Genter Julie Anne: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2934. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I rise to speak about the Government’s financial statements for the previous year. Budgets are all about priorities. We have a choice about what we spend our money on and where we spend our money speaks volumes about what is really important to us. This National Government I think it is clear is quite out of touch with what is really important to New Zealanders. The Government Ministers and members have been speaking about the economic growth rate being slightly over 3 percent. Economic growth is not an end in and of itself. The economy is there to serve us. It is there to ensure that people are able to live better lives and the entire economy of course takes place within the confines of the natural environment.National’s economic growth unfortunately is not all based on us being better off. A significant portion of the economic growth that we are seeing this year and that is forecast for the next few years is entirely related to the Christchurch rebuild. We are not better off because we had an earthquake and a lot of buildings had to be rebuilt but that is what it looks like for the next few years. It looks like there is high economic growth. We are not better off because there is an out-of-control situation in Auckland with house prices. Yet it does look that way on the surface. I think many New Zealanders will realise that we are not better off; we are in an economy that is becoming more and more divided between those who have and those who have not.National’s economic strategy is based on increasing pollution and increasing inequality. It is a woefully 20th century approach. We know more and more from the research that is coming out around the world that there are opportunities to have a far more sustainable economy. The great economic opportunity of the 21st century is responding to climate change and to global inequality. By responding to those we could have a sustainable economy that actually left New Zealanders better off. New Zealanders love their natural environment and they want to live in a country where we all have a fair go and where not just a smaller and smaller portion of people increasingly hold the majority of the wealth.Of course National started with tax cuts for the wealthy which continues to cost us about a billion dollars a year. That was a choice that this National Government made to prioritise tax cuts for those who already had a lot of money rather than using that money on programmes that would actually address the problem of growing poverty amongst children in this country. So rather than spending the money on the quarter of a million children in New Zealand who do not have enough to eat who go to school hungry and who are not able to learn it chose to prioritise tax cuts for the wealthy. Then it claimed that despite having a billion dollars a year to spend on tax cuts for the wealthy we did not have enough money so we had to sell our State-owned energy companies which were turning a nice profit for the taxpayer. So in order to raise about the same amount of money that we lost through tax cuts for the wealthy in the first 4 to 5 years of this National Government we sold our profitable State-owned energy companies. Of course the privatisation of those shares went to just a small portion of New Zealanders just several thousand New Zealanders—those who had enough money in their pockets and a few thousand spare dollars in cash to pick up those shares and who are now benefiting from that investment. National said that it would spend the proceeds of these asset sales wisely on productive infrastructure. That was the term used by the Minister of Finance who was also the Minister for Infrastructure.But in fact what we have seen the money spent on is a bunch of election bribes. So rather than prioritising infrastructure projects on the basis of a rational assessment of what is going to be best for the New Zealand economy we have seen bridges and roads randomly chosen from around the country where Steven Joyce the campaign manager for the National Party thinks they are going to yield the most votes for the National Party and will be the best way to win electorate seats. They are also poor investments not just because they have been cherry-picked from what National thinks is the greatest priority but because they do nothing to reduce our reliance on carbon pollution and imported oil. One would think given it is 2015—it is the 21st century—that we would be investing in infrastructure that actually reduces pollution and responds to climate change.This National Government is so arrogant that it refuses to take the advice of the OECD the IMF the UN and the thousands of scientists working for the UN who have told us that we need to take urgent action to respond to climate change. We need to reduce climate pollution and all new investments in infrastructure should take us in that direction of reducing rather than increasing pollution.