Seymour DavidHon DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise to add to what others have said about this Budget Policy Statement report from the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I would give some responses to what Barbara Edmonds said but to be honest I can't remember any of it already!I was interested in some of the things that Chlöe Swarbrick said and I know it's unparliamentary to refer to a member's absence but you've got someone who is actually doing her best impression of the woman who wasn't there. It's almost as though she wasn't part of the last six years where the Greens backed up the Government. She says We need more affordable housing. We need more affordable rent." She was part of a Government where the average house price went up $250000 or 30 percent. She backed a Government where the average rent went up $200 a week. Then she comes along and says "Oh isn't it terrible. Give me one more chance and I won't screw it up as bad next time." I mean the Greens have got to take some accountability. This Government and the New Zealand people are inheriting a huge mess and they created it. And no amounts of catnip clips on Instagram are going to make your rent cheaper. They're not going to make the economy better; they're not going to make your job more secure. All they're going to do is maybe boost someone's following on Instagram. I think this country has fallen for that formula before and look where it got us.Where it got us is that we've got a Government inheriting an extra $100 billion worth of debt. The interest on that debt will soon be $10 billion per year. We've got a Government that is inheriting inflation that is 5.8 percent domestically even as tradable inflation from the rest of the world falls. We have a Government that is inheriting an official cash rate of 5.5 percent a level of interest that flows through into people's mortgages—and yes their rents. We've got a Government that is inheriting a structural fiscal deficit. What does that mean? It means that when you wash out the cycles and the ups and downs in the economy at the end of the day the Government policy settings that we inherited meant there was not enough money coming in to meet the commitments to spending that the previous Government made. That is the basic inheritance of the Government. But enough about us. What about the people up and down New Zealand?Let me tell you some of the stories that I've heard from people just in the last few weeks and what we're trying to do about it. I've spoken to real estate agents who tell me the number one reason people are selling is because of relationship breakdown because of years of financial stress through the COVID period and the inflation period and everything else that the previous Government did for us. I've talked to people who say "You know what the toughest thing about running our retail store is that people are on edge. They're stressed and they abuse us because the price rises are getting to them because they're constantly checking their account to see if they can afford the next thing they need to do." I've talked to people in construction who say "I don't know what I'm going to do because there's no more work after a certain point in the future."Things out there are grim and they're grim for New Zealanders because fundamentally while New Zealanders were tightening their belts Grant Robertson the former finance Minister was loosening his endlessly. And as a result we now face the fiscal circumstances that I describe where the Government insulated itself from the challenges of debt by just borrowing some more. We now need to tighten our belts as a Government just like firms and farms and families have been having to do for years of Labour's fiscal abuse. And that means that in this fiscal policy statement we make three commitments. One is that we are cutting back the wasteful spending. The fact is that there has been too much waste under the previous Government. These guys never saw a problem that they didn't think could be solved with borrowed money! Some of the expenditure that now lives on in folklore was just extraordinary. A classic is the $50 million on designing a bike bridge they didn't actually build. In what sort of fantasy can you afford to do that? The New Zealand Government did it.We've just had a report from Kāinga Ora. This is a doozy. These guys over there—Kieran McAnulty and Arena Williams and all of them—supported and were part of a Government that actually decided to set up Kāinga Ora in such a way that it loses half a billion dollars a year. Every day Kāinga Ora loses a million and a half dollars. This is what we've inherited and people need to see this reality—the Kāinga Ora model. They were supposed to bring about affordable housing but they were so inefficient. For all that money they're losing they managed to pay over the odds for the land over the odds for the builders and the materials and the project managers. I mean get this: the Labour Party tried to make housing more affordable and they were so inefficient they actually managed to make it more expensive. It's actually difficult to exaggerate how clownish that Government was in its execution.The result of all of that is that the amount of money spent per person after inflation—let's not even talk about that for now—was 30 percent more in 2023 than in 2017. They managed to spend 30 percent more money on you after inflation and actually get worse results in just about everything from education to housing to health. They say "Oh but there was a pandemic." Yes there was a pandemic but the rest of the world had moved on by 2022-23. Only New Zealand was still labouring under a Labour Government that used it as an excuse for just about everything. They're still using it as an excuse now. It's kind of interesting that by 2023 they were still blaming the former National Government that went out in 2017. I predict that in 2026 Labour will still be blaming things on COVID!The facts are that if we don't get this spending under control we are doomed. So that's why we make no apology and I'm proud to be part of a Government that is cutting wasteful spending reducing bloated bureaucracy reducing expenditure funds that took people's money gave it to someone else and didn't actually get a good result. Yep we're cutting waste and yep we're cutting taxes. That's the second thing in this Budget Policy Statement. And I've heard people say "Oh $10 or $30 a week or a fortnight—that's nothing to me." Well actually to the people on that side of the House over with Labour and the Greens and Te Pāti Māori when you're earning $160000 it might not mean much to you. But I can tell you that to those people that I talk to people on the main streets of places like Waiuku actually when things are really tight and you're checking your account all the time and you're taking things out of the trolley this tax relief will be welcome. I can assure you because that's what people are saying to me.Then finally we are actually going to do more and better in the areas that matter most. I'll just give you a few examples. The Healthy School Lunches Programme wasn't funded past the end of this school year. Next school year if Labour's Budget figures were taken seriously it would have ended. We had to either borrow another $340 million tax another $340 million or find $340 million of savings elsewhere to make it happen next year. Do you know what we've actually done? A little bit of option 3 but we've also made the scheme $104 million cheaper while feeding more children at the same time. And that is I think the emblem of what this Government is doing. After years and years of Labour doing less and less with more and more this Government is doing more and more with less and less—just as households and firms and employers and farmers have had to do for the last three years of the cost of living crisis. The Government is now living by the same values and applying the same discipline as they have had to.So roll on the Budget next Thursday which will finally show that some adults are back in the room some responsibility and some accountability is being taken for the Government's finances because as a great woman once said when the Government takes a bigger slice there is so much less cake for everybody else. This Government is shrinking its slice so there will be more cake for the rest of hard-working New Zealanders."