Hughes Gareth: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 27 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:4052. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. According to the Bible it took only 7 days to form the earth and all the plants and animals on it yet Bill English managing a so-called rock star economy has not been able to achieve this over 7 years. Of course this was National’s seventh Budget. It continues 7 years of deficits debt dairy dependence and declining homeownership. It seems the only indicator that is not going backwards for National is our greenhouse gas emissions which we know are just going up and up.The Budget did nothing for a whole generation of young Kiwis who are swimming in student debt and cannot get into their first home or for Kiwi workers half of whom have seen their wages stagnate under National. After 7 years our economy is more dependent on a few raw commodities. It is a simpler economy than when we started. Just this week we saw a massive $2.6 billion trade deficit the largest in the 6 years since the middle of the worst global recession we have seen in decades. What we are seeing now are the impacts of falling dairy prices and also the dependence our country has on exporting this raw milk powder around the world.Likewise you can see it with the data that we saw in the Budget. The horses that the National Government has picked are not working. We have seen oil royalty income go down 38 percent minerals income go down 34 percent. We have seen coal royalty income go down 33 percent. On the other side of the ledger though we have also seen flat to declining science funding. Tertiary education has seen $1 billion stripped out of it over the last 7 years. We have seen New Zealand continue to languish in the bottom half of the OECD. We are going backwards on the important things like science and innovation yet we are increasing our dependence on things like dairy and oil which are not paying off. You can see it in the perilous state of the country’s books that Bill English showed us but you can also see it in the experience of the majority of Kiwis.Hon Anne Tolley: Perilous?GARETH HUGHES: Well Ms Tolley in this country Kiwis are working some of the longest hours for some of the lowest wages and we are paying some of the highest costs of living in the entire developed world. The whole country is sprinting just to keep where we are. We are not actually getting ahead as a country. The fact is we have got 290000 Kiwi kids in poverty yet for a country—[Interruption] I hear the National backbench interjecting. For a country that is feeding 20 million people around the world in our agricultural exports it is a travesty that we have got hungry kids going to school without food but your party voted against supplying them food in schools.Under National’s New Zealand we see the richest 1 percent controlling 16 percent of the country’s wealth. And the bottom half what does it have? It has got only 5 percent. Every year under National it just gets worse and worse. But the fact is that it is bad for our economic performance. The OECD has found that National’s rising inequality has shaved 10 percent off our GDP over the last decade. Sure there have been some productivity improvements but they have not flowed through to the workers. So sure we have got rising inequality but we are also seeing rising generational inequality.Previous generations of Kiwis used to have an affordable education and State support to get into a first home yet for Kiwis in their 20s or 30s a good job an affordable education and support to get into their first home are considered luxuries. Parents are struggling to raise their kids burdened by massive student debt and the high cost of living in areas like electricity and food. The majority of young Kiwis are forced to rent. In fact we have had to create an entire new name for this new generation which is being called Generation Rent. For this generation the dream of homeownership is slipping further and further out of reach. So we are seeing rising inequality generational inequality but perhaps the biggest inequality is what is happening with the planet which the last speaker Kennedy Graham just touched on—intergenerational inequality in terms of future generations’ security literally on the planet.Over those 7 years under National what we have seen is our emissions increase by 20 percent since National came into power. They are forecast to increase 48 percent by the end of this decade. Just in the last week within National’s Budget guess what there was? There was $31 million to subsidise polluters. National’s emissions trading scheme is a complete farce. It is not incentivising the clean-energy economy we should be developing and those clean-energy jobs; in fact it is subsidising polluters and that is National’s vision for the future. However there is a better alternative. That is why the Greens are putting up so many good ideas to rebalance our economy reduce inequality and give all Kiwis a fair go. Kia ora.