Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Well it's amazing to think that only four months after this Budget was delivered the great so-called Wellbeing Budget nobody has been talking about it and it has been long long sent off to the dustbin of history when people have been focusing on the so-called year of delivery where there has been nothing delivered. The postman has never come and the only delivery that we've seen is a sharply slowing economy and fewer opportunities for New Zealanders to get ahead. What we've seen is no delivery on the things that matter to New Zealanders: getting home from work on time through all the traffic congestion—all the things that were promised and are not being delivered.So what did we see in the Budget? Remember we saw a massive increase in spending and this Government's obviously shown that it's very capable of making announcements on spending. What we haven't seen so much is good quality spending. We've seen a lot more money sent off to the free fees at university which of course has led to no more students—in fact fewer students. We've seen more money go off to Shane Jones and Shane Jones has wandered around the countryside and he's hung it out. We still actually haven't seen any tallies yet of how many jobs have been created. I think I got to 54. I think he might be up to 63 maybe 72—who knows—but there's $500 million gone into the one billion trees and we're not sure what we're getting for that other than destroying jobs in the countryside converting land from sheep and beef to native forestry. So it is very marginal quality spending there.Then of course we've seen the lack of delivery on the promises. They're great at announcing things. This is the great gonna Government: We're gonna to do this we're gonna to do that but we haven't quite got round to doing it yet." They've taken $3 billion in this Budget out of infrastructure spending for the next five years because they haven't got around to doing anything. What have they done on infrastructure?Hon Julie Anne Genter: Thousands of kilometres of road maintenance.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Julie Anne Genter—of course she hates roads hates cars doesn't like "car fascists". So what they've done is they've cancelled a whole lot of projects that were ready to go because they didn't like them and replaced them with a whole bunch of projects that are not ready to go and won't be ready to go for five years. So what we've seen is a great hole opening up in the infrastructure. All the people with the diggers have got nowhere to go. They've got nothing to dig any more and that is leading to a hole in infrastructure nothing getting built nothing being delivered.We saw today the embarrassment—the embarrassment—of the Minister of Finance being asked "Name one project—one project—that they've started in the last few years." One project and he couldn't. He couldn't. He fumbled around and he fumbled and he flummeried and he ummed and he ahhed and he had nothing because there is nothing. They've started nothing new. There's been some continuation of work that started under the previous Government and thank goodness we did some stuff. We've got the Transmission Gully and we've got a few major roads in the Waikato being built and completed but once that's finished there's nothing to replace it because this Government's opposed to building anything. They don't like the car fascists and Mr Twyford said that we've overinvested in roads. OK so they've spent a lot of money or they've announced they're going to spend a lot of money but they haven't actually got around to doing it half the time.Then we talk about wellbeing and this is the great Wellbeing Budget. The Minister of Finance again building great scarecrows said "No one says that GDP is the only measure. Nobody claims that GDP is the only measure of success in any country." Of course nobody claims that. One of the greatest things about this country is that we live in a place which has a wonderful environment that we want to preserve and protect. It's a place where there's a strong rule of law where we have strong social cohesion where we have high trust low corruption—all these things are precious to this country and they're not measured by GDP. So nobody nowhere claims that GDP's the only thing that matters and every Budget that has been passed in this House has been focused on improving the wellbeing of New Zealanders. So the arrogance of this Government to assume that they are the first people to wake up and consider—the first people ever to think and consider—that they care about the wellbeing of New Zealanders is incredible. The arrogance of these people is unbelievable. Anyway. So they've brought in this Wellbeing Budget but the problem that we have with it is that it's just a smokescreen. It's just vague and billowing. The point of a Budget is to say: this is what we're going to spend and this is what we're going to buy for it and this is how it's going to improve the life of New Zealanders. That's what Budgets are about. But when they bring in all the sun and the moon feelings and all these things the potential that it has is just to make it harder for people to hold them to account and that is unfortunately one of the hallmarks of this Government: avoidance of being held to account. So in the year of delivery we wanted to know "Well what happened in this Budget? Where did they talk about extra money for cancer drugs?" Well there wasn't any—there wasn't any. So we've got all this extra spending no extra money for cancer drugs. And once—Hon Dr David Clark: The member's wrong—the member is plain wrong.