Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Obituaries

Hon Robert Leslie Gapper Talbot QSO

Mr SPEAKER: I regret to inform the House of the death on 13 December 2012 of the Hon Robert Leslie Gapper Talbot QSO, who represented the Ashburton electorate from 1966 to 1969 and again from 1978 to 1987, and the electorate of South Canterbury from 1969 to 1978. From 1981 to 1984 he was the Minister of Tourism and Postmaster-General. I desire, on behalf of this House, to express our sense of the loss we have sustained and our sympathy with the relatives of the late former member. I now ask members to stand with me and observe a period of silence as a mark of respect for his memory.

Honourable members stood as a mark of respect.

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): I move, That this House express its confidence in the National-led Government and commend its programme for 2013 as set out in the Prime Minister’s statement to Parliament. What a good strong start it has been for the National-led Government, has it not? What a cracker of a start—full of energy and full of new ideas, ready here to continue the 4 years of solid work and progress we have seen in the past. It is not even February and we have had a Cabinet reshuffle, 14,000 new apprentices to be hired over the next 5 years under the new programme of New Zealand Apprenticeships, warrant of fitness changes that will support every New Zealander around the country, and positive movement in the Crown accounts, and business confidence is up. No wonder—no wonder—the first political poll of the year has seen National on the rise.

Then there is Labour—some things just stay the same, do they not? Let us be honest. David Cunliffe remains about as popular in the Labour caucus as a pussycat at Gareth Morgan’s house. So here is a bit of fresh thinking and new ideas for Mr Shearer: get Mr Cunliffe a bell. At least next time you will see him coming when the cue comes. As for Mr Shearer—well, he had 6 weeks on the beach, did he not? For 6 weeks we did not hear a peep out of him, and I am tempted to say that when he came back there was not one single idea—not one. But, actually, wait, there was an idea. The idea was that the harebrained idea Labour had announced 3 months ago, that it was going to build New Zealanders a four-bedroom home in Auckland for under $300,000, was a con. That is what it was. He worked it out.

So anyway, rest assured, there is nothing to worry about for Labour, though, because I read in the paper this week that now Mr Shearer is a man of style. It is style over substance, apparently. Mind you, when you have no policies, you have no ideas, and after 6 weeks of thinking on the beach you cannot come up with anything, then reading an autocue to the party faithful in Wainuiōmata on Sunday afternoon is style, and no wonder you get points for it. I am a little surprised, though, that they did not have a theme song, or, these days, actually David Shearer’s theme song—they should have piped him in to Talking Heads’ favourite little number, “Burning Down the House”, because that is exactly what happened to the $300,000 house that was never going to be built. “Talking heads” is right when it comes to Labour and the Greens. That is what they do. They do that well—they talk. But when it comes to solutions, when it comes to action, and when it comes to results, it is the National-led Government that delivers those for New Zealanders.

Let us start with the international environment. Let us put a bit of context into what we face in 2013. Those situations that the world faces continue to be difficult. So, yes, the fiscal cliff has not yet been resolved for the United States. That has been pushed another 7 weeks into the future, or another couple of months into the future. But that issue has not been resolved. When it comes to European growth, that remains weak, and will, in all probability, remain weak. When it comes to global growth, that remains weak. We saw the IMF downgrading global growth in the papers just a few days ago. But New Zealand remains strong, and New Zealand looks to grow at about 2.5 percent according to Treasury and the Reserve Bank—stronger than the entire euro area, stronger than the United Kingdom, stronger than Japan, and stronger than Canada. Out of adversity comes opportunity. As we look to Christchurch, that is an area where $30 billion will be spent over the course of the next few years. It is likely to add about 0.7 percent of GDP.

On this side of the House, where we have ideas and where we have plans, and where big success is not just stumbling over the autocue, we have four key priorities. No. 1 is responsibly managing the Government’s finances. That means living within your means. That means New Zealand earning a living. That means being sensible with taxpayers’ money. The second is building a more competitive and productive economy, so that New Zealand businesses can flourish and grow and hire people, from one end of the country to the other. It is about delivering better public services so that those services that New Zealanders rely on can be in better shape for them. Finally, it is about supporting the rebuild of Christchurch.

This Government has done what no other Government before it has done, and that is set firm, measurable results. That means actually measuring up for the things that are important to New Zealand and being accountable for them, and we have ten challenges we have identified. They are serious challenges that previous Governments, including the 9-year Labour Government, hopelessly failed on. They include reducing the number of long-term beneficiaries in New Zealand. It is about increasing support for and caring about kids in New Zealand to make sure that they are in early childhood education, that they have rheumatic fever programmes available to them, or that they are immunised. It is about making sure that more youngsters get National Certificate in Educational Achievement level 2. It is about reducing crime—even though this Government has delivered a 30-year low in the crime rate in this country. It is about embracing the digital world.

Let us go back to getting back to surplus. On this side of the House we know that, when it comes to spending, Labour and the Greens are the Usain Bolt of spending. They are the world champions when it comes to spending. Nothing has changed, and they will continue, given half a chance, to do it again. They cannot help themselves. Every time they open their mouths, they either get it wrong or they spend money they do not have. Those are the only answers they have got. This is a Government that actually has New Zealand on track to get back to surplus, and that is something to be proud of. It takes responsible management, it takes trade-offs, it takes sticking to modest spending allowances, and it takes making tough decisions. But all of those things are important for the future growth of our country, and all of those things about responsible spending programmes are absolutely necessary if we are not going to laden up a future generation of New Zealanders with more and more debt. We look around the world and we can see plenty of examples of countries that want to follow the Labour-Green prescription for their economy. There are plenty of them, and now they cannot afford the things they want. Now they are up to their eyeballs in debt. Make no mistake. It would be no different. If Russel Norman thinks that printing money is the answer to New Zealand’s problems, then that just shows you how out of touch they are with everyday New Zealanders, who have been saving like this Government.

Secondly, we are committed to building new assets in this country without debt, and subject to the Supreme Court ruling, of course, in a few days’ time, the mixed-ownership model programme is on track for 2013. That will see New Zealanders with an opportunity to invest in important assets. That will see a deepening of the capital markets, and it will see an improvement in oversight for those companies.

We are committed to continuing to improve the productivity and efficiency of the economy, and again I go back to the plan that was rolled out last year, the six pillars of business growth, which are working. So let us just have a look at how they are working, because, yesterday, in the charade that was organised by the Labour Party, the Greens, and New Zealand First, HamiltonJet turned up and said that high exchange rates are hurting its business. Well, that is true. High exchange rates in countries, from Australia to Brazil, and right around the world, do get affected when the exchange rates go up, and that is an issue that New Zealand businesses have had to contend with as well. But this is the interesting bit. This is what HamiltonJet told them, but they did not want to tell the public. They said they could survive with a New Zealand - US exchange rate of 75c. Why is that? Because this is a Government that has undertaken tax reform in the last 4 years, labour market reform in the last 4 years, and Resource Management Act reform. This is a Government that has tackled local government, it has tackled the size of spending in central government, it has got on top of red tape, it has signed more trade deals, and it has listened to business. Yes, the exchange rate is high, but what would happen under a Labour Government? This is the answer: more debt, more spending, interest rates up, more bureaucracy, and more red tape. You never find the words “less bureaucracy, less red tape, and reform of the important parts of the economy” coming from Labour and the Greens. What you hear of is more spending and more pressure on those businesses.

Innovation is critically important to our economy. This Government does something about it. The Callaghan Innovation centre is being rolled out in three centres across the country in 2013—in Auckland, obviously, in the Hutt, and in Christchurch. The National Science Challenges will demand answers and give answers to the critical issues that our businesses face. More university funding, a Government that has been putting money into the Primary Growth Partnership and the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases—that is what happens under innovation and science when it is appropriately funded and properly looked after.

When it comes to training, this is a Government that actually trains people, as opposed to spending money and getting absolutely no results, and wasting tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. That is why on Friday I announced, along with Steven Joyce, 14,000 additional—

Rt Hon Winston Peters: How many?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I announced 14,000 additional apprenticeships over the next 4 or 5 years, and money and incentives for those who sign up—$1,000, or $2,000 if they are going into the construction sector—and for their employer to take them on, along with the 4,000 places that are in the trades academies and services academies this year, or the 8,200 fees-free places in Youth Guarantee, or the 700 additional Government-funded engineering places around the country.

This is a Government that wants to build infrastructure. That is not something that you will be hearing from Labour and the Greens. So, yes, we have got a public-private partnership starting in terms of my electorate in the Hobsonville Primary School this year, we are going to have a prison built in Wiri in the years ahead, and we are going to have $12 billion worth of roads built over the course of the next decade under a National-led Government. If you are in a car and there is a rush of blood to the head and Labour and the Greens do get there, you had better like your radio station because you will spend a long time in a traffic jam, because the first thing that will be gone with those people are the roads. You will be on a road to nowhere, with a car not moving. You need to build infrastructure. Ultra-fast broadband—we support it, they are opposed. This year 300,000 businesses and homes will be connected to ultra-fast broadband. There will be 1,300 schools and 30 hospitals with fibre right to the gate. Labour says no; the National Party says yes. There are 100,000 rural homes—they do not care about them on the Labour side—that are going to be connected up with access to faster broadband. In 2013 we will complete the digital switch-over. When it comes to infrastructure, $18 million was announced last week to go into irrigation. Labour and the Greens say that they do not care. They do not want irrigation. Tell that to the farmers who were on TV in the Hawke’s Bay last night, and see what they think of that. While we are at it—the Skycity convention centre, let us get that thing off the ground and going as well.

When it comes to housing, that is not a new debate. I am sorry, I hate to break it to David Shearer, but actually people have been worrying about housing ever since men moved out of caves years ago. The thing that makes housing affordable in this country is what this Government is doing: keeping interest rates low, reforming the planning system—

Hon Member: It’s a lot of rubbish.

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Making sure that there are greenfield and brownfield developments—and that is it. They think it is a load of rubbish to have more land, have cheap interest rates, have a proper planning system, and train more people. No, their answer is to borrow money and promise people you will sell them a house for under $300,000, and, by the way, when they wake up, boomfa! It is a one-bedroom bedsit in the central business district. Well, that is Labour for you—it is all an optical illusion. We will be clearing up those issues.

Let us move to education. This is a Government that cares about education. If Labour wants the fight on education, bring it on, because this Government has more kids getting National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2, more kids in early childhood education, and more Māori and Pacific kids achieving. This is a Government that is not afraid to take on the digital challenges in the modern 21st century. This is a Government that is not afraid to say yes to national standards—yes, of course we want to measure, monitor, and report to parents what kids are doing. In 2013 we are committed to better results and better information, and making sure our parents have the information. You see, this is the interesting thing: Labour and the Greens, what do they say when it comes to air quality and water quality? They want to measure, monitor, and report on it, but when it comes to kids’ education, it is see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. That is the problem, is it not? That is the problem when it comes to that.

In welfare reform, this year there are three new benefit categories, greater work obligations, and building expectations that if you can work you should work—that is what is in the lifeblood of New Zealanders. When it comes to health, talk is cheap. We saw it from Labour for years—lots of money and no delivery. This is a Government that has added 30,000 additional elective surgical operations in the 4 years we have been here, and there are more to come, more money for rheumatic fever programmes, the roll-out this year of the Youth Mental Health Project, and more money for doctors and nurses.

When it comes to delivery of the 59 Treaty of Waitangi settlements that have taken place, 33 have occurred already in the last 4 years under this Government. What a busy Government this has been.

I could go on, as there is so much to talk about, but let us just get to this one final point. During the course of 2013 this busy, committed, well-structured National Government will deliver lots of solutions to the country, and every single one of them will be opposed by Labour and the Greens, because this is the way it goes. Tax reform that delivered great change incentives to New Zealand to get ahead? They are opposed. Major roads in New Zealand so people can get around, and our buses and cars and people can get there? They are opposed. A free-trade agreement with the United States of America worth $2 billion to our economy? Metiria Turei, the Greens, and Labour—they are opposed. Resource Management Act reform to make things go fast in this country? They are opposed. Giving young people a chance to get a job through 90-day trial periods? They are opposed. The starting out wage? We introduced it; they are opposed. Work obligations for beneficiaries so it is fair for both everyone and the system? They are opposed. Oil and gas exploration, so that our kids do not have to go and work in Western Australia? They are opposed. The International Convention Centre? They are opposed. Hobbit legislation? They are opposed. You see, they are opposed to everything because they only know one thing: spend money. Cheque-book activism—that is it. They are out there to spend your money—well, more importantly, spend your money that you do not have, to promise you things that will not turn up.

Under a National Government the $550,000 house will be delivered to you on time. A good economy and jobs and opportunities will be delivered. Under Labour it is all one big optical illusion. No wonder David Cunliffe is out there getting a bell. He needs to put it round his neck, because when they all wake up and realise that what David Shearer said on Sunday was absolutely zippo, other than that he got it wrong 3 months ago, boy, the knives will be out.

DAVID SHEARER (Leader of the Opposition): The Labour Party will oppose this motion. It has no confidence in the Government. The only thing missing from Mr Key’s speech was the punchline, because surely that speech was an absolute joke.

I am flattered, though, that Mr Key spent so much time talking about the Opposition. Clearly, he is quite worried about what we are proposing and the policies we are putting forward. But he quite clearly has no way and no idea of the way ahead. New Zealanders actually do not want stand-up comedy. They want somebody to stand up for them. These people work hard. They pay their taxes. They bring up their kids the best they can. Who is standing up for them and who is backing them? Certainly not this Government. Did you hear the words “ambition” or “aspiration”? Those words are not words you hear any more from John Key. You used to, but you really hear them only at election time. What we hear now, these days, are tired, old one-liners and excuses—excuses. Excuses like the housing affordability crisis being the Auckland Council’s fault! Our economic woes are the problem of what? The Canterbury earthquakes! And do not forget the global financial crisis. Remember that great claim last year by John Key that that was the problem on-caused by the Labour Government? So it is actually our fault, the global financial crisis!

After 4 years New Zealanders expect more than that. After 4 years they deserve much, much more than that, and deep down John Key knows it. You can hear it in that slightly shriller voice. The relaxed, easygoing John Key is going. He is being replaced by the “Mr Angry” and the “Mr Defensive” John Key. Now he is this week “putting … our political opponents on notice that the government’s got to move and act this year.” Well, that is kind of him to give us a heads-up. We have been waiting for 4 years for the Government to move and act. On behalf of New Zealanders I would like to thank him for that.

I can understand why the mood has changed, because it is all downhill from here for John Key and this Government. He must be thinking what must his legacy be, and I can see it now: “At one time this man was popular.”—because there is precious little else. Let us look at John Key’s record. There are 180,000 people who have left for Australia. A thousand people a week are going to Australia. We have got 7.3 percent unemployment—the highest unemployment in 14 years. There are 85,000—85,000—young people not in work and not in training. And, above all, we have the worst economic growth of any Government in 50 years. Well, I will give him credit for one thing. At least he had the decency to fess up to dropping the ball on Sky TV last year.

He said: “It’s been quite a strong performance from us, with the problem of one exception. The unemployment rate is just simply too high.” Well, that is the epic understatement of the year. It is an epic fail from this Government. Unemployment is at a 14-year high, the highest since that lot was last in Government. And these are not just statistics; they are real people. They are the miners who lost their jobs at Spring Creek. They are the Hillside workers made redundant by KiwiRail. They are the teenagers leaving school to go on the unemployment scrap heap. They are the New Zealanders whom John Key and his “Mr Fix-it, Steven Joyce, have forgotten.

Talking about Mr Joyce, the “Minister of Everything”, the jack of all portfolios and the master of absolutely none, his bureaucratic empire just gets bigger and bigger. The great white hope of the private sector will be best remembered for creating the great white dysfunctional whale of a bureaucracy called “Mobie”. Apparently, Mr Joyce has done such a bang-up job of employment that he is now the man to fix Novopay, because Hekia Parata, of course, cannot fix it—although she caused it. Did anyone actually know he was responsible for unemployment—unemployment? He is the “Minister of Unemployment”, with 7.3 percent unemployment. It is no wonder that he keeps quiet. The only jobs he is creating are the ones that he is creating for himself. But, to be fair to Steven Joyce, there is really only one person he wants to make unemployed, and that is Judith Collins, because she and she alone—and she will admit it herself; she will tell you—can stop him from adding the job of leader of the National Party to all the other jobs that he actually has as well. So he is doing the next best thing, which is to become the “Minister for Everything”.

The clock is ticking on John Key and his Government. They have had their chance, and they have blown it. In his first week—last week—John Key finally decided that we need more apprentices. Well, I am so glad that he accepted the complete obvious. But we have had a 20 percent drop in the number of apprentices since this Government took office—a 20 percent drop—so he is actually only playing catch-up. Despite our having 85,000 young people not in work, education, or training, we are now having to import foreign labour. It turns out there is a skills shortage in Canterbury for the rebuild, and the Government has only just realised that. I would have thought that was so obvious that even Treasury could have forecast it. It was obvious to us at the last election that there was actually a youth unemployment problem. That was when we announced our plan to pay employers the equivalent of the dole to take on unemployed people as apprentices. It is a plan that John Key pooh-poohed. “Well, actually,” he said “we’ve got it all under control. The market’s going to do it.” It will not—it will not.

We need an active, smart Government, because New Zealanders are tired of working harder and not really being able to get ahead. They are tired of scrimping and saving, and not being able to buy a house despite saving hard. They are tired of a Government that says the market will fix it. That just does not cut it any more. We are facing a new era. We are facing an economic landscape that has changed. It is not just a blip. It is time for a new direction. It is time for a hands-on Government. It is time for a Government led by Labour. And we will take on the big issue. We will make the big decisions.

We will start by putting 100,000 Kiwis into affordable homes. These are first homes. These are first homes. They are not dream homes, but they will give Kiwis their first step on the housing ladder. Currently, it is possible to buy three to four-bedroom homes in Auckland for about $430,000. The New Zealand Housing Foundation is doing that as we speak. Just imagine—just imagine—the savings that we can make when we do that on a much, much bigger scale, building thousands of homes a year. Construction companies tell us that they can build those houses for way cheaper than they are being built at the moment. This is a hugely exciting programme for New Zealand. It will be the biggest building programme in 50 years. It will create thousands of jobs and boost the economy. That is what a Government can achieve if it decides to be hands-on.

And what has John Key got? He has got zip, zero, nothing. He is making up the numbers to try to convince people that all of this will not work. Well, we might not be able to build an affordable house in his neighbourhood, but we can certainly build a house in his electorate for that price. He is putting the boot into first-home buyers. He is taking away the little hope that they have got, because he has got nothing. He is telling the Auckland Council that it does not have 15,000 sections. Well, he might have wanted to listen to the radio this morning, because Len Brown was saying: “We do have 15,000 sections, actually.” He is telling the Auckland Council that it takes too long with building consents. Well, he may want to do his homework before he says those sorts of things, because if you go around the country, what you find is that, actually, councils are delivering. The Auckland Council is 95 percent compliant on building consents and resource consents. So he is making it up as he goes along, but it is a great story: “Let’s put the boot into first-home buyers. Let’s give them absolutely no hope.” Well, that is not good enough for me. Labour will do something about it and we will do it with hands-on Government.

Its secret weapon on housing—its secret weapon—is to appoint the fresh-faced Nick Smith as the housing Minister. No disrespect to Nick, but he is not so fresh. And neither are National’s ideas, because from what we heard from Mr Key just now, National has zero ideas—zero ideas—and now he is telling us we do not need to have zero Budgets any more. So after last year whacking up petrol taxes to get a surplus, what has changed? What has changed with this Government so that suddenly we do not need to be worried about zero Budgets any more? Well, clearly, John Key has got a crystal ball that economists do not have. Or maybe, simply, he has read the writing on the wall, and he is getting out his chequebook—getting out his chequebook, something that he accuses us of—and he thinks that by spending more he will become more popular. Well, it will not work. Kiwis are smarter than that, and we are going to be holding the Government to account. They know that National is better at spinning excuses than at actually getting up and making a real difference. We will be holding it to account, and so will the rest of New Zealand.

Labour is prepared to take the tough decisions on the tough issues. We will make the tough decisions. National might be happy to sit back and watch as the high kiwi dollar kills our exporters and our manufacturers haemorrhage jobs. What Mr Key did not say about HamiltonJet was that when he was asked yesterday what he would suggest it should do, he said: “Change the Government.” That was what you said, Mr Key. You missed that part out. Labour will take the tough decisions, so we will get hands-on and change monetary policy so that our businesses can compete with the rest of the world. We will back our risk takers and our innovators with tax breaks for research and development. We will build a smart and sustainable economy that delivers more jobs and better wages. We will introduce a capital gains tax to encourage investment in job-creating companies, rather than encourage speculation in the Auckland property market.

We are prepared to take the tough decisions. We will support looking at the superannuation age of eligibility going up, so that we can afford superannuation for our younger people right now in the workforce, because in 3 years’ time, as John Key knows, the education budget will be smaller than the budget that we spend on superannuation. It is simply unsustainable.

And we will help our young people into training and jobs—something that the Government has just woken up about. Too many of them are drifting and dropping out of school. So we will make the transition from learning to earning much easier. We will extend Reading Recovery and put food into low-decile schools. Someone once wisely said: “An empty stomach and an empty lunchbox set kids up for an empty life.”

Hon Trevor Mallard: Who said that?

DAVID SHEARER: Actually, that was John Key in 2007. It was a great line—it was a great line. It is just that he forgot about it after he said it. Since he said it, we have actually had no change. There actually has not been any change. I guess it just sort of slipped his mind. But if he does get round to changing his mind and he does put it through, he will have Labour’s support. We will back good ideas if they do come from the Government, and we will work with it to improve them.

John Key’s answer to education is to back his education Minister, Hekia Parata, the woman he calls “one of the smoothest communicators [National] has ever had.” It was a smooth performance trying to cram more kids into classrooms. It was a great communication job shutting our schools down in Christchurch. She is someone who has created despair in the hearts of teachers and parents. She is someone who, unbelievably, can make Anne Tolley look good. John Key’s defence of Hekia Parata puts him squarely in the frame for her failures. Her next stuff-up is his to own, because kids and their parents deserve better, and we are behind them.

From education to the economy, Labour will flesh out our new direction for New Zealand in 2013. We need new policies to lift our kids out of poverty and violence. We need an economy that works for all New Zealanders, not just the few at the top. We need our environment to drive our economic success, and our economy to keep our environment clean. And we need this country to be a place that our children and grandchildren are proud to call home. We want all that. Even John Key, I believe, wants that. But he has shown he does not know how to get New Zealand back on track.

His deputy certainly does not have a clue. Bill English tells us that his big priority is not jobs or growth; it is actually welfare reform. Well, here is news for him: you can reform welfare all you like, but people actually need jobs to go to. This is Bill English, who said that Labour should apologise to the nation for its time in office. So, what, we should say sorry for running 9 years of surpluses? That is something this Government has not been able to do one of yet. Sorry for paying off debt? Sorry for getting unemployment to the lowest in the Western World? It is Bill English and John Key who should say sorry, for mismanaging the economy, letting unemployment skyrocket, and for coming up with just one answer, one answer only—selling off our best assets.

So I am putting Mr Key and this Government on notice. John Key has had 4 years to live up to his promise—[Interruption]—5 years now—to close the gap with Australia and build a brighter future. It is a future that he does not want to talk about any more. He has had 5 years to deliver higher wages and a more competitive economy. He has had 5 years to deal with the housing affordability crisis, and has done nothing. The time for excuses is over. In 2013 we will hold this Government to account, but we will also offer New Zealanders a real alternative. It is time National got out of the way and let a Labour Government get on to making New Zealand a place that it really should be.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou katoa e te Whare. I am very proud to speak on behalf of the Green Party to the Prime Minister’s statement. A quote from Bill English comes to mind: “Is that it?”. Was that it? Six weeks over summer to think about new policy, and the Government comes up with precisely nothing, yet again. There is nothing in today’s speech from the Prime Minister that offers any tangible solutions to the big issues that are facing our country and everyday New Zealanders. Worse, the direction set out by this Government does not reflect the intrinsic character of New Zealand or the underlying values of New Zealanders. Its hands-off economic conservatism benefits its very wealthy backers and runs counter to our country’s proud history of economic egalitarianism and fairness. Its cold-hearted social policies run roughshod over our decades-old contract of supporting people when they need help, and our loving commitment to be our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. Its short-sighted view of our beautiful environment—our rivers and beaches, forests, and national parks—as nothing more than irritating impediments to its exploitative economic agenda is like stabbing a knife into the heart of our national identity. It is not who we are and it is not who we want to be.

New Zealanders have a strong and proud national identity. At our best, we are a unique mix of environmental guardians, social reformers, and economic innovators. New Zealanders also have a proud tradition of leading and forging an independent path. We were not the second country to give women the vote; we were the first. Hillary was not the second to climb Mount Everest; he was the first. We said no to nuclear, even though it damaged our relationship with the then greatest superpower on earth, because it was the right thing to do. We are gritty fighters who regularly punch above our weight. We are constantly striving for a better future that is economically, socially, and environmentally richer. But John Key and his Government do not reflect who we are. Instead of making us richer in the things that matter, they make us poorer, because on every important measure this Government is failing, and in its failure it undermines our heritage, our identity, and our potential.

So let us look at that failure further, and what better place to start than our economy? New Zealanders are finally waking up to what Americans learnt 4 years ago: if you want to destroy an economy, you hand it to an investment banker to run it for you. All of John Key’s Wall Street insider knowledge has been used, to dazzling disaster on the New Zealand economy. The Merrill Lynch playbook of destroying good, everyday jobs, fuelling an unaffordable housing crisis, and damaging our long-term viability, just so the rich can get a little bit richer more quickly, has been expertly implemented in this country. This fallacy that a National Government is a good manager of the economy has been proven to be wrong yet again.

The facts speak for themselves. When the National Government took office the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent; now it is 7.3 percent. There has been a net reduction of over 40,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector alone. When National took office the Government debt was $40 billion; now it is $82 billion. When National took office the national savings rate was a very modest 2.1 percent; now it is 0.7 percent. While John Key continues to blame the global financial crisis or Labour for his Government’s poor economic performance, most of the other OECD countries have just been getting on and managing it. IMF data shows that the New Zealand economy had performed worse than the majority of countries in the OECD since 2009. The data shows New Zealand scored 18th out of 34 OECD countries for GDP growth, 22nd for unemployment, 30th for the current account deficit, 28th for national savings growth, and 23rd for Government debt—failure, failure, failure. By all measures of traditional economic success—growth, employment, the current account deficit, national savings, and Government debt—New Zealand has performed poorly when compared with the OECD. This is a very bleak picture. Economic measure after economic measure tells a story of missed opportunities that, left unresolved, will leave generations of our kids permanently worse off.

That is not who we are. New Zealanders are proud economic innovators. We have transformed our economy, many times over, to respond to the world around us and to seize opportunities for the future. The best opportunities for the New Zealand economy lie in transitioning to a truly green economy, yet there was not a single mention of these opportunities in the Prime Minister’s statement today. The Pure Advantage group’s report released last year tells us we have natural global advantages in geothermal energy, but the Government wants to hock off our best launch pad into that lucrative energy market by selling Mighty River Power. We need to stop the Government’s ideologically blinkered asset sales so that all New Zealanders can benefit from the huge geothermal opportunities that Mighty River Power has before it. But today’s speech once more attempts to make the unwinnable case for asset sales. The Prime Minister is still trying to convince New Zealanders that asset sales are a good idea for this country. We know that selling our power companies does not add up, and that is why over 360,000 New Zealanders have signed the petition calling for a referendum to stop the asset sales. The report the Green Party commissioned last year from Business and Economic Research proved categorically that asset sales would cost the Government more than they bring in. Even Treasury’s projections now confirm that the sales process alone would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of selling our assets would go on forever. The sales would leave a $100 million a year hole in the Government’s books long after the revenue has been spent.

