Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker and it's so good to see you in the Chair reflecting the gravitas of the position in such a powerful way! This is an opportunity to have a parliamentary debate on a Wednesday afternoon at a time that many New Zealanders are facing a cost of living crisis that we have in this country. The price of so many everyday items is going up very substantially—fruit and vegetables rent housing costs as well as transport costs—at a time that is putting real pressure on families.And wages are not keeping up. We heard the headline figures: 6 percent inflation and about a 2.6 percent increase in wages—people going backwards. And what's this Government's response? Well it's typically to blame Vladimir Putin and the tanks going across Ukraine when this of course has been the situation for the last 18 months and has been driven primarily—primarily—by a Government that is addicted to spending; addicted to spending.Grant Robertson is the leader in chief pumping and stimulating the economy with all the borrowed money that they have found through the COVID crisis and continuing to do it well past the point of the crisis. Even now as businesses can't get access to workers there's these two great puzzles going on: you can't get access to workers sufficient to keep your business going and everywhere we go—and everybody in this place has been walking down streets going to restaurants or whatever and has found that there's a little sign outside saying We're closed because we haven't been able to get staff." We see those signs everywhere we go.And yet at the same time the number of people on the job seeker benefit continues to increase because this Government has done away with all the effective sanctions in the system to encourage and give people a nudge to get back to work and secondly at the very same time the Government's still spending hundreds of millions of dollars on make-work schemes such as Jobs for Nature where we're actually paying people to do things—nice things to have—for a billion dollars to take workers out of the workforce and give them to a Government make-work scheme. It is absolutely amazing that the Government still thinks this is a good idea to be funding expensive make-work schemes when employers can't get access to workers.We also have a Government that's addicted to spending other people's money. Of course it does that always in the tax sense but it's also doing that through applying new and additional costs to small businesses that are struggling. The latest example of that is the so-called—misnamed—fair pay agreements that were introduced; the legislation was introduced yesterday. It will force employers and employees across the country to sign up to a mandatory national award in particular industries or for particular occupations—a return to a rigid 1970s-style industrial landscape—at a time when younger people particularly in New Zealand but New Zealanders generally value their freedom and want to be able to have the flexibility and the working arrangements to sit down with their employers and work out what works for them. Instead this Government's going back to more rigid union-controlled organisations. And what does it do? Ultimately it adds to the cost structure that New Zealand businesses face and that makes them less competitive internationally it makes it harder for them to succeed and compete on international markets and it also fundamentally adds to the cost of living alongside all the other increases that have been passed on.So we have a Minister and a Government that just do not seem to accept that basic principle that if you add a lot of costs into the structure of the economy and into businesses those costs have to be paid by somebody and it flows through to the cost of everything that we pay for in this country. It is contributing to the cost of living crisis that New Zealanders face every day and that's why we'll be fighting that over the next few months. The Government probably won't listen. They'll use their massive majority to ram it through and we'll have to deal with it with the support of the New Zealand public when we come to power next year to sort these things out.Briefly on law and order we are seeing again and again the strange contrast between a Government that claims that it's doing all sorts of wonderful things to hold the gang members to account and an ever-increasing list of gang members in this country and a sense of lawlessness on the streets of this country—and an increase in violent crime. The only point I would make is that the criminal community gets its message from this Government and the message is that we'll come up with an excuse for what you do and we'll explain it away and we won't hold you to account. That message is coming through loud and clear and we need to change that message and ensure that the absolute priority of any Government should be the security of its citizens."