Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
[Sitting date: 02 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1886. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
But down here with our feet pointing towards Stratford-upon-Avon the electoral crown is slipping. The sceptre is falling from the executive grasp and that is because of the absence of mercy in the budgetary policy of this Government. It is because of the lack of vision among its strategic planners who fail to see the structural distortions in our national economy and the resulting imbalances between it and the global economy.  
But mercy is above this sceptred sway 
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings 
It is an attribute to God himself 
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s 
When mercy seasons justice. 
If ever this Government deserves a seasoned admonition it is today when its Budget Policy Statement is up for judgment. There have been 3 months of global developments to shade the strategic economic canvas 3 months of continuing political ineptitude to darken the domestic stage. But it is not only a lack of economic justice and a plea for political mercy that characterises this Government’s current misfortune. It is above all as I said yesterday an ideological conviction met only by political rigidity and a cautious disposition that will bedevil our future.  
The Key Government endlessly repeats the mantra of innovation creativity and entrepreneurship and then cuts the Budget that could underwrite these qualities for our next generation. This is manifest in its wilful blindness to the issue of macroeconomic concepts—how to measure for example our economic well-being. According to the Government only by GDP. It is obsessed with economic growth to the point of mania. From the Speech from the Throne of December 2008 to this Budget Policy Statement we have heard that the Government’s overriding objective is economic growth so that Kiwis can have a brighter future prosperity jobs education and health and we shall balance economic opportunity with environmental responsibility as we go. But that excludes the broader notion of societal well-being. All around the world in Bhutan Canada and Norway through the OECD and the UN work is under way to broaden the measure of economic performance to encompass societal well-being.  
In New Zealand our statistics and environment departments have been working with other countries to develop indicators of sustainable development. That was the result of some public funding back in June 2000 initiated by the Green Party. That work was professionally done. We now have a report of 2009 identifying indicators of environmental and social criteria. These would broaden the performance indicators of a country along the lines that experts have been calling for since the Earth Summit back in 1992.  
I have submitted into the ballot a member’s bill that would amend the Public Finance Act to broaden the indicators required in the Budget statement beyond the traditional ones of GDP CPI unemployment and current account deficit. I call upon this Government to adopt the bill and incorporate it into its governmental legislative programme. If the Government were to do so this strict court of national legislators might accept the deeds of mercy of which I have spoken thus and mitigate the justice of the Government’s plea towards a different sentence from what was written into the annals of English literature some 500 years ago.