Joyce Steven: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeJoyce Steven: General Debate[Sitting date: 16 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9802. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): Well the pressure is showing. The pressure is showing on Andrew Little. There is only so long you can deal with very very low leadership ratings before you do wacky stuff. We saw it with Phil Goff. We saw it with David Shearer. We probably saw it quicker than we expected with David Cunliffe to be fair. He sort of went straight to wacky from the word go. But here we are now dealing with Andrew Little. Yesterday he was ripping up 30 or 40 years of monetary policy that has encouraged investment and growth in this country saying that he would be the one to set interest rates because he is the one who would make sure that they would be passed on to New Zealanders. Today he is away again. Today he has got his person out bagging the New Zealand wine industry. So not content with being negative about some parts of the economy the wine industry is the new one in his sights.We have also had the bagging of the immigration sector generally. Andrew Little was out in Lower Hutt last week saying he was not convinced that it was a good idea having Chinese and Indians working and actually cooking food in Chinese and Indian restaurants. That would seem to be an outrage and he thinks we should stop that because under his economy we should not have immigration. We are looking here I have to say at possibly the angriest leader since one that we knew and loved in his day who was Rob Muldoon—Hon David Parker: Crosby/Textor.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: There is no such thing as Crosby/Textor. I would be worried about the Corbyn-Sanders consultancy which you guys are actually subscribing to at the moment. You used to wind us up about Crosby/Textor. Well I will tell you what: we never went to Corbyn-Sanders for our advice. And if I were you I would stop paying because it is not working for them and it sure as heck is not going to work for you over in the Labour Party.The problem for the Labour Party is it has completely lost its way—completely lost its way—and over the last 7 years it has declared a huge range of crises in New Zealand and has presented panicky solutions that New Zealanders have looked at and said: “No that’s just silly and panicky and that actually the settings are broadly right. Yes we have challenges—countries always have challenges—but you take sensible long-term approaches. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” We all look overseas at countries where they pretend there are simple solutions where the Government just moves the levers around—countries like Venezuela and Argentina where they actually go out there and they declare they know better than the world and they know that they can hold the world up and hold the sky up even though things are changing around them. And that is the sort of policy that Andrew Little is now promoting. That is the level of desperation in the modern Labour Party. It has said: “We’re in trouble we’re stuck on 30 percent so we’re going to do wacky things that everybody knows don’t work but we’re desperately going to try to peel some votes off the Russel-less Green Party and the New Zealand First Party.” Well if that is the way the Labour Party is looking middle New Zealand will turn their backs on it because middle New Zealand knows that you cannot do crazy silly economic things that do not actually solve any problems.Yes it is tough for the dairy industry right now. This Government knows it because we have dairy farmers and processors in our ranks; we talk to them every day. They know it is tough; we know it is tough. We are working with them to do the things that can be sensibly done but actually mucking up New Zealand’s banking sector right at the time when you want it to have confidence in the dairy farmers would be the silliest answer—the silliest answer—that you could come up with. That is the sort of rubbish that you expect from the New Zealand First Party but you do not expect it from the largest Opposition party in Parliament—until you look across and you see that one of its most talented MPs is David Clark and then you realise what you are dealing with and that is the challenge for the Labour Party.The reality is that sensible conservative fiscal and macroeconomic policies have got this country delivering at a rate in terms of growth and employment. Employment growth is in the top three in the OECD which is actually the envy of most OECD countries since the global financial crisis. That does not mean that everything is perfect—challenges have to be dealt with—but tipping up the New Zealand economic framework to get a headline in the newspaper will be seen for the desperate desperate act that it is.