Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. This Budget Policy Statement sets out again that the Government will have a wellbeing focus. It says that there's going to be a just transition to new fuels. How's that working out? Well it turns out that we're having a dress rehearsal of what this Government's just transition looks like. By banning exploration for the most efficient cleanest-burning fuel that could be used for a just transition we find ourselves burning coal. That's what the future is going to be like. There will be more coal in our future because this Government's just transition is so myopic they have banned the one fuel that could be used for a transition.And then they say that we're going to have better child wellbeing. Well there are some kids who go to King's College—Hon Willie Jackson: Very negative—very negative!DAVID SEYMOUR: —and they get very good grades and Willie Jackson can tell the House all about it in a moment. But then there are other kids at decile 1 schools. Do you know what the pass rate is for kids at decile 1 schools at university entrance? Oh about 20 percent—you know less than half of what it is for kids at decile 10 schools. Child wellbeing—has anybody heard about the performance of Oranga Tamariki? A scandal from start to finish. And then we talk about physical and mental wellbeing. This from the Government where a Minister of the Crown calls other politicians a nutter in front of 400000 people on Mike Hosking. That's the Government. And is it any wonder if that's the attitude of senior Ministers of Cabinet in this Government that we have school principals in the Epsom electorate including where Chris Luxon's daughters went to school who are telling me just this week that they have serious difficulties with students getting into mental health services because COVID has pushed kids over the edge and the services for them are not scaling up to meet that demand?This is the reality of this Government. They said it's a wellbeing Government a just transition the future of work Māori and Pasifika child wellbeing physical and mental wellbeing. Well it's not just the ACT Party which says that this is a triumph of spin over substance. We said that two years ago when they first started talking about a Wellbeing Budget. I was astonished and I think it's unusual for a social democrat Government to be lambasted in The Guardian. Now this is the newspaper that took over from the Red Star and they are lambasting this Labour Party because it says this wellbeing Government this Wellbeing Budget was supposedly world leading. But" it says "the country still struggles with deep-seated social problems that seem incongruous … growing inequality; high rates of child poverty the worst youth suicide rate in the developed world; [stifled] … progress on climate change. Its housing affordability crisis has become one of the worst in the world and has countless flow-on effects. The waiting list for public housing has hit an all-time high with 20000 families waiting for a home—four times what it was when Labour was elected in 2017." That's what the left-wing Guardian is saying about this Government's Wellbeing Budget. That's how the initiative is going three years in. It is a disaster by its own standards. The idea of a Wellbeing Budget cannot be taken seriously. There is no substance. It's all spin. By the very measures that this Government set for itself it is failing in education in health in mental health and housing and The Guardian to its credit is calling this Labour Government out for its failings. But then there's what we normally worry about in a Budget and that is: how much money is the Government spending? I hate to seem old-fashioned but Budgets are supposed to be about how much money is the Government spending and what results is it getting for that spending. Well one of the things that potentially people should be concerned about when it comes to Government spending is actually the amount of debt that this Government is taking on. We now have a projection that there's going to be 48 percent of GDP debt at its peak and incredibly the Minister of Finance is trying to say that this is a good thing because previously the estimate was 53 percent of GDP debt at the peak. Well the truth is that the biggest problem that this country faces in the short to medium term is that the Government has borrowed so much money when interest rates are low knowing that interest rates may not stay low. It's easy to borrow a hundred billion bucks when the Reserve Bank is just printing it hand over fist. You know some people say the Labour Party won the 2020 general election. I'd say Social Credit won it because they're the ones that are having their policies implemented funding the Government by printing "funny money". The only difficulty with that is that eventually you get inflation as someone could have read in the Herald this morning from Richard Prebble a fantastic former member of this House. If you increase the supply of money and the supply of goods and services stay the same inflation is what happens and it's happening in the housing market. That's why the housing market's gone up 22 percent in the last year. It's difficult to overstate how badly this Government has failed. They have managed to be elected to fix housing. In fact Stuart Nash—he had a few clangers this morning on Hosking—said the Government has "fixed housing."! I would hate to see this Labour Government screw something up if a 22 percent increase in house prices and therefore a reduction in affordability is this Government "fixing" something. Well that's a direct result of the monetary policy that has been used to subsidise the Government's spending. Here's the problem. Eventually it doesn't work because people lose faith in the currency and interest rates have to rise back to the prices that people will actually loan the Government money. And when that happens having borrowed on low interest rates facing high interest rates we are in a mess of trouble. Then the Government's Budget policy response says: "But we've done such a good job on the Government's response to COVID-19." Well let's just think about that for a moment. This Government had a less challenging job responding to an epidemic than any other country on Earth. And we know this is true because I asked the Minister responsible: could he name a country that went into COVID-19 with greater isolation with a more sophisticated civil society with greater wealth and that was in a better position to fight a pandemic? He could not name one because there isn't one. And having had the easiest least challenging job in the world they have duffed it time after time after time. Just this morning on the Health Committee the officials admitted that case B at the Grand Millennium hadn't been tested for the last four months. Now this is not a new thing. This was litigated through the press in this Parliament all through the end of last year. The Government was asked: "Is the Government testing people who work at MIQ?" "Oh yes we're testing them now. We didn't before but we're testing them now." They're still not testing them. And then there's vaccination. I remember a great word in New Zealand politics and it's time to bring it back: "omnishambles". We are facing an omnishambles in vaccination because fundamentally this Government cannot put in place the information systems to understand who's vaccinating who with which vaccine and when. It's going to be the gift that's going to keep on giving for an Opposition but a disaster for the rest of New Zealand.So what should we want instead from our Government? It's actually not particularly complex. What we should want from a Government in this Budget is an opportunity to grow out of our country's challenges. It starts with honest conversations about the challenges this country is facing about the debt about the gaps in educational attainment about the inability to produce urban land—land that is consented and connected to opportunity by infrastructure so the next generation can build homes like the boomers. If we have those honest conversations about the real challenges facing this country perhaps we could also grow our productivity and be in a position to pay down the debt. But at this point we have a Government that pursues a whole lot of objectives—airy fairy. It's failed. Even The Guardian says so. It's time for New Zealand to unite behind good ideas and stop wasting money on the divisive spin over substance that is fast becoming the trademark of this Labour Government. Thank you Madam Speaker."