Seymour David: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8765. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): It is great to be back and in the spirit of the beginning of the year I would like to begin with some agreement. I agree with Andrew Little that the National Party is by and large managing the policies that Labour put in place but I want to agree with the Prime Minister that the National Party is managing those policies so much better. Such is the history of these two parties over the time that they have governed our country.I want to pay tribute to the outgoing member Tim Groser and the fantastic job that he has done with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is extraordinary that a small economy of $240 billion at the bottom of the world has managed over the period of a decade to draw in 11 other economies with a collective GDP of $27 trillion and create a free-trade zone and an agreement that will have inestimable benefits for New Zealanders and New Zealand exporters. And I say “inestimable” because the argument for free trade is often very much like the argument for freedom generally. The reason that we want freedom is that we do not know exactly how people will use it and how big the advantages of having freedom including freedom to trade will be. So I say to all of those who naysay and say “We don’t know and can you name it and can you show us exactly how valuable this thing will be?” that I do not think they really understand the true purpose of freedom.While we are on the Government’s agenda I have been enormously proud of course to work with my good friend and colleague Hekia Parata on the partnership school kura hourua policy. The members opposite must be getting worn down opposing this policy when they see 93 percent and 100 percent pass rates announced and when they see that this policy has the guts to do what none of them would ever do and that is to actually close a school when it is failing children.They will whinge and whine and cry but they know that in reality this is a policy that is not in danger of failing. Oh no what the members opposite and their supporters are terrified of is that this policy is succeeding growing and multiplying. On that I want to thank my colleagues Marama Fox and Te Ururoa Flavell from the Māori Party who have made this policy possible. Here is the real kicker for the members opposite: this is overwhelmingly a highly positive policy for Māori.As I was listening to the Prime Minister’s speech I was asking myself: “Where is the highlight? What is the thing that I should focus on in reply?”. The truth is that really there was not one. There was just a large review of well-managed policies many of them introduced by the Opposition.Once upon a time we had a National Party that would have told you that tax cuts were critical to a centre-right Government. This Government says it may cut taxes in 2017. What sort of centre-right Government does not talk about tax cuts for 8 years? It is too difficult it would seem in a period of low inflation to index tax thresholds to inflation. Since the last tax changes all that time ago the failure to index tax brackets to inflation has cost the average family $500-plus every year from now on and has cost some over $1500. That is a small change that would be good for working families and good for New Zealanders which is a bridge too far for this centre-right Government.The OECD tells us that we have one of the highest tax rates on capital of any developed country and yet it would be too difficult to have a policy of deliberately dropping the company tax rate and harmonising it with the Māori authority tax rate over a period of time and so we actually find ourselves in a situation where we are spending more money trying to stimulate the economy with a partnership here and a regional plan there than we are prepared to give back to the businesses that made the profits in the first place. They are two issues where a centre-right Government should be making movement to improve the policy settings and improve our productivity.Our productivity matters or at least it used to in the rhetoric of centre-right Governments because we used to talk about being the Switzerland of the South Pacific we used to talk about being in the top half of the OECD and then things got choppy around the world and we forgot all about it. In the last year those chickens have started to come home to roost in unexpected ways. In the last 48 hours and in the last year we have seen foreign Governments telling us that they will cut benefits for New Zealanders. It would be easy for us to retaliate by cutting benefits for nationals from those countries coming here.The reason that that is not an effective strategy is simply this: other things being equal people want to migrate to higher-productivity economies. Other things being equal on balance people have moved from lower-productivity economies to New Zealand and from New Zealand to places such as Australia Canada the United Kingdom the United States and so on. They do not want to come here as much as we want to go there and we are finding ourselves at a loss in these negotiations about entitlements in each other’s countries.Aside from the agenda of improving the tax and regulatory environment and raising productivity for all New Zealanders we have also taken our eye off the ball when it comes to improving our country in the long term. Everybody knows that in Australia in Canada in the United Kingdom in Germany and in practically every other developed country with which we would like to compare ourselves Governments are recognising that people live longer and it is time to adjust superannuation. These countries are raising their ages of entitlement to reflect that very basic reality.We know that although there are presently five taxpayers per superannuitant by the time current university students retire there will be only two and they know it as well. A sensible country that wanted to look into its future and confront its long-term challenges would very simply open up a debate about raising that age. It is not a question of if it will happen but when and this Government has denied us the ability to have that conversation which is far far worse than denying us doing it—denying us even being able to openly discuss it.If the Labour Party had really wanted to reach out to millennials it could have confronted one very simple fact and it is this: in the last year the average student loan has been $28000 and in the last 3 years—roughly the average time that people study—the median house price in New Zealand forget Auckland has risen $78000 or almost three times as much. If the Labour Party wanted to deal with that issue Labour members would not be reading out and counting the Chinese names that they find in the property data. What they would be doing is actually confronting the supply side determinants of house prices and the difficulties that have led to Aucklanders building 40000 homes in the last decade compared with 50000 in the 1990s when the city was much much smaller.I could go on but in summary what we have is a nominally centre-right Government that is tied down by an MMP reality and cannot make the types of reforms that would confront New Zealand’s long-term challenges that would improve productivity for all New Zealanders and that would actually do more of the type of partnership school kura hourua reform that actually improves the quality of social services for those who most need it. In this environment I think the ACT Party has a huge amount to offer and I am looking forward to offering it all year. Thank you.