Gilmore Aaron: General Debate 
Gilmore Aaron: General Debate 
[Volume:663;Page:10985] 
AARON GILMORE (National) 
: 
 When I was a kid I was pleased to be told something which I remember vividly. I was told I should leave New Zealand a better place than when I inherited it. That was one of the vivid things that stayed in my mind when I was living in a State house with my grandmother. This Budget is not about rich and poor; it is about getting our economy growing and leaving it better than when we inherited it. It is not right that one-third of New Zealand’s tertiary-qualified people do not live in New Zealand. It is not right that when I was born New Zealand was richer than Australia on a per capita income basis but now it is not. It was not right that under the prior Government we were looking at bloated State sector employment ballooning deficits and ballooning debt. Back in November 2008 people decided that that was not right and they voted in a National Government. 
They want New Zealand to grow and prosper. Budget 2009 set the platform. It set the platform for us to prosper. We made some big calls in Budget 2009 in curing what was the worst recession New Zealand had had in 70-odd years. We made some tough calls. Yes we deferred expenditure into the Cullen fund. Yes we changed the expenditure on the research and development tax credit because it was not working. Yes we refocused large amounts of money into infrastructure to unclog the arteries in our towns and cities up and down the country into our roads into our electricity supply and into our communication networks. Economic growth means that incomes increase for all. It means more dollars for health care education and welfare. It means more and better jobs. It means choices. 
Since Budget 2009 despite the worst recession in 70 years what have we seen? Well I was recently given a book called  
Rescuing the New Zealand Economy: What Went Wrong and What we Can Do to Fix It 
 
authored by that well-known Tory Bryan Gould. This book was published in the dying throes of the previous Labour Government. He knew that the economy was broken then and we have gone out of our way to fix it. After years of stagnation the economy is now growing employment is growing migration to Australia is down 22 percent in the last 12 months and incomes are growing from jobs funded not by taxpayers but by real businesses up and down the country. 
There is a plan. We have a plan to stop borrowing and instead to invest. Tomorrow in Budget 2010 members will hear Bill English talk more about some of those plans. We have heard of some of the great plans we have already. We have heard more about the road to recovery and what we will see. We have already heard that $1 billion dollars—$1 billion dollars—will be spent on fixing leaky homes by the great Minister sitting behind me Maurice Williamson. We have heard that $30 million will be spent on tourism by the Minister of Tourism Prime Minister John Key. We have heard that $134 million will be spent on Whanau Ora. I was pleased to be at a meeting only last week in my part of Christchurch where 650 people came to hear the Minister responsible for Whanau Ora Tariana Turia. They heard what she had to say about that policy. No Labour Party members were there because they do not care. We will spend $24 million on fighting bowel cancer. I think that that is a wonderful thing. As a son of somebody who went through that horrible disease I think that greater testing and things in that area will be wonderful and it will help some people get through it. All we have heard from the other side has focused on tax reform. The issue that we care about is refocusing in the productive sector encouraging investment in production and not in consumption. 
This is a Budget on a path to prosperity. Tomorrow we will see another step along that path so that the time will come in the future when my children will decide that they want to stay in New Zealand and that they want to raise their children in New Zealand. They will look back at our Budget tomorrow and say that it made steps that put New Zealand on a path to prosperity put in place incentives and did not leave them with a decade or more of deficits or with a mortgage before they even started high school—let alone got into the workforce. The investments that we have made and have announced already will do that. We have announced that $321 million will go into the research science and technology sector. That is $321 million to allow our smartest New Zealanders to stay here and to create more wealth. But what do we hear from the Opposition? We hear bluster and rubbish that all we care about are tax cuts. I think those members may be surprised tomorrow. We have heard that $250 million will be invested in KiwiRail—the thing that Labour tells us we are going to shut down. Yesterday we heard about a plan to invest $4.6 billion in KiwiRail. I think that is a wonderful thing.