Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker and I'll be speaking on this Appropriation (2019/20 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. It's just a small bill; a short bill that packs a fair punch with billions and billions—tens of billions of expenditure. So if you look at this bill it's innocuous in many respects. Then you run down the line on page 30—just quietly on page 30—$12 billion on one line item: business support subsidy $12 billion not too bad and then various other bits and pieces here that have been listed.The thing that of course New Zealanders are obviously asking as they see a lot of this expenditure going out—some of it of course is absolutely appropriate and right particularly when we run through the health expenditure. You would expect that we would be putting more into health and disability support services in the Lakes DHB and the Hutt Valley DHB and the Nelson Marlborough DHB—everybody expects that. We've been dealing with a global health crisis.But then there are other bits of money that they've seen rolling out the door: whether it's all the money spent to kill the possums or various rail proposals from our friends over in New Zealand First. They've sort of racked their brains and they think Didn't they just spend a whole lot of money opening up that line to Wairoa? Isn't it true that most of the trees that they're hoping to get on the line to Wairoa actually are closer to Napier Port than Wairoa?" So they have to sort of get in a truck and go back to Wairoa and then get off the truck and get on the train and then take the train to the port. As a result there have been a grand total of six trains so far in the six months. Then they see millions and billions of more money being spent on various lines up in Northland and there isn't much prospect of any more trains going on those.So they ask the legitimate question: how are we going to pay for all this? The worry that many New Zealanders have is that this is a Government with $20 billion in Grant Robertson's kitty that will spend whatever it takes to try and keep their polling up till 19 September then on 20 September the smiles will drop from their faces and New Zealanders will be presented with the bill and the bill is higher taxes next year if they were lucky enough to win the election. So New Zealanders have got a stark choice: do they want those higher taxes or not? And they'll be asking themselves that over the next little while.So while many of the things that are listed in the Supplementary Estimates make sense the overall scope of spending is concerning. What is more concerning of course is the continual and constant gap between the announcements and the delivery. All New Zealanders this week have been reflecting on that—they've been reflecting on the Prime Minister's front-and-centre descriptions of how the Government has delivered on and done this and done that on border security and then they've seen the reality. Then they haven't seen the Prime Minister; what they've seen is a reference to a systems failure and various officials running around defending it and Minsters not being seen anywhere. David Clark—DEPUTY SPEAKER: It's very interesting but it's not about the Estimates.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well it is about—Madam Speaker with your indulgence there is a very strong connection between these Estimates which represent the money being spent and what we're getting for it and the confidence that New Zealanders have or the lack thereof in it.Then we're talking about how there's supposed to be a focus on COVID but if you looked at page 31 for example you would see many millions being spent on establishing a single national vocational education institution. Well that's short for taking over the entire polytech and centralising it turning the whole industry upside down shaking it from its feet and then expecting that you can go and spend $1.6 billion to get a whole lot of apprentices into the working environment and those two things don't fit very well together.So my simple message is one of yes in a time of crisis yes we need to borrow and yes Government can spend in order to help us through a crisis—nobody debates that. The question is how much and how effective is that spending? And that is a much more debatable motion. What we've seen in this Government has been a mixture of some effective spending but a whole lot that hasn't been effective. When we see the Budget proposals including these Supplementary Estimates what we've seen is a fair amount of money devoted to dealing with COVID but also a lot of money in areas that are not directly related to COVID but they are areas that the Government wants to do for their political reasons.Now that's fine but at a time when we're taking on an enormous amount of debt and the projections from the Treasury are that we'll be having a deficit of $28 billion this financial year and about the same next financial year and then over the next four years we'll be adding an extra $140 billion of debt—in that context recognising that New Zealand is a small isolated economy prone to national disasters and with also high private sector debt there does come a point where it is risky for the country.So our simple message is that yes we take on debt but we're careful about it we don't go crazy and we don't take more than we need. And in a time of crisis you've got to be a little bit considerate about whether some things that might be nice to have in the boom times are still required in the difficult times. We haven't seen any of those hard decisions made in these Supplementary Estimates in my opinion. On that basis we are yet to be convinced of the merits of this bill. Thank you Madam Speaker."