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Hon TODD McCLAY (National—Rotorua): Madam Speaker, thank you very much. It is an important year. It must be election year because the last speaker, Andrew Little, didn't mention a number of things straight off the bat. And I'm going to come to those because this is a Government of announcements and a Government of prom... |
We didn't hear anything from Mr Little about Pike River. That surprises me because he's made huge commitments there to families. We actually didn't hear any reason why gang numbers are increasing as quickly as they are, except they say they're all being sent here from Australia. But if you talk to the police and you ge... |
Well, today we are 200 days away from the election, and if you can't build a few houses, you're not going to see them build any roads. And if they can't build any houses under KiwiBuild, the electorate is not going to see them deliver on the very, very many worthwhile yet lofty promises that they have spoken of day aft... |
The things they haven't spoken about are what are most important to New Zealanders. You know, we have an economy that's slowing and we're going to hear speaker after speaker from the Government get up and talk about coronavirus and international headwinds and try and blame the things that have slowed and gone wrong wit... |
The average GDP growth rate in New Zealand is about 2.8 percent over the last 10 or 15 years. In the last few years of the Key-English Government, we were averaging or hitting around 4 percent per year. What does GDP growth mean? GDP growth means when an economy is growing, businesses have confidence, there is money fl... |
Now, when on this side of the House we talk about GDP growth, it's not about the big companies. It's not about what a 1 percent or a 2 percent or a 3 percent GDP growth actually means to the large companies in New Zealand; it's about every single everyday New Zealander who works so very, very hard, and those Kiwis that... |
I say again: small businesses in New Zealand are hard-working New Zealanders—they're Kiwis. They're not people that are actually out there doing wonderful, huge things on the world stage. We need them too—these are just hard-working Kiwis that are finding it much harder than they should because this is a Government tha... |
And let me just tackle one thing. One of the challenges that actually much of our economy has had for a period of time is finding an active and willing workforce—workers, both skilled and unskilled, to fill the jobs as they become available. They've said day after day that they can't find people to fill jobs in the hor... |
Well, here's the problem that we have. As businesses over two years have said, "We can't find workers."—part of the reason why the economy will be slowing: they can't find workers. We've seen the unemployment rate go up by 27,000 people. And that's counterintuitive. If there are businesses out there saying, "We need em... |
You know, over the last term that we were in Government, 10,000 jobs a month were being created—10,000 jobs a month were being created by our economy coming out of the global financial crisis. You've got to remember, actually, we were a Government that didn't have a single surplus because of the great challenges that t... |
Our economy should be doing much better than it is. It should be doing much better than it is. There should be many more opportunities for New Zealanders. This is a Government that should be investing in productive New Zealand. They should be investing in things that are going to get New Zealand moving, not throwing mo... |
There are two points I want to touch on about that cost of living on New Zealand families, and they are fuel and fuel tax. We saw last week an announcement from the Prime Minister saying that the cost of fuel in parts of New Zealand may go down by 30c a litre. Well, good and well if that happens. But a study is not goi... |
National has one. And we're going to outline that and talk about it as we go forward to the election. We're going to make sure that we keep taxes low. We're going to keep debt low by being responsible managers of the economy and responsible when it comes to spending taxes—something this Government has never been accuse... |
The last speaker, Mr Little, said that they'd announced a $12 billion infrastructure project. Well, I say to Mr Little, and I say to the Prime Minister, you can't get to work faster on their announcement. The kids are still going to get wet walking on the sides of the road under their announcements. Actually, what the ... |
What I want to say to you and the public who are listening is that the coronavirus will be a big challenge for our economy. But it was slowing long before that and we should be in a much better position to deal with it. It's the ineptitude of this Government and that they haven't done their job properly, delivered on t... |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU (Deputy Leader—NZ First): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It's a privilege to stand up on behalf of this Government and speak to the Prime Minister's statement. I think I could contribute my entire 10 minutes by correcting just about every line offered by the Hon Todd McClay in his contribution to the House... |
Hon Gerry Brownlee: I don't think so. |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: I know so, Mr Brownlee. I know so and I will. |
But the first thing I want to point out, and it was noted on this side of the House, and I'm sure the other side of the House knew it wasn't coming—they knew it wasn't coming—but there was no mention of the great Opposition leader, Simon Bridges: not a murmur, not a mutter, not a single utterance of the name "Simon Bri... |
But I will now spend my time replying to the previous speaker. |
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, hopefully talking to the Prime Minister's— |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Yes, I am, and, thankfully, he was also. So what the previous speaker talked about was immigration and how hard it was to find. So, actually, what we've done as a Government is made it easier for Pacific peoples to come in to New Zealand, to come in to industries. Primarily, it is about getting out i... |
The previous speaker complained about immigration. What I would complain about that previous Government, the National Government, was that they used wanton, unfettered immigration as a way of growing the economy. In fact, again, Mr McClay mentioned GDP per capita. And I would contest his contribution strongly, because ... |
So he then spoke about income and earnings and the cost of living. Well, actually, the cost of living has gone up, but wages have gone up faster than that cost. |
