Cunliffe DavidHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): New Zealanders face a stark choice. They have a choice between a Labour-led Government that will manage the economy in a way that is inclusive—a place for everybody with returns to everybody—that is sustainable and that is a high-value economic strategy or they can have more of the same. More of the same means declining productivity it means public relations spin from the Government and it means that most New Zealanders are getting poorer stung by a crippling housing crisis. So let us first name the game then let us look at the effects and then let us look at how we change it. The Government's game is pretty obvious to most Kiwis: open up the gates to immigration and unrestrained foreign investment pump up the dollars do not give a damn about the impact on individual Kiwi families but just go for the headline number that total GDP. OK it is increasing by about 3 percent a year but GDP per person is declining to flat. Productivity is declining to flat. We are stuck with all our cows in one exit making commodities that are worth less and less and now after the fact the Government is talking about diversifying—something it should have been talking about a decade ago. So the game is to pump up that headline number by letting in as many people and as much investment as you possibly can and ignore the effects on the ground. What are those effects? The first is that most New Zealanders are getting poorer. Here are the numbers and they are from the Government's sources and from the Parliamentary Library: working families' share of GDP—that is New Zealand's total income—has fallen by $50 a week per family under National. Under Labour around 51 percent of all extra growth went to working families. Under National that has declined to 37 percent. The difference is about $50 a week that families should be getting but they are not. And 50000 more Kiwis are unemployed under this Government than under the previous Government—50000. Unemployment is 144000 now. By the Government's own numbers it was 96000 which was admittedly too many but it has gone up by nearly half another 50000 and many of those are young people—80000 young Kiwis are either not in employment or not even in education and training. The Government has left them behind. If they did have jobs then they would discover that it does not really matter because the Kiwi Dream for them has gone because National's housing crisis is crippling middle New Zealand—absolutely gutting it. People hate living in Auckland now for two reasons: (1) the Minister for Gridlock" has not fixed the traffic because the Government is pumping up the immigration numbers to make GDP growth look better. There are 40000 more cars on the road in Auckland and you cannot take that many people on to the trains. It is getting worse—ask any Aucklander—not getting better. And what are they driving to? Well it will not be a house that young people can afford to buy because the housing crisis has become a national shame. People are leaving Auckland in droves. It is getting hard for schools to recruit teachers hard to employ nurses and hard to get cops to go there because they cannot afford to live there. Think about the impact on superannuation when a generation from now most people will not have paid off their home because if they have one at all they will get into it later in life and they will not have time to pay it off. New Zealand superannuation was not built to pay mortgages and it was not built to pay rent. The elder poverty in New Zealand because of this Government's housing crisis is going to be crippling—yes Mr Chair it is the Estimates debate and we are lifting the lid on some of the underlying economic problems that are driving New Zealand backwards. You cannot get past the housing crisis and all New Zealanders know that is true. The third key issue is that there is no plan for sustainable economic growth. You get rich as a country by lifting productivity and by making sophisticated products and services that people want to buy. Do you know that in Fonterra in the last 5 years the proportion of milk going into high - value - added products has not shifted at all? Under this Government's watch no more product is going into high-value—"