Duncan Helen: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Duncan Helen: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 16 June 2004. Volume:618;Page:13653. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HELEN DUNCAN (Labour) 
: 
 Budget 2004 is a great Budget. This Budget will take New Zealand forward. This Budget is good for families and it is good for the economy. I can tell Simon Power that all New Zealanders benefit from this Budget because this is a good Budget economically. It is a prudent Budget and a fiscally sound Budget and every New Zealander benefits now and will continue to benefit from the sound prudent fiscal management of this Government. The economy has never been in better shape. The Opposition knows that; so does the country. 
This Budget is all about growth and opportunity. It provides half a billion dollars for growth and opportunity—that is right. That is what New Zealand wants to hear. This Budget is about getting New Zealanders into work and making that work pay. New Zealand knows that the National-led Government in its 9 years in office was not interested in getting New Zealanders into work. There was hugely high unemployment. It was not interested in making work pay because wage rates went down and down through the 1990s and the working people of New Zealand know all about that. 
This Budget is about getting New Zealanders into work and making that work pay. It provides for lifting family support and the family tax credit. It improves abatement levels for family income assistance and it replaces the child tax credit with a large in-work payment for working families. These are all things that will benefit the families of New Zealand. I am proud to say that this Budget is about richer communities not about richer individuals. 
This Budget makes significant extra investments in education health and housing. I will mention just a few highlights: there are improvements to childcare; tertiary education is more affordable benefiting more than 36000 students; there are double the number of publicly funded major hip and knee replacement operations; and extra assistance for housing will mean another 1054 State houses next year and improvements to a further 856. These are issues that this Labour Government believes in and cares about. 
What would the National Party do? It is rather hard to know because it does not have a lot of policy. The only policy the National Party talks about is tax cuts. Do tax cuts work better? Well cutting individual taxes spreads the money too thinly. The ones who benefit the most are the ones who are the most well off. The higher one’s income the more one benefits from tax cuts. Of course the Opposition knows all about that. It looks after its mates who are the ones who are all well off. 
The Working for Families package beats tax cuts any day of the week. The Working for Families package will boost the income of working families more than any tax-cut package ever could. People talk about the polls asking people whether they would rather have a tax cut or whether they would rather have extra family assistance and they say that people always opt for the tax cuts. I want to know whether they are asked whether they would rather have $38 in tax cuts or $155 in income assistance and then see what sort of an answer would be given and it would not be the $38. The Working for Families package boosts the income of working families. Tax cuts are not the solution for working families struggling to raise their children. Tax cuts are a blunt instrument and put the most cash back in the pockets of those who need it the least. 
I shall give an example. A two-parent single-income family with four children that earns $55000 will gain an extra $150 per week from the Working for Families package. Tax rates would have to reduce to a flat rate of 9.5c in the dollar to boost that family’s income by the same level. I challenge the National Opposition to tell New Zealanders that it will reduce the tax rate to 9.5c in the dollar because we know that it will not. Often families do not pay enough tax for tax cuts even to deliver equivalent benefits that the Working for Families package will deliver. This Budget is not about rewarding rich mates as the Opposition wants to do. It is about providing fairness and security for low and middle income New Zealand families. 
The Budget provides for significant extra investments in education and health. It makes big improvements in childcare. The rates of subsidy will increase significantly and many more families will be eligible for that subsidy. As well the Budget also signals another dramatic improvement in early childhood education investing another $365 million over 4 years. Education is a big winner from Budget 2004. Provision is made for an extra $206 million over 4 years for primary and secondary education in the Budget. There is an extra $365 million over 4 years for early childhood education. This Government is delivering on its commitment to lift education standards for all young New Zealanders by injecting extra funding of $2 billion over 4 years into education bringing total spending to $9.2 billion by 2007-08. 
Our commitment to the compulsory education sector continues with extra funding of $206 million over 4 years which includes an extra $92 million over 4 years for schools’ operational grants. Between 1999 and next year an additional $226 million in operational funding alone will go to schools to assist them to deliver quality education for their students. In real terms that is a per-student funding increase of 10 percent. 
The Budget is a landmark Budget about educating young Kiwi kids. As I said before we are investing new funding of $365 million over the next 4 years in early childhood education bringing the total annual funding by 2007-08 to approximately $660 million. That is a real commitment to those young children who are the future of New Zealand and where the research proves that the investment will do the most good. From the middle of 2007 3 and 4-year-old children will be entitled to 20 hours free attendance per week at a community-based early childhood education service. That is a significant step; it is fantastic. It is about extending the tradition of free early childhood education from kindergartens to other community-based centres. We have had that free early childhood education in the kindergarten sector but not in the other community-based centres and I am absolutely delighted with that. Having been a worker in education I know that that investment in those very young children will yield the greatest return. 
Budget 2004 marks the start of a new era for early childhood education in New Zealand. It is the first major change in funding for early childhood education since 1989. This major new investment means that by 2008 this Government will have increased its investment in early childhood education by 79 percent since 1999. That is a real indication of the commitment this Government has to the youth of New Zealand and to our New Zealand families. We really care about education and providing a quality education for all New Zealanders and all New Zealand families. Budget 2004 is a great Budget for the working families of New Zealand and I am proud to be associated with it.