Tabuteau Fletcher: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTabuteau Fletcher: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10507. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): It is a pleasure to take a call on behalf of New Zealand First in this part of the debate. I choose to speak about the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment this evening and its report. I think everyone in the Chamber this evening will acknowledge that it was a ministry designed to fix all woes—that was the intent. I do have some sympathy for Minister Joyce. He must be getting tired. It must be exhausting. He is like a bald Hercules running around the country putting out fire after fire. We will all soon be talking about lost productivity within the ministry loss of focus and how whole departments are getting lost within this super-structure. Although to be fair there is a giant TV right at the start of the maze to light the way for those lost and confused staffers and members of the public brave enough to enter.The report describes the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment as the primary-facing agent for New Zealand business. I am just wondering whether that means the stone sign outside the super-herculean ministry facing passers-by which cost $24000 more than they had budgeted for—a total of $70000 for a stone sign on the side of the road. It is just unbelievable. The report from the super-herculean ministry states that if the community is confident that its society and environment will be protected and enhanced and the benefits of growth are fairly shared the New Zealand business environment will flourish. New Zealand First could not agree more with that statement but yet again the superlative choice of language from this Government is first rate and paints a picture not just in the minds but also in the heart. It is just truly wonderful.But let us examine the statement “if the benefits of growth are fairly shared” in a bit more detail. We know the benefits of growth are not being fairly shared and this ministry has no solution. We now know that this Government is cool or simply apathetic about tax havens. We know that tax avoidance by New Zealand and international corporates totalling somewhere in the vicinity of $7 billion is all good with this Government. We know that it is fine to allow international fraudsters to use the Auckland housing market to launder money. We know that it is fine to allow Kiwi homes to be the means for foreign speculators to make giant or gigantic capital gains at the cost of our Kiwi lifestyle and our Kiwi Dream. “No rush.” says the National Party “Let us not upset big business. We do not want to compromise big corporate profit margins—heaven forbid if they drop in any given year.”As the ministry itself has said the benefits of growth must be fairly shared for the business environment to flourish. What we do know for sure is that New Zealand’s inequality measures are rapidly increasing—that is the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and there are more of them. Actually small to medium sized businesses and even the big players in the New Zealand economy are literally losing out on profits because of income inequality here. Rising inequality is responsible for wiping a third off New Zealand’s economic growth over the past 30 years. New Zealand’s GDP growth was stunted by as much as 15.5 percentage points between 1990 and 2010—more than any other OECD country. Income and wealth inequality in New Zealand gets bigger by the day. It is not all the fault of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment I acknowledge but “Rising inequality has been the norm in most developed countries but few have seen its increase by as much as New Zealand.”This ministry’s Minister needs to stop talking about huge trade gains which even by their own analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership for example are less than a 2 percent increase by 2030. These gains are so tiny actually that impartial analysis of this free-trade agreement shows us that as we sign up to this type of partnership—and that is what it actually is a partnership—income inequality in New Zealand and in those partnership nations will actually increase. That is not a solution.Reports noted.