English Bill: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 18 August 2010. Volume:665;Page:13230. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. So the party that is mired in splits and divisions calls a snap debate on splits and divisions. Now that is a great strategy in the same way as the party that is responsible for all the damage to the New Zealand economy is trying to front-end the economic policy as its strongest point! It is a bit like Trevor Mallard saying that other people are unbalanced. That is the strategy of a party that is still struggling and understandably so with the challenges of being in Opposition. The one hurdle that members opposite must get over—there are a lot of hurdles in Opposition and we know a bit about that—is to admit the voters were right. 
Hon Members 
: Ah! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: They have to admit the voters were right. How close do we think the Labour Party is to admitting that the voters of west Auckland were right to throw Labour out? It is no closer than it was a week before the last election—no closer. With all the other machinations—all the little tactics all the very odd strategies such as we have seen today—that is the one hurdle members opposite are nowhere near getting over. I think that will happen in about year 4 or year 5 probably which is a long way to go. 
The interesting thing is that the voters know when a party has got over that hurdle. It does not matter how clever a party is or whether it is the most cohesive and smartest political machine that was ever invented—and still run from New York by the sound of it—the voters know that the Labour Party still thinks the voters were wrong. Guess what? The voters think they are right I have found. The voters have not changed their mind. Actually they think they are in charge. I know the Labour Party does not understand that yet. It still thinks that Darren Hughes is in charge. It still thinks that Phil Goff is in charge. Actually Chris Carter is in charge. He is the one who is really telling the voters what the voters believe—that Labour cannot win there are splits and divisions and they cannot make up their mind about their policy. 
The Government fortunately has the opportunity—given to us by those same voters—to grasp the challenges and particularly the long-term challenges for the economy. Those are considerable. They have always been a bit of a challenge in this small open economy at the end of the world but they have been made much larger much more challenging by the actions of the last Government particularly since 2005 where its policies effectively wrecked the tradable sector of a trading nation. If a Government is going to damage a trading economy it could not have done more than the last Government did. There has been a 5-year recession in our export sector in the best economic conditions—that decade was called the “great moderation”—where other countries grew very strongly. Just by way of example in the 4 years to March 2010 the Australian economy grew 11.6 percent; we grew 2 percent. Then we found out in recent days that if one takes the statistics that Governments use to calculate national superannuation—that is the average wage series that is used to calculate national superannuation—and one adjusts it takes the after-tax numbers which the Government takes when it is adjusting national superannuation which is the after-tax average wage and adjusts it for inflation guess how much New Zealand incomes grew on that series—which is used for national superannuation so it is not one randomly selected? For 9 years it grew by 0.3 percent. [ 
Interruption 
] It grew by 0.3 percent. I thought that meant 0.3 percent a year but it does not. No most of that growth happened while Labour was still enjoying the benefits of the previous National Government’s policies. From 2004 on it was almost zero. I think 0.3 percent was the actual result. From 2005 on real after-tax incomes as measured by Statistics New Zealand with the tool it uses for calculating national superannuation had almost zero growth.