal with people with mental health problems in New Zealand. It is a plan that is working for the casinos which get to build convention centres off the backs of problem gamblers. This is probably a plan that is working for them. Of course it is a plan that is working for the Saudi millionaires who get to have sheep flown from New Zealand over to their farms in Saudi Arabia at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per sheep. Goodness me! I hope they got a meal with that. I hope they got a lie-flat bed and they got to check in their luggage. Actually most New Zealanders could not afford to pay that for their own travel let alone spending tens of thousands of dollars per sheep to transport sheep to Saudi Arabia as Murray McCully has done in his facilitation payment deal which most New Zealanders would look at and regard simply as a bribe.This is not a plan that is working for the vast bulk of New Zealanders. It is a plan that involves broken promises right left and centre. Unfortunately I get only 10 minutes in this debate so I cannot catalogue all of them but let us look at a few of them. Back into surplus John Key promised New Zealanders before the last election. He did not just promise he was going to do it; in fact he promised that he had done it. Then after the election what do you know? The surplus disappears. He says it was only ever an artificial target and it was like landing a 747 on the head of a pin. So how much was that deficit? It was $684 million. That was the deficit. National did not even come close. I am not even sure how that could possibly square up with John Key’s comments. Then of course we do not even know whether it is going to deliver a surplus next year. He promised to create 150000 extra jobs. Will the Government deliver on that promise? No it will not. He promised to increase average wages from $55000 to $62000 a year. Has it delivered on that promise? No it has not. He promised it would not cut KiwiSaver. Has it delivered on that promise? No it has not. It cut the $1000 kick-start from KiwiSaver. He promised no new taxes. Has it delivered on that promise? No it has not. It is going to be introducing a capital gains tax. It whacked up the levies on broadband. It introduced new taxes on people travelling through airports. It promised to improve our export performance. Has it delivered on that promise? No it has not. This is a Budget that is littered with broken promises.This Government got a bit of a pass when it came into office 7 years ago because the global financial crisis was going to put whoever was in Government under a bit of pressure. So the Government got a bit of a pass. It got a bit of leeway. Seven years on things are getting worse not getting better and New Zealanders can rightly say this Government is not delivering. This is a Government that has simply lost its way—a Government that made bold promises that it did not deliver. John Key says we are on the “cusp of something special”. Where have we heard that before? Could it be David Cameron saying that “we are on the brink of something special”? He clearly got the Crosby/Textor memo. Tony Abbott of course did not. He said that the Australian economy was on the brink of devastation. He obviously was not quite so on-message there. But of course we know that actually the Government’s promises are all about campaigning not about delivery because they are all delivered by the same people who are promising the same things around the world.We have got in Australia for example Tony Abbott promising the “foundations of future growth and prosperity”. That was Tony Abbott’s promise to the Australian people. David Cameron of course talks about the fact that they have “laid solid foundations”. You can see a similarity of language here. And what does John Key say? He says “growth … based on the solid foundations”. He is not even that creative when he rips off the other leaders from around the world David Cameron and Tony Abbott. John Key cannot even change the words; he just quotes them verbatim. That just shows how out of touch and how much the Government members have lost their way when all John Key can do is pick up off the shelf the speeches being delivered by David Cameron and Tony Abbott and deliver them as if they were his own ideas because the Government has not got any ideas of its own. That is why the current New Zealand economy is stagnating under this Government and the books are going backwards.Of course it all starts to pile up on John Key and his Government members. They start to get found out. What do they do? Normally they would turn to a debate about the flag but that is already going through a referendum so they cannot do that. So what is the next off-the-shelf crisis that they can create? What is the new diversionary tactic? There is a boat coming! There is a boat coming! Therefore goodness me there is a crisis. We have heard this before when there was a boat coming to New Zealand so the Government had to go into urgency and push legislation through Parliament. The boat did not come anywhere near New Zealand. It went round the other side of Australia. It came nowhere near New Zealand but this is John Key’s diversionary tactic. It shows how desperate the Government is when it goes and pulls that particular card off the shelf. It shows that Government members really have nothing else to talk about and all their broken promises are coming home to roost.The education sector is struggling under this Government. We have seen teachers who have basically had next to no pay increases for 7 years under the National Government. Schools’ funding is not keeping up with the rising cost of education. Hekia Parata said in the House today that the Government did not base its school funding decisions on an arbitrary figure; it based it on what schools actually spend and what the costs of delivering the curriculum are. I challenge her at any point to produce the figures that show that because we know that the cost of delivering education is going up and up the technological costs that schools face go up and up the pressure that they face goes up and up and the funding is simply not keeping up with that. In the early childhood sector it is criminal what is happening at the moment. Increases in participation are a good thing but that is masking the fact that on a per child basis early childhood education funding is going backwards. The result is going to be more cost for parents or lower quality education or in the worst case scenario both. That is simply not good enough.This was a Government that said it was aspirational for New Zealand. Where did that aspiration go? Where did that aspiration go? It has disappeared. This is a Government full of hollow promises hollow rhetoric and spin and when it cannot get away with that it then resorts to smear and it does not deliver what it promises New Zealanders. Government members are simply content to sit there on the Treasury benches and not deliver for ordinary everyday working New Zealanders who are happy to work hard to get ahead but they do not have a Government that is going to back them despite the promises for aspiration and despite the promises about getting ahead. This is a Government that is simply not delivering.