Parker DavidBUDGET DEBATEDebate resumed from 20 May on the Appropriation (2021/22 Estimates) Bill.Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): A week and a half just about two weeks since the Budget was delivered and hasn't it gone down well? A bit of whinging from the other side of the House but the vast majority of New Zealanders are congratulating us on our efforts to secure the economy while continuing to keep people safe. I'm going to talk about some of the high-level forecasts that have come from the Treasury backed up by recent forecasts from the OECD and then come to some of the initiatives that are in the Budget. Over the next four years 221000 extra people are projected to gain employment. Unemployment is forecast to drop to 4.2 percent lower than National ever got it after the GFC. Annual GDP is growing. The economy's growing. It's growing better than it was previously. We are going back to pre-COVID levels pretty quickly—by 2023. The OECD report out today says that's not just good for New Zealand; that's very good by OECD standards. The deficit is forecast to fall—the Government deficit—from 5.3 percent of GDP in 2022 to 0.6 percent by the end of the forecast period with a return to surplus in 2027. So we do have a pathway back to surplus and I make the point that this is about the same time that it took National to get back to surplus post the GFC despite the challenge from COVID obviously being much deeper. Core Crown debt now is forecast to peak at below 50 percent of GDP and we've retained a buffer of more than $5 billion in the COVID recovery fund to guard against the possibility of future outbreaks. Wage growth's already been above inflation in New Zealand under this Government meaning that people in work are much better off than they were in real terms before the Labour Government took office. But our agenda goes beyond working people. We don't want to leave anyone behind and we've had four years of progress on that front as well. It started in 2017 when we cancelled National's tax cuts and we designed support for low and middle income families. We introduced the winter energy payment we introduced the Best Start payment that went to families with children we increased the family tax credit and we extended paid parental leave. That was a $5.5 billion package. At the same time we introduced child poverty legislation and started working on our targets to halve child poverty in 10 years and we've done a lot of things in support of that. We've indexed benefits to wages. We've kept investing in people to connect them with their work during COVID. We've made changes to the in-work family tax credit and we'd already lifted benefit rates by $25 a week. So in the last two years we've seen improvements in all nine measures of child poverty and we've lifted 43000 children out of poverty already after housing costs—after housing costs. I'm going to come back to housing because it has been a challenge but we are making progress. This Budget is predicted to lift another 33000 children out of poverty. We've increased main benefits by between $32 and $55 a week. The first of those payments starts in July and rolls out next year as well. And the changes that we made since we took office mean that there's 100000 families who will be $175 a week better off and of course that is the difference between Labour-led Governments and Governments of a different hue. There still remains a large difference between the benefits of working and being on a benefit. Even after these increases a jobseeker support benefit is $315 a week. It is not a lot of money to live on: to pay for the basics to put food on the table to pay your power bill. These are not overly generous entitlements and I think one of the reasons why New Zealanders up and down the country have backed these changes is that they saw how hard it was during COVID. They felt vulnerable themselves. They saw the support that the Government was giving via employers of $580 a week per full-time employer and they thought Wow those benefits are low in comparison; we need to move them."Now we know that housing is inextricably linked to poverty and wellbeing. We're building more public houses than any Government in decades and we've got 18000 fully funded out to 2024 7500 of which have already been delivered. People decry that but you count that on a daily basis and you know 7000—that's hundreds a week. We're finishing tens of houses—about 15 houses—every day of the working week and over time 15 new public houses finished every day makes a difference. The private sector's doing their bit. The stats were out today: 43000 consents in the year to June—43000. That's 30 percent more—30 percent more—than when National left office. These are big changes. We've closed tax loopholes we've banned foreign buyers we've extended the brightline test we've introduced progressive homeownership we've expanded support for first-home buyers. These factors are now working as shown by the Reserve Bank and the Treasury forecast saying that house price inflation is dropping to about 1 percent per annum on average through the country next year.We're investing in Māori housing. We're investing in infrastructure to assist councils to provide the infrastructure that we need to build these houses. We're reforming the Resource Management Act (RMA) system. There's $132 million not just to redesign the application but to avoid the mistake of the RMA which was that a good law was passed but it just wasn't implemented. At the time they didn't fund the Environment Court. They didn't produce a standard plan. They didn't have standardised definitions and they didn't pursue national direction. All of those things are being addressed through our RMA package.I want to mention yet another area that we're delivering on which is— Matt Doocey: Bureaucrats!Hon DAVID PARKER: —vaccines. Oh the other side they say "Bureaucrats". You know I think New Zealanders actually realise the benefit of public servants in helping us get through the COVID journey that we have negotiated so far and yes some of those what they call bureaucrats are people who help in ministries with the COVID strategy and that's working too. We're at 108 percent in the last data that's on the website that's updated weekly—108 percent of target as the Minister Chris Hipkins said in the House today. We're delivering vaccines at a faster rate than they are being delivered and it's a delicate balancing exercise as we manage those stocks so that we don't run out by the time we get the big deliveries later in the year but we are still on track to vaccinate every New Zealander that wants to have a vaccination by the end of the year. Those stats have been broken down by locality they've been broken down by week and they're all available on the COVID-19 vaccine data website that the Ministry of Health maintains. I invite those who are listening to look at them because every week we show the number of vaccines that we are carrying out the number of first doses the number of second doses. Now some of the critics as to the number of people that have been vaccinated say "Oh there's only 20000 or 30000 people been vaccinated." They're wrong. The data that comes out tomorrow based on the trends that we've seen in prior weeks will show that more than 200000 New Zealanders have now had their second dose. We know that the third category of people includes about a million people. We've done the majority of the people who are in managed isolation and quarantine—virtually all of them actually—and the health workforces; they're largely vaccinated now. But the extension of this to category 3—it is a million people in category 3. A million people in category 3 cannot be vaccinated overnight in part because the stock of vaccines is roughly 300000 people and anyone that can do arithmetic—and there's obviously some arithmetically challenged people on the other side because they can't seem to work out this obvious truth that if there's a million people in category 3 then until you get the big deliveries coming in July and thereafter you can't vaccinate all of that million people from 300000 doses that are in the country. They're arriving at roughly 50000 extra doses until we get the big deliveries later in the year so 50000 per week plus the running down of the stock allows us to do towards 100000 a week—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired."