Collins JudithHon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Thank you Madam Speaker. Looking through the Estimates it's really clear that the term COVID-19 comes through loud and clear. That's because this country is facing an economic catastrophe. So we see large amounts of money going into trying to deal with the COVID-19 situation; the risks around obviously health; the risks around the border—the lack of quarantining that we've seen; and we also see a large amount of money going into trying to deal with the economic costs.The Estimates themselves seem to have massive amounts of money here for the business support subsidy leave support scheme essential workers—Hon Shane Jones: What page is that?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Page 31—to the Minister who clearly hasn't found it before himself. But thankfully I have read it. And what we're seeing here is a tremendous amount of money going into it. Of course it has to go into it because we have—in our little country of a mere 5 million people—a situation where a lot of people right now are losing their jobs and they're losing their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own. Small businesses are closing their doors. Many of us around our electorates will have seen huge numbers of businesses having closed their doors. Just go around the electorates it's really clear. In some streets half the businesses have already shut and others are looking in the future to have to shut. There has been a wage subsidy scheme and that is a good thing but it is wrong to say that that has gone to help businesses. That has actually gone to help staff the workers to be able to still have an income coming in. We on this side of the House support the fact that staff have been able to have their wages contributed to that something has been able to get paid—about 80 percent of those wages—we think that's a good thing. But we also know that the businesses that we are going to want as a country to be there to keep people employed that they have essentially had next to nothing. They have not had help with their rent. In fact landlords have been told that they have to help out their tenants with their rent. The landlords have not had the help. We have businesses where if they have franchises they often have franchise costs that they have to be able to pay. Some of them have had to shut. We've seen some of our well-known franchises have to shut.We've seen the hospitality industry utterly devastated—and I will not use the term decimated because that means that they would've lost a tenth of them—they've been devastated. We've seen the tourist industry devastated. What we would like to see on this side of the House is an economic plan to help businesses come back from the dead. That's what we need to do and the best way of doing that is to implement it before they're fully dead and actually do it while there's still some life in those businesses.I fear there's not enough in these Estimates to genuinely and sincerely help businesses to stay afloat. What we're seeing around the country is councils—local councils are saying they want to get involved really spend big on infrastructure to help their economies. But of course they're also putting up rates as well; rates for businesses who cannot afford it; rates for landlords who cannot afford it; rates for householders who cannot afford it. We're seeing the Government not fast track the projects that they said they were going to fast track in fact not even announce all the projects that they wanted to fast track. We've been told since April that everything was ready to go—We just need to be able to get the construction industry back again able to work"—and it was all going to happen really quickly lots of infrastructure being built around the country. What we've seen is not nearly as much infrastructure as we would have expected. What there is being built is often through the councils rather than through the Government and the Government funding.We've also seen tremendous loss in the education sector particularly around international students and in the tertiary sector generally. This is not something that's going to be easily overcome. Yes once borders are able to be opened and yes once we can have any confidence in our quarantine system—which I say has been dealt some pretty mortal blows. Yes we might be able to get things going there again but by that stage we will be back competing with Australia and other providers of educational services to international students and we may well find that we have lost opportunities that the educational institutions have spent years trying to get in place—DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just remind the member to deal with the bill in front of her.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: —and years trying to build that.So when we look at the Auckland City Rail Link for instance in here we see there's—what?—it's $193 million coming back into it. That's because—why is that? Is that because it's coming back in because things aren't being spent? What's happened to all of the cost that you might expect in here for some of the other rail work that we were told was happening?Let's have a look at the tertiary tuition and training on page 33 of this bill. Let's have a look at that. We've gone from $16.8 billion coming in to—my word a tremendous amount going out: well actually almost nine times that going out.We have massive losses coming as a country. Just after the Budget was being read Grant Robertson stood up in the House and told us that we would have to have some tweaking because of the COVID-19—tweaking of the Budget and tweaking of the Government's finances. This is not tweaking; this is quite serious. I am concerned that some of the costs in here and this money being spent are not necessarily all going to be going into building our economy building our preparedness for round two of COVID-19 or possibly even round three of COVID-19. I'm not sure that it's going to be appropriately spent. We know that this Government has shown a lack of willingness to judge itself by its results but a tremendous wish to be able to judge itself by how much taxpayer money it spends. Taxpayers would expect that when we look at some of these costs in here whether it's the Primary Growth Partnership the New Zealand agricultural greenhouse gas research that that will be money well spent. We certainly hope so. We look at the earthquake-prone heritage buildings. It's a reduction of the authority provided by clause 7 of the appropriation. I'm not sure why that's reduced. Certainly all around New Zealand and provincial New Zealand there are buildings that are vacant and they're vacant because they are considered to be earthquake-prone. The problem with that is that they've been standing for well over 100 years. They're not being slept in. They could actually be opened I would have thought during the daytime for people to run business from or even the odd time that they could be used for some event. What worries me tremendously in provincial New Zealand is that we have these heritage buildings being left to rot because nobody can afford to put them into the earthquake safeness that we now require for buildings for heritage buildings. And here we have money that seems to be being lost to that account. So I'm not quite sure why that is and I'm sure that the Government would like to explain that to the people of Whanganui of Napier of Hastings of all around New Zealand where right now they need money into their economies and this Government seems more intent on taking it off them rather than giving it to them and building their economy. Thank you Madam Speaker."