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: The member is not wrong. There has been no increase. There was no increase of any substance to the Pharmac budget. In fact it was less—Hon Dr David Clark: There was $10 million in the Budget.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —than the increase in the population that was required. So in real terms—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just to remind the Minister: he does have a turn next.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you. In real terms and in per-person terms the Budget had less money going into pharmaceuticals including cancer drugs. With all the money that they've got they're actually putting less into that area so they had to make some changes now out of embarrassment because they realised that it was out of touch with what people expected.What about the food parcels? We heard the Auckland City Mission. Remember the Prime Minister was going to solve all those problems? And yet we've got the largest queues ever for food parcels. We've got more homeless on our streets. Why is that? Well it's primarily because they've greatly added to the costs of rental properties. They've laden costs on to the people who provide rental properties and—surprise surprise—quite a few of them have decided it's all too hard and they're going to get out. So there's been a reduction in supply of rental properties the prices have gone up about $50 a week and fewer people are struggling to get into houses. Surprise surprise there's more pressure on food parcels and more pressure on homeless people in this country as a direct result of the things that this Government has been doing.Then they've added petrol prices. The first bill that was passed after this Budget was an increase in petrol prices making it difficult for New Zealanders to get around and to get ahead. But there was no tax relief at all—no tax relief to be seen anywhere. The Minister of Finance has quite clearly declared that over the next three years there will be no tax relief for any New Zealanders. So any extra money that comes into Government because of any growth or inflation "We're going to take it all and we're going to take it all because we know how to spend it." No tax relief in contrast to what National has offered. The only people that got any kind of relief out of this Government were the deadbeat dads because the mothers no longer have to name who the father is if they want to go for a benefit which is a disgraceful policy. Fathers should always be held to account for their children.So what have we got in this Budget? We've got lots of spending lots of flummery around wellbeing but no growth plan—no growth plan. The biggest growth policy in this Budget was a $1 billion subsidy for rail and Shane Jones—you've got to hand it to him. He's very good at getting the money—very good at getting the money—but he's not so good at spending it. And yet with the extra $1 billion going to rail the question that's on everybody's mind in Auckland is "Why on earth don't they get on with building the third rail line through Auckland so that commuters don't have to wait for freight trains all the time?" So the one job that they should be doing on the rail they're not doing and I'd love to hear an explanation from the Minister about that—why he thinks it's so important to spend a billion dollars everywhere else on the rail network but not make any progress on the one job that needs to be done.Secondly the other thing that this Budget hasn't focused on is a growth plan for this country. So what we're seeing is a rapidly slowing economy. We were in the top half of the OECD in growth in the last five years of the National Government—11th—and that was per person because that's the only thing that really matters. If you've got the population growing by 2 percent every year then if your economy is growing by only 2 percent every year well you're not making much progress. Under National we were growing on average 1.7 percent per person over the last five years. That has fallen away under this Government to barely growing at all per person and the reasons for that are not as the Minister of Finance claimed today all Donald Trump's fault or the Chinese's fault or the Iranians' fault—or any number of people they've blamed for what's going on. It's not all international causes. Of course there's an element of what's going on internationally but the main reason is domestic and it's the fact that this Government through all its combination of policies has driven down business confidence to the extent that nobody's prepared to invest. Well people are holding off investing because they're too scared. They don't know what's happening.The third thing is that this Government keeps every week adding costs to business and to families and making it harder for people to get ahead. Secondly they've created so much uncertainty with all the 230—I can't remember how many—working groups we've got at the moment. They've tossed all their things up into the air; everybody is wanting to see what's going to happen where it's all going to land and in the meantime they're keeping their hands in their pockets not investing because they don't know what's going on. They've added costs they've created uncertainty and the third thing Dr Clark is that they have demonstrated incompetence in some of the key areas which they've had responsibility for. KiwiBuild is the most dramatic. They came in and Phil Twyford was going to solve the housing problem—we're all idiots; he's going to solve them! And two years later he's admitted that it's a complete failure. We see that same failure in their transport policies and that is why New Zealanders have lost confidence in this Government and the sooner they get replaced the better."