The Government’s failures, of course, do not stop there. The Government is undermining a key part of who we are as a country when it undermines and devalues our beautiful country. We all remember being able to swim in rivers when we were growing up, but now we cannot, because so many of them are full of effluent. The Government seems to have a pathological opposition to any measure that seeks to protect our beautiful country and make our claims to being 100 percent pure a reality. Bringing in Nick Smith for a spot of “greenwash” window dressing simply will not change that. The so far under-told story of this Government is its failure as an environmental guardian. Its approach to the environment runs counter to our history and to who we are as New Zealanders. The Government’s environmental policies do not share the values of everyday Kiwis, who want to love and protect our amazing country.

Again, when we look at the environment, the facts speak for themselves. New Zealand has plummeted from the top spot overall to 14th in the most recent Yale University Environmental Performance Index. Our Māui’s dolphin is on the brink of extinction. In 2005 it was estimated that the population of Māui’s dolphins was 111. It is now estimated that that has halved to just 55, and yet the Government still has not implemented the interim measures to protect the Māui’s dolphin that the Department of Conservation proposed in March of last year. So what would it say about us as a country if we allow the Māui’s dolphin to become extinct? How will we explain to our grandchildren that this Government was prepared to stand up for the interests of the commercial fishing industry rather than a native dolphin that is relying on us for its very existence? What would the Māui’s dolphin’s extinction say about National’s actual commitment to the environment?

And let us not forget about climate change. Our agricultural nation relies on a stable climate for our prosperity, and yet this Government has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol and gutted the emissions trading scheme. While our gross emissions continue to increase under this Government and we do a disservice to our local economy, what does it say about our commitment to our Pacific brothers and sisters? What does our withdrawal from tackling climate change internationally say to our neighbours—to our cousins—whose islands are going underwater? We are a Pacific nation, with a significant Pasifika population here, but this Government does not care enough to do the heavy lifting on climate change to tackle the serious issue playing out in our own backyard to our own family. This is just not who we are.

I would not want to be a child growing up in New Zealand today. The support that my daughter and I received that helped me to get to where I am and where she is today has been stripped away by this Government. This Government’s social policies have been a disaster for families and especially for children. On official measures, income inequality in New Zealand is now the highest it has ever been. Low and middle-income earners are feeling the squeeze, while the best-off continue to increase their share of the wealth in their control. At the same time, more of our kids are now living in poverty—from 22 percent before the 2008 election to 25 percent at the last one. National crows about its rheumatic fever programme—we heard a bit about that today—but it allows more and more children to become sick and suffer from it because it ignores the housing crisis. Everyone deserves a secure roof over their heads, but our rates of homeownership have plummeted, with less than two-thirds of homes now owned by the families who live in them. The recent Demographia report shows that New Zealand has some of the most unaffordable housing in the world, and that was met by complete inaction by this Government. Bill English said he would wait for another 12 months to see what would happen. So much for us all being in this together. For many New Zealanders the ability to lead a good life is cut off at the knees by the lack of opportunity and support at an early age. The Government’s mean-spirited approach to poverty and hardship does not reflect the values that have shaped our more egalitarian past. We can be a more caring country, one that protects our most vulnerable citizens and offers an equality of opportunity for all.

The Government has lost touch with who we are as a country and has no new ideas to get us out of the hole that it has dug. The desperate Cabinet reshuffle embeds that failure. It rings only of a change in personnel, certainly not policy. And the Prime Minister’s plan set out in his speech last Friday, and again today, offers more of the same blame and excuses—a boring plan by a bored man. It is the Government’s worst ideas of 2012 repeated. It is just Groundhog Day again: adverse asset sales that will make the Government books look permanently worse off and lose the clean-energy potential of these companies, a shonky Skycity convention centre funded by the proceeds of gambling addiction, human misery, and money-laundering, and dangerous deep-sea oil drilling that puts our beautiful beaches at risk of a Gulf of Mexico - scale oil spill.

Today’s statement from the Prime Minister is the most telling for what it does not mention—the plans that the Government is not making. There was not a word on the crisis in manufacturing and the 40,000 jobs lost. There was not a single word on climate change—not mentioned once in the statement. There was just one sentence on child poverty and a vague reference to looking at other people’s work and recommendations. There was not an utterance on the Auckland central business district rail loop and the Government plans to support it. Where are the plans to tackle youth unemployment, the exodus of New Zealanders to Australia, restocking the empty earthquake fund, or rebuilding our billion dollar “100% Pure New Zealand” brand after the recent threats to it? All the Government is good for is name-calling, slander, and schoolyard gibes that seek to ridicule real work that the Opposition is undertaking to address the big issues like unemployment and housing affordability. You know a Government is tired when all it can do is attack great ideas that are popular with the public. John Key has been relegated to being the “Prime Minister for Making Excuses”, and it is really sad to see. Deep down he knows that the Government has failed, and under National the future is blighted and certainly not any brighter. The Government’s long holiday from running the country needs to come to an end.

If it will not act, then all we need to do is to step up instead for a better future. Unfortunately, 2013 is not an election year, but New Zealanders cannot wait until the next election to stop the dangerous direction that the Government is taking. This year the Greens will step up the fight for decent jobs, the elimination of child poverty, and our defence of the environment. We will do this through generating new thinking and fresh ideas, and through building a movement of people to stop the worst of the Government’s agenda. At Rātana last week I had the great privilege to announce our plans to help families achieve the Kiwi dream of owning their own homes or being more secure in rental homes. This is an initiative that will have lasting impacts. It will give young families a real shot at owning their own homes. It is great for our environment, as we will build more sustainable, compact homes, and for child health and family well-being, and it will create thousands of new jobs. The Green Party will continue to develop smart solutions to our modern problems. We will offer New Zealanders real alternatives to this tired, bored, and unimaginative Government.

But, as well as new ideas, we will also offer New Zealanders the opportunity to take action. The Green Party has launched an initiative to draw together new constituencies of New Zealanders disillusioned with the direction that the Government is taking. We are committed to giving New Zealanders a political voice and the opportunity to be involved in politics outside of elections and without having to join a party. We think this is essential for our democracy. All New Zealanders have a political voice and the right to express it.

Opposing a tired old Government, developing new ideas, and giving Kiwis the chance to get active in politics—these are our priorities for the year. It is clear that the Key Government is resorting to the politics of fear and the politics of hate to try to hold on to power, but it will not work, because that is not who New Zealanders are. The Government may have given up on making this country a great place, but the people have not. Tēnā koutou katoa.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): I have no confidence in the Government, for the following obvious reasons: first, the interests of New Zealanders are repeatedly being ignored in favour of foreign big business; second, all this Government offers young people is reduced pay and a lifetime overseas; third, valuable State assets are being sold at bargain prices to overseas buyers; fourth, unemployment is reaching crisis levels and little is being done; fifth, the balance of payments is deep in deficit and the Government will not act; sixth, the exchange rate is crippling exporters and manufacturers, and again the Government refuses to act; and, last, the Government is dividing our nation between Māori and non-Māori by separatist policies it swore never to introduce in this country.

Sometimes we have the privilege of watching a great political event unfold. Sometimes we hear speakers inspire us with great vision. Sometimes a great leader shows us the way to a better and brighter future for our country. Sadly, we missed out on all three today. It is no use flapping your hands around like a penguin, Mr Prime Minister; the fact is that was a boring, useless speech, and we all know it. We all know it. The best part of the Prime Minister’s speech today was when he sat down. That was the very best part of that speech. The rest of it consisted of the same old, same old neo-liberal, free-market pixie dust. It sounded like he wrote it in the shower, or in Antarctica or somewhere like that.

The philosophy behind it goes something like this: one, flog off the country to overseas investors; two, create a currency speculators’ paradise; three, change the labour laws again to kick the workers in the guts; four, cut Government services; five, starve the regions; six, subsidise overseas businesses, like Warner Bros, and ignore chances to keep New Zealand enterprises going back home; and, seven, when in doubt build another motorway.

New Zealanders’ great leaders were once people of vision. They did not spend their lives gazing into a computer screen. They did not spend their young lives betting against their country’s currency so that they themselves could become wealthy. They surrounded themselves with like-minded individuals. They wanted to make life better for their people. Their vision was of an independent nation making its own way in the world, using its own New Zealand resources, with educated and skilled New Zealanders who could expect some sort of fulfilment and satisfaction, and they went on to create the greatest country on earth—all in the lifetime of some of us. We led the world with our social justice, our care of the young and the old, and the guiding principle was that simple expression that we have to give them a fair go. That noble concept of a fair go for all was the first casualty of the neo-liberal practice by the political neanderthals who have polluted this country politically since 1984. I know that Mr Banks might laugh, because those words are rather large. “Neanderthal” is not a race and it is not a tribe. “Neo-liberal” is a political expression. Of course, he leads the ACT Party and he does not even know what “neo-liberal” means. He leads the ACT Party and he knows nothing about right-wing economics or anything at all, which surely is a recipe for disaster.

What we have now is a Government that governs by photo opportunities, sound bites, and spin-doctoring. Seldom in our history has a Government assumed such an air of lofty arrogance—

Hon Member: Conceit!

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: —in such a such time. Conceit, vanity, big-headedness—in more ways than one. There is no engine room of ideas, no policies, no plans or perceptions. As I travel around New Zealand, more and more National people say to me: “What is this Government going to do about this?”, and I say: “I don’t know, but you voted for them.” They say: “But I won’t next time.”, and those numbers are becoming legion, to use an expression from the Bible. They are growing every day, and that is why some of those—[Interruption] Oh, no, no, no. Listen, lads. I know a bit about this business. I know what it is like to sit back there and be fooled by so-called leadership, and in your case what you are going to see—[Interruption] Oh, the north. Is it not amazing? Northland. Why is Northland being led in the main from the National Party, by such no-name, do-nothing MPs? The whole province. What has that man up there done for Northland? Nothing. He was meant to attack the drug culture; it is getting worse. What has that man over there, who was a Minister, done for Northland? Nothing. But, then again, John Banks was there for years, and what did he do for Whangarei and Northland? Zero. The province that should be at the heartland of this country is looking so backward because they made the fatal mistake of voting for incompetent MPs. But my message to them certainly is, when we open our office in Whangarei next Monday, to hang on up there because help is on its way. There is no doubt about that. We know where our support base is building.

But back to the main theme of today: sound bites, spin-doctoring, lofty arrogance. The Prime Minister, who is supposed to be a smart guy, cannot understand the single biggest problem this country faces—that is, we cannot earn enough money to make our way in the world, because our currency is massively overvalued. It is out of control, and every exporter and manufacturer knows this. The world’s best-performing economies know this. But here we have an original thinker in, guess who, Steven Joyce proclaiming that—and he was quoted as saying this yesterday—“He feels the currency will come down a bit.”—he feels the currency will come down a bit. There is no science, no analysis, and no research. Oh, it is just a gut feeling. He said it is “a fool’s paradise” to intervene in the exchange rate.

See this chart I am holding up? This is a chart of export profitability. See that? See how it goes down that way? See how it went that way? This is a chart that Mr Steven Joyce and his colleagues should look at, because if you look at this chart, it is the mirror image in reverse of the currency exchange in this country. The very peaks are troughs on the other side, the very troughs are peaks on the other side, and all against one group of people—New Zealanders, Kiwis. I refer those backbenchers over there, whose political future depends on this understanding, to these two charts. There is the currency and here—[Interruption] They are both up the right way. [Interruption] Oh, a very good question from the National Party backbencher from Kaikōura. He wants to know which chart is up the right way. Neither, sunshine! Neither is the right way. Oh, how sad. And he is from a farming background. Every farmer with about 500 cows knows he is losing $138,000 a year because of an inflated currency. That man represents them. He does not understand diddly-squat.

These charts paint a stark picture. That is export profitability, and there is the US dollar exchange rate. It is clear: as the exchange rate goes up, our earnings as a country go down. Yet we had Mr Joyce yesterday dismissing leaders of the manufacturing and export sector who had testified to the damage that a chronically overvalued dollar is causing. He just wrote them off. Who has credibility? The serious people who are actually running a business in a highly competitive world, or a Minister out of ideas but who is too arrogant to consider he may be wrong? We need policies for this decade, not policies stuck in the 1990s. Who has credibility?

Mr Steven Joyce poses as a self-made millionaire, but every morning he rises, he points his head towards not Mecca but Pakuranga, and he goes down on his knees and he thanks a man called Maurice Williamson, who in the early 1990s was Minister of Broadcasting and under a Vickrey sales process gave him, literally, broadcasting licence after broadcasting licence for a pittance. Mr Joyce bid the highest bid, but under Mr Williamson’s programme he was required to pay only the second-highest bidder’s bid. Do you like that? Do you like that? So he bids $1 million for the licence, Mr Banks bids $100,000 for the licence, and I bid, say, $50,000. Mr Joyce, in this case, gets the bid because he had the highest bid, but he pays Mr Banks’ bid of $100,000. What do you call that? It is a rort, and that is how he became this extraordinarily wealthy, self-made man, who now knows all about exports too, because, apparently, he is in exporting. We know what he is exporting: people. It is high time he got off his high horse. We know he has got a big head, but this is no place to pose around here.

Hon Steven Joyce: 30 years in here and doesn’t do a thing.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: This is no place to pose around here. Oh yes, and 30 years gives me one thing over you, Mr Joyce, and it is a thing called experience and judgment. That is why you will be gone shortly. At the very first time you fly the white flag you are gone, because you cannot even win a seat. You never could.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The Speaker may well be gone, but the member should not refer to it.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Well, in that case, you will both be gone. Where does the National Party find these people?

We in New Zealand First do not accept defeat. Mr Key and his colleagues are strangling our manufacturers and exporters. Mr Key and his colleagues are sentencing them to commercial extinction with a massively overvalued dollar. All manner of experts, from the IMF downwards, confirm this. But, no, Mr Key and Mr Joyce know better. Well, Mr Key’s Government is about working for currency speculators. It is not working for real New Zealanders. This is a Government of currency speculators, by currency speculators, for currency speculators. Our Reserve Bank bill will be back shortly for another rerun. We lost by one vote last year, but it is more relevant every day now—every day now. This is an export-dependent nation, and we have been that since 1882. Sooner or later those people out in the provinces are going to come round to understanding that this is now or never, and for the National Party it will be never. I make this very, very clear: there will be no Government after the next election, when it flies the white flag, that does not go along with this plan to deal to our massively overvalued dollar. By that time, provincial New Zealand will get a chance. Workers will get a chance. They will have a future in our country because we will be back creating wealth in New Zealand.

You know, in the halcyon days when we were No. 1 in the world, manufacturing in this country was over 30 percent of our GDP. What is it today? It is less than 13 percent and falling. And all of that means no hope or future for young New Zealanders. This speech could have been written by the National Party 40 years ago, by people like Holyoake and Holland, when we were No. 1 in the world. But, no, no, this new bunch that have come along understand nothing about economics, of course. They just read about it; they do not know anything about how it works. That is why Mr Banks can laugh while he is in a Government that has borrowed more money than all the other Governments in history altogether—borrowed more money than every other Government altogether.

There he lies back lounging in his chair. There he is, “Mr In Charge of Everything”. He will not be fixing up Novopay, either, I tell you now. He will not be fixing up Novopay. What he will do is sack them if he has got any brains, and give a New Zealand enterprise the chance. Mark my words: he will fire them, because they are incompetent. I have seen this before. Who was it who ended up having to fix up the computer programme called INCIS? Remember? Same thing—another blunder. Same policy—no plan. That is what is going to happen with Novopay.

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Same party.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Same party. We know there are nervous Nellies amongst National’s backbenchers. Some of them are from the provincial regions. Take the guys from, for example, Southland. There is Southland, with less than 3 percent of the population and more than 18 percent of the exports, and National MPs everywhere, and how wealthy is Southland? It is down at the bottom of the heap in this country. How could your most wealthy per capita people from the provinces, from heartland National, be at the bottom of the heap? Answer that question, if you are from down there. I know that the man from Dipton does not know, because he has not been there for a long time. The man from Dipton lives in Wellington, of course. He has totally forgotten about the south. But there are other Southland members. How do you explain your most wealthy per capita people, whom we desperately need in our country, being at the bottom of the economic heap? It should not be. Who is at the top of the heap? Oh, all National’s friends in Wellington Central and Auckland Central, who do not export anything. That is a fact. The highest per capita earners, the ones who create the wealth, are getting the rawest deal at the bottom. We are going to fix that. Our message to them very shortly is to line up this time—help is on its way. But it goes like this: vote first, reward second—vote first, reward second.

Oh, and one other thing: Mr Key recites the global financial crisis. You know how he states “global” financial crisis? It was never a global financial crisis. It is a Western financial crisis, and someone in this House knows more about it than anybody else, and his name is John Key. Because he used to know all those guys, and he used to work for them, and he knows about the malfeasance and malpractice that led the Western economies to the very brink of collapse. Does he own up to it? Do you know what he actually said in the House? Excuse the language, but he said: “Oh, when I worked for them they were a bloody good business.” That was what he said in this House. It is in the Hansard. Good business? When the darn global financial crisis that he refers to—but actually the Western financial crisis—all the Wall Street trickery, was exposed, who was No. 5 to go belly up and require the American taxpayers’ bailout? An outfit called Merrill Lynch. I know that there are some people in the gallery who think that wealth means goodness, that wealth means morality, that wealth means talent, but some of us know better. Often, all wealth means is hedonistic greed and sating one’s own interest at the expense of the country. Well, whatever was wrong with New Zealand First, no one over here has ever spent part of his career investing against his nation, against his nation’s interest—

Maggie Barry: Not Brendan Horan, anyway.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: —and very, very proud of it. Oh, leave out the flower power girl at the back! I mean, if there is a disappointment, it is that North Shore keeps sending people here who cannot hold a candle to George Gair. They keep on sending nondescript people who look good on paper but cannot perform in this House. They have not got the skill, the talent, or the sheer resolve, commitment, aspirations, and dreams to make good MPs. Just because you have a flower show does not make you fit for Parliament.

But back to my main point. We are not here just to criticise. We are here to support policies that are good for this country—that are good for this country. Let me just say this. You know, right now, in Auckland—and I will give you an example of what is going wrong—I know real estate agents who have told me of foreigners coming in and buying houses sight unseen as investments. It is all a fact. But, of course, the man from MediaWorks will not mind that, because that is what he likes. He thinks all money is good. He thinks all money from overseas represents a thing called foreign investment. He does not know what a corporate raid from abroad looks like. He thinks it is all good, because somehow the money goes somewhere. Except that anybody in this world who understands reality knows that ownership of money is what matters, and the benefit from that money should be the people’s benefit, not just for the few and the very few—or, as I say, these tarred, tawdry, tired, over-mighty subjects who spend so much time in the National Party’s pocket, sad to say.

There are people who wish to say that the age of this country’s population means we have got to put up the retirement age. Do you know what the cost is, net, of GDP for retirement in New Zealand at the moment—for national superannuation? It is 3.7 percent. Is that unaffordable? No, it is not. All the countries abroad that are facing the so-called similar problem are facing 8, 9, or 10 percent. Ours is 3.7 percent, and it is a myth to say we cannot afford it. But what we cannot afford is an incompetent Government that cannot create enough wealth. That is what our problem is. It is not what we are spending on our elderly people, or young people, or sick people; it is that the Government simply cannot create, because of its incompetent policies, the wealth that once used to be our legacy and made us No. 1 in the world. National is a shadow of the party that it once was. But it is no surprise, because if you go overseas, if you choose two different people, one being Mr Key and one back here called Don Brash, what will be the result? What will be the result? Well, one was a total disaster, and this one will be a disaster very shortly.

The last thing I want to say is this. If this country continues going down the road of a constitutional review based on a constitution where the cornerstone will be the Treaty of Waitangi, despite all the warnings by famous Māori, like Apirana Ngata and others—if this country goes down that road—then two things will have happened. The National Party and the ACT Party will have totally betrayed the constituency out there whom they promised never to do that to, and the second thing is that this country will have no future if we are going to go down this separatist path and not understand the basic things that every New Zealander needs, whatever they be, whatever their background, their history, or their ethnic make-up. It is, first of all, decent housing, a decent education programme for their young, a decent health system should they get sick, and, the last of all, a decent job with the best of First World wages. Those four things are what Māori want, and, in fact, they are what everybody wants.

Hon TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Māori Party): There must surely be some quintessential concepts in any state of the nation address for Aotearoa. Lest we forget, Te Tiriti o Waitangi provides us with the constitutional pou upon which any discussion of nationhood can emerge. The contribution of iwi entrepreneurship—Māori-owned tourism, fisheries, agriculture, forestry, and other industries, estimated to be worth approximately $39 billion—is hugely important to both the domestic economy and enhancing our profile in the global market. We would, and do, challenge the Government that it will only be possible to deliver better public services when our agencies are culturally competent, when our ministries take the effort to respond to, and to relate to, all the diverse populations that live in this land, and when we see institutional racism eradicated. We cannot abide the political silencing of difference. We need to move beyond the bland, the categorisation of “vulnerable children”, and generic references to “groups which have historically underperformed”. Let us name ourselves, identify our unique edge, and share our commonalities while at the same time taking pride in the essence of who we are.

We have a waiata from home that begins:

Kia ’uiuia mai nā wai koe?

Māu e kī atu, tirohia atu ngā ngaru e aki ana

ki Waipuna, ki te Matapihi, Pūtiki Wharanui, ko Ngāti Tūpo’o.

It asks the question: where do we belong? In that waiata it answers it by saying “Look yonder at the waves surging towards Waipuna, Matapihi and Pūtiki Wharanui, because there reside the descendants of Ngāti Tūpo’o.” The waiata traces over maunga and puke, over waters, and over the pathway along Te Awa Tupua—the lands and sacred spaces that mark out our rohe, ngā hapū o Whanganui. It is but one of many of our tribal treasures that are central to indigenous knowledge. Our waiata, our tātai—our genealogies—and our kōrero are our distinctive body of knowledge that can be instrumental in shaping a future Aotearoa that is inclusive of all. The future Aotearoa that the Māori Party strives for cannot be bland and it cannot be generic. The browning of our nation demands bold action if we want to see success that is shared by all.

I want to stress from the onset that tangata w’enua are not the prize in a grand political lottery. Over the last week we have witnessed various political parties eyeing up the Māori vote and swooping in for the kill. What they do not realise is that mōrehu no longer depend on politicians or individuals to tell them how they must vote. We oppose any form of electoral opportunism that targets Māori for polling gain. Our interest is in the survival of tangata w’enua. How do we maximise the contribution that we can make to the survival of people, particularly Māori people? I want to remind us that Māori were all alone on these islands for hundreds of years. We shaped our own world view. We grew and we survived colonisation. Against that history, the media’s compulsive fascination in predicting the death of the Māori Party after a mere 9 years in existence seems somewhat premature. So I place on record our determination to survive as a party, as a movement, and as a people. Over 157 years ago physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston said it was the solemn duty of all Europeans to smooth down the dying pillow of the Māori race. The view of the day was that indigenous peoples would not survive European conquest and disease, and, indeed, history would reveal that the Māori population was decimated, but it was not extinguished, and never will be.

And so, we come today, to 2013, and to the ongoing challenge to us all about how to best protect, preserve, and achieve the survival of Māori as a people, knowing as we do now that what is good for Māori will be good for the nation. We have always known that we have to sit ourselves at the seat of power to be the most powerful advocates for our people that we can be, and this is where I return to a key concept in the Prime Minister’s address—the vital importance of innovation. But the innovation we talk of is not only that of science funding, of revered experts, or of a high-tech institute; we are talking social innovation, and we are talking Whānau Ora.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. There is quite a lot of talking in the House, and we do not talk in the House when other people are trying to speak. I would appreciate it if there was less speaking.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members have heard the speaker’s plea, so a bit of decorum, please.

Hon TARIANA TURIA: Thank you, Mr Speaker. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer reminds us of the inevitable resistance that many of our most revolutionary ideas have received, whether they be giving women the vote, people being trusted to drive cars at high speed, or the concept of kindergartens. He said: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Some in this House are still at the first stage, but thousands of New Zealanders speak with great enthusiasm about the process of transformation that is being experienced with Whānau Ora—the restoration of pride and self-belief that we can do and we can be. At the end of last year the Press carried a story of one w’ānau, extending to more than 100 members in the upper South Island, who received the meagre amount of $5,000 from the Whānau Integration, Innovation and Engagement Fund. Yet with that fund they developed a plan to reduce their debt and create business opportunities. They developed a Te Reo - based language and financial literacy and numeracy programme, He Pakaka Reo Matua. But, most important of all, it gave the families a chance to dream. It was the opportunity to move from worrying about how to pay the power bill to actually planning what they want for their families 10 years from now.

Our survival will come when we believe that we can and we will be able to do these things. Our greatest work is in standing up for what Piriwiritua fought for. The kawenata that he signed up to with Michael Joseph Savage is as relevant today as it was back then. No longer can politicians act as if all roads lead to Rātana, to Māori, or, indeed, to Pasifika peoples, making false promises with no regard for follow-through. Our answers lie within ourselves, and our solutions will be most enduring when they are owned and driven by our own.

And so the Māori Party is very clear about survival on all fronts and what it will take. We know that the expression of the kaupapa and tikanga that has sustained us for hundreds of years will contribute to the survival strategy. Our focus is on pursuing these kaupapa: Whānau Ora, including building healthy w’ānau resilience through addressing poverty and increasing educational achievement, jobs, training, and economic development; upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi; reducing the social hazards of alcohol, drugs, gambling, and tobacco; and taking up our responsibilities as tangata tiaki, whether it be on water or on land, living by a philosophy of sustainable development. We need intelligent leadership, and we need bravery both within our w’ānau and across every sphere of influence. Our quest as a political movement is to continue to pay it forward; to act with conviction, knowing that our basis for growth and stability is assured in our own histories, our kaupapa and tikanga; and a restoring of the essence of all people to define their own realities. We can have a new start for Aotearoa, and I believe that the Government’s willingness to enter into a relationship accord with the Māori Party in 2008 and to recommit to that relationship in 2011 is recognition of its public willingness to see the Māori voice as valid, credible, and vital to the future of all New Zealanders.

HONE HARAWIRA (Leader—Mana): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker, and a happy New Year to you, too. The year 2013 looks like being an exciting year for Mana, as we look to build on successful initiatives from 2012 and focus on being part of an effective Opposition to National this year. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for the broad support for Mana’s Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill, or the “Feed the Kids Bill” as it has become known, including from the Child Poverty Action Group, Every Child Counts, Unicef New Zealand, Save the Children, IHC, Poverty Action Waikato, the Methodist and Anglican Churches (Methodist Public Issues and Anglican Action), Te Rōpū Wāhine Māori Toko i te Ora (Māori Women’s Welfare League), the Post Primary Teachers Association, the New Zealand Principals Federation, the Council of Trade Unions Rūnanga, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, and the Māori Medical Practitioners Association.

During election 2011 one of Mana’s main pledges was to fight for Government-funded meals in poor schools, and in 2012 we drafted the bill to honour that pledge. That was immediately followed by the Children’s Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty recommending the introduction of a Government-funded food programme in low-decile schools, and a major policy speech last year from the Leader of the Opposition calling on the Government to provide free meals to children in low-decile schools. At this time I want to thank those political parties that have already indicated their support for the bill, including Labour, the Greens, the Māori Party, and the newly independent Brendan Horan, who has given me his assurance that if the bill passes he will refrain from singing to the House. I am not sure exactly when the bill comes before the House, but I am hopeful that there will be enough support for it to get to a select committee.