Hon David Bennett: Oh! |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Mr Bennett doesn't like to hear that good news, but our incomes, our disposable incomes, which are income after cost—for the benefit of those opposite—have gone up faster than the cost. Well, our disposable incomes have gone up. |
It's interesting that Mr McClay would use fuel tax as an example of burden on the average New Zealander, because in Rotorua the price of petrol is lower than I've seen in years. It's under $2 per litre. So, yes, this Government did what the Opposition would have done had they been here, and we implemented and continued... |
He accused us of being a Government that hasn't done anything, but we've done more—and perhaps I'll use my own example to illustrate that—than the Opposition did in their nine years in Government. I like to think of them as a Government by public relations. All they did was release public PR statements to the media and... |
Can I use the example of housing, for example. In her contribution, the Prime Minister spoke about blue smoke. I like to think of it as a blue haze of denial. Over the last nine years, there were no houses built by the Opposition, no State houses built—oh, there were a few; I have to qualify that. There were a few Stat... |
Hon Gerry Brownlee: Yeah, quite a few. |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Yeah, quite a few, but there were more torn down, Mr Brownlee. There were more literally torn down by the National Government in their time, and so New Zealanders now are struggling. As has been pointed out on this side of the House numerous times, if those people on the Opposition benches there had ... |
They spoke about rents going up—well, Mr McClay spoke about rates going up by $50 a week. Well, actually, under the tenure of the previous Government, rents, funnily enough, went up. They went up by a similar amount. The line of regression shows the cost of renting rental properties has gone up at a steady and consiste... |
Hon Gerry Brownlee: That's not right. |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: No, it is right, Mr Brownlee. It's very, very right. I'll tell you what a line of regression is later. So what the other member said was that National's economic promise to this country was that they would keep debt low. That's what the member said, but then he'd said we'd be spending more. He said t... |
Thankfully, those New Zealanders have seen exactly what those empty promises and those empty words mean. They have seen it first-hand in the previous nine years of that previous Government. They saw first-hand the fact that they were underfunding our customs agency, for example. |
Hon David Bennett: Can't even fill 10 minutes. |
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: So a completely porous border, Mr Bennett. Mr Bennett, in his own hometown, was dealing with border incursions, viruses—was it red velvet? There were numerous incursions of viruses and diseases, and they sat on the other side there and said, "No, we've got it covered." Yet Minister Salesa just recent... |
I finish just by using Rotorua as an example. I'm proud to say, for example, that Rotomā No. 1, a Māori trust in Rotorua, has committed to invest $80 million in the local business community. Why have they said that? They said that because this Government is investing more in our provinces and our regions and, of course... |
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): Who would believe that that speech has just been delivered by a former professor of economics? Very few, I think—not that there'll be many people listening to it, poring over it, or trying to understand what it said. |
I rise to support the amendment by the Hon Simon Bridges to the Prime Minister's motion, and I am surprised, but actually not particularly thrown, by the fact that so many of the Labour Party speakers have stood up talking their hollow rhetoric. They remind me largely of the emperor with no clothes, and I say that beca... |
In my hometown of Christchurch: a big fanfare two years ago with the $300 million capital sum for Christchurch to get on with the business of recovery. How much of that's been spent? How much of that's been committed? Not one dollar. What about a new project that might've got the city moving? Not one—nothing that wasn'... |
Then you come to the issue of things like homelessness. Homelessness was going to be their big call—"We're going to fix it." What have we got? More people homeless, and why? Because they've dramatically reduced the rental pool by putting the boot into landlords from one end of the country to the other, not recognising ... |
Then we get the economics professor saying there before that the Government's never built more State houses. That programme was all started under a National Government, and guess where the houses are being built? They're being built on land that was cleared of 60- and 70-year-old State house dungers that were no longer... |
Consequence of all this: rents on average up $50 across the country, in some parts of the country much more—Queenstown and Auckland, for example, $70-75. That's over $2,500 a year. Then on top of that, let's add in the petrol costs. Now, Fletcher might like to say that petrol's cheap in Rotorua— |
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Use his full name. |
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —but my constituents in the South Island don't live in Rotorua. They pay more than people are paying in Auckland, even though there's an Auckland regional fuel tax. So tell me how that works for the betterment of ordinary New Zealanders. That's an extra $700 a year. So we're climbing now to almost $... |
Then we have today in the House the Minister of Housing standing up saying that they've really got on top of the shared equity scheme to get more people into their own homes. What do we hear from her? They've had 18 months of workshops, 18 months of sitting round looking at each other, thumb twiddling, wondering how th... |
Then we come to the Green Party. Tell me one thing the Green Party have achieved for the environment in the time that they've been in Government so far—just one. Absolute silence across the House. Their biggest achievement so far has been a referendum on personal use of marijuana. That's what they'll go out to the elec... |
Then, of course, if we look at other aspects of the environment, why is it that when there is an overwhelming majority in the House to pass the Kermadec legislation, it's not ever brought forward? It can only be that I'm wrong, that the National Party wants to support it but the Green Party doesn't, because if they did... |
