Prosser RichardRICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): What a pleasure it is to rise and take a call in this debate in reply to the Prime Minister's statement and to make my first contribution for this year. I would like to extend a very hearty happy New Year to you Mr Speaker. I will undertake now with witnesses to do my very utmost to make sure that you do manage to keep your New Year's resolution.Well honestly what a load of sycophantic rubbish we have heard spouted over these last couple of days really from both sides of the House about the new Prime Minister and how wonderfully he is doing and how wonderfully he is going to do and so forth. But in actual fact I have to admit that I was quite looking forward to Bill English's first speech as Prime Minister. I had always found that Mr English's speeches as Minister of Finance had this particular soporific effect on me. He would get started and then a few bars in I would find myself drifting off to sleep.So I was quite impressed when he first got started that he was actually quite animated. He was really quite excited using expression and gesticulating—you can look that word up Mr Bennett; it is not what you think it is. But shortly thereafter he reverted to type. The next thing I knew my colleague Clayton Mitchell who was sitting next to me was elbowing me in the ribs. The familiar waft of verbal chloroform had come over me and away I had gone. It appears that Cruisy Bill" as Labour seems to have dubbed him is no more exciting than "Snoozy Bill" who used to put me to sleep.I actually have here a copy of the speech that he gave and I was here listening to it when he gave it. But having sat through it listened to it and read it again I still do not know what he was saying. It is quite impressive actually that as Prime Minister and leader of the Government—through to the election at least; certainly not beyond—Mr English has not lost his ability to spend a long time saying nothing at all. That is actually quite appropriate—Hon David Bennett: Well maybe it's you you can't.RICHARD PROSSER: —thank you for those comments the new Minister from Hamilton which does deserve a mention—as the Government has not actually done anything to talk about and so I guess saying again the things it is going to do in the future falls in the same vein. It is all sort of smoke and mirrors.When we talk about what the Prime Minister states about his agenda—what he is going to do what his Government is going to do what he wants to do—we hear the same old refrain National members have been repeating over and over for as long as I can remember. Long before I joined New Zealand First long before I became an MP long before I came into this House I heard the Prime Minister on the other side talking about being aspirational—aspirational this and aspirational that. Well that is a great thing to be but it seems to be a bit of a mirage. We seem to be getting ever and ever closer to it but never actually arriving. That I think is because this Government as I said never does anything. It talks about wanting a better future for New Zealand and wanting a brighter future and wanting a bigger more bustling economy but the Government never does anything about it.A case in point: when looking out my office window just before I came down to the House I saw a wharf filled with logs. If a Government was truly aspirational for a country like New Zealand which has a huge forestry resource we would not have a wharf full of logs. We might have a wharf full of plywood a wharf full of particle board a wharf full of pre-nailed trusses or a wharf full of processed timber products that were being exported to foreign countries—Hon David Bennett: Well what's to stop that happening?RICHARD PROSSER: —but no we see a wharf full of logs because the Government is insufficiently aspirational that it still allows that sort of thing to happen Mr Bennett.Hon David Bennett: But you want us to build the factory?RICHARD PROSSER: Look Mr Bennett I want us to have sawmills and processing plants and for those industries to occur in New Zealand and to employ New Zealanders—good jobs for real people.Hon David Bennett: Are we going to pay for it? Are we building it?RICHARD PROSSER: This is all private enterprise Mr Bennett. It is all private enterprise. There is a difference Mr Bennett between free enterprise and free trade. When New Zealand First is leading the Government next time round you will see this because we will show you the way forward. As our leader has been prophesising for the last 20-something years there is a better way. The time has come when that is going to be demonstrated. If you are lucky enough to come back next time if the good people of Hamilton return you as their representative—and who knows they might now that you are making them famous by giving them a Minister for the first time in decades—you will be privileged to watch while the Rt Hon Winston Peters leads a Government that puts these plans into action.Logs are simply one example. Members on both sides actually have made mention of housing. Of course the Government members have not spoken about it very much because they do not want to acknowledge the crisis. A Government that was truly aspirational and had plans and vision would probably turn the clock back to about 1930 and actually just start building some houses. That is because if you do not have enough houses the answer to that problem is to build more houses. It is