During election 2011 Mana also made a commitment to a programme of building 20,000 houses in 2 years. That kaupapa was picked up in 2012 by Labour with its commitment to build 100,000 houses in 10 years, and enhanced by the Greens’ own housing proposals announced last week. In 2013 I expect Mana to continue to provide leadership in the fight for better housing for New Zealanders, especially those in dire need right now. We want to see an end to policies that make it harder for poor families to access affordable housing. We want to see a rebuilding of the State housing stock. We call on the new Minister of Housing to take a fresh approach to this problem, and to talk to and listen to those people being hurt badly by current policies—people who are being forced out of State houses in communities like Glen Innes, Maraenui, and Porirua, people in rural areas like the far north being forced to live in unacceptable conditions with no hope of any help, and homeless people in Christchurch, Auckland, and elsewhere, as well as those church and community groups working with the homeless, and families on low incomes. And on another housing-related matter, I wish to invite all my parliamentary colleagues to the court case arising from my arrest at a housing action at Glen Innes last year. The case has been set down for hearing on 19 March, but may have to be moved to another date to accommodate the growing list of witnesses who have offered to speak in my defence. I fully intend defending the case myself, with the assistance of a number of lawyers who have offered their help at no cost. It should be a good show.

The third plank in Mana’s election 2011 campaign has yet to be picked up by anyone else here, though I expect it to be adopted a lot sooner than people might have thought some 15 months ago. That is, of course, the “Hone Heke tax”, or the financial transactions tax, as it is known elsewhere in the world, a proposal that had most political parties and political commentators sniggering during campaign 2011, but which is quickly becoming recognised in other OECD countries as the only sane way to increase Government revenue without stealing it from the poor, by making the banks pay for the financial crisis that they have created. A few days ago the European Commission approved a proposal to implement exactly such a tax on all transactions between financial institutions within those 11 member States of the European Union that have approved it, without it affecting citizens or businesses—a tax that would raise a minimum of €57 billion a year. The “Hone Heke tax” is clearly an idea whose time has come. I look forward to Opposition parties coming out more openly in support of it over the next 12 months.

On behalf of Mana and the people of New Zealand I would like to thank the New Zealand Māori Council for its efforts to stop National’s plans to sell off our State assets, by instigating a court action over the Māori interests in water. In particular, I would like to thank the Mana president, Annette Sykes, who was a critical player in the tribunal hearings last year and who remains a key player in the High Court hearings due to start later this week. The efforts of the council and those hapū and iwi that have supported its case have forced the Government to delay its asset sales programme, giving the rest of the country time to push for the petition for a referendum on asset sales. The challenge now is to complete the petition and for all parties and organisations opposed to the sale of State assets to pressure the Government to hold a referendum on asset sales, to test its argument that that is what New Zealanders want. It is not, of course, and Mana stands ready to do its bit to help put an end to the madness of selling our kitchen to somebody else and then having to rent it back for the rest of our lives.

As we move towards the end of the Treaty settlement cycle I wish to remind the House that the Treaty lives for ever and that anyone thinking that the Treaty will become null and void after Treaty settlements have ended is sadly mistaken. The Treaty is a taonga to Māori and the foundation of all constitutional arrangements in this country, and all attempts to write it out of legislation will be resisted mightily.

Much has been made of the Māori Party capturing the headlines with a messy leadership challenge in these last few weeks and calls from Māori Party members for me to come back and take over the leadership of the party, so let me make this clear: I have no aspirations to lead the Māori Party. Those calls have come from Māori Party members themselves. I am comfortable and proud to lead Mana, a vibrant and active political force with a clearly identified constituency known as te pani me te rawa kore—the poor and the dispossessed—and policies aimed specifically at addressing their needs first, because people matter more than profit. But, as I did right after election 2011, I want to again extend the hand of friendship and whanaungatanga to my colleagues in the Māori Party, and remind them that there has to be a link between the fact that their membership has gone from 24,000 when I was there to just 600 last year and their continued commitment to a Government and its policies that have destroyed Māori families and Māori hopes and aspirations. I call on the Māori Party to walk away from that relationship and return to its roots, and I stand willing to take up the offer made by the Rātana movement to host any discussions that might lead to unity in a Mana - Māori Party alliance. Mana clearly has the vibrant and energetic membership and the strong and positive leadership; the only question is whether the Māori Party is open to unity.

As we begin the new year it is fitting that we farewell those who have passed away in the year gone by and send our best wishes to those in hospital today. To my whanaunga Raumati Para and Whaea Kō Kō, may you soon be free of that which ails you, and I look forward to seeing you both in the near future. And although it is a rare occurrence for me to send best wishes to a policeman, I suspect there are many around the country who join with me in wishing Paddy Whiu all the best at this time. Paddy has become the face of Māori policing and iwi liaison—the gentle, caring, and smiling face of a police force that is often mistrusted and sometimes reviled in Māori communities. At times when tensions are high and people’s emotions are on edge, Paddy has that unique ability to lower the heat through his simple good nature, kind words, and warm humour. Kia kaha, my friend, we are all praying for you. Ka hoki ngā mahara ki a rātou kua ngaro. Ko Jacqui Te Kani tērā, ko Timi te Heuheu, ko Hone Kaa, ko Pita Tapsell, ko Rau Kapa, ko Mama Tere me wērā atu, me wērā atu. E ngā mate, haere. Tātou anō rā e te kanohi ora, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora tātou katoa.

[Thoughts go back to those who have gone, namely Jacqui Te Kani, Timi te Heuheu, Hone Kaa, Pita Tapsell, Rau Kapa, Mama Tere, and others. To those who have passed on, depart. To us, once again, the living, salutations, acknowledgments, and greetings to us all.]

Hon JOHN BANKS (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party and the people of Epsom to support the statement of the Prime Minister.

Over the summer break I have had the opportunity to get out and about to talk to New Zealanders—the sort of people you represent, Mr Deputy Speaker—people from the South Island, from Picton, Westport, Greymouth, and Hokitika, and, of course, the people of Remuera, Parnell, and Mount Eden. I have been out and about, taking stock. New Zealanders are working harder and much longer for a lot less. What they want is freedom to achieve through their own efforts and enterprise. What they do not want is handouts, and they almost all reject the entitlement society. They back the Prime Minister and they rate John Key. They do not see Labour, the Greens, and “Winston First”—the coalition of the dispirited, the deluded, and the bewildered—as an alternative Government. That is what they said to me in Picton, in Westport, in Greymouth, and in Hokitika, and, of course, in Remuera, Parnell, and Mount Eden, over the summer.

They do not see David Shearer as a Prime Minister; even less do they see Russel Norman as the Minister of Finance. To a man and to a woman, up and down the country they say that Mr Shearer is a nice man, and most members of this Parliament will attest that Mr Shearer is a nice man, but “a nice man” is the kiss of death for a political leader. They do not see David Shearer as a future Prime Minister. They see him as an interim leader of a dysfunctional Labour Party Opposition. That is what they see David Shearer as.

I remember “Winston First” when he was so good that he could comb his hair while approaching a speed camera, when he was so good that he could have this House in fits of laughter and hysteria, when he was so good that he made points that cut through everything. Today he is now part of the bewildered and the deluded—the coalition of losers that the people I mentioned do not want a bar of.

I tell them that under MMP we could have these people on this side of the House. They say: “Hardly, Banksie. It couldn’t be true that we could have David Shearer as Prime Minister.” I said: “The way MMP works, losers with loser coalitions could easily become Prime Ministers of this country.”, and what a catastrophic day it would be for investment, growth, and jobs in the South-west Pacific if those people ever got on this side of the House.

The ACT Party and the people of Epsom back John Key as Prime Minister. But we want the Government, the National part of this coalition Government, to do more to resist and roll back the entitlement society that has enveloped us. We want this Government to expand the freedom to achieve. What Labour promises in hands-on government is a Government of hands out and a sapping culture of entitlement. Never forget that political parties that in Opposition are big enough to promise you everything you want are in Government big enough to take from you everything you have. What Labour promises is more handouts, more borrowing, more taxes, and no solution.

We saw one single policy of the Labour Party, part of the coalition of losers, last year, when it announced that it was going to build 10,000 houses a year for $300,000 each. Well, it did not last very long, because after a 6-week break on the beaches of Northland the parliamentary leader of the Labour Party came back and said: “I got it all wrong. It was probably a median figure.” I was in Westport. You cannot buy a home in Westport for $300,000. You cannot buy a home in Picton and you cannot buy a home in Hokitika for $300,000. You certainly cannot buy a home anywhere in Auckland for $300,000.

What we want to do is resist and roll back the entitlement society. We want this Government to expand the freedom to achieve. That is what the ACT Party believes in. In Labour’s world, to get ahead is to put your hand in the pocket of the person beside you. That is the way you get ahead. It is not about the freedom to achieve through the enterprise of your own efforts; it is about taking from someone else’s hard work. Take housing. Young Aucklanders want to buy or build a home in their own backyard, yet the median price in Auckland is now almost seven times the median household income. Auckland is almost as unaffordable as London. We know that housing unaffordability is complex. However, the major culprit is central and local government—the Resource Management Act, metropolitan urban limits, and the building regulations. What is the Opposition’s response? Labour promises to build Government houses to fix a problem largely created by the Labour Party in its 9 years on this side of the House. There has been no word on where the money will come from to build 10,000 houses a year, and a promise of a cost of $300,000 a home, which will just give you chicken coops in Auckland, if you are very, very lucky.

On Sunday Mr Shearer told the country that he is going to hold a conference this year to work out Labour Party policy. He is going to hold a conference to work out Labour Party policy, but at Wainuiōmata, north of Wellington, on Sunday afternoon he announced the Labour Party policy, and the Labour Party policy for circa 2013 is “We cannot really build homes for $300,000, even here in Wainuiōmata.” It is not good enough. The Labour Party has shown it is not serious. The present leader proves that the Labour Party is not serious about moving across the aisle to this side of the House.

Labour members have not uttered one word on Resource Management Act reform. That is the focus of this coalition Government—Resource Management Act reform. Here is my prediction: Labour members will vote against every major Resource Management Act reform this year that will help young New Zealanders get their first home without a Government handout. The single most helpful thing that we can do in this Parliament is Resource Management Act reform to make it easier for young people to get up the ladder of housing ownership.

The Greens will not be outdone in the auction of make-believe money. For them, the Government will not only build the house but loan you the money to build the house that the Opposition said it was going to build 10,000 of each year. What they will not say is how many houses or how much it will cost, because they are not very good on the numbers. I have not heard in 14 months in this Parliament anything that this Government does that is supported by the Green Party. What those members will not say is how many houses and how much it will cost. What we do know is that you cannot have backyards to play in, and the Resource Management Act cannot be touched. After promising make-believe houses with make-believe money, the next day the Greens attack the dairy industry, which helps New Zealanders earn their way in the real world and pay taxes, so that the Greens can keep on spending if they ever get on this side of the House—the real wealth earners, out in the hinterland. For them, the Greens, wealth is created by the printing press, not by working hard, taking risks, selling things other people want, and saving. It is the party of old dudes and young fogies.

I have told the Government we have a one-in-20-year chance to get it right and do it once. We need to be bold. ACT will be helping. In other areas, the Government is moving towards giving New Zealanders the freedom to achieve, and away from the policies of handouts and the politics of entitlement. ACT wants National to pick up the pace. Here are three examples. Partnership schools are about freedom to achieve for talented educators, dedicated parents, and kids who need a break. We will have a bill providing for regulatory standards around increasing disclosure for Government bills and increasing openness and transparency. ACT’s spending cap will help New Zealanders better understand how much politicians spend and what quality that spending is. ACT wants the Government to keep moving towards the freedom to achieve, and away from the culture of entitlement that zaps initiative, and confidence, and independence.

We reject Mr Shearer’s hands-on Government and nanny State handouts. We know that anything is possible, however humble your origins, if you simply give New Zealanders the freedom to achieve. New Zealanders want the freedom to achieve through their own effort and enterprise. They do not want handouts. They do not want the coalition of dispirited and deluded and bewildered in Government. They do not want a Government of handouts that takes from others who work hard. They do not want a coalition that is not serious about policies for the good of all New Zealanders. They do not want a coalition that will stop young New Zealanders from paying their own way into their first homes. Resource Management Act reform. ACT stands for freedom, choice, and responsibility. ACT stands against the culture of entitlement, which zaps independence. That is what we stand against. ACT believes and stands for—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.

Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future): New Zealand has been through some pretty tough years of late. Whether it be the outcome of the Christchurch earthquakes or the international global economic meltdown, Kiwi families have had to face some pretty tough decisions in their lives. A number of their dreams have been overturned and a number of their plans for the future have had to be completely revisited. As a consequence of all those things, they have become, pretty understandably, intolerant of mere words being offered as solutions—be it from their insurance companies, their employers, their trade unions, their political leaders, or whomever. What the people of New Zealand, as a result of their experience of recent years, are desperately seeking is a sense of reassurance and a commitment that policies being promoted will be achieved and put in place to their benefit.

So although they might have enjoyed some of the comedy associated with the various state of the nation speeches of recent days, there is a sense of bewilderment that no concrete plans have been put forward and no concrete strategies have been delivered, and they still live in the hope that things will happen. So what I want to do this afternoon in the time available to me and on behalf of United Future, as a support party to this Government, is outline the things that we intend to achieve this year. They will not be on the grand scale of things, but they are things that, as a responsible support partner, we will achieve and we will deliver for the people of New Zealand.

The Leader of the Opposition and I think also the Prime Minister made reference earlier to the issue of superannuation. One of the issues that is critical for this country’s future is the structure and affordability of national superannuation. This year, as part of our confidence and supply agreement, there will be a Government discussion paper released on the concept of flexible superannuation—a reduced rate, if one chooses to take it, at the age of 60, or an enhanced rate if you defer to the age of 70, with the base rate still being struck at age 65. In other words, the individual makes the choice about their retirement, not the State making that choice for them, as is the case at the moment. That concept of individual choice on retirement is paramount. It is gathering pace. I know that the Leader of the Opposition supports it, I know that other parties in this House support it, and a substantial number of members of the New Zealand public do, as well. So we will have a discussion paper out there to kick off that process of debate. It will coincide with the periodic review that the Commission for Financial Literacy and Retirement Income undertakes, and I believe that it will inevitably lead to a more flexible approach to superannuation in the future that will address all of the concerns that have been expressed by so many over recent years.

At the other end of the scale, this year will see establishment of the Families Commission’s Family Status Report. It was part of the legislation that was passed last year. It is built on a concept that that the coalition Government in the United Kingdom has introduced in recent years, where there is an annual report on the impact and effect of Government policies on families, to guide policy development for the future. That will be a very practical step forward for a number of families and also for the policy makers and for the decisions that we have to make in respect of those issues, and I welcome that initiative.

We will see the Game Animal Council legislation, which has long been something that United Future has campaigned for, passed through this House, and I give notice also that as part of our confidence and supply agreement the legislation to phase out guided helicopter hunting on the conservation estate will also be prepared and introduced, because it will also have a significant positive impact on recreational opportunities in New Zealand.

Although we are making progress in the area of drug and alcohol treatment of prison inmates, there is still a long way to go. As part of our confidence and supply agreement, we will be pushing this year for the introduction of the planned pre-release alcohol and drug assessments when prisoners appear before the Parole Board, so that there is information available about the level of their dependency at the time that a decision is made, to govern their release and their work back into the community.

In the next couple of months, this House will pass the new child support legislation that I have long championed, and that is the biggest change to our child support arrangements since the scheme was introduced in the early 1990s. It will be a fairer scheme. It will provide much greater recognition for shared custody arrangements and a much more flexible approach in terms of the reality of today’s childcare environment, where not all custodial parents are at home—a number of custodial parents, the majority of them, are in the workforce as well—and where the system needs to be balanced out to become much fairer in terms of the contribution that both parents have to make to the upbringing of their children once their relationship has failed.

We will also see in place by August of this year the new legislation establishing what was described by a House of Commons committee in Britain just before Christmas as world class and something to be envied: our psychoactive substances legislation, which will shift the onus of proof to the suppliers of those products to prove that they are safe before they are allowed to be sold or distributed to vulnerable young people in New Zealand. That will be a huge step forward, and it will mean that the temporary regime we have at the moment of banning these substances as we become aware of them can be replaced by a more permanent and long-term arrangement.

We will also see in the next couple of months the release of our Suicide Prevention Action Plan. This is an updating of the existing strategy. It is one that will focus much more on today’s realities in terms of where the pressure points are, the most at-risk groups, and also the best way of addressing this awful problem in our community. New Zealanders do not appreciate that more people die by suicide each year, by a considerable number, than are killed on the roads. We rightly place huge concern on the road toll. It is time to elevate that level of concern to those who end their lives through suicide, because the 500-odd people in that situation each year leave families, they leave friends, and they leave workmates. They leave a flow-on effect right through society that we have to address.

Just before Christmas the mental health strategy was released. One of the key elements in that, which will be carried through into the new suicide prevention strategy, is the important role of community agencies working alongside official agencies. The previous strategies relied too much on almost a directive approach from the centre, when in fact we have a huge number of agencies and people active in this field with experience, with capability and skill, whom we need to be utilising to mobilise, if you like, the community at large to make improvements in the overall status of mental health, but particularly to start to address what is an unacceptable suicide rate in New Zealand, particularly amongst young people.

Those moves are about making progressive change that will benefit, fundamentally, New Zealand families in a number of ways: through more certainty about their retirement, through more accurate information about the impact of policies on them as they go through life, through enhancing their opportunities to go out and enjoy New Zealand’s great outdoors, through making sure that people with alcohol and drug problems get access to the treatment that they need at an early enough time, through a fairer child support system, through a more accurate regime in terms of the control of these new psychoactive substances, and, ultimately, through working—and the youth mental health strategy and the Prime Minister’s plan released last year are part of this—to bring together all of our mental health resources to improve the mental health of New Zealanders and to reduce the incidence of suicide.

They are the things that United Future, as a party that has always put the well-being of the New Zealand family centre stage, will be campaigning on delivering this year. But, more than that, they are the things pursuant to our confidence and supply agreement and pursuant to legislation that is either before the House or about to come before the House that I can say with confidence will be achieved during this particular year. For those families around this country who despair often that politicians talk and talk and talk, and deliver little that is of benefit to them, particularly at stressful times, I say look to that record. Look to those achievements, recognise those benefits as being positive, and then judge the performance of others against that standard, because, as we come together for this year—this difficult year ahead of us—the expectation of New Zealanders is that every single one of the members of this House will work to progress policies that are beneficial to New Zealanders. There might be a little bit of rhetoric along the way, but that will not become the dominant element. The dominant element will be our performance, our policy, our delivery, and, ultimately, the benefit we deliver to the people whom we represent in this House, the people of New Zealand.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just before I call the next speaker, Standing Order 33 gives a provision for the Speaker to appoint any member of the House as a temporary Speaker. Because of the unavailability of the two Assistant Speakers, I intend to appoint Chris Auchinvole to fulfil that role in the period immediately following.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): I would like to offer you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and the House a happy New Year, and best wishes to everybody. I hope everyone had a great summer break and has come back ready to work. I thought, actually, having listened to all the speeches so far this afternoon, that I would give a weeny bit of advice and a bit of feedback. Mr Shearer, you have taken 20 minutes of my life—20 minutes that I will never get back, and 20 minutes that you owe me. Having said that, Mr Shearer had a good effort, and that good effort was that he was trying not to, for once, plagiarise Ed Miliband, the leader of the UK Labour Party, and was for once trying to actually say something himself. Who knows what it was. I have to say that some of us had to have a cup of tea part-way through, just to keep going.

Then we have got Metiria Turei from the Greens. She would like to make this country a great country. Well, I have got news for her. Her job is over. It already is a great country. It is the best little country in the world bar none, and it would be even better if she and some of her friends stopped bagging New Zealand from one side of the world to the other. It is disgraceful the way that some New Zealanders and some members of Parliament think it is quite all right to go overseas, bag New Zealand, try to destroy our tourism markets, try to destroy our economic stability, and then come back here and say “I’m here for New Zealand.” Well, actually, no, they are not. New Zealand First—well, Mr Peters is always entertaining. Always entertaining—he does not say a lot, but he is entertaining. When he talks about justice—I notice he did not really today, and there is a good reason. He would not vote for the search and surveillance legislation, in there with the Labour Party and the Greens on that one. He would not vote for the alcohol reform legislation. At least the Labour Party came to the party eventually. So I would say to just remember those, Mr Peters. The Mana Party, Hone Harawira—actually, I have said his name. That is enough; nothing more.

Let us talk about where we are going this year in justice. But, actually, before I do that, just a word of advice. I will now quote someone, and I will name them—I will not plagiarise them like Mr Shearer does—Martin Luther King Jnr. I am looking at that coalition of the four parties opposing the Government. “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Well, that sums up the Opposition, and it sums up their supporters.

So what we have got in justice is a year ahead that is pretty fantastic, really. We had a great year last year. Search and surveillance legislation got through by one vote. Crime is at a 30-year low, despite the Opposition. Things are moving very well. The police, corrections, and justice are working really well together, sharing resources where they need to, and trying to make sure that we have the same goals in mind, which are all about keeping the crime rate down, reducing the number of prisoners who come out and reoffend, increasing drug and alcohol treatment, increasing education for prisoners, and making sure we have fewer victims in the first place. And it is succeeding. It is succeeding even better than many of us thought it would. Last year there was another 6 percent drop in the overall crime rate, and that is on top of other significant drops since we have been the Government.

And despite all of that great work, there was no extra money this last year in justice; we have had no extra money, but we have had to make better use of what we have. Part of that is actually making use of technology, freeing up the front-line staff to be able to do their job properly. In the police, a lot of it is around preventing crime in the first place—thinking outside the square, and not just reacting, but actually changing the environment in which people live. The police have shown time and time again that they are absolutely the people to lead this sort of work. They are people who understand their communities, and they are people who can make a serious difference, particularly for young people, and particularly for the victims of crime, many of whom are repeatedly victimised by the same people, the same families, over and over again. But the crime rate is coming down—a 30-year low. By the way, the road toll, what is that? That is at a 50-year low. There is increasingly better policing, smarter policing, and excellent leadership.

We are also going ahead with new legislation this year, with the help of our support parties and partners. One of the things we are going to do is make it harder for those accused of serious offences to get bail. I would like to hope that we would get some support around the House for this. Time and time again we see someone accused of a very serious offence go on to commit another extremely serious offence—in some cases, far worse. I think there should be some reasonably good cross-party support for that. At the same time we recognise that bail is something that most people would think should be available for someone before they have been convicted or before they have even had their hearing.

Also, we are going to be reducing the number of parole hearings for prisoners who are very unlikely to be released at that parole hearing. We think that is a sensible use of the Parole Board’s time. It saves a lot of time and effort for corrections, but, more important, it saves victims coming, year after year after year, to listen to parole hearings when there is little or no chance of someone getting parole. This has really come about primarily because of the fact that we understand what Michael Choy’s mother went through, time and time and time again, listening to it. There were six or seven parole hearings a year, no chance of these people getting parole, and victims having to turn up. The fear would be—and some people have asked me why they bother turning up. Well, just imagine the fear that if you do not turn up, they get parole. She would go and blame herself for the rest of her life because she had not turned up.

We are also introducing a new type of restraining order to protect victims further from harassment. It was really brought about by the situation that happened in Invercargill the year before last that I am sure people will remember, when an offender came and decided to live right next door to the victim of sexual assault. Of course, that caused a tremendous amount of fear in her, and because of the time that had elapsed and the time that he had been released from prison, there was nothing that could be done under the law.

We are also increasing the penalties for child pornography. I actually think that this is a very important piece of work. We know that over the years child pornography has proliferated, particularly through the use of the internet, the cloud technology that is used for storing these images, and all sorts of high technology to further victimise the children, who are utterly destroyed. Their lives are utterly destroyed by this sort of behaviour. I think, hopefully, that most of the House will understand just how important it is for us to be, in fact, leading this as part of the global alliance that we now have against child pornography. In December just this last year I was very privileged to be part of the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online, which was set up in Brussels. It is led by the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, and also the EU commissioner Cecilia Malmström. We are part of that alliance, and with other countries coming in and being able to state what they are doing, I am proud to tell this House that we were, in fact, one of the leaders of this. We are also, obviously, using technology to assist the police and to assist corrections to be able to do their jobs more effectively, and also to be able to free them up from some of the tasks that might otherwise take their attention when they could be putting more work into preventing crime and rehabilitating prisoners.

In the justice area it would not be right not to mention the reform of the Family Court, which is long overdue. I have had some very heartening responses from former Ministers of Justice commenting about how they would have liked to have been able to get this through, but, of course, there are very effective lobby groups amongst the lawyers. Having been one myself, I know just how effective they can be. But we do need to encourage people to sort out their problems in the best ways possible through a better use of dispute resolution and more targeted counselling. There is a way forward on this, and the way forward must be to understand that when children are involved, these parents once loved each other enough to have children. They must, in fact, put their children first and try, wherever they can, to sort out their differences. At the moment, their children suffer, the taxpayer pays through legal aid and through all the other services made available, and in the end I cannot think of anyone who has ever been through the Family Court system who has ever felt that they were better off for having gone there. The Family Court needs reform. It does great work, but we need to update it, upskill it, and we need to be more responsive to the needs of those who use it.

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I am looking forward to an extremely busy year. I think we have something like about 30 pieces of legislation that we want to get through. I hope that other parties will be able to work with us in a spirit of some consensus, understanding that some of you will want something for it, and that there might be some concessions. But I think we can work together, have a great year, and actually make this country an even greater country than it is now. Metiria Turei, this is the best little country in the world.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): While listening to John Key’s speech, all I could think was that if that is the best the National Government can do, bring on the next election, because New Zealanders have been waiting. They have been waiting for over 4 years, heading on towards 5 years now—

Hon Trevor Mallard: We’re in the sixth year.

CHRIS HIPKINS: We are in the sixth calendar year of this National Government, and New Zealanders are still waiting for that brighter future that John Key promised them. Remember that? He was ambitious for New Zealand. He was going to deliver us a brighter future. He was going to stem the exodus to Australia. How has he gone on those? Everything was going to get better under John Key, yet—

Moana Mackey: Turbocharged.

CHRIS HIPKINS: He was going to turbocharge the economy, and yet every major indicator of Government performance under this National Government has gotten worse. And what do we get from National now? It is all someone else’s fault. It has got an excuse for everything, and a solution for nothing. It has no new ideas about how to address the major problems that New Zealand is facing, but it has an excuse. Everywhere we turn, it has got an excuse.

It has put Steven Joyce in charge of Novopay. He quickly went from “Mr Fix-it” to “Mr Excuses”. It took him a week—a week—to stop claiming he was going to fix Novopay and to start blaming everybody else for it and telling teachers: “Actually, I’m not here to fix it; the bad news is it is all going to get worse.” It took him only a week to get to that point.

Listening to the introduction of John Key’s remarks, what are the big ideas? Well, the big things that he could point to were a Cabinet reshuffle, where the bright hope for the future is Nick Smith, and warrant of fitness changes. That is going to turbocharge the economy. Of course, deregulation works so well in the building industry, and that is what the Government wants to do now for the automotive industry. That is its big idea.

The one thing John Key did not say, which he could have said, was that the Government is going to make a list of all of its lists. Every time John Key delivers another speech in Parliament we get another list, another set of priorities, another group, another set of themes. When is it actually going to start delivering on all of these goals and targets it sets? We have not seen any evidence of any progress so far, to date, on any of that.