We've heard about the 12 infrastructure projects that were committed under a National Government—they keep on saying they weren't funded; well, they're funded Budget by Budget, and the last two Budgets have been theirs, and it's them who didn't fund them because they cancelled them. Now they turn up and say, "We've got... |
We've seen the debacle over KiwiBuild. I can't stress enough how bad that is. How bad is it that a Government can set up a programme to build houses with huge targets, spend hundreds of millions trying to put it together, end up only building under that scheme 300 houses, then end up with many of those unsold, and have... |
And you keep on going through all of these things and finding the difficulties that people face all the time. What I think is really interesting is just how fascinated the Government is with themselves—absolutely fascinated. Now, when "the Professor" was speaking before, he was talking about all the wonderful things th... |
So I'm sure that the Labour Party going into the next election round will be not saying "Let's do this"; they should be saying, "Let's talk about doing this"—because that's been very successful for them: just talking about it, just announcing, never doing. There's no fear that that'll affect the New Zealand First Party... |
I want to make my final comments about the claim that they're going to reduce the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump. Well, here's the deal: in every $2.10 average per litre fuel price in New Zealand for petrol, there is $1.10 in tax—$1.10 in tax. And then there is—and this is the bit that moves all the time—the 70c... |
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I understand this is a split call, so I call Jan Logie. |
JAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It's with a sense of gratitude, really, that I stand to speak in response to the Prime Minister's speech about this Government's commitment to wellbeing and dealing with the really enduring underlying problems in this country that have not been given the attention that they ... |
I just want to take a moment to make this real for everyone in the House and people who may be listening, as I go through some of the news headlines that we've had just in two months this year in this area, where a former scout leader was convicted of sexually abusing five boys, over 40 years. A disgraced Rātana Church... |
In just two months, these are the stories that made it through into headlines in our media, and yet the research tells us that police are called out to incidents of family harm every four minutes in this country. These headlines are just the tip of the iceberg of the trauma being experienced on a daily basis in our cou... |
That is why within just such a short period in this Government we have created a whole-of-Government response to bring Police, Courts, Health, Education, and other agencies together. We've passed three pieces of legislation, including world-first legislation for leave. We've introduced sexual violence legislation to re... |
Hon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Last weekend, we had National's Bluegreens conference, and we were promised a big announcement. What was that announcement? A $5 million fund for community groups for conservation work and beach clean-ups. That epitomises the National Party ... |
New Zealanders need to be able to enjoy nature. We need to restore the dawn chorus in our forests. We need to be able to have healthy oceans where whales, dolphins, fish, and seabirds flourish. But the previous National Government slashed conservation funding. It ignored the fact that our most essential infrastructure ... |
So under this Government, we have seen really good progress. The key is passing the zero carbon Act, to ensure that we have a framework to enable us to reduce our carbon emissions and protect our climate. We have seen a record investment in conservation not just in Budget 2018, with an extra $180 million, but again in ... |
What has the result of this been? A real investment in dealing to predators. In the current financial year, Te Papa Atawhai—the Department of Conservation—has organised the biggest ever aerial predator control operation: over more than 800,000 hectares, to deal with possums, rats, and stoats, to ensure that birds like ... |
Under this Government, we've had the biggest ever addition to a national park, with 640,000 hectares added to Kahurangi National Park in the Mōkihinui catchment. We have named the 11th great walk—Hump Ridge Track, in Southland—and we've had a huge effort by the Department of Conservation and the Defence Force to clean ... |
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Excuse me. Order! Order! In fairness to the person speaking. Thank you. |
Hon EUGENIE SAGE: Thank you, Madam Speaker. We are tackling that crisis. |
It's rich to hear Mr Brownlee talk about the environment, because over and over again, I have been congratulated for the action that this Government is undertaking on waste, doing more in the last two years than the National Government did in nine. |
We're setting up the design criteria for a container return scheme, because New Zealanders use about 188 plastic bottles each year, and the bulk of those end up going to landfill. So we need to have a container return scheme. We're designing waste out of our system, encouraging resource recovery, with criteria for mand... |
We've got a major resource recovery programme under way to improve and better coordinate kerbside recycling, so we get more resources being recovered and reprocessed rather than going to landfills, and we're expanding the landfill levy so we have more revenue to recycle back into waste minimisation—all issues that the ... |
Hon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): Thank you, Madam Speaker. When this Government was first elected, I did a speech around socialism and what socialists tend to do. Unfortunately, everything I've said has come true. We are in the midst of a social experiment that hasn't worked: a social experiment of the socia... |
What we've seen from this Government is a Government that has ruined New Zealand. Within two years, they have taken this country into deficit and, effectively, taken this country into negative growth. That is the legacy of the Labour - New Zealand First - Greens Government. And why has that happened? Well, we've got a ... |
Then the New Zealand First leader—what have we got? Some economic guru that has never made a dollar in his life, never been involved in business, and yet understands everything that needs to be done, knows exactly what needs to be done for the New Zealand economy, when the man has lived off the teat of this building fo... |
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Use his full name. |
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