Parker David: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Debate on Budget Policy Statement 
[Sitting date: 13 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8479. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I must have been at a different committee from that man Todd McClay. I sit on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the committee that I was on heard that 180000 people have gone to Australia that we have had rising unemployment that the wage gap has increased between New Zealand and Australia that the Government has not rebalanced the economy towards exports and that the current account deficit this year is the second-worst in the developed world after Greece and that next year by the IMF’s calculation it will be the worst in the world. That select committee heard all of that. Where was that member? I thought he was meant to be chairing it. 
Do you know what? New Zealanders are disappointed in this Government and I want the Minister of Finance when he stands up to apologise to New Zealand for failing to meet his undertakings to the electorate time after time. In 2008 he was elected on the promise to close the wage gap with Australia. What has happened? It is going up. It is going up and indeed now it is so large that an Australian works for 4 days to earn what a New Zealander has to work for 5 days to earn. It has gone up by 50 percent from $120 a week to $180 a week. Even when you use the measure that the Deputy Prime Minister now uses which is not the measure that the Prime Minister used to use but even when you use his recalculation when you take into account the increases in GST and when you strip out the tax cuts that were already coming in from the Labour Government—even on an after-tax basis when you do it properly—that wage gap has got bigger. 
Why should the Government apologise? Because it is mismanaging things including in the Minister’s own department Treasury. There has been egregious mismanagement of the Crown Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme where for the first 5 months after the Government gave a guarantee to finance companies it did not even ask one question as to whether they were increasing their lending and their deposits by hundreds of millions of dollars on the back of that guarantee at the cost of the guarantor taxpayer—did not even do it. Then last year we had scandal after scandal. We had ACC we had Dotcom and the Prime Minister having his brain fades and we had the Deputy Prime Minister forgetting to talk with the Prime Minister so he was beset with that issue rather than managing the economy. We had the Banks donation scandal and it is scandalous that we have a member in this House who broke the law in respect of campaign donations to try to get elected. That man who of course supports the Government tripled council debt when he was last Mayor of Auckland. We have had the Skycity bungle where some parties had the inside running—crony capitalism where the insiders got the deal—and everyone else did not know about the deal and so the Auditor-General found that it was not fair. What is the impact of the Government dealing with scandal after scandal instead of doing what it does? The economy is not doing as well as it should. 
The latest scandal is the Government trying to say that it is not its fault that Solid Energy is as far in the shtook as it is. I have got a letter here from the then Minister for State Owned Enterprises Simon Power to Solid Energy in 2009. First off it noted that there is a “significant decline in forecast coal prices”. So this is the Government acknowledging in 2009 that it knew of that issue—2009. Then it said: “I would like all SOEs to increase their gearing from current levels”. So the Government wanted it to borrow more. Solid Energy had we heard in question time at that time debt of $12 million or $15 million and in the period after that at the request of the Government it borrowed an extra $300 million— 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: How much? 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: —$300 million Mr Peters; an astounding amount—with the approval of the Government knowing that the coal price was going down. It was putting some money into things like lignite which we had the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister— 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Who opened the lignite? 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Well they actually took the photo op. That was after Gerry Brownlee was elected saying “sexy coal” in that pre-election video pushing Solid Energy into further developments despite the decreasing price of coal. The Labour Party—and it is a matter of public record—was quite opposed to the lignite development. The Government ripped the rug out from under Solid Energy on biofuels which it had invested in by Gerry Brownlee changing the legislation and completely ripping away the market but the National Government says that that is not its fault. 
 The incompetence of this Government in economic matters can be judged from the fact that its central economic agenda for this 3 years is selling off the electricity State-owned enterprises. Selling what already exists does not increase New Zealand’s output. It is this lack of an economic plan this failure to do what it promised to do which was to move New Zealand towards an export-led recovery and export jobs that is at the heart of New Zealand’s problem. Government members refuse to do what everyone agrees they need to do except for them. We need a capital gains tax to encourage people to invest in our productive enterprises rather than in speculative land banking or whatever is happening in Auckland. We need people to be saving more through a universal KiwiSaver scheme. That would grow the economy but no National will not do that. We need to change monetary policy. There was a good article I thought today by Colin James. In his syndicated article he was saying that it is time for the Government to wake up and realise that the rest of the world is intervening for the benefit of their exporters and New Zealand should be too. But no the National Party members have got themselves into a corner on everything. 
They are left doing little things. Some of them are good; actually most of them are Labour Party policy. You know we have got them coming out in the coming Budget with something that other parties in this Parliament agree with like a warrant of fitness for rental houses. They are actually now saying that they are going to do something with Government procurement—too little too late and absolutely inconsistent with what they have done in respect of closing Hillside railway workshops and their other refusals to support local manufacturers and local IT providers but none the less adopting at least a small part of Labour Party policy. They are adopting loan-to-valuation ratios after they said that that was just silly. That was just silly a year ago— 
Hon Annette King 
: Did they say that? 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: They said it. In fact the sorts of things that are now being done were described by Steven Joyce as voodoo economics. Of course he is “Mr Fix-it”. If you pronounce it like Simon Bridges would it would probably describe it because what has he done to ultra-fast broadband—3000 connections? Four years into his period in office and we have got 3000 connections. We have got them trying to rewrite the regulatory framework we have got them making money off poor people in poor suburbs to line the pockets of the shareholders of that company that is not doing as it ought to and is the Government enforcing that contract? No. 
I want an apology from the Minister of Finance for not meeting the undertakings that he gave to this country in advance of the 2008 election. Why is it that we keep having downgraded forecasts of growth? We now know because today we have got a letter at the Finance and Expenditure Committee that Treasury admits that a third of all growth—modest though it is—is coming out of the Christchurch rebuild. They claim that is a problem yet it is a third of all growth. That is only the first-round effect. Treasury would not tell us what the second-round effect was. This Government is failing in its economic duties.