John Key alluded to the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House.” I am interested to note that that comes from the album called Stop Making Sense. Well, John Key did not need to be told that; he was already well and truly there. But I have got another Talking Heads song for John Key that is actually far more appropriate. It is called “Road to Nowhere”. That is exactly where we are going under this National Government. We are on the road to nowhere, under the National Party. John Key gave exactly the same speech last year, exactly the same speech the year before, and exactly the same speech the year before that. And what has the Government delivered? Nothing. All the priorities have been the same. Five times now we have had to listen to John Key talk about them, and five times he has failed to actually be able to point to a single result. For 5 years we have been listening to this, and yet no results. New Zealanders are getting sick and tired of waiting, and at the next election they are going to deliver their verdict on this National Government.

John Key told the country that he has asked his Ministers to lift their game. Well, what has he been doing for the last 4½ years? Clearly, he did not seem to mind that they were underperforming. Then, of course, at the next election, New Zealanders are going to look at John Key and they are going to ask: “Well, what would another term of National look like?”. As well as the complete absence of any ideas, who would John Key be relying on to prop him up? We have got John Banks, the man who had the audacity to come to the House this afternoon to talk about handouts—John Banks talking about handouts! We have got Peter Dunne, the man who was single-handedly responsible for ending the planking craze. Then there is Colin Craig, whose highest priority appears to be to maintain gender-segregated toilets. That is what John Key’s future Government is going to look like.

Then we turn to education, and, of course, we on the Opposition benches are so relieved that John Key has left that great communicator Hekia Parata in place as the Minister of Education. We are very, very pleased that Hekia Parata will be continuing as Minister of Education. Let us go back over a few of her greatest hits. She made her grand splash as Minister of Education by telling parents that she could improve the quality of their kids’ education by putting more of them in every class. That was Hekia Parata’s great solution. That was a policy that even Anne Tolley had the sense to know was not going to work and was not going to be a good idea. Hekia Parata told us at the time that improving the quality of teachers was important, and even mooted the idea that teaching should be a postgraduate profession, so one should have to have a postgraduate qualification before entering the classroom. And then, promptly, within the next very short period of time, she introduced these very shortened teaching qualifications for someone to move into teaching that are actually a lot less than an undergraduate degree. Then, of course, she introduced the idea of charter schools—something National was working on before the last election but did not put in its manifesto—where teachers would not have to be registered or qualified at all.

What was Hekia Parata’s next great triumph? Well, it is difficult. At this point the list starts to become quite extensive, but let us start with Christchurch schooling. Having started what was quite a good process—and I will give her credit for this: she started quite a good process by engaging the community and getting buy-in to the idea that change was required; the Government did quite a good job of that first part of the process, and I will give it credit for that—the Government then completely pulled the rug out from under it by putting up a whole series of very concrete proposals that then became just ideas, and then they were concrete proposals again, completely destroying all of the goodwill towards change that had been built up in Christchurch.

Then we had the Novopay debacle. This is not all Hekia Parata’s fault, of course; Craig Foss shares some responsibility, as does Bill English.

Hon Amy Adams: It was the Labour Party.

CHRIS HIPKINS: It was the three of them who signed off on the implementation. Oh, now Amy Adams thinks it was the Labour Party’s fault, because after 5 years the best the Government can do is blame the previous Labour Government for something that it has done, that it put in place. The process of selecting a new payroll system—yes, that started under the last Labour Government, but after 5 years, clearly, this Government did nothing. Clearly, this Government did absolutely nothing in that area, despite the fact that it is its members’ signatures that will be found on the pieces of paper hitting the go live for Novopay. And still all the Government can come up with is excuses and not one solution. Up and down the country, thousands of people are still waiting to be paid, and all the Government is interested in doing is pointing the finger and saying: “It’s not our fault. It’s gonna get worse. There’s nothing we can do.” That is all those thousands of people are getting from this National Government: excuses. It is not good enough; they want solutions. If all the National Party can do is come up with excuses, it should hand back the salaries. We will happily take over and we will fix the problem—any day. Any day National wants, we will happily fix that problem.

What else happened in education? Well, the Government decided: “Oh gosh, things are getting a bit difficult. We need a scapegoat. Blame the officials. Sack the Secretary for Education.”—the one whom it hand-picked to implement the agenda that it selected. All of the things that the Government pointed out had gone wrong under the Secretary for Education stem back to policies that Ministers had put in place. What happened to the idea that Ministers are the ones who are accountable—that the ones who put their names on the ballot paper ultimately are the ones who have the responsibility and the accountability? That does not exist under this National Government any more. It has still got John Banks down there—no responsibility there. It has got Hekia Parata sitting over there—no responsibility being accepted over there. And Nick Smith—the guy who had to resign from Cabinet because he abused his position to get preferential treatment for one of his mates—got restored to Cabinet in this latest reshuffle. There are no ideas or notions of responsibility and accountability in this Government—oh no, none at all. The best that it can come up with is bringing out a few retreads.

New Zealanders know that on all of the fundamental measures this Government is failing. With unemployment at 7.3 percent, clearly the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment has got a bit of time on his hands to dabble in other people’s portfolio areas. With deficits being run up every year, this Government seems to think that it can take the focus off that. With the exodus to Australia continually increasing, suddenly it is not talking about that any more. It is a Government with no ideas, it has run out of energy after only 4½ years, and at the next election it will be replaced.

Hon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn): Can I take the opportunity to start by wishing the House a happy New Year, and saying how nice it is to be back here for another year of what I am sure will be robust and healthy debate, over the course of the year. Actually, my view is that 2013 is going to be a good year for New Zealand. I can tell you one thing: it will be the fifth year that this National-led Government will have led New Zealand through the recovery, through the global financial crisis, and through the Christchurch earthquakes that have devastated us, not only socially, in lives lost, but also economically. It is the fifth year that John Key and this team will commit all our resources, all our attention, and all our focus to help New Zealand make the most of its potential and to continue being what I believe is the best place in the world.

Over the time since our election in 2008 we have delivered. We have delivered for New Zealand. We have delivered a plan of reform that has seen us get through some of the most difficult international conditions any of us, I think, can remember. This year that will continue. We will continue to deliver real gains for New Zealanders in health, in education, and in their public safety. We do not talk just about how many reports and committees we have created, and how much money from the public we have spent. We measure our success in terms of how many operations New Zealanders are getting. We measure our success in terms of how many of our kids are getting the education they need. We measure our success in terms of the crime rate, whether New Zealanders are safe, and we measure our success on whether we are building conditions that allow our businesses—our hard-working, entrepreneurial, innovative Kiwi businesses—to get ahead, to hire staff, to build futures, to export to the world, and, actually, to prove to the world that there is nothing New Zealand businesses cannot do.

That is happening all around the world. If there is one thing I have seen over the summer—because I have had more time to travel around—it is how often you come across incredible, innovative Kiwis who are leading fantastic, successful, world-leading businesses, often from very small, humble little spots in New Zealand, and all they want from their Government is for it to build the foundations that allow them to succeed, to support them in the ways that the Government best can, and then to get out of the way. That is what our Business Growth Agenda is about. It is about recognising that we do not create jobs, but we do build the conditions that allow business to create jobs. That is what we have been focused on and it will continue to be our focus. That is why you are continuing to see New Zealand put its trust in John Key and put its trust in this National-led Government. I am incredibly proud that for the fifth year we will help New Zealand to that brighter future.

So we have been focused on export markets, on skilled and safe workplaces, on natural resources, on capital markets, on innovation, and on infrastructure, because these are the things that do make a difference. These are the things that build the conditions for business. I want to talk about a couple of those.

The first will be no surprise to the House—I want to talk about our roll-out of ultra-fast broadband. I do not think this gets enough air time in this House, because this is a fantastic initiative, which Labour opposed, by the way. This is a $3 billion infrastructure project that is happening right now, that has created more than 2,000 jobs in the build alone, and that is ensuring that New Zealand—New Zealand kids, New Zealand businesses, all New Zealand citizens—will have access not only to high-speed broadband but also to the markets, the customers, the services, and the resources of anywhere in the world. It does not matter whether you are at a small school on the West Coast of the South Island or in a remote community on the East Coast of the North Island, you can compete, you can learn, and you can access resources. By June of this year 300,000 homes and businesses will be connected to ultra-fast broadband—will have the ability to connect. Thirteen hundred schools and 30 hospitals, plus another 100,000 rural homes in that very important rural community, will have access to faster broadband.

The information and communications technology sector, which ultra-fast broadband particularly supports, of course, is a $20 billion sector—$20 billion. It employs 40,000 Kiwis and makes $5 billion a year in exports. This is the sort of project that they need to remain competitive in the world, and this is the Government that is providing it. We are very proud to do it, we are committed to it, and I am very proud to be the Minister in charge of it.

Of course, I also have a role with Gerry Brownlee in the recovery of Christchurch. You have heard the Prime Minister say this afternoon that this is one of the four key goals for us this year, as it has been since the earthquakes. Can I update this House. To date the Earthquake Commission has now completed more than $1 billion worth of work. Thirty thousand homes have been fully repaired under the Earthquake Commission processes alone. We have had nearly 1,000 demolitions in the central business district, plus there have been $145 million worth of building projects consented in the central business district alone, to date.

We are really on the road to getting there. It is still a long road and there are still a lot of difficulties, but we are on our way, and Canterbury, it will be no surprise to anyone, has some of the best economic data in the country. Our job numbers are up, our unemployment numbers are down, the volumes going through our ports are at record levels—we are flying. Canterbury is the place to be, and this Government is right behind it every step of the way.

Can I talk for a moment about water. Water is, to my mind, our most valuable natural resource. It is one of the things that set New Zealand apart economically and also in our very important Kiwi way of life. Water is at the forefront of my programme for the environment for 2013. We are going to continue our focus on clean-ups of polluted sites. To date we have spent more than $101 million in the 4 years we have completed in office, and that will continue. That is more than four times what was spent in the last 4 years of the Labour-Green Government.

We are very proud of that work, and it will continue. We recognise that there is a huge amount of work still to be done to get the resources, and the framework around water, right, and so this year we will be continuing to develop the work that we have put in place through the national policy statement on freshwater, which the National Government delivered, and continuing to develop further the important work of the Land and Water Forum, which the National-led Government put in place. We will be delivering a framework that makes sure New Zealand is able to make the most of this vital resource.

I also want to touch on the other key focus for me in the environment portfolio for the year, which is continuing to reform the Resource Management Act. The Resource Management Act has for too long been a sacred cow. It has for too long been a barrier to growth. It has been an ongoing saga of time, money, and opportunities lost—thrown away and spent on consultants—battles, and often not moving the outcome anywhere from where it could have got to far more quickly. The bottom line is that we need fewer and higher-quality plans that give communities far more certainty, provide proactively for the future growth of their communities, and properly balance economic and environmental interests.

The consent processes have to be more time efficient and they have to be proportionate to the impact of the proposals. Let me just give you a couple of examples of the frustrations from these things that have been seen across this country. Many members of this House will remember Project Hayes, the wind farm proposal of Meridian Energy. I am not focusing on whether it was a good proposal or not. I want to look just at the process. That was a $2 billion project, and by the time—after 3 years—it was eventually refused by the Environment Court, nearly $9 million had been spent to get it to that point, and that would have been just the applicants. There would have been many hundreds of thousands more, I am sure, in community and submitter costs. The Environment Court made a specific point in its judgment of criticising the fact that if it were not for the inconsistent, inaccurate, and uncertain plans of the local authority, much of that cost could have been avoided. We cannot continue to put communities and applicants through those sorts of hurdles because the plans are not up to scratch, not clear-cut, and not consistent. We have to make better choices than that.

There is a plan change in Auckland at the moment seeking to provide for another 250 residential units. We all know how short on housing Auckland is. That plan change for 250 residential units went in more than 4 years ago, and it is still waiting to become operative. So there we have a process trying to get 250 more housing units into the central parts of Auckland, and 4 years on it is still not operative. These sorts of delays cannot continue, they help no one, and they will be something we will be tackling this year.

HOLLY WALKER (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Acting Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The year 2013 has begun, and it started with the Green Party putting a set of bold new initiatives on the table to tackle what is likely to be one of the defining political issues in this House this year—the issue of housing affordability. Make no mistake—we have a housing crisis in New Zealand right now. It is a crisis of affordability, with homeownership increasingly out of reach for ordinary New Zealanders and rents skyrocketing, and it is a crisis of quality, with hundreds of thousands of children growing up in cold, damp, overcrowded, substandard homes that are making them sick. This housing crisis is locking families out of homeownership, and it is locking children into poverty. It is putting pressure on our biggest city, Auckland, and it is all too real for the residents of earthquake-affected Christchurch. All over the country, but especially in those two cities, people are living in cars, in garages, in the backyards of family members, in campervans, in caravan parks, and, increasingly, on the street, and that is because of a lack of Government investment, action, and leadership to address this housing crisis.

We on the Opposition side of the House have been talking about a housing crisis for quite a long time, but the Government seems to have been pretending that it does not exist. So while we on this side of the House have been advocating for a greater commitment to State and social housing, the Government has been selling and knocking down State houses. While we on the Opposition side of the House have been coming up with solutions to the housing crisis, the Government—now that it has finally realised that there is a problem and that it probably has to say something about it—has simply pointed the finger at local councils and said it is their problem. Apparently, the market would solve the housing crisis if only those pesky councils would allow more sprawl.

Well, I have news for the Government. It is your problem. The housing crisis is your problem. The more New Zealanders who are locked out of homeownership or who live in poor-quality, substandard, or overcrowded rental accommodation, the more it is going to cost the Government. Having our population securely and safely housed is a public good, and it is something that we all benefit from. So if the market is failing, as Bill English has admitted it is, we all pay the price. There is a real case for Government leadership and Government investment in the housing sector.

We actually have a proud history of Governments taking the lead on housing, going right back to the big State house builds of the early 20th century, to the old State Advances Corporation loans that allowed families to build their own homes, to the ability to capitalise on the family benefit to buy your own home. But somewhere along the line Governments lost sight of it. They gave up on housing, and none worse than this one. This Government’s approach to housing is not hands-on. It is sitting on its hands.

By contrast, I am very pleased to be part of a party that is prepared to put bold, innovative solutions on the table. Last week we released a package of housing solutions that would put homeownership back within reach of thousands of low to middle income New Zealand families and modernise tenancy laws to protect the rights of the increasing number of New Zealanders who are renting their homes. Our progressive ownership model would see low and middle income families living in affordable, efficient, and accessible Government-built homes and gradually purchasing equity in those homes. It is very simple and it takes advantage of the Government’s low sovereign lending rate. It would make a huge difference to the lives of tens of thousands of New Zealanders. Our progressive ownership policy could also complement the Labour Party’s KiwiBuild programme, which is a good policy but one that has some challenges, namely that families would still have to be able to save a deposit and qualify for a bank mortgage to be able to purchase one of the homes built under the KiwiBuild programme. Setting some of these homes aside for progressive ownership would improve this policy for low and middle income New Zealanders, many of whom are perfectly capable of meeting their weekly housing costs and budgeting their weekly expenses but who struggle to save for a deposit on a new home because the cost of rent and the cost of living is so high.

Our progressive ownership policy makes economic sense as well. The investment the Government would make to build the homes would be offset by the asset created in the form of the homes, so there would be a zero impact on net Government debt and there would be a revenue stream created from the rentals of the houses. It would keep wealth in New Zealand, instead of funnelling it into the coffers of Australian banks through mortgages, and it would create jobs and employment in the construction industry as well as flow-on economic benefits. So can we build these affordable, efficient, and accessible homes and make them truly affordable? Absolutely we can.

Last week I visited The Trusts EcoHouse in Waitakere—the first eco-house built by Beacon Pathway in Auckland in 2005. It is a basic three-bedroom home that is well oriented with solar water-heating, rainwater collection, and passive heating through its concrete floor—it requires absolutely no heating, even in winter. How much did it cost? It cost $220,000. We can absolutely make these homes affordable. With good design it is possible to build affordable, efficient, and accessible homes. The problem is not land supply, as the Government would have you believe. We do not have to sprawl out of the urban limits and into our productive farmland to build enough homes for the families who need them right now, with all the hidden transport and infrastructure costs that that sprawl would entail. There are enough sections to build 15,000 homes within the Auckland City limits right now, and I wish the Government had listened to Len Brown on the radio this morning explaining that exact point.

There are exciting medium-density designs that can produce comfortable homes in livable neighbourhoods. We just need a Government that is willing to get on with it. When the Greens are part of the Government, that is exactly what we will do. A Green Government would also protect people like me who rent our homes. Homeownership rates have plummeted in the last 20 years, particularly amongst middle-income families, and more and more of us are living in rented houses, whether by choice or necessity. In the Green Party we believe that everybody should be able to have a secure, safe, and warm home, whether they are renting or buying. Too many families live in cold, damp, overcrowded homes, and most of these are private rentals. Many of them, unfortunately, are State rentals, although at least the number of those is getting smaller as the Government bowls them all down. What we need is a warrant of fitness for rental properties, and this really is an idea whose time has come. You need a warrant of fitness for your car—although perhaps not for that much longer under this Government—and we rightly expect that all kinds of goods and services meet minimum health and safety standards in order to be able to be marketable. So what could be more important than making sure we have adequate housing, given the huge role that it plays in our daily lives?

Finally, we think renters have the right to more secure tenure in their homes. Many of the benefits of homeownership are about staying in one place, being able to put down roots, having an incentive to take care of your house, not having to move your kids around all the time, and making connections with your community. But it is increasingly difficult for renters to do this. If we gave tenants the first right to renew a fixed-term tenancy when it expires and restricted rent increases to once per year, it would increase security for renters and deliver tangible improvements to their lives and their homes. Of course, alongside these changes in progressive ownership and modern tenancy law we still need an increased investment in State and social housing to help those in the very greatest need and on the lowest incomes, and to offset the incredibly damaging policies of this Government in the State housing sector during the last year. The Green Party will continue to advocate for decent investment in social housing and a halt to the Draconian demolition and removal policies this Government has had towards State house tenants.

The year has just started and the Green Party has already put these innovative proposals on the table to address the housing crisis in 2013. Unlike the Government, we spent our holidays thinking about solutions, and we came back and put these new proposals on the table. By contrast, this Government is bereft of ideas. It has chosen, instead, to sit on its hands and when it finally does get them out from under there, all it uses them for is to point the finger at the Auckland Council. It is not good enough. New Zealanders will not fall for it, and neither will we. Kia ora.

DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): The Government has made the Christchurch rebuild a top priority, and it says that the domestic construction boom will be centred on the $30 billion Christchurch rebuild. It will use it as a generator of economic activity, while at the same time using the Canterbury earthquakes as a reason for the economic hole we are in. But it was only a few days ago, 2 years after the earthquakes, that the Government finally announced a new apprenticeship scheme. The $30 billion cost of the Christchurch rebuild will be a huge economic stimulus for employment in building and construction and it is no exaggeration that the success of the rebuild and New Zealand’s economic future will be closely aligned, but we cannot afford for this opportunity to be squandered by political mismanagement.

The Government has been slow off the mark on issues that were obvious soon after the earthquakes. It is a case, I think, of too little, too late. After 2 years of policy stagnation, growing unemployment, and a mass exodus of workers overseas the Christchurch rebuild is set to accelerate only from mid-2013. The first lot of apprentices finishing the Government’s newly announced apprenticeship scheme will come on to the market 3 years too late—far too late. The opportunity has passed for the scale of employment benefits that might have been achieved.

Why did the Government not act a lot sooner—in 2012 unemployment numbers escalated to 175,000—especially in youth unemployment where the apprenticeship scheme could have soaked up some of those numbers? The mass exodus over the last 2 years includes 9,000 Kiwi tradesmen, mostly to better work opportunities in Australia. Over the same period 6,000 migrant tradesmen have arrived, leaving a shortfall, still, of 3,000. Temporary migrant work visas present associated problems, such as lax background checks, recruitment agency scams, overstayers, guest workers with no commitment to New Zealand, and their earnings going offshore.

Kiwi workers should not have to compete with guest workers, who undercut wages and downgrade work conditions, and compete with workers from low-wage economies, adding only to the exodus to Australia. Over 12,000 temporary migrant work visas were granted for last year for the Christchurch rebuild, mostly for workers from Britain, Ireland, and the Philippines. Recruitment packages included airfares, financial services, accommodation, a buddy system, monthly social events, and so on. None of this was afforded to Kiwi workers. Only this week has the Government announced the Canterbury Skills and Employment Hub to strengthen labour market testing for guest workers; again, too little, far too late.

Kiwi workers should always have been at the forefront of the queue. Why did it take 2 years for the Government to act? Given the Government’s poor record on visa control, what confidence can there be that the Government’s new initiatives are robust enough to combat endless migration scams? Also, what new structures and resources are being put in place to ensure that the $30 billion injection into the economy advances Kiwi employment and not migrant guest workers? Last year 138,000 guest workers were granted visas to work in New Zealand with no labour market testing. The result was that many jobs were lost to Kiwi workers.

I want to go on to make some comments about the red zone policy for Christchurch, which I think has been a bit of a disaster. The Government can no longer sustain some of its shoddy policy-making over those decisions. In New Zealand it has always been accepted that if the Government compulsorily takes land, especially residential land, then it must pay the fair market price for that land. Secondly, it is a matter of simple fairness that the Government will not take advantage of disaster situations to acquire land at unfair value.

For practical reasons using the last rating value was acceptable, but it should have been only a starting point. The Christchurch 2007 values and the Kaiapoi 2008 values were already out of date in 2010. Rating values are far too inaccurate to be fair, so the Government’s first mistake was not to allow a challenge to rating values where they were not a fair assessment of property value. That was especially unfair where significant improvements had been made since the date of the valuations.

If that was not bad enough, then consider the plight of people who had bare sections or uninsured homes on red zoned flat land. The Government’s offer was only 50 percent of the rating value for the section. That is outrageous; effectively a legalised fraud because of the circumstances. These people could not sell their land, except to the Government, and could not build a house or live there. A red zoned bare-section owner would get only 50 percent for their section when a next door neighbour would get 100 percent. That is illogical, inexplicable, unfair, and an abuse of power by this Government.

Gerry Brownlee said that this was justified because there would have been land damage. That is poppycock. There was land damage for both bare sections and those with homes built on them. He also said that 50 percent was fair, and that he would not reconsider. Well, he should reconsider now that it has been revealed that Government officials had advised the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery to give bare-section owners and uninsured home owners the same treatment as insured home owners—that is, 100 percent of the land value. The Minister dumped that advice and substituted his own guess of 50 percent of the land value. That, in my view, is a substantial abuse of power. Commercial land owners in the red zone have been similarly badly treated.

Finally, the performance of Government agencies involved in the recovery has been lacklustre. The Earthquake Commission is taking far too long to repair homes. Insurance companies are also taking far too long, and the Minister has failed to do what he said he would do, which was to get the insurers moving on with the repair and rebuilding of homes. The use by the Earthquake Commission of only one project manager, Fletcher’s, has been another bad mistake. It does not have any competition and can virtually do what it likes. The central city rebuilding is also taking far too long. Demolitions, after 2 years, are still incomplete. Over the whole city basic infrastructure repairs are far from finished. It seems that the lowest priorities in the west are getting first attention. Roads and other horizontal infrastructure are still left with only temporary repairs, if that, in the east of the city.

The end result has been a litany of bad policy-making by the Government, and substandard, desperately slow, and inadequate performance by agencies. The Government has already failed on the Christchurch rebuild as one of its top priorities. I give it barely three out of 10—not even a pass rate. It has made a mess of it. It needs to change gear and get the recovery going.

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Defence): Happy New Year, and what a surprise to see you in the Chair. The National Government has got off to a fantastic start this year. The first day of Parliament today, and already look at what we have had: a decisive Cabinet reshuffle; reform of the warrant of fitness system, saving New Zealanders $159 million a year; a major announcement on irrigation last week, with $400 million going into that and $80 million to set the scheme up; and 14,000 new apprentices. The point of this is that if you were listening to the leaders of the National Party and the Leader of the Opposition today, you would see there were two very competitive narratives there. You would see that on this side of the House the Prime Minister was very clearly laying out his plan to continue the work of the National Government, the work that we started 4 years ago and that we are going to continue down the track with. It is very clearly focused. It is about sensible financial management, it is about building the economy of New Zealand, it is about rebuilding Christchurch, and it is about providing better public services. There is a very concrete plan in all those four areas.

Take that in contrast to David Shearer this afternoon, who was saying he is going to make the tough decisions—he said it twice, actually—and then he said he was going to make strong decisions. The first big challenge he has got is clearing out the shadow Cabinet next week, because there is some real culling to be done on that side of the House. If he cannot get rid of some of that Labour Party dead wood, it shows that he does not have the steel to face up to the challenges that he says he is going to deliver on as Labour Party leader. We were sitting there on Sunday watching the news, watching Mr Shearer speaking at Wainuiōmata Rugby Football Club reading off those auto cues. We were expecting some serious policy, and what did he deliver? Absolutely nothing. His answer to the housing crisis is to say that the National Government just needs to roll up its sleeves and build more houses. Well, that is pretty easy to say when you are in Opposition, but what the people of New Zealand are looking for is a solid plan to get the economy going. We have had zero policy from the Labour Party.

Meanwhile, over on “Planet Green”—I do not know if you saw their state of the planet thing on the news last night; there was more green space there than you would see in rural New Zealand. Apparently it was in the middle of Mount Eden, but it looked like every attendee had 2 square kilometres of space all to themselves there. The Greens are talking about printing money. They are talking about all sorts of bizarre stuff. What we are focused on as a Government is things that really matter to New Zealanders. At the forefront of those is making sure that the economy is going in the right direction. That is why National Party members and National Ministers are very focused on delivering on that economic agenda.

If you look at the reforms we have been progressing as a Government, it is all about making the economy grow—making it expand. You have got to also look at the international context. New Zealand over the next 3 years is going to have a higher rate of growth than the US, than Canada, than Japan, than the eurozone. That is pretty hard to beat. That is after 4 years of very solid economic stewardship in the most difficult economic circumstances seen since World War II and the Depression before it. When you look at this Government’s record in that international context, it is very, very clear that we are on the right track.

What is also very clear is that this programme resonates with New Zealanders, because they know that in John Key we have got the best Prime Minister that New Zealand ever has had, and they know that we have got the guy who has the knowledge and the decisive leadership to lead us through what has been a very difficult set of circumstances. So if Labour Party members think that by devaluing the New Zealand dollar by 25 percent they are going to increase New Zealanders’ standard of living, they are just dreaming. There are no easy fixes here. They are talking about a manufacturing crisis. Well, they are just in cuckoo-land on that. They do not have answers. What they want to do is interfere in the management of the New Zealand dollar. They want to accept the exchange rate, but they will not absolutely commit to that. I want to hear David Shearer come into this House over the next week or so and tell us what he really is going to do to bring the dollar down, because what that would mean is higher petrol prices at the pump. It would mean a higher cost of imported goods, and it would actually mean that New Zealanders will be hurting in the pocket. So I caution those members. They want to think very, very seriously before they make those sorts of promises.

There are other sorts of promises they have made—things like housing. They are going to build a hundred thousand houses for $300,000 each. Well, that is impossible. In actual fact, David Shearer is admitting that he cannot deliver on that. When he said that initially, people were expecting, you know, three to four-bedroom houses. Yesterday on TV he was saying “Well, actually, no. That is going to cost over half a million dollars a house.” So he knows that they cannot do it. Meanwhile, what are we doing? We are just progressing on with sensible reforms. If you look at infrastructure, broadband, fibre to the home—it is all happening. If you look at what is happening around hospital building, the Canterbury District Health Board redevelopment, and if you look at $12 billion worth of roads over the next 10 years, this is the sort of infrastructure you need to get an economy going—not you, Mr Speaker, but one needs to do that. What I can tell you is that if you ever have a Government made up of the Greens and the Labour Party, things are going to grind to a halt, because when Holly Walker and co. are in that Cabinet, they are going to stop the road building. They do not agree with this stuff, so Labour’s hands are going to be totally tied. Then you throw in Hone Harawira—what is going to happen there? So you can you see that nothing is going to happen if these people were ever given the Treasury benches.

