King Annette: Budget Debate 
King Annette: Budget Debate 
[Volume:673;Page:19249] 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour) 
: 
 We have just heard from the Minister for Social Development and Employment. It was interesting to hear her final comments in her speech about children. One of the areas where she has disappointed me most is that she has been more about talk than action in her 2½ years as Minister. Although she has said how much she cares about children she does not follow it up with action. I am looking forward to the day when there will be some real action and children in New Zealand will be put at the centre of a Government’s policy. 
I have heard the words “bland” “boring” “no vision” “no plan” “no ideas” and “a Budget for yesterday not tomorrow.” Those are some of the comments that we have heard from around New Zealand on the National Government’s third Budget. I would like to add a few other words to those ones. There has been quite a lot of “creative accounting” in this Budget. There is a fair dose of “dodgy figures” in this Budget. Some very heroic assumptions have been made in this Budget and the whole lot has been mixed up with a very big handful of fairy dust. I believe that the public over many many months have been played like a fiddle in the lead-up to this Budget. The Government has been assisted by the media by commentators and by cheerleaders for National all playing the same tune as we went into this Budget. People were softened up to expect a tough Budget. There would be no new spending; it was a Budget about savings and growth. There would be cuts to projects that were “nice to have” although it has never been defined what “nice to haves” are. It was to be about the unaffordability of the growing deficit this country has. 
We were told week in and week out over and over again that we were borrowing $380 million a week and that it was unsustainable unavoidable and unacceptable. New Zealanders were told that in this Budget they would have to take the pain. They would have to accept the pain they would have to swallow the cuts that were coming and they would have to stop complaining about selling our power companies and selling Air New Zealand because there was no alternative. The poor Government had to do this because it was forced into this position! That was the mantra we heard week in week out. I believe that the public were played like a fiddle. The truth is that the public are being fiddled by National because if we look at National’s Budget we see that it is based on some pretty dodgy figures indeed. They are now emerging. Weeks after the Budget was presented; we are starting to get the true picture of what this Budget actually meant. 
Let us take the first dodgy figure: the need to borrow $380 million a week which is equivalent to $86 having to be borrowed every week for every man woman and child in New Zealand. But we have now discovered something after the Budget was presented and it came out not by the Government being upfront about it. The public has learned that Bill English has been borrowing $100 million more per week than he needed to borrow. But miraculously before the election the Government will not need to borrow so much so good will their management of the economy be. No one would argue that they ought not to borrow when the terms are good but why not be honest and upfront about what they are borrowing and why they are borrowing it? New Zealanders are clever enough to understand if they are told but what was happening had to be uncovered and drawn out. 
The Government used that $380 million per week of borrowing as a way to scare New Zealanders. It made people much more worried than they needed to be. People worried about their own personal situations. They saw their jobs going they saw their partners’ jobs going and they saw prices rising faster than their wages. They saw their food bills power bills petrol costs and rents going up. They could see that the tax cuts that were supposed to help them and the income assistance available were less than the rising prices they were facing. They knew they were not getting compensation in their wages or from those tax cuts so they were very worried about their own situation. Loaded on top of them the Government then made them worry about the position this country was in. It was about to implode because we were borrowing $380 million a week. 
It has been beautifully orchestrated by National members. They were covering up their own economic incompetence. They used the shadow of the Christchurch earthquakes and the Pike River disaster along with alarming Kiwis to set up what I believe is an agenda to push through their old tired policies of the past. It was all about positioning for the election. There is no denying that we have to reduce our Government borrowing in this country. It needs to be tackled and a Labour Government would do that but why not be honest about what we are borrowing? Why not front up to the public of New Zealand and say what money will be spent on? The first step in a recovery plan is to be honest about the situation one faces. We have not had that sort of transparency from this Government. This Government should own up to the fact that it is borrowing for the tax cuts it gave to thousands of well-paid New Zealanders last year. It should stop the fudge about it and stop the fiddle about it. It is a fact: this Government is borrowing to pay for tax cuts for the top income earners in New Zealand. We could not afford those tax cuts but the Government gave them anyway. 
The irony of it is that Government members made changes in this Budget to Working for Families. I believe the changes they made to Working for Families bring them in about $300 million or $400 million which affects middle-income earner families earning up to around $80000 or $90000 per year in joint income. Government members could have been much fairer if they had just lifted the top tax rate a little for those who got the big windfall in the tax cuts last year and it would have brought in the same amount of money. But who did they tackle? Who did they hit? They hit middle-income earners with families to grab money off them but left the high-income earners in this country with their tax cuts and the money in their pockets. There was no fairness in that. 
Let us have a look at some of the fairy dust that Government members sprinkled around at the time of the Budget. Let us look at the jobs they said will be created over the next 4 years. They said we will get 170000 jobs. Was that not the same figure that they promised in the 2010 Budget? I believe it is. In fact if we look at the Budget’s additional information estimates we see that 155000 jobs will come between now and 2015. That is actually 10000 fewer than they had in last year’s Budget. Those jobs will not be out there unless there is a change in this Government’s direction and a proper plan to create those jobs. In fact unemployment has gone up not down. Then we had the fairy dust about how our economy was going to grow by 4 percent every year over the next 4 years. Even Treasury is backing away from that prediction. Guess what? There is more. We can look forward to wage increases of between 4 and 5 percent every year for the next 4 years. Who believes that? The public certainly do not. 
Then we had the doozy of them all: the creative accounting in the Budget. We will be allowed to choose whether we sell our assets. We will get to choose by voting at the next election. But when one looks at the Budget documents one sees that the Government has already cashed up. It has banked the money already over the next 4 years. The Government has sold our assets. It is a con job. There is no choice for New Zealanders. The Government has banked the money from the sale of those assets. 
Then we get to KiwiSaver the other bit of a fiddle that went on. We get to choose whether we want to change KiwiSaver but the Government is already cutting the $10 a week tax credit from New Zealanders from 1 July. This Budget is not about a forward plan; it is about pulling the wool over the eyes of New Zealanders.