Russell Deborah; Willis NicolaHon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. There was a moment in the Finance and Expenditure Committee hearing with the Minister of Finance on the Estimates that I remember very very clearly and it was an astonishing comment made by the Minister where she said that she expected to see more workers in hard hats and high-vis and fewer workers wearing a lanyard on Lambton Quay. It's a bit of an astonishing thing to say when the Minister was surrounded by officials wearing lanyards and threatening their jobs. It was quite a hard-edged thing to say.The astonishing thing is that just three months on in August 2024 we've been receiving reports from the New Zealand construction industry that the work is right down that they are losing work that Government work has disappeared. They are losing workers they are losing people to Australia they cannot see a future for them. So we now have fewer people in hard hats and high-vis and we actually also do seem to have fewer people wearing lanyards on Lambton Quay. We can all see the impact of that in Wellington which is—you know it's a great city; I love Wellington but it is pretty a tough place to survive at the moment if you're trying to run a business.So it seems that the Minister by cutting costs so aggressively has in fact tanked the economy—fewer workers altogether—and I wonder what responsibility the Minister takes for the actions that she has taken in her line-by-line taking money away from New Zealanders taking money out of the Budget taking money away from the construction industry. I wonder what responsibility the Minister takes for that huge impact on our economy.Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance): Well it's wonderful to know that Dr Deborah Russell is still in fact the revenue spokesman. I'd thought that David Parker was auditioning for that role today with his comments on capital income taxes and the like but I suppose we could characterise that as a leadership bid rather than a bid to be the revenue spokesperson.Look the member has raised a couple of matters. One of them is about the impact on the Wellington economy of our efforts to ensure taxpayer money is going to its best purposes. I would share with the member an anecdote where I went to a breakfast in Wellington recently and a business owner turned to me and said Thank you Nicola. Actually we can hire people for our business now. For years we were competing against Government agencies that paid them more and we couldn't get the skills that we needed into our business." Actually having skilled experienced people able to deploy that within private enterprise is no bad thing Dr Russell.Then you've asked me about hard hats in the construction sector and what I would put to you is that this is a Government that is very committed to real infrastructure projects—not make-believe ones like light rail and project Onslow and all of that guff but real ones like filling in potholes like repairing local roads like building State highways. We have set out an extensive Government policy statement on transport which makes that commitment real and puts funding to it.The member has asked me whether I will take responsibility for an economy which has been ravaged for six years by the economic mismanagement of the Government she was a part of. No I won't take responsibility for the impact of a Government that poured fuel on the inflation fire such that interest rates rose higher than they should have otherwise. Those interest rates have then had a crippling effect across the economy and have displaced economic activity and have driven unemployment.What I will take responsibility for is the decisions that we have taken since coming to Government which have seen inflation come down the first reduction in interest rates in four years tax relief delivered to the bank accounts of New Zealanders and a much sharper focus on outcomes for the taxpayer investments we make."