Meantime, we are progressing with a programme of serious reforms. Water and irrigation are absolutely vital to agriculture in this country. You see, we are in drought conditions at the moment. What are we doing about it? We are actually doing something practical that is going to make a difference, with $80 million initially and $400 million over the next few years. That is the sort of thing that is going to get the agricultural sector going. It is not going to be continued bleating by the Opposition about the price of the New Zealand dollar, because, frankly, we cannot do anything with a floating exchange rate. By definition, it is floating. The dollar is worth what it is worth. We have to work with it, and you will see that many manufacturers in New Zealand know that. At the same time, they have been benefiting from cheaper costs of imported parts for the products they are manufacturing. So there are some pros and cons in that issue of the value of the dollar, but what we have got to develop in the economy in the long term is a real resilience to ride out those highs and lows, and if you look at it overall, with 2-3 percent economic growth over the next few years, we are definitely on the right track.

I just want to speak about Better Public Services, because that is one of our top four priorities. It is no secret that the public have not got the best delivered public services over the past 10 years. It is no secret that under the Labour Government the size of the Public Service expanded by 50 percent, but the results were not any different. So we are taking a very focused approach to that. We have chosen 10 results areas over five different sectors. We have put very clear targets there that we expect the Public Service to meet, but, more importantly than that, the Public Service has to reorganise itself so that it has a configuration that sees those services working properly together to actually deliver results. We have got to make Wellington relevant in Glenfield, which I represent. We have got to make Wellington relevant in Southland. We have got to make it relevant on the West Coast and in Northland—everywhere outside the beltway, because it just has not been so. In the area where I am responsible, State services, we are going to make sure that the Public Service really is delivering for New Zealand.

I just want to reiterate for the public that if you look at those two narratives, the Prime Minister’s narrative was very focused on those top four priorities—rebuilding Christchurch, sensible management of the finances, growing the economy, and we are making sure that we are going to be delivering Better Public Services as well. David Shearer—he is talking in vague slogans. He tells us he is going to take the tough decisions. You should have seen—

Hon Maurice Williamson: But he doesn’t tell us what they are.

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Well, yeah, he does not tell us what they are. But you should have seen the faces on his caucus today during that speech, because they have blown their chance to remove Mr Shearer. They are going to have to vote him back in in February. Mr Cunliffe now says he is not even going to challenge him. I reckon Mr Shearer is going to be there through to the next election, and he is going to be the albatross around Labour’s neck for time to come. So there you have it. There are very clear choices for the electorate: sensible economic management and a clear plan from John Key, or vague, vague slogans from David Shearer, the Greens, and co. I rest my case.

Hon SHANE JONES (Labour): Ā, tēnā tātou katoa i roto i tēnei pito o te tau hōu.

[And so, salutations to us all at this end of the new year.]

Greetings, Mr Speaker, and fellow members of the House, on this day in the new year. If ever there was evidence as to how poorly the Cabinet restructuring has gone, then that last speech demonstrated it. Not only did Jonathan Coleman misrepresent that damp squib of a Cabinet reshuffle as decisive, it was actually divisive. What on earth possesses National to think that the promotion of Nikki Kaye is going to, No. 1, generate more jobs, No. 2, transform the economy, or in any mild way improve the prospects of the 33 percent of New Zealand’s economy and population that is Auckland? That will happen only when there is a change of Government and the member to my left enjoys the privilege of holding at long last the seat that should have always been held by the centre - progressive left.

Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: Well, watching blue movies didn’t improve the economy.

Hon SHANE JONES: You can carry on with all these tired barbs, but there is one thing that you will know about this speaker—a hide thicker than a rhinoceros.

Let us come back to what was actually said in the Prime Minister’s speech. No. 1, he resents the presence of David Shearer and Annette King, who are moving forward on housing policy. What National overlooks is that the Resource Management Act reforms, which the Prime Minister and the current Minister for the Environment say they are going to deliver on—they have had phase one and they have had phase two, and they have done none of it. The only thing that has happened that might remotely improve the prospects of better housing processes and prices was what was started under our administration and was wisely continued by that person known as Mr Williamson, who has defeated all the pollsters’ and pundits’ views as to who has outlived their usefulness in Cabinet—but that is another matter. That is for that side of the House to work out.

Before I go on to talk about houses and affordability, let us talk about a house divided within itself—the Māori Party. The Māori Party actually requires the ongoing sustenance of the John Key Government, because it has no place, it has no future, and it has no relevance in terms of how we are viewing the development of the country. One of the leaders has wisely announced that her time has come and her time has gone. She, unfortunately, did not check with the co-leader as to why he was hanging around. I suspect it is to do with financial circumstances or some more personal matter like that, but, irrespective of who stands to lead that party, that party is dog-tucker. When the members of the party are openly calling for the return of Hone Harawira to lead the party, then you know it is a version of the spaceship on Doctor Who. They will fit themselves and they will fit their members inside the proverbial telephone box. I think it is very sad that their legacy will be to have propped up a Government that is led by John Key, driven, essentially, by Steven Joyce, and starved by Bill English, and which has left the garden-variety, day-to-day lives of Māori households far worse off. That is one fact you cannot escape from. Sure, you can rely on the cultural narrative and you can get warm and fuzzy about the matatini, and we do support—in a rare outburst of bipartisan support—the ongoing work of the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, but those touch on only a narrow part of the broader problem. The fact is that there was so much aspiration, so many goals, and so many dreams associated with the Māori Party, and it is now evident that not only is the vessel empty but also the vessel is sinking.

But help is on the way. Those members who were there are privately telling us that they cannot wait—indeed, one of the orators at Rātana Pā said he cannot wait—for the prospect of David Shearer and fellow Labour members, with associated parties, forming a progressive Government. And what are they going to do? The reason they are going to move on housing is that it is the hallmark of a progressive Government. It is not unreasonable that the State should play a more active role in providing assistance for people to own the largest asset the vast majority of Kiwis have the pleasure of owning: their own whare. Why is it good enough for the farmers to receive a subsidy in irrigation but no assistance be extended to low to middle income New Zealanders to get the only asset they are likely to truly own? Why is it good enough for $600 million to be doled out to the farming community yet the Government remains flinty and mean-spirited, without providing any such assistance to those Kiwis who want to actually acquire? Let me ask a question: will that water be free? Will that water be conceived as a public good? Will that water attract a tax? Will the farmers ever pay back any of the dough that is going to be poured down the gullet of this new subsidy trail called publicly subsidised irrigation schemes? All those results, all those answers, and all those facts currently elude us. But do not for a moment think that we will allow that policy to go forward whilst the blowtorch is going to be placed upon Mr Shearer and Annette King about our housing policy.

Housing solutions have to be varied. There is no such thing as a universal, singular housing accommodation solution. In some cases it will suit small families, large families, or blended families. The main thing that the speech today from our side of the House has emphasised is the political will to use the resources of the State to enable New Zealanders to move out of homelessness and not owning their own property, and to escape from a permanent situation of being a stuck member of the renter class. That is a worthwhile idea. That is a notion that is perfectly legitimate to contest as politicians. What will be the response of the Government? Well, it will look for a chorus of people to diminish the merits of the scheme. But the merits have already taken root within the minds of the people who are going to benefit from the scheme. That is why polling shows that it is a brilliant policy. That is why a host of experts in the area of social development and property development are saying that this is the kind of lever that can significantly turn round large swathes of the economy.

I am prepared to admit that there is some merit associated with increasing apprenticeships. It is a pity that it has taken 4 years too long and that it was nicked off this side of the House after that side of the House destroyed apprenticeships, ruined trades training, and tried to turn young New Zealanders into workers of a precarious nature. We are not going to acquiesce to, or agree with, that. At the time, I am presuming, the earlier National Government decided to destroy apprenticeships so that it could depress the value of wages. Not only did it destroy the value of wages but also it destroyed the value of being an artisan, of being a craftsman, of being a tradesman, and of being an expert with vocational qualifications.

In a funny way, it arrived at a point where its ideologists wanted it to be, and changed some of the foundation influences of what a Kiwi is proud to be. Thousands of our households come from families—not this small, narrow, privileged farmer class that is going to get $600 million of free money for water that they will never pay for. But, rest assured, once we bring in our capital gains tax, that show will be over. Those people who have farmed purely for capital gain—that show will be ta-ta, “Goodnight, Irene”. That pleasure awaits us, once the voters give us the privilege of governing again. But I digress. That belongs in another time.

One thing I will wind up on is that although it is a good opportunity for us to exchange ideas and exchange views, it is sad that the Government does not appear interested in, or capable of, changing tack. Just to remind ourselves, this is a Government that believes we can improve the fortunes of New Zealanders by selling assets we already own. If we just look at the sell-off of the Fonterra shares, it gives you an indication of who will end up owning the shares of our energy companies—40 percent foreign-owned. How on earth does that transform the fortunes of ordinary households in New Zealand? Secondly, on the question of Fonterra, I suspect that as we drill into the Minister responsible for primary produce we are going to learn how implicated and how acquiescent the Government was in actually covering up information associated with the recent Fonterra scandal. But that is another matter. A group of parliamentarians who are back and happy to do the best for their country heard a speech from the Prime Minister that just fills us with dread because it is the same dismal, tired, irrelevant, and very thoughtless rhetoric. Kia ora tātou.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction): I am delighted today to be able to take a call in the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement. Unlike a lot of my colleagues on this side, who I think have admirably covered almost the whole range of issues about the economy and about what the Government has achieved in a whole range of things like water and so on, and law and order, which Judith Collins has done a magnificent job with, I actually want to concentrate on only one subject. I am going to spend 10 minutes on the one subject, and it is affordable housing. I have heard over and over again rhetoric from Opposition parties that the Government thinks it can sit on its hands and do nothing about the affordable housing issue. Well, first of all, I want to take them through a number of initiatives that have already been done by this Government and are finished and now working. I want to take them through a second tranche of initiatives that are currently under way, like the Building Amendment Bill (No 4), which has currently just been reported back from the Local Government and Environment Committee and is awaiting its second reading. And I want to talk finally about some initiatives that I think are longer term but that will bear fruit.

The first thing I think we have really got to do as a Parliament is separate out the issue of an affordable house from affordable housing. Why? Because one is just the building and the other is the entire piece of kit—that is, the land, the building, the access, the roading, the water, and the sewerage. That is what makes up housing. An affordable house is actually easier to do. If David Shearer wants to build an affordable house, it is easy. It is absolutely easy to do. I will explain to members what we did. We ran a starter home competition through the Department of Building and Housing. We went out to New Zealand’s architects and we said: “Can you design a really nice three-bedroom house that is absolutely livable and that has got all the warmth and sunlight and everything else, and the absolute limit on the build is $168,000?”. Architects from across the country took part in the competition. We got it down to a shortlist of 10 designs—those designs are available on the Department of Building and Housing’s website—and finally a design won it. We had made a commitment as part of that that we would build that one design, to show that it could be done. And so if members want to, they can drive down Preston Road, Ōtara, and as they drive along they will see State house after State house after State house that is identical, and then suddenly they will see the standout house. I do not even need to give you the address in Preston Road; it is a standout house. It is magnificent. It has got beautiful glass that lets sunlight in. It has got warmth. It has got double glazing. Any member of this House would be happy to live in it. And we built the actual house for $168,000.

But that is not what the debate in this House is about; it is about affordable housing. Let me tell you about that. The Housing New Zealand Corporation made the land available. We got all sorts of speedy consents done. We got all sorts of product suppliers and that helping along the way. But, in the end, do you know what the house actually cost when it finally went to sale? It was $420,000 for the land and everything else, in terms of services that go with it. So when I hear the debate in this House about affordable housing, please stop that nonsense, if you are talking about $100,000 and something, and tell me you are talking only about the house. Unless David Shearer wants to build his houses on some cloud somewhere, he is going to have to pay for the cost of all the services, the Resource Management Act stuff, and all the land that goes with it. You cannot do that in Auckland for $300,000. You cannot do it for $400,000. You would be very lucky, on a modest house, to do it for $500,000. Why is that? I look at the valuation of my property in Pakuranga—in fact, I looked at the valuation of my property in Pāuanui recently, and 80 percent of its total value is the land. It has got a nice house on it—it has got a lovely house on it—but 80 percent of the property value is the land. That is the problem. They are not making any more of it, Mr Shearer. There is only a certain amount of land and right now the restrictions and the limits that go on have stopped it.

I want to talk about some of the things we have done, because when I first became the Minister for Building and Construction in 2008, anybody who wanted to build a house could. All you needed to do was have a cellphone, a dog, and a ute, and you could head off and build. Well, we have brought a licensed building practitioner regime in place. It came into effect in March last year—mandatory—and now you have to be a qualified, skilled, competent person to do the various work streams. You cannot just go out and say: “I want to build a house.” You are actually acting illegally and face huge prosecution if you are not a skilled person. We have got the private sector working with us, headed up by a very, very competent man called Bill Smith, and it is working on what is called the Productivity Partnership. It is making recommendations to the Government on a whole range of issues where we could get some improvement.

Let me tell you this. Building and construction used to be about building something. It is rapidly becoming about manufacturing something. Kevin Stanley in Matamata took me to the Stanley building and construction company one morning and showed me these massive big jigs that had all the four-by-twos flow into place and the bolts all come down and the panelling all go up. They were building the building before your eyes inside the massive shed, and when it rolled off on to the truck it was a manufactured building. But our processes in this country are still so archaic that every one of those has to get a building consent for itself, not the process. What you should do is license the process and say: “If you meet the certain qualifications of building this building properly, then you can build as many as you like.” Well, guess what? We did that. We passed something into law called MultiProof. MultiProof now means that if you are building multiple numbers of a particular building, you no longer have to go to the council to get a consent for each and every one, as you had to. You get the consent just once, and only once, and then you can go out and build that building as many times as you like. That is hardly hands-off, Mr Little. That is hardly hands-off; that is a pragmatic solution that has been put in place under this Government.

We have also passed some legislation—not looking to, but have passed—that initiates risk-based consenting, because, again, the worst thing about the building consent process in this country up until recently was we had a one-size-fits-all. So if you were building the Mark Hotchin $35 million house in Paritai Drive, you faced the same scrutiny and the same inspection rate as if you were building a single-storey three-bedroom timber-framed house on flat ground with no risk at all, and that is nonsense. So the new risk-based consenting regime that has been triggered by the Building Act amendment now says that the level of consenting, the level of inspections, and the level of scrutiny that you should be subject to should be proportional to the risk that is associated. So if you are building a weird and wacky design of multiple levels, where you could have leakages or things that could be damaging or dangerous, you should face the full scrutiny. But if you are building a stock standard timber-framed three-bedroom home that is using standard treated timbers, which are now mandatory, by the way, and which we brought into place—the new mandatory H1.2 timber; again, not sitting on our hands—

Hon Member: You took it out in the 1990s.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: —again, not sitting on our hands—we brought in the mandatory treatment of timber. So the whole process of building a house, starting from the design, where the designer has now got to be a licensed practitioner and not just someone who grabbed a piece of paper and decided to have a scribble, right through to the consenting of that design, right through to the building of it, right through to the actual sign-off, has now got way more professional management about it. But there are still some unbelievably antiquated, old-fashioned bits to the process. I have to say that the old idea of keeping a standards book called 3604, which weighs half a tonne but you have to buy it as an apprentice or as a carpenter and carry it with you, as opposed to that being freely available on your iPad—when you are under a house, flicking your iPhone out, going to the page, and having a look at how you connect a joist on a 45-degree angle seems like a more sensible thing.

So in the end my message to this House is this. There is a huge amount of work being done on affordable housing. There is a huge amount of work being done on affordable houses, but there is a lot more to be done in the housing area, because most of that relies on getting some land freed up that is affordable and getting the services provided so that when you do put some of these quite good affordable houses on to those sites, they actually do not then get drowned by all the cost of doing it.

So I take my hat off to Bill Smith in the Productivity Partnership. I am delighted we have now got licensed building practitioner schemes. I am delighted that we have got risk-based consenting through this Parliament. There is more to go, but this idea that it is a sitting-on-our-hands Government doing nothing is just simply wrong. I will not accept that. Yes, they may say we have not done enough, yes, they may say there is more to do, but I am proud of the achievements so far. Watch this space as we roll out some more of the affordable housing reforms during the course of 2013.

Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): I think that speech from Maurice Williamson confirms for all hard-working New Zealanders that this Government is not committed to affordable housing. In fact, it seems like this Government prefers to kill the dream for young couples to own their first home, and prefers that people living in Ōtara, Māngere, and South Auckland continue to live in cars and garages.

Hon Maurice Williamson: What a lot of nonsense.

Su’a WILLIAM SIO: That is what I heard, and I suspect, Mr Williamson, that that is what hard-working New Zealanders listening to that speech will have interpreted as the meaning of that speech. He says he does not want to accept that Government members are sitting on their hands, but all that speech said was: “We’re not going to be doing anything about the dream of owning your first home.”

Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to wish you a happy New Year. I suspect that for many hard-working Kiwi families the only way that they would know that this is the new year is that they have seen the change of numbers of the year, from 2012 to 2013. For the majority of hard-working New Zealanders and their families, very little has improved, if anything at all, in their lives after 5 years of a John Key - National Government. When John Key and the National Government came into power in 2008, the majority of New Zealanders were open-minded and wanted to give him and his Government the opportunity to prove everyone wrong. New Zealanders wanted to believe that he is not your typical National Party Prime Minister, fashioned in the same mould as the late Robert Muldoon or Jenny Shipley or Don Brash. New Zealanders wanted to give him the opportunity to show that he is better than any of the former National Party leaders, but people are now saying that he is worse. I have read newspaper reports of allegations that he is this smiling assassin. That is what is being reported in many of our local papers.

We all lapped up his many promises of being ambitious for New Zealand, of being an aspirational leader. He promised that no one would be worse off when he introduced the tax switch that favoured the top 10 percent of income earners the most. He promised that he would not raise GST and then increased it to 15 percent, hitting the poorest in our communities the most—solo mothers, the unemployed, the jobless, and particularly families with young children. He promised to create 170,000 jobs and then failed to meet those targets in the first year. Then we heard the 10-point plan, the six-point plan, and the revised plan, all of which amounted to no more jobs being created in the private sector. He promised to reduce the number of New Zealanders moving overseas and living permanently in Australia, and what we have seen is 180,000 people in the last year leaving for Australia.

The majority of New Zealanders have had a gutsful of empty rhetoric from Mr Key and his Government. I think for many there might have been some hope that the Prime Minister’s speech today would provide a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, for the 175,000 people unemployed, for the close to 300,000 who are jobless, and for the many thousands who are underemployed, there was a glaring omission about how this Government will address the unemployment issue in 2013. Look at the figures that we have seen so far: 7.3 percent unemployment is the worst in 13 years. When the last Labour Government came in, in 1999, we had to deal with similar numbers, and we were able to reduce them significantly from double-digit figures to close to 3 percent by the end of 2008. With the John Key - National Government, from single-digit figures we are now back again at higher numbers, at 7.3 percent. For young people 15 to 19 years old, unemployment is 25.5 percent. For the regions, such as in Northland, it has gone up. For the Auckland region, if I look at the figures of late, in November, it is now 10.3 percent if you have no qualification and 8.5 percent if you have got some school qualification. In other parts of the country, such as in the Bay of Plenty, we have seen unemployment rise, and in Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay we have seen unemployment rise. In Taranaki, in Manawatū, and in the Whanganui area it has gone up.

The groups that are hurt the most by the lack of effort by this Government in addressing unemployment are Māori, Pacific and Asian people, and women. For Māori, we are now back at 15.1 percent. For Pacific people, we are at 15.6 percent. Asians are, again, at double-digit figures, and for women unemployment is 7.4 percent. Nothing in the Prime Minister’s speech today gave us any indication whatsoever for people on the unemployment roll, those looking for jobs, those who were made redundant in the last years, and those who are struggling to find permanent and better-paid jobs. So what message did the Prime Minister send today to the majority of New Zealanders? They have to continue working harder and harder and for longer hours—when they can find jobs—for less and less and less.

In many ways, this Prime Minister and his Government are creating two different New Zealands: a New Zealand for the wealthier, whom the Government promotes and supports, and a New Zealand that just cannot figure out how this occurred under somebody they thought had great promise. This is, I tell you, a reflection that gives an indication to members across that side of the House just how difficult the struggles are for Māori and Pacific people. Close to Christmas time, when the tsunami hit Samoa before Christmas, there was a call that went out to families, particularly targeting families who had relatives in particular parts of Samoa who had lost literally everything. There were six containers that were contributed free of charge by a company. We could not fill those six containers when we asked the local families in Auckland whether they would be prepared to help. Despite their desire to help their families, they just could not fill those containers. Why? Because they have struggled through the high cost of living. They are struggling through unemployment. They are struggling with low pay.

Labour sees creating jobs as the most urgent priority that we need to focus on. As our leader, David Shearer, said earlier today, this year we will continue to hold this Government to account. But where it has ideas that will support the rest of New Zealand, we will support those. In fact, we will aim to improve those ideas. But so far, from the speech we heard today from the Prime Minister, there was nothing in there that will give the brighter future that was promised in 2011. I ask families now listening to this debate and having listened to the Prime Minister whether after 5 years of this Government things have improved in their lives. Have they got better? Are they earning better money? Do they see a brighter future at the end of the tunnel?

Hon Members: No.

Su’a WILLIAM SIO: The answer, as you hear from my colleagues here, is no, no, no. The only way we can improve things is by doing what the executive said at the manufacturing inquiry yesterday: change the Government, change the Government, change the Government. That is going to be our task in 2013 and 2014. The mood has changed, and I would say that the rest of New Zealand is seeing Mr Key and his Government for what they truly are. They do not care. They do not care one iota about this country or about the young people who need training, skills development, and education. They do not care about investing in the brighter future of this country. It has all been empty rhetoric.

Hon JO GOODHEW (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector): I would like to greet the House by saying that it is nice to be back. It is nice to be back in business again. It is nice to be back in a position where we, the National Party, can continue with our plan that will mean a brighter future for New Zealanders. It is already reaping the benefits of the very disciplined plan of action under John Key, our Prime Minister. There is lots to do.

I am delighted to be beginning this year with the portfolios that I held last year, and in addition to those the very exciting addition of being the Associate Minister for Primary Industries, which is something very, very close to my heart and my electorate of Rangitata. But even more so it should be close to the hearts of all New Zealanders. New Zealand is very heavily reliant on primary industries for its economy. So it is a very important portfolio and one that I am absolutely delighted to be working on with the Hon Nathan Guy.

The previous speaker, William Sio, talked about Labour creating jobs. You know, that really is where there is a huge chasm between this side of the House and that side of the House. On the other side of the House, the Government creates the jobs. On this side of the House, the Government creates the environment where the jobs will follow, where the businesses thrive, where they want to take on more employees, where they want to invest in their businesses, and where they want the economy of New Zealand to grow. Let me remind the House of something I have said many times before. When the biggest business in town is the Government, we are going backwards—to hell in a handbasket, in fact. When the biggest business in town was the Government, as it was under successive Labour Governments, there was a huge clean-up to be done—a huge clean-up to be done. And that is why, considering the clean-up exercise that we were left with after Labour went out of office, coupled with the worst recession since the 1930s—a global financial situation that has, in fact, tested many countries around the world—in fact, I would have to say that New Zealand is doing remarkably well, growing at just under 2 percent and projected to grow around 2.5 percent. You know—my apologies, Mr Speaker; of course you will know this already, but the rest of the House may not know or may need reminding—that is stronger than in the eurozone, Japan, the UK, and Canada. That puts us in pretty good company in terms of where we are at. New Zealand is on the right track, but it will not be without further huge effort on the part of this Government and all New Zealanders that we will get ourselves out of the mire that we found ourselves in in 2008 with a projected 10 years of deficits. Surpluses were great. The Labour Government had them and it squandered them. It does drive me mad from time to time to think about the terrible job Labour did.

What have we got now? This year should be a year of positivity. It should be a year of positivity, because we are heading in the right direction. New Zealanders have toughed out some very dark days. Certainly, they have put in the hard yards, and the Government has put in the environment that will allow them to move out of those tough days.

We have four priorities, which the Prime Minister outlined earlier today. Responsibly managing the Government’s finances—was that not a change 5 years ago? It is a very changed way of thinking about things. Building a more productive and competitive economy—again, that is how jobs growth comes. It is not about the Government creating the jobs. They are not sustainable when the Government creates them. Better public services—a number of my portfolio areas are looking towards that, and I will certainly enlarge on some of those a little later. And rebuilding Canterbury.

I want to pause for a moment and actually talk about the sorts of headlines I am seeing in the mid-Canterbury and South Canterbury papers at the moment. The headlines say: “Unemployment numbers down again”—unemployment numbers down again and at record low levels. The headlines say: “Businesses feeling the pinch of skill shortages”. Those new apprenticeship numbers will certainly help the businesses in my electorate. At the same time, we have businesses like the new salmon processing factory being built in Timaru, and we have Light Leathers taking on more and more staff. In fact, we have good news stories, strangely enough. I cannot remember that in other years gone by. I cannot remember having good news stories under Labour as often as we have in the local papers at the moment. It means that those businesses are finding that the environment they are working in—with lower taxes and less regulation—helps. They know that not only have we achieved change in the Resource Management Act but we are planning more change. We still have some tough tasks ahead of us in reforming the Resource Management Act—things that will be helping businesses. I tell you, the people of my electorate know how important irrigation is to the future increased productivity of our land. They also know how important it is that water is used wisely, well, and responsibly so that it does not fall victim to high productivity. In fact, it is a balance—of course it is a balance—but the people of my electorate certainly know that the potential is there for the $80 million newly announced irrigation project as a cornerstone, with private finance in there as well, to be a real boon for my electorate.

Those were the four main priorities, but underpinning those is the Business Growth Agenda. Again, businesses actually employ people. Businesses give jobs to people without jobs. Businesses give people pay increases. Anyone would think that what we are seeing in headlines is: “Pay goes down again”. That is not what we are seeing. It has been very tight. It has been very tight, but, actually, I cannot remember inflation ever being so low in the years when I have been noticing it. I certainly cannot remember interest rates being so low. If you have got a $200,000 mortgage, that is a $200 a week benefit compared with what it was in 2008. That is certainly a bonus. But the work programme under the Business Growth Agenda is the plan we are enacting. And I just want to remind members that those six parts of the Business Growth Agenda are around export markets; innovation; skilled and safe workplaces; infrastructure, because building infrastructure is very important; natural resources—and this is where water comes in, amongst other things—and capital markets.

In my own portfolios—just to touch briefly on my own portfolios—when it comes to better public services, under my Associate Minister of Health portfolio responsibility for aged care, all facilities will be participating in the rollout of an interRAI tool, which is about actually assessing all people across the whole country in a consistent, standardised way. All aged-care facilities will be doing that. We will be publishing quality and safety markers. The care received in hospitals is getting better and safer all the time. We are meeting targets for more people having elective surgery and more children having their immunisations done on time. And we as a Government do not rest on our laurels. When we hit a target, we set an even more ambitious target. That is not something we saw under the previous Government. So now we want 8-month-olds to have had all their vaccinations—not 2-year-olds but 8-month-olds—because when they are at their youngest they are at their most vulnerable. That is why we have changed that target.

