Curran Clare: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: General Debate[Sitting date: 06 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3262. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):Well what is the opposite of boom? It is bust—bust. I tell you what—the legacy of this Government will resonate for decades with its economic mismanagement of large Government projects and the secret deals it has done with large companies which have hurt New Zealand industries destroyed skilled jobs wasted taxpayers’ dollars and let down New Zealanders.It has botched up and it continues to botch up large Government projects. I am going to talk about a few IT projects across Government. There was the project to reform the Inland Revenue Department system—$1.5 billion. There was the Novopay botch-up and having to pay our teachers $45 million to fix that up. There was the merger of the Customs Service and the Ministry of Primary Industries systems; a blow-out of 25 percent—$25 million. There were the changes to the child support system which resulted in an $830 million blow-out. Well that does not sound like boom to me; it sounds more like bust. No wonder this Government cannot reach a surplus.The Government members pride themselves on being top-notch economic managers; in reality they are economic managers from hell. Whānau Ora is just the latest example. The Government cannot even get to a Budget surplus but it is good at papering over the cracks and it bullies people into keeping quiet. It threatens whistleblowers it breaks its promises it makes excuses it denies it looks the other way and when something goes wrong—well it is always somebody else’s fault. It is either the previous Government’s fault the officials’ fault the councils’ fault or some poor individual’s fault. There is always some poor individual whom it will point the finger at to take the rap.One of the biggest failures of them all continues to dog this Government. Colleagues here have talked about the big failure in this Budget but one of the big ongoing failures of this Government is its deeply flawed and economically wrong decision which was fully sanctioned by this Government for KiwiRail to purchase carriages and locomotives offshore killing local industry—killing a local industry—ripping the core manufacturing capacity from a city and forcing skilled workers to leave town or to leave the country or to settle for the dole or a job at Bunnings. For what—what was the value? What was the value for money here? It was 500 wagons 40 locomotives and hundreds of millions of dollars given in an overseas procurement decision to a Chinese Government - owned company that has turned out to be a complete failure.There are asbestos-ridden locomotives fault-ridden wagons and what do we have now? We have got a team of Chinese workers brought into New Zealand to continuously fix the faults that would not have occurred had the locomotives been built in New Zealand. The workers are not being paid a minimum wage. It is all highly secretive and the Minister responsible for not carrying out a proper inquiry into those Chinese workers being in New Zealand—the Minister responsible for letting them in in the first place—is the same MP from Dunedin who did not stick up for keeping Hillside alive.This is worse than false economy; it is economic mismanagement and it is destruction of a whole industry. It is wanton—wanton—destruction of meaningful jobs and value to the Dunedin economy and not just to the Dunedin economy but also to the wider region and to an industry that is adding value to the whole of New Zealand. Meanwhile this week in Victoria just across the Ditch the new Labor Government announced in its Budget a 10-year plan for 100 new metropolitan trains 100 new trams and significant expansion of the regional train fleet. It was a $2 billion commitment—well that is a vision. It will inject funding into local rail manufacturing and broaden skill sets. That is giving hope to a whole community.