Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I want to thank my parliamentary colleagues for what has been quite an incredible year for our Parliament and our country. I want to thank all of the staff in the different offices—Bills Table Hansard the Clerk—that make this place tick and work. I particularly want to thank my own staff here in Parliament but also in my office in the Epsom electorate. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that I've got the best staff of the entire Parliament. I'm grateful to them and those that work in the ACT Party as well.I realise that if I was to be remembered for anything this year it would be the passage of the End of Life Choice Bill. I particularly want to thank the Office of the Clerk the Parliamentary Counsel Office and some of the people around the House—the Minister of Justice—who have been particularly helpful in allowing that to happen. I want to thank certain opponents whom I won't name. We couldn't have done it without you to be really honest. That bill will go to referendum next year and the question will be whether we become as Chris Bishop so ably put it a more humane society that is more compassionate more understanding and more free.It's a time of year to reflect on what sort of country we are and who we are. It's occurred to me this year as we've gone through various tragedies that our country is a country where everybody has one thing in common and we're so diverse that it's probably the only thing: each and every one of us has travelled further or our ancestors have travelled further for a better life than anyone else on this planet. The runners-up are the Australians but they didn't come as far and in many cases not quite as freely. But we are pioneers or children of pioneers and we shouldn't be here settling for second best. If that's what we wanted we'd still be living most probably in Asia or Europe.Yet when we ask ourselves what the real metrics say not the puffery from the Government we see in the Programme for International Student Assessment 20 percent of 15-year-olds testing functionally innumerate and illiterate for the 21st century. That's not good enough. Productivity growth—what really matters for people being able to work less and consume more and enjoy life—is in the tank. It remains there and it has been for some time. This Government promised to fix housing. The truth is that rents have gone up and homelessness has gone up and KiwiBuild has become a kind of joke and a byword for failure. Even child poverty something the Government made its flagship—they passed the measures and we know it didn't work and I said it wouldn't work at all because actually it's gone up even by those measures.The quality of lawmaking is evident in all of those failings. Our nation after the tragedy in Christchurch deserved a sober and effective response to make us safer. It gives me no pleasure to stand here vindicated by the objective failure of the gun buy-back to say that this Parliament failed in that objective and I'm pleased to have stood against it. We won't be any safer by the Government cracking down on freedom of expression in the wake of that tragedy. It will make us less of a place that is able to reason through its differences and more likely to settle them violently—a sad irony.Time and again the ACT Party has stood alone in this Parliament opposing low-quality lawmaking. One only has to look at the market studies into petrol companies. Last week we had the absurdity of the responsible Minister saying he was going to drop petrol prices by 32c. He must have forgotten the importer margin is 25c. How he thinks he's going to make petrol 32c a litre cheaper by targeting something that costs 25c I have no idea.But our ancestors and in many cases ourselves as New Zealanders did not come so far for a better life to put up with such mediocrity in lawmaking. We must do better and for that reason I'm very much looking forward to 2020 and putting forward the case that we all prosper better in a freer society that makes high-quality laws.Mr Speaker finally with the exception of your presiding over question time in relation to me I'd like to thank you very much for the contribution you've made to the integrity and honour of this House and wish you a very merry Christmas. Thank you.