I just want to briefly talk about one of the targets around making hospitals safer. There are some targets that will be announced about surgery being safer, about falls being prevented, and about healthcare-acquired infections. These are important better public services. Each member of this Government is playing their part and getting the message out about the National Party’s intentions for New Zealand. We are coming out of the recession—the period when there have been difficult times. But, at the same time, we have lowered taxes. Superannuation has gone up even more because of lower taxes. In fact, members of the House, there are now better results, indeed, for women and their families as well. The gender pay gap has closed to 9.3 percent. It has been coming down each year—something we do not hear the other side of the House making much of. In terms of the better public services again, we are making sure that money is well spent. We have put an extra $100,000 into the volunteering fund. We have so many volunteers in this country doing an absolutely fantastic job. It is important that the Government is using the money that it has set aside for a portfolio like mine in the best possible way and to make use of it. So we have increased our support to volunteers.

In terms of the SuperGold card for seniors, well, it is just incredible. It started out at 188 businesses and 2,215 outlets. There are now more than 4,300 participating businesses and 8,600 outlets. That is true value on the SuperGold card, not like the empty card that was waved around when it first came into being. Actually, what that took is commitment on the part of this Government to put the resources in to build that resource so that older New Zealanders want to put the card in their wallet. Up until now they were saying “Why bother?”, unless there was public transport in Auckland that they wanted.

This Government is committed to all of our goals, and that is a better and a brighter New Zealand and future for all New Zealanders. I am proud to be playing my part.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki): Kei te Whare Pāremata tēnā koutou i tēnei rangi. Ka mihi rā ki a tātau me ngā mate kua pā mai ki tēnā, ki tēnā o tātau i ngā rā whakatā kua hipa ake. Waiho rātau kia moe, kia okioki. Ko tā tātau, ko te poroporoaki i a rātau hoi anō, waiho rātau kia moe. Huri noa i tō tātau Whare, ngā mihi o te Tau Hou ki tēnā, ki tēnā o koutou. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora tātou katoa.

[Salutations to each of you in the House today. I salute us and the deaths that each of you and us experienced in the holidays just past. Allow them to sleep and rest. Our job is to farewell them, so let them lie there. Greetings of the New Year to each of you throughout our House. Salutations, acknowledgments, greetings to you and to us all.]

Following statements from the earlier speaker, the Hon Jo Goodhew, it is good to be back. It is good to be back from a break. Firstly, to the capital city, which is looking pretty nice today—absolutely beautiful. As Wellington people would say, you cannot beat Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara on a good day. It is wonderful that the golden weather has arrived just in time for one of the world’s greatest sporting parties, the Wellington Sevens. We are going to see, I am sure, some fabulous creativity on and off the field. I am sure we are going to see people cheering, singing, strutting their stuff, and other activities. It is going to be a pretty massive celebration, as well as a fierce competition. If only we could borrow some of that spirit for this Chamber for the rest of the year, that would be pretty awesome.

The second reason it is good to be back is that it means an end to the silly season of commentators interviewing themselves about politics. As I read the summaries of 2012 and, of course, the forecasts for 2013, I was struck again and again by how many journalists and commentators and “blogsters” find it hard to describe or categorise where the Māori Party sits. Are we left, are we right, or are we in the centre? That is what they ask. I suspect—and he will probably not thank me for this—that David Farrar of Curiablog is the only commentator who gets it right consistently. Whenever he analyses the potential coalition outcomes of a new political poll, he notes that “The Māori Party is not shown as part of the centre-right or the centre-left.” He is on the money—he got it quite right.

The Māori Party is not about labels that have been imported from other political traditions. We have our own kaupapa. I know that it can make it difficult for mainstream commentators to understand what we are on about, or to explain it succinctly and accurately to their readers. We are proudly different from any of the other parties in this House. We are not from the right, which thinks that politics is about smaller government allowing big business to create wealth that then magically trickles down to everybody else. We are not from the left, which thinks that it is all about bigger government generously sharing some magically appearing wealth. We are not from the centre, which thinks that it is about a sprinkling of magical common sense. We come from a different tradition, one that starts by thinking about relationships: relationships between people, relationships between people and the environment, and relationships between the past, the present, and the future.

Relationships are not about theories. Relationships are about practices. Relationships are about how we talk together. Relationships are about how we work together and create things together, so that together we can pass on something better to our mokopuna—to our grandchildren. In fact, relationships are what the Treaty of Waitangi is all about.

We come from a tradition that has survived the blind efforts of previous Governments: Governments of the left and the right, Governments that could be brutal or merely paternalistic, and Governments that tried to eliminate differences to impose a single, standard way of thinking and living. We come from a tradition that knows what it takes to emerge from sheer survival to standing up and asserting our role in this world on our terms. We are honoured to carry forward the traditions of great New Zealanders such as Sir James Carroll, Sir Apirana Ngata, and Matiu Rata. It is a tradition carried forward by Dr Pita Sharples, whose visionary work in Māori language retention and education, kapahaka, and prison reform is paying real dividends today. It is a tradition carried forward by the Hon Tariana Turia, whose courage and commitment to upholding the actual meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi inspired a new generation of political action.

This is what the Māori Party is about. It is about relationships, and it is about resilience.

We will continue to work with any party on policies that can deliver real progress for real people—not theories, not politics, but people. Sometimes it will be progress measured in inches, and sometimes, just occasionally, it will be measured in miles. I acknowledge especially the work and transformational progress being made by the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations. That is the real reason it is good to be back here today. It is that we have got a lot to do. There are a lot of people who need this Government, this Parliament, to do more, better, faster; not just to provide stable Government in difficult times. We know about difficult times. We have been living in them for 200 years. We want progress, not stability.

Back in 2008 the Māori Party decided that it could make better progress by being at the table of a National-led Government. We knew that it would have been much easier politically to be on the outside, making dramatic hand gestures. That was an option. But neither Tariana Turia nor Pita Sharples or myself got into politics because we thought it would be easy. We got into it because we wanted to make real progress for real people. And we are, through Whānau Ora, insulating homes, Tātaiako, tackling rheumatic fever, and so on.

Is the progress fast enough or far enough? No, and it probably will never ever be. We are hungry and we are impatient, and our eyes remain firmly on the horizon, where our dreams lie: where every family, every whānau, is healthy and strong, where every child is loved, and where every person is using their talents and skills to the absolute utmost, and not just Māori New Zealanders but every whānau, every family, every child, and every person, because as a party we naturally celebrate diversity as a sign of strength and not weakness. We know that Tainui is different from Ngāti Kahungunu, is different from Kai Tahu, and is different from Samoan, or Tongan, or Chinese, or Indian New Zealanders, and on and on and on. We know that in our bones, because that is the experience from which we spring, and it is why our party is not—emphatically not—an ethnic party.

We are a party of kaupapa and tikanga. Our kaupapa is a gift open to everyone in Aotearoa: tangata whenua, tangata Tiriti. Rich and poor, men and women, young and old, white, brown, black, or sunburnt, tattooed, pierced, or blue-rinsed—it does not actually matter. Our kaupapa is a gift that is open to everyone who knows that the one-size-fits-all solution just does not cut it. It will not work, because we come in all different sizes and shapes and colours. It is a gift that is open to everyone who knows that healthy families, whānau ora, are the first measure of successful communities. Our kaupapa is a gift that is open to everyone who knows that we must all go forward together, or we surely will not go forward at all.

It is good to be back, and we are looking forward to getting down to the work. Tēnā koutou katoa.

JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I have to say that I was not very impressed with the Prime Minister’s statement earlier today. There were no new ideas—certainly no smart green ideas—and it was full of posturing and straw man attacks on the Opposition. I think it is really unfortunate that the National Government is unwilling to engage with constructive criticism. I think that the New Zealand public—even those who did vote for the National Party—would prefer to see the Government engaged with substantive criticism, and give some consideration to ideas brought up by other parties, and either adopt them or give some rational, coherent explanation of why the Government is not going to adopt them, rather than just dismissing them out of hand and repeating silly straw man arguments.

So my example is that Mr Key said today that the Green Party is against all roads. In fact, I think I have heard the Minister of Transport say that the Green Party wanted to go back to dirt tracks, and that is obviously completely absurd. The Green Party wants to see a smarter use of our existing roads, and, really, all New Zealanders could get behind a smarter use of our transport infrastructure, right? But we do not really hear any explanation from the Government. All we hear are attacks and straw man arguments. For me, the most mystifying and terrifying statement in the Prime Minister’s speech today was that he was bragging about spending $12 billion on a few uneconomic motorways. Twelve billion dollars of taxpayers’ money is going to be wasted on six highway projects, most of which will not even break even in terms of their economic impact, according to the Government’s own business case.

I know that people in the National Party, including Mr Key, repeat a sort of empty mantra that they are investing in roads, but, in fact, they are not investing in roads. In fact, many of our regional roads are falling into disrepair. The regions know this very acutely, because the transport budget to pay for maintenance and safety on these roads has been raided to pay for a few motorways of madness. It is mystifying that Mr Key would be bragging about spending $12 billion, because while National is cutting spending on core services that would actually assist Kiwi households and businesses, it is both putting up the petrol tax and planning to spend billions on a private loan to pay for these motorways. That is right—the National Government is increasing borrowing and raising taxes to pay for extremely wasteful projects that will do nothing to increase economic productivity. I know that sounds mad. It is mad. I cannot believe it. If I could be very charitable, perhaps it is very misinformed. I am pretty sure that the Prime Minister does not have time to look into the details of the business cases of the $12 billion projects, but it would be nice if he did.

So today Mr Key claimed that if the motorways were not built, cars would be sitting in congestion. As a transport planner, I can tell you that there is not a professional in the world who naively thinks that new motorways will reduce congestion. The fact is that they do the exact opposite. They increase the number of cars on the road in urban areas. One would think that Mr Key might understand the fundamentals of economics—you know, concepts like price elasticity of demand. If you make it cheaper and easier to drive at peak hour, and to live further out from the city on cheaper land, then the response is that more people will drive into the city at peak hour. We cannot infinitely increase the road space in our urban areas. In fact, we are already at capacity. The cars have to go somewhere when they get off the motorway. They get on to the roads that are being underfunded by this Government because it is spending so much money on a few big, pork-barrel projects.

Motorways do not reduce congestion, and that is why no big city in the developed world is building new motorways. In fact, some of the biggest cities, like Seoul in South Korea and San Francisco in California, are removing their inner-city motorways. This Government is unbelievably looking to spend $100 million on a motorway flyover that will be an eyesore in front of our historic cricket ground, the Basin Reserve in central Wellington, worsening congestion in Wellington and destroying property values where they are most valuable. I am sorry to say to the National members who are here now, and to the Prime Minister, that the motorways of madness are not going to reduce congestion and they are certainly not going to increase economic productivity, despite the fact that the National Government is blowing the majority of the transport infrastructure budget on them. What would work? What is a smart idea to actually reduce congestion, to actually get some productivity benefits out of transport? Because it is possible.

Take the Auckland City rail link. Obviously, this is an extremely important project that the National Government is saying no to. The National Government is saying no to our biggest and fastest-growing city. Last year I asked the Minister of Transport, Mr Brownlee, what new passenger transport infrastructure projects the National Government had committed to in Auckland. What could he say? The only thing he could say in response was a study, the City Centre Future Access Study. So the National Government has not invested in any new infrastructure for buses or trains or walking or cycling in Auckland, actually. It does cite $1.6 billion, but all of that was committed under the previous Labour Government—$1.1 billion was Project DART, and then $500 million for electric trains. Actually, that is not even money that the central government is investing in Auckland; it is a loan to pay for electric trains. All of this money was committed back before 2008, and it is catered to increasing demand for public transport. It has resulted in traffic volumes actually not increasing over that period, although part of that was also due to oil prices and the economic situation, and instead the Government has spent a small amount of money on the City Centre Future Access Study, which has conclusively shown that if the Auckland City rail link is not built, Auckland traffic will be at a standstill.

But the National Government’s response is to say that it is not needed, that we cannot afford it, and that it is not going to spend money on it, even though it has $12 billion to spend on a few motorways that will do nothing to reduce congestion. So the choices are really clear here. You have got $12 billion to invest in transport. Why not invest it in smart green projects that will actually reduce congestion, and will actually get more people moving in our largest and fastest-growing city, rather than taking out a $3 billion loan to pay for a project like Transmission Gully, which is a depreciating asset? Aucklanders’ fuel taxes will be paying for Transmission Gully 20 years from now—Aucklanders stuck in congestion because the National Government said no to a smart, sensible project like the Auckland City rail link.

In the last few years we have seen 30 percent more rail patronage in Auckland than anticipated 5 years ago by the transport models. The Northern Busway has been a roaring success. It carries the equivalent of 2½ lanes of traffic during peak hour over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. We have not seen any increase in traffic volumes over the Auckland Harbour Bridge in that time. The Northern Busway requires no operating subsidy. That is the kind of smart green thinking that is good for the economy, it is good for people, and it is good for the environment. That is the kind of investment that we want to see in the Green Party. It is a better use of our existing roads, not duplicating existing ones to the tune of $12 billion. The Green Party would like to work constructively with the National Government, and we await it replying coherently to our criticisms. Thank you very much.

Hon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): I would just like to reply to the Prime Minister’s statement for 2013. First of all, can I wish you a very happy New Year, Mr Deputy Speaker, and other members of the House who are down here this evening. Certainly, the National Party has started this year with a lot of gusto. We heard today, when the Prime Minister stood up and laid out his plan for 2013, how much initiative and how much fresh thinking this Government has got to bring to 2013, which is a hugely important year for us.

But before I get on and start talking about the fantastic address from the Prime Minister today, what I wish to talk about is the previous speaker, Julie Anne Genter from the Green Party. I think she is the transport spokesperson for the Green Party. She had some amazing quotes in that diatribe just before where she talked about the Government’s approach in terms of building roads of national significance—$12 billion invested over 10 years. She called them “motorways of madness” and extraordinarily wasteful projects. She also went on to say that “Motorways do not reduce congestion,”. My constituents, who will be sitting in their vehicles now, leaving Wellington City and going up to the Kapiti Coast, will be horrified to think that the Green Party transport spokesperson thinks that about Transmission Gully and the Kapiti Expressway. They will be sitting in congestion, listening to that member bang on about a whole lot of mistruths, when, in fact, congestion is hugely important to the New Zealand economy. People will be sitting in their vehicles now listening to the Green Party member saying “Oh, you don’t need to worry about congestion. We shouldn’t be building any roads at all. We should be putting it into the Green Party’s magical sort of dreamland of building more houses, raiding the Land Transport Fund so that it can put it into pet projects.”

Well, what the member fails to realise is that the Land Transport Fund actually funds a whole lot of public transport. That helped fund the electrification of trains through to Waikanae, which Minister Joyce opened with me a couple of years ago. It was a fantastic project. The Government is focused on public transport, it is focused on the plan for KiwiRail and turning that round, and it has rolled out the Matangi trains—I hope the member has been on them; I have been—in the Wellington region. They are fantastic trains from Korea and they are doing a great job in terms of moving commuters around the Wellington region. But for the member to stand up here today and say that we should not be investing in roads—and also she went on to say that Auckland taxpayers will be paying for ever for Transmission Gully. Well, that is not correct.

I will tell you one thing: the Green Party is opposed, like the Labour Party is, to public-private partnerships. We on this side of the House embrace the private sector. We say bring it on, step up to the plate, help us build Transmission Gully, because we need it—it is hugely important. New Zealand collectively is funding the Waterview Connection project in Auckland—it is going to make a huge amount of difference—at $2.2 billion. Transmission Gully is forecasted to be around $1 billion, but looking to come down with the private sector funding. The Green Party member should be standing up in the House and that saying this is hugely important for economic growth. Instead, she is banging on with a whole lot of mistruths—that, actually, decent transport infrastructure has little to do with congestion—which are not true at all.

Of course, the other important thing is the changes that we have made with the Resource Management Act that are helping to get these projects up and running quicker, which the Green Party opposes and the Labour Party opposes.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Hon NATHAN GUY: Just before the dinner break I was talking about what a fantastic Prime Minister’s statement for 2013 it was. Judging by the delivery, the passion, and the content of that speech, the Prime Minister is certainly going to be delivering a lot more of those statements in this House. Certainly I would see many more statements into the next term as well, and beyond.

In essence, what the Prime Minister laid out today was the importance of economic growth and, actually, how well this Government has been doing in pretty trying times over the last few years. We all understand that we have had the global financial situation, which has affected a lot of countries—in fact, every country around the world, pretty much. The countries that we like to compare ourselves with are the countries in Europe, the UK, Canada, and also the US, and we are doing incredibly well in comparison. It is interesting that Treasury has forecast economic growth for the next 3 years of about 2.5 percent, which is fantastic.

That leads me on to talking about the Canterbury rebuild, which is of huge significance to the New Zealand economy. The Government has always said that it wants to support the people of Canterbury in getting back on their feet. We are talking about a rebuild somewhere in the vicinity of $30 billion over the next 10 years or so. The Government has a real focus on supporting the people of Canterbury and the people of Christchurch, and getting the central business district and all of those precincts that have been rolled out by the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, the Hon Gerry Brownlee, to really start to take shape down there as we move out of the demolition phase into the rebuild phase.

Importantly, yesterday as Minister of Immigration I announced that we are going to ensure that the Canterbury Skills and Employment Hub will be even more efficient than it is currently. We have signalled to employers who want to bring in some migrant workers—and we know that in the Canterbury rebuild we will need to bring in some migrant workers—that this Government has a real focus on making sure that Kiwis are first.

At the end of November we announced the Canterbury Skills and Employment Hub. What has happened since that announcement is that there have been 240 employers who have registered, 800 job seekers have put their hands up saying that they wish to seek jobs, and there are currently 200 vacancies. Basically how it works is that if an employer is looking for someone to perform in their company, then they write in or make an approach to the skills hub. Within 48 hours someone from the Ministry of Social Development makes contact with them and says that, yes, there are Kiwis available, and puts them in contact with one another. If there are not Kiwis available, then they go through the immigration process. We believe that we can streamline this and ensure that we have a real focus on Kiwis first, but we know that the scale of the Canterbury rebuild will mean that we will need to bring some migrant workers in.

What we also heard from the Prime Minister’s statement today was a strong focus on education. We have set some clearly very courageous and determined targets for young students to ensure that we get 98 percent participation by 2016 in early childhood education. That then rolls on to national standards. I heard the Labour benchers have a bit of a chuckle, because we all know that they are opposed to national standards. When I read my kids’ reports just before Christmas time, I thought it was fantastic that now we have plain reporting and I understand, like all the other parents do, how well my kids are doing in terms of those core subjects that all parents want their kids to do better at than they currently are doing: reading, writing, and maths.

Importantly, we have also set another very strong target, which is for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2, to ensure that we get 85 percent of our 18-year-olds up to this by 2017. We are also increasing the proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds who achieve a level 4 diploma or degree, so we have a real focus on education.

We also have a real focus on law and order, and on ensuring that we keep our communities safe. Putting my local MP hat on, in my home township of Levin I can say that we have now the most police officers ever in the history of our township on the beat. And that is under this Government, and we should be very proud of that fact.

What we had the other day was Mr Shearer rolling out his state of the nation speech with no new policy. By the way, all he said was: “Woops! Mea culpa. I made a mistake. Actually, our housing proposals are all wrong. We can’t build houses for Auckland for $300,000. It is actually going to cost $550,000 to build a four-bedroom house in Auckland.” So it was interesting that that is all we heard from Mr Shearer, and that is all we are really going to hear from him for the next 12 months or 24 months. But, of course, he has to survive the leadership struggle. We know there is a vote coming up. Will he survive that? We also know that there is a reshuffle coming up. Of course, that is going to mean that some of the front bench will be moving to the back bench, and we wait to see where he puts Mr Cunliffe.

SUE MORONEY (Labour): Happy New Year to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to the House. Can I start my contribution to this debate, first of all, by congratulating some of the Waikato-based members of Parliament for the National Party, namely Louise Upston and Tim Macindoe, on their promotion to senior whip and junior whip respectively. It is a great shame that we did not see any Waikato MPs make it into Cabinet. We do, after all, have the most productive region in the country, yet there are no Waikato MPs—no Waikato MPs—in the National Government’s Cabinet. That is a great shame, because I would have liked to see Louise, Tim, David Bennett, and others be considered for a role in Cabinet, but it seems that they were not able to make the grade for that. That is disappointing. But I particularly want to congratulate Tim Macindoe. I know he has been working for a long time to get the junior whip’s role, and he has got there. It is a role that I had in my first term in this place, and it is certainly a big learning curve. It really was a big learning curve for me. I learnt a lot in that role, and I know that Tim, having got there in his second term will, I am sure, still have a lot to learn in the role as well.

But he must be disappointed to have had his first outing in that role be the backdrop for that disappointing contribution from the Prime Minister today. That Prime Minister’s speech was so dead boring that I thought Tim was going to go to sleep at certain stages throughout it. I think I saw his eyelids flutter and his eyes roll back in his head a couple of times. There was nothing in that speech that would give New Zealanders any certainty about the brighter future that that Government has been promising for 5 long years. It was the kind of standard formula that we have become used to from this Prime Minister now, after hearing five versions of it. He starts off by blaming Labour for everything—this is his set formula. Then he tells a few jokes—you know, he gets a bit of stand-up going—and then he moves on to making excuses for why the Government has not been able to do what it said it would do the year before, and he hopes that when he gets to the end of it no one notices that he still has not got a plan. After 5 long years he still has no plan.

It is a bit like Groundhog Day, because contributing to this debate a year ago I was saying this is the year the Government has to turn the economy round. It has to get jobs going. This is the year that there are no more excuses for that Government. There are no more excuses. And here I am again, 12 months later, saying exactly the same thing, because the Government failed. The Government failed to do what it had to do in 2012—what the electorate was crying out for from this Government in 2012. The Government has failed, and today that speech from the Prime Minister was another example of failure. It was the same old formula: a few stand-up jokes, a few excuses, blame the Labour Party, but no new ideas.

Listening to some of the other contributions that have happened, I noticed, when I listened to Jo Goodhew’s speech, that she kept promising she would talk about her portfolios. She talked about health quite a lot, and she talked about older people, but she did not have anything to say about women—and she is the Minister of Women’s Affairs. They are, actually—we are—51 percent, only, of the population, and she could not find anything to say about that Government and its performance with regard to women and their families. But there are no surprises there, because it is this side of the House, it is Labour, that understands the pressures on families today in New Zealand, and that is demonstrated—absolutely demonstrated—by our commitment to bring about a proposal for affordable housing, because we get it. On this side of the House, in the Labour Party, we know how important affordable, secure, and decent housing is for families. It is a pretty fundamental thing. If you have not got that right, if you have not got decent housing, then it is no good having any of the other cycleways or these sorts of frippery sort of plans that the Government comes up with from time to time—these one-off shots. They make no difference to those families.

Then there is the Government’s position on paid parental leave, because the Government just does not get it. The Government plans, later on this year, to use a little-used tool in this House. In fact, it has never been used in this way before. The Government plans to use a financial veto against babies, for goodness’ sake! That is what it plans to do. The Government has told the electorate that even though my bill to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks, 6 months, the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill, based on getting good breastfeeding patterns going and all those things that we know are good for future generations—despite the fact that my bill has majority support in this House, the Government will stop it in its tracks. I am going to ask the Government this year to play fair, play fair on behalf of families, because this House will pass with a majority the extension to paid parental leave. I am asking the Government to actually go and talk with families. Find out how important this is for them, listen to the submissions to the Government Administration Committee, and lift the threat of a financial veto against those families, those babies, and our future.

Then there is the Christchurch rebuild that we just heard the previous speaker, Nathan Guy, speaking about. I got pretty excited when he talked about a Canterbury skills hub, because I thought that finally, finally, the Government had got it that we need skills development in this country, and that there would be training on offer for all of those young people who are crying out for a direction in our country. But they are not going to get it from that Government, because it turns out that the Canterbury Skills and Employment Hub is about working out how many migrant workers we need to rebuild Canterbury. It is not about Kiwi workers at all. So that is extremely disappointing, because that Government had plenty of time. It has had 2 years to work it out, from the time those earthquakes happened. It has had 2 years to get apprentices going, to get apprenticeships under its belt, so that they could be rebuilding Christchurch. Those young people are without hope, because of that Government’s lack of action on issues like the Christchurch rebuild. Well, the Government has no excuse for that. It knew that was coming up. It knew the rebuild was going to be important to this country. The Government knew that there were many young New Zealanders looking for the opportunity to be trained, and it has failed to do it.

But I think the biggest joke, the biggest stand-up part of the comedy routine from the Prime Minister this afternoon, has to be when he talked about education. Everyone knows that the National Government does not understand just how important a quality education is to families in New Zealand. For many families that is the thing they rely on for the next generation. I know of families that will go without many of the necessities of life, to ensure that their children get a decent education. That is how strongly many low-income families in particular feel about education, and so they should. But what have they had from that Government? They have had attack after attack after attack on our quality education system. They have had a Minister of Education, smooth communicator that she is, telling them that the pathway to a quality education is to increase the number of children in every classroom, so that every teacher had more children to deal with and more children to be imparting that quality education to. Well, it does not take a high degree of education to know that that was just rampant nonsense. But such a smooth communicator is Hekia Parata that she managed to convince the entire National Cabinet that this was a great idea. It was not just her. The entire National Cabinet agreed that increasing class sizes was a great way forward for our education system, and the shame of that is that they still believe it. They could not get away with it, but they still believe it, and they will find a way to revisit that when they can.

Of course, it all started with the Government diminishing early childhood education quality by cutting $400 million out of early childhood education in Budget 2010. The Government cut that money out to stop centres from employing 100 percent qualified staff. That was the beginning of the slippery slope of reducing the quality and the standard of our world-class education system. Well, you will not have that from this side of the House. Christchurch schools, Novopay, charter schools, national standards—the list goes on and on.

If that Prime Minister firmly believes that the Government is developing this brighter future, then I think he needs to get out and talk with families, talk with real people, about what their aims and aspirations are. Talk with the person I talked to a couple of days ago—actually, it was the editor of the Waikato Times—who told me that he once believed that national standards was a great idea, until he saw his children’s first report and he could not understand a word of it. So that Government’s days are numbered, and it starts this year.

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development): I just want to stand up in support, obviously, of the Prime Minister and his outstanding address today. He is the man with the right policies, with the right team, and with the right focus to take New Zealanders forward. This year is going to be a big year, but, to be fair, last year was a fairly big year for this Government and for the work that we have been doing for people. It has been clear what that vision is for them, the plan is under way, and I have to say that, certainly, the welfare reforms are well and truly on track.

It has been a substantial year particularly for the Ministry of Social Development and for the work that we have been doing for our most vulnerable people. As I say, we have been driving through significant welfare reforms and developing a Children’s Action Plan—the likes of which has never been seen before, quite frankly—that will see a way forward for our most vulnerable children.

When going up and down this country we received more than 10,000 submissions from New Zealanders. We got submissions from organisations that work with children, from everyone—from our schools through to individuals, mums and dads, and professionals. It was quite outstanding to see their commitment to the work that they wanted to see done and to now see their work with implementing it.

The year ahead is going to be really significant for us, and we have chosen two areas where we are introducing our first Children’s Teams. We have already got that well and truly under way in Rotorua, and I have got to say the people there are embracing it with everything they have got. They have been somewhat surprised that they get to develop it for themselves. They thought that this Government was going to come along and say exactly what it wanted. We said: “No, here are the ingredients. How you actually put this all together for your kids is up to you.” Māori have certainly been embracing it and want to see it work, and so do many other New Zealanders.

What will be interesting is to hear from the Opposition whether or not it will be supporting the Children’s Action Plan going forward. I know that many New Zealanders are interested in that. I get asked about it pretty much every day I am out there. Anywhere I go and hold a public meeting, I am getting at least 100 people along to it and, I have to say, they are from every walk of life. I have never had such a diverse audience as I have been getting at the meetings that I run on vulnerable children.

