Parker David: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Sitting date: 26 June 2012. Volume:681;Page:3365. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 What a load of bollocks that was in respect of targets! Bill English said we in the Labour Party criticise those targets. Well we sure do because here we have got the National members out there again sprinkling fairy dust promising accountability in 2017 and not acknowledging any accountability until now for their failures on so many fronts. We have them saying: “Look we’re going to decrease violent crime by 20 percent by 2016 or 2017.” We all want violent crime down. It has actually been going up in New Zealand under this Government. More particularly overall crime has been going up in parts of Auckland which is suffering the results most severely of the economic deprivation caused by this Government’s policies. Then Government members come along and say: “Look we want violent crime to go down.” and then say that that is a result. That is what Bill English said then. The results they announced earlier in the week were that they were going to have a target in 2016. That is a result under the National Party. 
What is missing from those targets while we are talking about these targets? Well there are no targets around the sustainability of superannuation. Nothing. Nothing. There is no target or milestone around closing the wage gap with Australia. Remember that promise? The National Party in the 2008 election said that it would close the wage gap with Australia. Has it? No. Has it agreed any milestones? No. Has it got any target for that in these Better Public Services targets? No it has not. National members say that targets and milestones are important for accountability of the Public Service but not if it affects them. They do not want accountability for the measures that they promised that they would achieve because they know that they are failing to achieve them. 
It is not just the wage gap with Australia. What about this promised step change in the economy? Well you know the other thing I was surprised about in that speech we just had from Bill English was that he virtually did not talk about the economy. At the end he said: “Look there are problems in the world and therefore it’s tough in New Zealand.” Again we all know that there are problems in the world. No one expects the Government to magic away those problems but 1000 people a week for the last year have not gone to Australia because of the problems in Greece; they have gone to Australia because of the problems in New Zealand and those problems are not being addressed by the National Government. 
The Budget does nothing to improve New Zealand’s export performance—nothing nothing at all to improve New Zealand’s export performance. New Zealand has now run a current account deficit for every year in more than three decades. New Zealand’s credit rating which National members said would never drop under them was dropped by Standard and Poor’s and some of the other rating agencies last year because of our external liabilities our net liabilities to the world—not the Government’s liabilities to the world because the last Labour Government ran Budget surpluses and we reduced Government debt to amongst the lowest in the world. Even now after 4 years of this Government after the challenges of an earthquake because Michael Cullen Helen Clark and her Governments put money away in a time of plenty—Budget surpluses that were opposed by Bill English Don Brash and John Key—and because Labour did that even now after 4 years of deficits under the National Government New Zealand still has low levels of Government debt. 
But we have got high levels of private debt and it gets worse from here. Every year that you have a current account deficit that deficit is bridged by either borrowing more money from overseas or selling your assets to overseas. This Government oversees both of those and has got no plan at all in this Budget to turn it round. As a consequence we have Standard and Poor’s saying that the biggest risk for New Zealand is our external deficit—the fact that the value of our exports does not cover the cost of our imports and our interest. Every year from here it gets worse. Treasury has it going out to 6 percent of GDP—or 6.8 percent of GDP I think it is—by 2016. The Reserve Bank says it is a problem the OECD says it is a problem and the IMF says it is a problem but National ignores it. That is what this Budget is: it is a zero ideas Budget in respect of the big issues. 
What are the other things we have had in this Budget that are touched upon by the supplementary estimates? Larger class sizes. Larger class sizes is the way to improve educational outcomes which we all— 
Hon Annette King 
: But not for their kids. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: No not for their kids—that is right. In fact the media disclosed the fact that a large proportion of the National Cabinet Ministers have their kids in private schools that sell their attributes to people on the basis of smaller class sizes than they can get in the State sector already. New Zealanders rebelled against that because they did not like it. Now the Government is trying to fool them by pulling the wool over their eyes by saying that it does not need to address some of these difficult issues like our export performance like the age of eligibility for superannuation like our need to save more through improvements to the KiwiSaver scheme and like some more investment into the export sector by introducing a capital gains tax so that people invest in businesses on the basis of the profitability of those businesses rather than the tax bias that currently favours investment in property to the detriment of our export sector. Those are the sorts of measures that we ought to be debating today but we do not hear one word of them from the Minister of Finance. We have these pixie dust rainbow at the end of every street promises by National but no way to get there. 
Even National’s objective in respect of the number of people dependent on working-age benefits has as its target a higher figure than it was when it took office. Is that not abject failure? We had Bill English saying that we did nothing to reduce long-term benefit dependency. We actually had New Zealand’s unemployment down to the lowest in the world. There were about 2 years when we swapped with South Korea. It was South Korea and New Zealand who had the lowest rate of unemployment in that year. We had domestic purposes benefits down as well. We had the DPB numbers down as well. 
We had crime dropping across the country in no small part because we had a buoyant economy people had hope in their lives and they were adhering to the social mores of our country because they had a sense of hope and participation in our community. When you have increasing numbers of people who do not have hope then they ignore the rules in society more often. It is no excuse from my perspective but it is a reality that when you have poor economic performance you have increasing crime rates. Bill English denies that as his predecessors did in prior National Governments but whenever you have the economy going better you do also get drops in the rate of crime. 
Growth in the economy growth in jobs growth in exports and growth in income are what we needed from this Budget and we have not got any of them. This Budget forecasts very very mediocre growth—very mediocre growth. Even since the global financial crisis outside of Europe average growth rates have been far higher than we have achieved in New Zealand. That is despite the fact that our two largest trading partners Australia and China have been the most prosperous economies in the world. And yet New Zealand has been in the doldrums. This Budget does not show any advance upon it. 
 I think it says a lot about the National Government that the biggest part of its economic agenda these 3 years is to change who owns what already exists. That is what is happening with these State-owned enterprise sales. That is the biggest part of its economic plan. Not only does it increase the Government deficit by $100 million per annum not only does it increase our current account deficit overseas and not only does it increase power prices to domestic consumers but also these asset sales disclose how empty the cupboard is when it comes to important economic changes being brought about by this Government. The central part of the Government’s economic plan for these 3 years is to sell off those State-owned enterprises and we on this side of the House know that changing who owns what already exists does nothing to improve our economy. We do not get any more exports out of it. We do not get any more jobs out of it. We do not get any more economic growth out of it. 
What we do get is more inequality. The National Party oversees inequality very well every time it is in power. We see a move of assets and income to the higher-income people at the expense of the middle classes and lower-income people. We have seen it in prior Budgets from this Government where 40 percent of its income tax cuts went to the top 10 percent. It is those top 10 percent of income earners—the wealthiest people in society—who will be disproportionately buying these shares and we will see inequality in New Zealand increase as a consequence. 
This Government continues to throw out these little targets and throw diversions. We have had— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. His time has expired.