all well and good saying: "Well we'll let the market decide and we'll carve off these special areas and we'll make it easier for developers to move in and build houses." and so forth. They seem to have this strange idea that if you put some land aside the developers will move in and build cheap houses for poor people. Well no of course they will not. I mean why would they?The same thing happened in Nelson—it is happening in Nelson right now. There is a block of waterfront land that has been put aside for affordable housing. The developers have moved in and they are building half-million-dollar apartments because they can. The thing about the free market is that when there is a demand for something suppliers will supply that demand and when there are no limits on who can come in and who can buy houses and how many houses they can buy and they have access to virtually unlimited money they will pay whatever the developers want. Why would a developer say to himself or herself "Well I'm going to go and build 100 low-cost houses." when they can build 100 high-cost houses instead and still sell them?An aspirational Government would put some rules in place around who can come into the country and buy houses with their unlimited money and who cannot. Then the aspirational Government would turn round—as in fairness the first Labour Government did in the 1930s—and say: "Well we have a problem with people who don't have enough houses. We will build some." They plucked some money out of thin air as this Parliament has the authority to do they built houses and then they rented them to people over years and years and years and paid back that expenditure.That is the kind of thing that an aspirational Government that actually has a plan does Mr Bennett. It does other things too. It extracts value from the products that this country produces and it does that in a number of different ways. It does that not through restricting enterprise but by directing trade in ways that make it more profitable both for the country and for the private businesses that generate that wealth. We cannot get away from the fact—we should never ever get away from the fact—that the resources that are extracted from this country are extracted for the most part by private enterprise by farmers by miners by foresters and by fishers and sold to the world. But they are sold into a market that is a fierce jungle kind of a place out there and it needs some rules around it. It needs some rules to make it work in our favour.An aspirational Government would look at the products and the resources that this country has and the way that it sells them to the world. It would look at putting some rules in place and giving some assistance to New Zealand businesses to make sure that they were extracting the most money out of those resources as possible. A Government that had aspiration could do this off its own bat from the very start by looking at say the royalty regime that this country charges for the products that we export. Our oil for example is one of our biggest export earners yet New Zealand's oil royalty regime is about the cheapest in the world. Saudi Arabia charges between 50 percent and 85 percent as royalties on its oil. New Zealand charges between 1 percent and 5 percent. Why are we giving this wealth away?The next great gold rush for want of a better description may well be fresh water and New Zealand has a freshwater resource as we know that is incomparable in the world. At the moment that water is allowed to be exported from this country by anybody who has a permit to extract it with no return at all to the country that supplies it. So New Zealand First because it is truly aspirational and does actually have some plans for the future is saying that when water is exported from this country it should command a royalty paid to the Crown on behalf of the people who own it.Hon David Bennett: How much?RICHARD PROSSER: Well we have not set any numbers Mr Bennett but we certainly will.Hon David Bennett: Oh! If you know what it is—RICHARD PROSSER: OK as a comparison if we said for example 10c a litre that would make our water worth—to the Government to the nation—about $16 a barrel in terms of an oil equivalent. If you say that Saudi Arabia is charging a 50 percent royalty for its oil at the moment it is getting about $25. That is quite comparable—$16 for water against $25 for oil. Ask yourself which is actually more valuable. I mean you can live without a barrel of oil but can you live without water? People who are buying this water are buying it because they have not got it themselves and they cannot get it. We have it in huge quantities and yet we are giving it away for nothing. The rest of the world is looking at us and saying: "You're silly. Why are you doing that?".A New Zealand First Government will not be doing those sorts of things. We will be extracting the value that exists in the resources and wealth that this country has and bringing it back into this country for the benefit of the nation and for the benefit of its people. The good news is that a new order is sweeping the world. We have seen it with Brexit. We have seen it with Trump. It will happen here in New Zealand. There is an exciting leader with a vision who will go forward after the next election and take this country to the great heights that it deserves and that is the Rt Hon Winston Peters. He will be there after September leading a New Zealand First Government. Thank you."