The question I get asked every time is whether the Opposition will actually be coming along and standing up to be part of the work for these most vulnerable children. I have to answer honestly every time and say that I do not know. The Opposition has not indicated that it will be willing to work alongside us on it, and I certainly hope that, as this is a new year, we can see some of the work that is going on for those most vulnerable children actually reaching beyond what is party political at times, and putting the interests of those kids first instead.

I have been incredibly proud of the work that we have been doing in coordinating our responses across health, education, the police when needed, and certainly across the Ministry of Social Development, and even within that, of course, across Work and Income, Child, Youth and Family, and the Family and Community Services group.

What was most important was how we actually got that one response for children and families as we needed it. We have got a number of different initiatives that are going on. It is time they were consolidated. So you try things, and you work alongside. Some work better than others, and you have always got to be standing up, reassessing, making sure that you are on the right track, and then taking forward what really is working. I see this particularly in my own portfolio and in the work that goes across those social services—that we do pull together and really start consolidating and putting more into it. When I look at the work of Whānau Ora and how that works alongside those most vulnerable families I think it has been quite incredible.

We introduced last year the young parent payment and the youth payment, and that is going now to those youth providers who provide a service for young people. That got rolled out in about August last year, and in those first few months it has been really interesting to see how they go, but this is the year that it takes off.

To be quite frank, towards the end of last year there just were not the same training opportunities to put young people in because the year was winding up and so they were preparing them more for the beginning of this year. We have simply seen thousands of kids who now go through a provider instead of Work and Income. We are hearing from them—which I think is most important—and they are saying it works. They are saying they would rather be connected to someone who knows them, who understands them, who has more flexibility, quite frankly, than a Government agency does, and who can see them as individuals.

I think that this year is going to be a big year as far as seeing them get better connected into education, in whatever form that takes for them, recognising that they are individuals. They are usually individuals who have had a bit of a hard life and school has not always worked out for them, so we have to do differently.

This Government’s investment in these kids was an additional $287 million—$287 million, and we are putting it where it counts. This is not the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff; this is in the paddock, way back. This is about getting them before they go into the system and when they need the most help, and it is about how we can actually wrap it round them. It is recognising that the Government alone does not have all of the answers, that they sit within our communities and that if we put the right funding alongside them and give them the mandate to go and do it, then we can make a big difference.

The big difference made by the sharing of information between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Development has been huge. We know who these kids are in real time. We can get the names to the right people. We can track them down. We can then keep that contact with them and get them back into school earlier.

I think it is important to recognise that in just the last year 29,648 young people aged between 18 and 24 left a benefit to go into work. So nearly 30,000 young people aged between 18 and 24 went off a benefit last year to go into work. Let us compare this to 2008, recognising it was a completely different time. In 2008, 14,800 young people went off a benefit and into work. Granted there are more of them now, so you would hope there was more, but when we constantly hear that there are no jobs, that there simply is not any work, it is not true. A lot more work needs to be done, but I say if you are not looking you are not going to get one.

Our expectation is that people are work-ready, and our reforms say that. Yes, we expect people to be drug-free and able to turn up for the jobs that are available. Yes, we think that if you have got a warrant out for your arrest, then you should not be able to sit on a benefit and almost use that money to run. Yes, we think that if you are of a certain age and you do not have obligations such as caring for very young children you should be able to work part time. Yes, we think that unless you are actually out there actively applying for jobs, getting your CV ready, and asking people for a job you will not get one. Those expectations are making a difference.

Sue Moroney: What jobs?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Well, let us go. In the 4 years from November 2008 until November last year 305,000 people came off a benefit to start work. They are not the ones who went off to go into another relationship, and they are not the ones who actually went off, or swapped, a benefit; this is 305,000 people who actually came off a benefit to start work, and that compares to 280,000 people in the 4 years previous to that.

Are they finding it hard? Is it tough out there? Absolutely, but to sit back and feel sorry for them like the Labour Party would like to do is actually not going to make a difference for them. We are upskilling them and putting the money where it is really, really needed, so more money is going into employment assistance than ever before.

Let me talk to you about Job Streams, because I hear that the Opposition is really interested in it. The other day we had one of Shearer’s big new ideas. He came out with—wait for it—a big new idea, and that is that we should subsidise employers and help those who are on benefits so that they can get into work. Well, duh, it is already happening, mate. Wake up and smell the roses. It is called Job Streams and it has been happening for the last year. Before that we had Community Max and we had Job Ops. I would like to say that under Job Ops and Community Max nearly 90 percent of them did not go back onto benefits. Nineteen and a half thousand kids—

Sue Moroney: No wonder things are so bad. She thinks it’s an apprenticeship scheme.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Shall we go? Nineteen and a half thousand kids got an opportunity into a job—19,500 of them—and 18,000 of them are still in work. Now we have Job Streams, which is a subsidy into work. That can be up to $21,000 a year—$21,000 a year could be the subsidy for someone who is not connected into the workforce and has been out of work for a long time. That makes a difference for them.

Sue Moroney: Where are the apprenticeships in that?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Well, we have got 14,000 more apprentices that are going to be coming on board over the next 5 years. We are not just putting numbers through like Labour did. Labour just shoved them on half-hearted courses so that it could come up with the numbers, but it did not take into consideration whether or not they finished the courses or came out with something that had quality. And obviously they did not, because as soon as times got tough those kids fell out of jobs.

The kids that had gone through that process under Labour fell out of jobs as soon as things got tough, because the jobs were not real and it was a false economy. So, yes, the public will have a choice: throw more money at it like Labour did, do not worry about the actual quality, and do not worry about the results, or come to this Government, which has a vision, is in control, and will actually look after those young people when they need it.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just before I call the next member, earlier in the day I explained that the House has two presiding officers unavailable. Under Standing Order 33 the Speaker can appoint a temporary Speaker. I will now appoint Jacqui Dean to take some time in the chair.

Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I would like to take this opportunity to wish both you and this House a happy New Year.

Well it looked for a while like the National Government had had an epiphany over summer, that it had woken up to two things: that we had a youth unemployment problem and that we needed to invest some money into skills training and apprenticeships. But actually, after hearing the last contribution, it seems it was a very short-lived epiphany because what we have had is a whole lot of backtracking from the Minister for Social Development who has just spoken. She has told us about how those schemes existed, National has been doing it, and she cited the wonderful example of Job Ops. This was $5,000 as a subsidy to an employer to help people in. It was regarded as a reasonably successful programme. It was not apprenticeship training, but it was a way of moving young people into work. So it was for this reason that we were greatly disappointed when in Budget 2012 the funding for this scheme was cut and it was not rolled over into the new financial year. This is a policy that the Minister got up and told us about tonight that was actually cut in last year’s Budget.

There are two important reasons why the epiphany, if it had actually been long-lived, would have been good. Firstly, yes we do have a youth unemployment problem, and, secondly, we might need some people trained for rebuilding Christchurch and in our skills trades more generally. Is there a youth unemployment problem? Obviously the Minister has spent the summer, rather than having an epiphany, trying to rejig all the numbers to make it sound better.

Let us look at what the state of employment and the future actually looks like in 2013 if you are a young person in New Zealand. It ain’t that flash. If you were aged between 15 and 19 years of age at the end of last year, 25.5 percent of your cohort was unemployed. One in four of your cohort was not in work. This is not something to be proud of. This is not something to celebrate. It is something that any member in this House, no matter their political hue, should be concerned about and committed to actually addressing.

But it was not just for this very young age group, for the 15 to 19-year-olds. If you were aged between 20 and 24 years of age 12.8 percent of you and your peers would not be able to find a job. These are not levels of unemployment that any of us can think are acceptable. These are young New Zealanders who are growing up without hope and young New Zealanders who are getting on planes and leaving, all the time.

Then we have 13.4 percent of our young people, or 85,000 young New Zealanders, who are not in any form of work, education, or training. There has been nothing done to address this. There has been nothing substantial done.

Let us have a look at some of the measures that this Government has put in place. I want to briefly have a look at the Limited Service Volunteer scheme, which was put in place. This is, of course, the great scheme where young people were going to go and do an intensive course with the military, to train them up and, hopefully, to get them back into the workforce.

Darien Fenton: What happened to that?

Dr MEGAN WOODS: Well, what did happen to that? That is a very good question that I have been asked. At the end of the 2011 financial year 40 percent, or 735 of the 1,828 people who had completed this course, were still unemployed after 3 months. Do not think this is substantially addressing the very real problems we have in youth unemployment.

But then last year the Prime Minister came up with this stunner. He came up with an absolutely stunning way to address the 25 percent unemployment we have in some age groups in youth unemployment—the 85,000 young New Zealanders who are not in work, education, or training. He wrote to 175 businesses asking them to take on a Limited Service Volunteer graduate. Did this work? I do not know. The Ministry of Social Development has informed me, in answers to written questions, that it has not collected any data on this. So we do not even know if this is working. If there is data now being collected on that, we would welcome the chance to see what the uptake from those letters was.

But let us go back. Let us roll the clock back a bit to April 2011, an election year. John Key rode into Christchurch on his white horse to the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology and talked the talk on skills training and apprenticeships. He was going to offer sweeteners, as he said in April 2011, to get young people into trades training. Well, this failed. His “Mr Fix-it”, Steven Joyce, the man who is handling unemployment in this country at 7.3 percent, came and told us that this was because there was a lack of demand. John Key’s sweeteners have not worked. And what did we see last week when John Key rebooted the apprenticeship policy, when John Key had another crack at it? More talk of sweeteners—$1,000, or $2,000 if you are in a priority trade, to help you buy some tools. Is this a sweetener?

Jonathan Young: Great idea.

Dr MEGAN WOODS: What would be a great idea is actually structurally looking at getting young people into apprenticeships. We support getting young people into apprenticeships, but what we see from members opposite is a squandered opportunity.

The money was allocated in Budget 2011 for training people throughout our country to help with the rebuild of Canterbury. Until November last year, a good 18 months on, this Government opposite had managed to spend only $8 million of the $42 million that was budgeted. It has squandered that opportunity. In that time 657 young New Zealanders took up that opportunity. It is no wonder that we have members opposite standing up and telling us today that skills hubs in Canterbury are about bringing in overseas workers to fill the gap. They have failed to train our young people. They have failed to give our young people this opportunity, and they need to own up to that.

The 10,000 places that were announced last week is too little, too late, and it is only a drop in a bucket. It simply does not address the level of skills. If we had actually used the money when John Key announced it back in 2011, we would have young people who were 18 months through their training. These would be people who were nearly ready to go on the job site and contribute. But no. Instead, what we are doing is we are going and we are seeking skilled migrants from all over the country. This is not acceptable. This is not a Government that is committed to doing anything.

In John Key’s epiphany, he told us last week, there is a big opportunity over the next few years, particularly with the rebuilding of Christchurch, to train more New Zealanders in vocational careers that will set them up well for their working life, and Mr Joyce had similar sentiments. Well, actually, they have just re-run the press releases from April 2011. This was exactly the same rhetoric that was used then, and they have squandered that opportunity. It is our hope that it actually will be put into place, and that the sweeteners being offered may get young people into some of these training opportunities this time.

And, yes, we have been telling you in this time that we need to do something about this. Labour has consistently, since the 2010 earthquake in Christchurch, been telling the Government that we need to address this. We have put up positive alternatives, but there are 20 percent fewer apprentices today than when National took office. Half a decade in, 5 years on, what have they got as their legacy? Fewer apprentices in this country. The money that they put back last week into apprenticeship training—let us be quite honest. It is not even the equivalent of what they ripped out a couple of years ago from the training budget. It just does not add up.

So what will Labour do? Labour does have a positive alternative to tackle youth unemployment, and it is a positive alternative that we are rightly proud of. And when we go around the country, when I talk to young people in my electorate of Wigram, and when my colleagues talk to young people in their electorates, there is a great deal of enthusiasm.

We will pay employers the equivalent of the dole to take on apprentices. We know that employers all around the country are crying out for some help to work with this. We will back Kiwi businesses to be able to do this. We will work with councils on projects that support their provinces. We are going to be actively creating jobs. We are not going to sit back and wait for the magic of the market to do it, because we know that what is needed now and what New Zealand needs to address this crisis is an active Government that is willing to roll up its sleeves and do something, and not sit back and hope for the best. Hope, hope, and more hope have not led to positive outcomes for our young New Zealanders.

I think the future that our young people face is an absolute travesty. As David Shearer said earlier this afternoon in his speech, aspiration is not a word we hear anymore from members opposite. They have no aspiration for young New Zealanders. I hope to see some movement on the real issue of youth unemployment this year.

JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Madam Speaker, may I be the first to congratulate you on your opportunity to chair this debate and to wish you a happy New Year. I would also like to just acknowledge the very generous comments of Sue Moroney to her parliamentary colleagues Tim Macindoe from Hamilton West on his promotion and Jami-Lee Ross on his, and also to the Hon Simon Bridges on his promotion to Cabinet this last week. It is great to see these MPs rising up and being aspirational for this country.

Before I start on my contribution to this debate, I was taken aback by Sue Moroney’s reference to Groundhog Day. She started off by saying “2013—5 long years”. I look forward to her speech next year saying “2014—6 long years”, her 2015 speech saying “7 long years”, her 2016 speech saying “8 long years”, then saying “9 long years”, and a 2018 speech saying “10 long years of a wonderful National Government”. Is that not possible? What a wonderful thought that is for the people of New Zealand to think—that such a proactive, sensible, aspirational Government could be in place to lead this country forward in its goals.

I believe that we have every reason to be optimistic in New Zealand. If we are bold in our aspirations—as we are—if we are sound in our judgment, and if we make the right decisions, then we can go further than any generation before us. This is possible, and our young people look to us because their future in New Zealand will depend upon it. We were elected in 2008 because of our aspiration. We were re-elected in 2011 because we delivered, and I believe that the people of New Zealand stand firm behind us.

The year 2013 will be a year when, fuelled by our belief that New Zealand can and should do better, we will continue to see positive reforms that lift our educational outcomes, that increase our economic activity, that grow our job market, that increase the opportunities for New Zealanders. I believe that is what we will see in this year, 2013. This Government enjoys continued support because New Zealanders believe in the common sense of our values and the soundness of our policies and decisions, and respect the record of our delivery of these policies.

As the MP for New Plymouth, the heart of the energy province of Taranaki, I continually see the economic transformation that a responsible use of our natural resources has brought to our region. That the oil and gas industry has risk associated with it, and that this risk sits largely with environmental and health and safety outcomes, is accepted. We know that. But what has not been fully explored is the flip side: the economic reward the industry can and could contribute not only to our region of Taranaki but also to other regions around this nation.

This golden weather we are experiencing reminds me of when I was a kid growing up under the shadow of Mount Taranaki—long, warm summer days in the beautiful environment that our province has. To me that is the Kiwi way of life. But the Kiwi way of life is not just about the world in which we live. It is also about affording the great way of life we have come to appreciate, know, and love here in New Zealand; as individuals, being able to earn good incomes in jobs for which we receive excellent training so we can buy our own home and not end up in a cheap, poky little box in a Labour Government ghetto somewhere. No, we want to build the economy and lift New Zealanders’ skill base so that they can earn high wages and buy their own homes, and so that we have high incomes and lower interest rates, which we have seen increase over these last 4 years of Government.

There are some things that a Government can and should provide to its population as a country: a world-class education system, which we are building; modern health care and social services that appropriately support our population; and excellent infrastructure. For example, I remember growing up in a South Taranaki town called Hāwera and going to the Hāwera town baths—the Hāwera town baths—every day of the summer. Then they built this fantastic aquatic centre, which is now called the PowerCo Aquatic Centre. And occasionally we would go up to New Plymouth, where I now reside and for which I have the privilege of being the MP, and go to the Todd Energy Aquatic Centre. We have these fantastic community amenities, both of them sponsored by, and named after, energy companies. So what I am saying is that hand and glove with our great way of life in Taranaki and our beautiful environment is this relationship we have with energy. I believe that in this nation we need to embrace energy as our way of life. We know that the engine room of our nation is the economy, and the fuel of our economy is energy. We need to understand that, and we need to not run away and hide from it.

The province of Taranaki is an example to all New Zealanders of what happens when you responsibly but actively utilise your natural resources, be that through oil and gas exploration or be that through dairying, which has a tremendous history in that province. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in my province, Taranaki, at present and over the next year, in exploration in particular. That is creating employment. That is creating great opportunities for New Plymouth and Taranaki companies. That is creating a great upskilling of capability in the workforce, giving them a world-class opportunity. I know that engineering companies in Taranaki then begin to export their capability, be that through engineering in Australasia or Papua New Guinea or through building superyachts sold around the world.

All of this is because of this industry that has been in our province for six decades or more. Even though we can go way back to the 1880s when oil was first discovered there, it is particularly since Māui came on stream that we have seen this proliferation of tremendous skills and development of industry. Some estimate that there are around 7,000 jobs—11.5 percent of all work—in Taranaki because of this sector. That is significant.

When we say that Taranaki can be an example to all of New Zealand what we need to say and what we need to see is that the step change that energy, development, and exploration can bring to this country can be very, very significant. It is the region with the lowest unemployment in the country—perhaps even in the developed world. Let us not be afraid of this. Let us be responsible. Let us be active. Let us ensure that we do everything excellently. But let us do it. Let us ensure that we grasp these opportunities that are before us, so that we can see our young people have employment and so that we can have the inflow of revenues into our Government that can provide all the things that New Zealanders desire and look for.

You know, we read in the New Zealand Herald in November that the oil and gas recruitment drive gave Taranaki the country’s highest advertised average pay packet, of over $93,000. That is a huge amount of money. Median household incomes in Taranaki are now over $68,000—the highest in the country outside of the main centres. We are very proud of what we have achieved in our province. We are very proud of the opportunities that we have taken hold of, and that we have done this responsibly for our environment and to our great workforce.

I say to New Zealanders who are listening tonight that if you want to see what New Zealand can look like under this Government that is prepared to pursue these opportunities, then look to Taranaki and see what that community is able to do and produce, and the benefits that have come back to it. You will see that there is a vibrant community. They are people who have a future, people who have a hope, and people who have opportunities for gaining world-class education, training, and skills that will take them anywhere in this country and anywhere in the world. Thank you.

Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): What we heard there from the member for New Plymouth, Jonathan Young, was a piece of fine rhetoric at points. We heard the word “delivery” on many occasions, but we did not hear much to back that up. What we have seen is a Government that has delivered higher unemployment, that continues to deliver 1,000 New Zealanders every week to Australia, that has delivered dropping median wages, and that has delivered the biggest gap between rich and poor that New Zealand has ever seen.

There were also some moments that reminded me of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. There were some linguistic flourishes that we should cherish. But what sits behind all of that rhetoric is a Government that is overseeing an omnishambles. This Government is seeing its support leach away and is seeing desperation creep in as the public of New Zealand realise that beneath the rhetoric is failure—a failure to deliver on promises. The latest promise is to get apprenticeships up and running again. John Key has said that he will supply a sugar hit to those who take up Modern Apprenticeships. It is tragic, I would point out, that taxpayer money is now being used—cash—to produce enticements to solve a problem that this Government created. This taxpayer money is required to attempt to solve a problem that this Government created. There are 20,000 fewer apprenticeships now than there were when this Government took office—

Dr Rajen Prasad: How many?

Dr DAVID CLARK: —and it is proposing to generate an extra 10,000. There are 20,000 fewer than when this Government took office.

Labour believes that education is the engine room of the economy, and we have a plan to deliver a stronger engine room and economic growth. This Government is playing catch-up. It is halfway aspirational to get back to where Labour was with the 100,000 extra places in the tertiary sector that Labour created during its time in office. But this Government has continued to underfund skills training for New Zealanders. We need every New Zealander properly educated to the best of their abilities so that they can contribute to the greatest of their potential for the betterment of their own lives, for their families, and for their communities. And the changes that this Government has wrought in the sector have meant that thousands of Kiwis have lost the opportunity to upskill as a result.

We have seen restrictions on student loans, we have seen caps on university places, we have seen the slashing of adult and community education funding, we have seen the rolling back of the 20 hours’ free early childhood education, and we have seen $145 million redirected away from skills training. Young people, in Labour’s view, need to be earning or learning. They need opportunities to better themselves, and right now there are 85,000 young people who are not in training, education, or employment. That is shameful. These 85,000 New Zealanders are effectively being thrown on the scrap heap by a Government that seems not to care. This Government seems more interested in preserving the privilege of those who already have than in making an economy where everyone can benefit.

In 2010 almost 5,000 prospective students were turned away from universities because enrolment caps had been reached. This pattern continues. If we contrast this record with a Shearer-led Government’s hands-on approach, we have a plan outlined for a world-class education system at your local school, we have a plan laid out for affordable housing addressing the market failure that is affecting so many Kiwi families, and we have a plan for jobs. We see apprenticeship opportunities being created with David Shearer’s plan for affordable housing and job opportunities. So when we think that that contrasts with 20,000 fewer apprenticeships under National, we see a stark contrast. We see two different parties with very different views of the world.

So in Dunedin, in my own town, what has been happening? What has been happening with Modern Apprenticeships? Well, if we look in the Dunedin area we see that in December 2008, as Labour left office, there were 343 people enrolled in Dunedin in Modern Apprenticeships. By December 2011 that had fallen to 255 people, a reduction of 26 percent—a 26 percent reduction in Modern Apprenticeships. So the best thing that John Key’s announcement might achieve is seeing apprenticeship levels recover to close to what they were when his Government took office. It is hardly going to create the step change that we hear in the National rhetoric. National has finally worked out that youth unemployment and a drop in numbers of apprentices is a problem. We must keep reminding ourselves that this problem is of its making.

The picture is actually worse than that if we dig beneath the statistics, and we see that much of John Key’s announcement is actually about a rebranding exercise. He has decided to call just about everybody enrolled in industry training an apprentice. It is a branding exercise. So when Labour’s 2008 Budget funding ran out and the number of apprenticeships dropped by nearly 20 percent, the number of industry trainees in the same period had dropped by 37 percent. John Key is trying to count now some of those industry training people in the Modern Apprenticeships scheme to boost his figures.

Dr Rajen Prasad: Oh, they don’t deny it.

Dr DAVID CLARK: They do not deny it. Across the House those members sit with their heads down. They know that the plan that John Key has announced is not really a plan. It is a poor effort at trying to cover over, paper over, the cracks in a failed attempt at improving the lot of those people who put themselves out there to better themselves.

Labour, by contrast, does have a proper plan, and it starts with an improved focus on careers advice, access to training in schools, youth transition services, and dole payments to employers to take on apprenticeships for 18 and 19-year-olds. We would increase places for young people in education and training. Some of the results as National announces its apprenticeship policy—we see on the one hand it is announcing something that is vaguely in the right direction; at the same time it is removing money with the other hand. It is giving with one hand and taking with the other.

In the Otago Daily Times this week there have been three stories about postgraduate students affected by the National Government’s latest round of cuts. The first one: Lisa Jankowska has been under the impression she would get her student allowance this year. She is enrolled in a 1-year course and enrolled halfway through the year. She has got to re-enrol because it is the second year of enrolment. She does not receive a student allowance. She will not be able to finish her course easily. Her 1-year Master’s degree in commerce is under threat.

The second story: a student doing a 2-year postgraduate diploma in natural history, film-making, and communication. A young woman called Veronica Harwood-Stevenson said she would have probably chosen to stay in her job in the film industry in Wellington if she had known her allowance would be stopped. She has gone from $244 a week on a student allowance to $175 a week on a student loan. She will be left with an extra $10,000 loan. She would have chosen not to better herself over the longer term because it is very hard to get by without that allowance, and New Zealand would have suffered had the changes already been in place. As a result, though, she personally will suffer by the Government’s changes.

The third story in the Otago Daily Times this week on a similar tune: a fellow called Anthony Davidson, who has been working for 3 years on his MSc. He has been travelling to the Auckland Islands to study nationally endangered southern right whales. With 1 year to complete his MSc, he fears he may now not be able to. He has clicked over 24 years of age and is no longer eligible for allowances—a Master’s degree going begging.

These are just some examples of those many people affected by the changes as National seeks to tighten again the criteria for access to loans and allowances as it again seeks to make sure that those who do not have the means cannot study and that only those who already have wealth are able to access further opportunities. This is a shameful approach from the Government. It is a hands-off Government that sees unemployment rising, that sees skill levels dropping, and that is failing to invest in the way that would see a prosperous future for our country.

We need a visionary Government that is willing to take the tough decisions, that is willing to be hands-on, that is willing to implement pro-growth tax reform and universal savings policies, and that is willing to give the kinds of tools to the Reserve Bank that will help an export-led recovery. Instead, we have a Government that has got the worst economic growth record in 50 years, with its hand on the tiller guiding us off into a sunset that does not really exist.

MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Well, unlike David Clark, the speaker who just resumed his seat, I believe that 2013 is going to be a great year for New Zealand. I was with the Prime Minister last Friday, actually, when he addressed the North Harbour Club, and he outlined the Government’s plan for this year. This National-led Government, of course, has always been very clear and consistent about our economic programme, and we are managing the Government’s finances well, getting back to surplus, and starting to reduce debt. The plan that he gave to the North Harbour Club and is outlined for us is a detailed plan. It outlines our priorities for this year, and they are ones that I believe that this team is very united in supporting. We are very firmly focused on encouraging investment, strengthening the economy, and boosting jobs.

Many of the 350 people who attended the lunch earlier on Friday were from my North Shore electorate. I spoke to a lot of them, and I can assure you that the initiatives that the PM announced were extremely well received, because his vision resonates with the New Zealand public. His stated aim for New Zealand to be a magnet for investment was actually greeted with thunderous applause. As he said, we need investment from people from overseas as well as from Kiwis, because the more investment we get, the more jobs will be created. It sounds really simple, but, apparently, it is way too complicated for Labour and the Greens to grasp.

On the North Shore we are very keenly aware of the importance of keeping the economy on track and also of being restrained on our spending, because that is how we run our businesses and our homes. We know that it is very foolhardy to live beyond your means. My constituents tell me very clearly that they are worried about the unemployment level and especially about jobs for our young people. We on this side of the Chamber understand their concerns, and even in these cash-strapped times this John Key - led Government has allocated money to where it really matters and to where it can make a genuine difference. My North Shore constituents have applauded in particular the initiatives to expand and improve apprenticeship training. The Prime Minister announced the introduction of an expanded and improved new apprenticeships scheme, which—in case the Opposition forces missed it at the time, I will spell it out for them—means there will be an extra $12 million in Government funding allocated to a new and regrouped apprenticeships scheme. The first 10,000 apprentices to enrol from about April this year are going to be getting $1,000 towards tools and $2,000 if they are in those priority trades, and the same will be paid to their employers. So it is a win-win situation. This is a Government that is taking a hands-on approach to boosting skills and supporting jobs.

We have also launched five new vocational pathways that very clearly signpost the subjects that our young people should take to get the jobs where there are shortages of skills. Endless arts degrees are not really going to get people the meal ticket they need, and there is just not the work available, so instead we are encouraging careers in construction, manufacturing, the primary and service sectors, and, as well as that, social services. In the trades and services academies there are going to be over 4,000 places available, and around 8,700 Youth Guarantee places as well.

Thanks to Minister Paula Bennett in the social development area we have had huge gains, and we have big plans to continue that. The White Paper for Vulnerable Children, which she talked about a few moments ago, contains a significant series of more than 30 initiatives, and that is part of the Children’s Action Plan to better protect vulnerable kids. I believe, as the Prime Minister does, that this is a piece of work that will define us as a Government, and it does more to protect vulnerable children than anything the opposing forces have done in their time on the Treasury benches.

Unlike the waffle and the piffle that we have endured hearing from the Opposition parties this afternoon, National’s plans are targeted to where it matters, and we have proven that we can and we will deliver on our promises. So 2013 is going to be a very busy year. We have some 30 pieces of legislation that we want to put through this year, and we are determined, we are energised, and we are focused to achieve that outcome.

Conservation and the environment are, of course, subjects that have always been close to my heart, and National is an absolute champion of sound, workable policies that strike the right balance of looking after our precious environment and exploring what our natural resources can offer our economy. Earlier in the day we heard from our Minister for the Environment, Amy Adams, about the Government’s priorities in the safe management of our abundant natural resources. I absolutely agree with the Minister that water is our single most important natural resource, and this Government continues to be committed to cleaning up polluted sites. For example, so far we have spent $101 million, which is more than four times what Labour spent, on cleaning up waterways. Most people agree that the Resource Management Act needs reform because of the lost opportunities, the time-consuming problems, and the frustrating processes that serve only to drive up costs and ultimately put up barriers to growth. Minister Adams is working through a very comprehensive package of reforms with Cabinet in amongst that area of resource management, which will be released in the next few months, because as a country we know that we need to improve our future planning.

As a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee I will be working very hard to continue to progress our local government reforms this year, despite the relentless negativity of Labour and the Greens. Is not the name of Opposition, though, entirely suited to the grab bag of the disaffected who occupy the Opposition benches this term? There is a complete lack of innovative, affordable, and effective policies. The Opposition really does exist only to oppose. It is against tax reform, opposed to roads, opposed to oil and gas exploration, and opposed to Resource Management Act reform and 90-day employment initiatives—all a bad idea. Labour’s new initiative is all about nonsense. Let us take housing. Usually, I am a staunch fan of recycling, but Labour has piled far too much manure on its ill-thought-out housing policy. It was first announced last year as a bright shiny thing. Once Labour’s costly guesstimates were entirely discredited, it reworked it a bit and announced it again in Wainuiōmata, but it remains as implausible and unachievable as its last crack at it.

National, on the other hand, is definitely walking the talk on affordable housing, and we have added an extra 2,000 State houses to the areas that really need them the most. We have also delivered 50,000 upgrades. We have insulated, in addition to that, more than 190,000 homes, and by the end of this year every single State house that can be insulated will be insulated. We are also helping more people get into their own homes, with the lowest interest rates in a generation. When I bought my first home 30 years ago the interest rates were around 25 percent. I had to save hard for the deposit and it was a struggle to meet the interest rates, but that was the reality three decades ago. Our Welcome Home Loan cap has already assisted some 4,500 first-home buyers with finance, and I very much look forward to seeing what further initiatives Minister Nick Smith will be coming up with.

Then there are our achievements in health. Our track record under Minister Tony Ryall has been nothing short of spectacular. A highlight, personally, of my first year as a member of Parliament was the announcement of the $25 million rebuild of the Taharoto Mental Health Unit at the North Shore Hospital. From my first weeks in the job early last year I heard terribly sad stories from families and from patients who needed and deserved a modern, fit for purpose facility. When I visited Taharoto I was shocked at how inadequate it was, and I was absolutely delighted to be able to announce on behalf of the Minister late last year that funding for a full replacement was being made available.

When we look at hospital operations, they are increasing, on average, by 8,000 patients per year. They are now at record levels: 35,000 more patients per year get elective treatment under National than occurred under Labour years. There are shorter waiting times, as well, for cancer treatment and for accident and emergency. North Shore Hospital, which was, by anybody’s standards, a very poor-performing hospital and a poor-performing district health board, has improved dramatically, and now more than 95 percent of patients are seen in accident and emergency within that target of 6 hours. So we in the North Shore have gone from having one of the worst-performing hospitals to now having one of the absolute best.

I am very proud to be part of this team, this John Key - led National Government. I think we are a unified, coherent group of people who share a vision, and share the vision of John Key. We are not in a mishmash of opposing everything, holding everything up, and actually halting progress where it needs to occur. This is a Government that is making a difference. One of the things that was said last Friday at the lunch was that people were very impressed by the positivity of the Prime Minister and by his ability to encapsulate the vision that all New Zealanders share and what we all want for our children and our grandchildren. We need to act now. We need to act decisively. We have in this Government a stable, proven leadership that can conduct us through tough times. John Key is very much a steady hand at the till and he has a very good, high-performing Cabinet, and I am very proud—

Hon Member: It’s called a tiller.

MAGGIE BARRY: A tiller, as well. He is in charge of the ship. He is not under attack by his own members. As a leader he is respected by his caucus and Cabinet team, unlike the other parties that sit in this House. We are very privileged to have him as our leader, and I am very proud to be part of this National John Key - led Government. Thank you.

EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker Dean, and congratulations on your elevation to sitting in the Chair. What a tired, negative, and hostile speech we had from the Prime Minister this afternoon. Obviously, Hawaii did not work any holiday magic. We had no fresh ideas, no vision, no energy—unlike the previous speaker, Maggie Barry, who had a lot of energy but no ideas—and a complete failure to engage with the major challenges facing Aotearoa New Zealand. At least the environment got a mention this year, which it did not last year, but when the Prime Minister and his Ministers and other MPs in National talk about the environment they talk about natural resources, not about nature, and that epitomises National’s attitude to the environment. Nature is primarily something to be exploited for economic gain. That is why the Prime Minister talks about opening up our oceans to foreign corporates for environmentally risky deep-sea drilling, not about the need to protect the Māui’s dolphin by effective controls on fishing.

To National, nature and our environment are not about our landscapes. They are not about our indigenous plants and wildlife that contribute to our identity as New Zealanders. They are not about safeguarding the places that we treasure, like our national parks, places that we go camping beside rivers and beaches, and places that many Kiwis like to spend their summer. They are not about that. Once upon a time, under former Prime Minister Jim Bolger, with Bill Birch, those Ministers went tramping. They understood something about our national parks and what it is to crest the high country and to stand on a ridge and listen to the kea, what it is to wander through beech forests, and what it is to experience some of the magic of those places. Yet under this Government we have an enthusiastic interventionist in Nick Smith as Minister of Local Government. He intervened to axe the regional council in order to promote irrigation development in Canterbury. He intervened to weaken water conservation orders. He intervened to draft legislation that has increased ministerial powers to direct and interfere with local councils. But as the new, recycled Minister of Conservation, will we see him intervening to protect our South West New Zealand World Heritage Area, to protect Fiordland National Park and Mount Aspiring National Park against the ill-conceived Routeburn tunnel proposal? Will he intervene to protect that great walk? No. He will probably just leave it to a second-tier official in the Department of Conservation, because under this Government National intervenes to tip the playing field in favour of development and in favour of its business mates.

We have seen that at Skycity. We have seen that with the irrigation fund helping irrigators with a subsidy. We have seen that with National taking an axe to the Resource Management Act. We have seen it with the Government making it easier in the Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill for mining to take place on conservation land, with the Minister of Energy and Resources as well as the Minister of Conservation deciding applications. National does not intervene in favour of nature and the environment; it intervenes always in favour of the exploitation of nature.

John Key is afraid to talk about the environment, because he knows that his Government’s policy choices are toxic to the environment. The Prime Minister said this afternoon that the Government was planning to introduce a package of reforms around water quality and the way we manage fresh water. When the Prime Minister talks about building on the work of the Land and Water Forum, what he really means is watering down the forum’s recommendations and cherry-picking. When we have got a Government that is trying to hide the extent and the seriousness of our water quality problems by ditching the consolidated nationwide state of the environment reporting that we used to have until late last year, and when we have a Government that is proud to be the only country in the OECD that does not have independent environmental reporting, I do not expect the water reform package to improve the outlook for our rivers, our lakes, and our aquifers. I expect to see more of what irrigators want, like tradable water rights, which will further complicate water management in New Zealand but increase the opportunity for consent holders to profit from any water they are not using.

This summer we have had numerous stories in the media about water pollution—toxic algae in Hawke’s Bay killing a dog, and last weekend in Marlborough we had the Taylor River raft race run along the riverbank because of elevated levels of bacteria in the river and low flows. The reason for that? The Marlborough District Council said that those high bacterial levels were partly because of runoff from Linkwater, an area of intensive dairying. We are seeing mussel farmers at Collingwood in Golden Bay unable to harvest their mussels because of contaminants in the Aorere River. We have seen the Mātiri, Mangles, and Mātakitaki rivers, again, not fit for swimming, with elevated bacteria levels, and kayakers reporting infected cuts. As one kayaker recently emailed to me, Murchison has a population of around 700 people and a sewerage plant, but an estimated cow population of over 10,000. That is the equivalent of more than 140,000 people, but with no sewerage plant. Yet what is National planning to do? Spend $80 million subsidising irrigation. It wants to push people off welfare payments to make it easier for agribusiness to create more dairy farms.

I came back from Arthur’s Pass on Sunday. When you leave the national park, shortly after that you see Lake Grassmere. It is one of the scenic gems of the Canterbury high country, yet what has happened there? We have had Mr Morrison, from the family of one of the principals of the Central Plains Water irrigation development, clearing all the matagouri adjacent to the road, using his digger and his bulldozer, and putting the land ready for more intensive farming and irrigation development, all with impunity—no obvious intervention from Environment Canterbury or the Selwyn District Council. The fact that he is bulldozing those matagouri shrublands, proposing to do intensive farming in the catchment of Lake Grassmere, will be an absolute tragedy for the lake because it will end up totally polluting that lake, which at the moment has got very high water-quality. Yet National will not put limits on dairying development through a strong national policy statement. We have only a weak national policy statement.

The Minister for the Environment talked about National spending money on clean-up initiatives. Those programmes were implemented and started by the previous Government. What the Minister fails to recognise is that if you are spending money on clean-up at the same time as you are subsidising irrigation, you are just compounding the problem, so taxpayers are paying twice. Amy Adams called water our most valuable natural resource, and said that New Zealand must make the most of this “vital resource”. But I did not hear anything in the Minister’s speech about protecting our rivers and lakes and protecting their fishing values, their swimming values, or their stronger water conservation orders. It was all about development.

The Government’s plans to reform the Resource Management Act will be more bad news for the environment and for organisations like the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society and Fish and Game that are involved in advocacy to defend the places that they love and we love, like the Denniston Plateau, the Mōkihinui River, and the Waitaki River. The Minister talked about the Resource Management Act as a “barrier to growth”. On “Planet Key”, good environmental outcomes are where developers are left with the minimum of constraint, and paradise is paved over and turned into a parking lot or an irrigation intake within 6 months, of course.

Amy Adams talked about inconsistent and inaccurate plans. The Green Party would fix this by having more national policy statements and more national environmental standards to guide councils. National has got a weak national policy statement on fresh water, and it has failed to finalise the national environmental standard on ecological flows, which was notified more than 4 years ago. National’s fix in terms of the Resource Management Reform Bill is once again to shaft democratic processes, to give more power to Ministers in Wellington and to take it away from councils. We have seen that with National proposing to appoint the commissioners for decisions on the Auckland Unitary Plan, not leaving Auckland councillors to appoint those commissioners. If we are having another raft of changes to the Resource Management Act, I suspect that they will be about undermining the powers of councils and putting more and more power in the hands of the Government.

A richer New Zealand is not about more motorways and more irrigation and more mining and more environmental destruction. It is not about something you measure just on a balance sheet; it is measured in the hearts of people across this beautiful country of ours. It is about investing more in the protection of our indigenous species, which we hold in trust for all humankind, not just New Zealanders, and it is about recognising that our economy, with its strong emphasis on primary production and tourism, depends on a healthy environment. The Green Party would invest in that.

JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa): I would like to invite the last speaker who has just addressed the House, Eugenie Sage, to come across to the Wairarapa. Come up to Mount Bruce, and you can see wildlife being propagated at a joint Department of Conservation - community facility there. Come and see our white kiwi—three of them. There are 60 kiwis living in the wild. Come and see our blue skies. Come and see our beautiful, clear, pristine water in the Waiōhine River, which I have swum in and drunk from most days since Christmas. It is fantastic. You are promoting gloom and doom that just does not exist. Please, come over the hill to the Wairarapa, and I will educate you and show you what a great job this Government is doing in protecting our environment, in the middle of people earning money by employing themselves, doing work.

Clearly, the Opposition has had 6 weeks sitting on a beach, suntanning itself, but unfortunately it has come up with no new policy ideas at all. I have taken particular note of the speakers who have been performing in the House this afternoon, listening to what they have said very carefully. David Shearer wants to be hands-on, but he opposes every hands-on move we make. Think about the comments from Sue Moroney, complaining about unemployment levels, and contrast those with Eugenie Sage, who has just spoken, who would like to shut the economy down. There is an absolute diversion of ideas and thinking in the Opposition, which is bereft of policy. Our colleague from Māngere, Su’a William Sio, could not organise the filling up of six free containers so he could send them off to Samoa. Can I suggest that he come across to the Wairarapa, come to Greytown, and we will have them filled in about half a day, because that is what people in our community do. If he had got in early, he would be beating the Solomon Islanders who are coming to work in orchards in the Wairarapa, because the Samoans have not taken them, but the Solomon Islanders will go back with containers full of interesting used items and new items from the money that they have earned.

I listened to Winston this afternoon—Winston Peters. I do not remember the message he was trying to leave, but I would say to all New Zealanders, including the 4.6 percent who gave him the party vote, please be generous to him, but have the intelligence to know when you are being taken for a ride.

Sue Moroney demanded the Government turn the economy around. Her comments underlined the difference between that side of the House and this. The Labour-Green Opposition are socialists who still believe in that socialist concept of the command economy. Sorry, it does not work. We need a complete package of measures to get this economy moving forward. There is no one issue that you can go flick and turn the light on or off.

Megan Woods provided some employment figures—12.8 percent of 20 to 24-year-olds are unemployed. Well, go and look at Europe, a market of 500 million people, and you will see that countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland are coping with more than 50 percent unemployment, particularly in that age group that you are quoting of 25 and under. If you look across the board, those countries are coping with 25 percent and more unemployment.

I listened to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has a very clear plan that involves returning this economy to surplus by reducing debt by pushing ahead with wide-ranging reforms, because we must create a more productive and competitive economy that will give people work, enable them to improve their lot, and allow them to use their initiative. We want to drive better results, and we want to get better value from public services, and, of course, at the same time support the rebuilding of Christchurch.

Through the period of the last 5 years this Government has been dealing with three major challenges: an economy that was left unbalanced by the Labour Government—it was also left in poor shape—the impact of the global financial crisis, and then, of course, the Canterbury earthquakes. So as part of the package of measures that the Government has been taking I realise and the Ministers on this side of the House realise that we have got to keep strengthening our export sector. That is why the Government has been committed to increasing the commitment around the contribution that exports make to our economy by aggressively pursuing more and higher-quality trade agreements. We have had agreements with China, we have had agreements with Hong Kong and with Malaysia, and we are pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership now. This year the focus will be Asia, because that is where we see huge opportunities for New Zealand businesses. Since 2008 our exports to China have trebled, and in the next 5 years developing countries in Asia, like India, China, and the ASEAN countries, will increase their share of world GDP by nearly 20 percent. There are great opportunities in countries like Laos, like Viet Nam, like Burma, which are opening up, as well as the traditional markets like Singapore and Hong Kong.

Last year the Business Growth Agenda set a target of raising the value of exports to the economy from 30 percent to 40 percent of our GDP by 2025. To do that, the primary sector will have to be the major contributor to our export earnings. It accounts for 72 percent of merchandise exports. To achieve that, despite the claims of the Greens, access to reliable water is critical for primary production. Those dairy farmers in my electorate who are suffering, particularly in the north, are suffering because we do not have irrigation schemes in place, and it is a very dry summer. If you are trying to dairy farm in a very dry area, that is really difficult. That is why the Government is investing $80 million for the initial stages of a company operation. That is going to be set aside in the 2013 Budget to allow irrigation development. That is very important in my electorate, particularly in the Central Hawke’s Bay around Waipukurau and to the south of Mount Bruce, particularly around the area of Masterton, Bideford, Gladstone, and Martinborough. Reliable irrigation represents a major step in unlocking New Zealand’s economic potential and having our tradable sectors growing strongly and delivering on the Government’s economic growth goals. I want to just say to the people of the Wairarapa that this arrangement and the support the Government will give to irrigation in the Wairarapa will happen irrespective of how the electorate decides to settle on local government administration—whether it runs with a unitary council or some other arrangement.

Finally, I would like to commend the work that Tony Ryall has done refocusing the district health boards. A major effort has been made in the Wairarapa, and we are linking up very strongly with the Hutt Valley District Health Board. Through that, Tony Ryall is ensuring that we are making each dollar go further, and we are getting great results. I would finally just like to highlight the fact that there are 70,000 fewer smokers today than we had in 2009. The rate of daily smoking for youth has fallen from 14 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2011 and 2012. That is because the Government has a plan. That is because the Government is taking action. That is because the Government, despite the claims of the Opposition, is delivering results. What a great job John Key and his team are doing. It is really a great pleasure and it makes me very proud to be a part of that team. Thank you.

DARIEN FENTON (Labour): It is my great pleasure to wish everybody a happy New Year.

Hon Members: Happy New Year.

DARIEN FENTON: Thank you, thank you. I also want, firstly, to congratulate the new whips in the National Party, the Government party, and the promotion, of course, of Louise Upston. I am looking forward to working with you all. I also want to congratulate the incoming Ministers and commiserate with those who have been told “Don’t come Monday.”

There is only one word to describe the Prime Minister’s statement today, and that is—

Hon Member: Brilliant. Brilliant.

DARIEN FENTON: —yes, I will get there—“disappointment”. It was such a disappointing statement—not that I have high expectations of this Prime Minister or this Government, but Kiwis are increasingly disappointed. What we heard today was more of the same. Especially disappointed will be those forgotten New Zealanders who are working harder than ever, doing their fair share, and playing their part, but struggling to get ahead. They are feeling let down, and who can blame them? The Government has turned its back on them. It has turned its back on those thrown on the jobless scrap heap in the last 4 years or the last 5 years. It has turned its back on those struggling to find a job, except to blame them for being jobless in the first place. Let us be clear: people want to work. They want to work, and this idea that they do not and that they are a bunch of skivers is just disgraceful.

After 5 years of a John Key - National Government there is a lot to be disappointed about. The Government has even taken, in the last few days, to mocking businesses in our manufacturing sector because they have had the gall to come forward in public to tell the truth about the manufacturing crisis in this country; the crisis that exists in what is a very important sector that helps create good jobs, and good quality jobs.

So we need a hands-on Government—a Government that is going to do something. But the biggest disappointment for me in his speech today, and, I am sure, for many others, was the lack of a mention of jobs. Not a word—not a word—about jobs; not a heading, not a single thing about employment. We heard lots of excuses, and we heard an awful lot of blame, but the only job creation programme in John Key’s speech today was to increase prison labour—creating workplaces in prisons where there are no rights, no difficult workers, of course, who insist that they should be safe at work and healthy, and no workers actually wanting to negotiate over pay and conditions, because, of course, prisoners do not have rights.

Do not get me wrong. Labour supports prisoners having the right to work, but this is not a job creation programme. Coming across on top of the Government’s other job creation programme of building a prison in Wiri, you do have to ask whether this is the grand economic plan that we can expect from this Government. The good news, I suppose, for the prisoners who are going to be working in prisons is that they will have a 40-hour week, according to John Key. So in that sense they are going to have something that no other New Zealander has any more: the 40-hour week has disappeared—it is gone. It disappeared a long time ago. The 8-hour day is long forgotten.

New Zealanders, as we all know and we say often, are working longer and harder than ever. We have an issue of long working hours. We have an issue of underemployment as well, but we also work some of the longest hours in the OECD. These forgotten New Zealanders are trying to do their bit, they are trying to do the right thing by their families, and the best the Government has come up with today is jobs in prisons.

There is a sinister little paragraph in the Prime Minister’s statement. I had to look quite hard to find it. On page 7 John Key says in his statement that the “Government will this year introduce legislation to boost labour market flexibility, including improvements to collective bargaining rules and extended flexible working arrangements. It will also progress legislation to introduce a new starting-out wage, to prevent young people being shut out of the labour market.”

Let us translate what that means. Translated, this little paragraph means that the Government intends to go ahead with pay cuts for young workers. What it means is that the Government plans to cut the pay for all New Zealand workers by making it impossible for collective bargaining. I have been hearing some whispers of the nasty little plans that it has got up its sleeve when it introduces that legislation. What it means is that our most vulnerable workers will lose their protection when their jobs are sold off to other employers. What it means is that this Government persists in its belief that reducing workplace rights substitutes for an economic plan.

In the next couple of weeks the Government will decide on the pay of our lowest-income workers, in its annual review of the minimum wage. The minimum wage is not the only tool for building quality jobs and decent pay, but it has become increasingly important as more and more workers are reliant on it. It is a tool that a hands-on Government will use, and should use, proactively because it affects so many low-income families.

Dr David Clark: They hands-on voted down the $15 minimum wage.

DARIEN FENTON: Yes, that is what I am getting to, that is right—and we have repeatedly called for a $15 minimum wage. This Government had the chance to do something about it last year, with David Clark’s Minimum Wage Amendment Bill, but of course it said no.

Since John Key took office, the value of the minimum wage in real terms has declined. So those who are dependent on it are worse off. These are the lowest-paid people in New Zealand, who are trying to feed their families on $13.50 an hour, and, in fact, less, given its real terms. A decent minimum wage, let alone a living wage, is not in the lexicon of this Government. It was not mentioned, along with jobs, in this speech. The Government has abandoned its promise to catch up with Australia, along with a whole raft of other broken promises. I mean, that just seems like such a joke. We never hear the Prime Minister talking about catching up with Australia. In fact, he has changed his language with that, too. The brain drain has now become the brain exchange. So that is now the excuse. It is all right that thousands of people are going to Australia for better wages and better jobs, because we are getting brains back from all around the world.

Sue Moroney: Really?

DARIEN FENTON: Yes. So, you know, that is the new language, that is the new excuse that we are having from this Government and from their Prime Minister.

The incoming Minister of Labour, Simon Bridges, could be extremely brave and make a significant mark as a new Minister by showing his sympathy to low-income workers and their families by lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour. He could do that. He could show that he has influence in Cabinet, when he sits around that Cabinet table, not that he is just a green Minister who knows nothing and hears nothing. He could do that. His influence as a new Minister will be tested by the decision he makes in the next 2 or 3 weeks around the minimum wage for 2013.

I hope that he is brave enough to take the minimum wage to $15 an hour, because if he does it will help address the issue not only of New Zealand’s low pay—it is a disgraceful level of low pay—but widening inequality and poverty. We need a decent minimum wage to provide a safety net for vulnerable workers, but also to improve the lot of many people, including Māori and Pacific workers.

Unfortunately, and it is not Simon Bridge’s fault, acting Ministers made a bad start to this whole minimum wage process by slashing the comprehensive review and limiting the submissions to just two organisations this year. They gave those organisations just 6 days to get their submissions in. That was the Council of Trade Unions and Business New Zealand, which are representative organisations. The Council of Trade Unions, I know, has 32 affiliates that it needs to consult with. They were given 6 days to make a submission on the minimum wage. That just shows an arrogant approach. I know both those organisations take this process very seriously, and they would have required much more time than that.

There are some big challenges for the new Minister in this portfolio, not least the challenge of stopping the carnage in our workplaces. There has been a lot of talk about health and safety. There is a health and safety task force—and I do credit the former Minister with setting that up—but people are dying every week. There is an urgent job for him to do. I am happy to help the Minister with that very, very urgent job. The former Minister was prepared to work collaboratively with Labour on that. It is an issue for 2013 that must be addressed.

Labour wants to see quality jobs, well-paid jobs, and safe jobs, not the increasing drive that we are seeing towards precarious work, towards McJobs, towards driving our sons and daughters overseas to other parts of the world, where they can be so much better off.

MELISSA LEE (National): I would like to start my contribution to the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement by wishing everyone a happy New Year. I would like to take a leaf out of the previous speaker’s example and congratulate my colleagues on this side who have been elevated to ministership, as well as the whips—the senior whip and junior whip positions. I know that you have all of our confidence and I trust that you will do a wonderful job.

To those people celebrating lunar New Year—it is not New Year yet for some of us—gong xi fa cai, xin nian kuai le, sun nin fai lok, akemashite omedetou gozaimasu, and in my mother tongue, in Korean, se hae bok mani baduseyo, which means may you receive lots and lots of luck. Happy New Year, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is the Year of the Snake, which is a symbol of steady progress. It was the Year of the Snake in 1965, 1953, and 1941. So for those of you born in those years, they were the Year of the Snake. The snake year symbolises steady progress and much wealth. Apparently, the snake is a good omen. May this Year of the Snake be a good omen for this National-led Government, for steady progress, and wealth—much wealth—for all New Zealanders.

My mother would always have us kids start off the year positive, and I will remain positive. There will be no criticism of the Opposition, no snipes, just pure positivity. According to my mother—no, Tim, it is not going to be boring—we have to behave. The way we behave on New Year’s Day is how we will be for the rest of the year that follows. If I could make just one little remark before I get on to the positivity: I do not wish to waste my time reacting to rubbish from the Opposition.

Now to the positivity. Since this day is like New Year’s Day as it is the first day of our parliamentary year, I shall try to live up to my mother’s expectations and be good. And I feel really, really good. I have had a great break with my family over the summer. I am full of energy and ready to take on the task and challenges of the working year, like my colleagues in the National caucus. Some have returned with a better tan than I have. I do not have much of a tan. They have a healthy glow and a big, big smile across their faces. It is lovely to see all of us, right across this House, in the Chamber, ready for the new year and ready for the work ahead of us. May you and yours be blessed with good health and much happiness.

During the summer break I did have a bit of time to reflect—apart from doing the weeding and the gardening and a bit of reading—and one of the things I did was to compare New Zealand with some of our near neighbours. Are we not just the best and most blessed little country in the world? I feel much empathy for our Australian neighbours battling bushfires all over the place. Every time I hear the news I feel terrible, and now there is flooding as well. Although we have had our own share of natural disasters, I felt blessed living in New Zealand over the summer, because I did not have to go out and get out the hose to try to dampen down my house, with the fear that a bushfire might engulf my house and destroy all the treasured memorabilia of our family, or actually hurt one of my family members, my loved ones, or my neighbours. I cannot even begin to imagine how terrible it has been for our neighbours across the Tasman. My aroha and prayers go out to them.

I have also had an opportunity to host a couple of visiting MPs from one of our Asian neighbours—in particular, from Korea—and talk about the wonderful news of their brand new, first-ever female President designate, who will be inaugurated on 25 February this year. Considering that it was my dream as a child to become the first ever female President of South Korea, I feel very proud that Korea has matured to see fit to elect a female President, finally. When the visiting MPs and I were talking, the MPs recognised that New Zealand was in fact the first country to allow women to vote, and the fact that we have already had a couple of female Prime Ministers. They knew that fact, and I felt very proud to be a New Zealander.

Talking about being proud, I feel very proud to support the Prime Minister’s statement in which he spelt out his vision and plan for the 2013 year. This National-led Government has a strong plan to grow our economy—to grow investment and to grow jobs—and to make New Zealand an even better place for all Kiwis. Our economy is actually robust. Since mid-2009 our economy has been growing at an average of about 2 percent a year, and that is a better record than that of some other countries around the world, if you look at the global economy. This National-led Government was re-elected in 2011 because New Zealanders believed that to build a faster-growing economy, an economy that would support more jobs, rising incomes, and better public services, New Zealand needed a National Government, full stop. Kiwis trust that we as a country cannot borrow and spend, that we cannot live beyond our means, and that we have to get our finances in order. That means reducing debt, and getting better results and better value for money from public services. It is a programme that is helping New Zealanders and their families get ahead, encouraging personal responsibility, and rewarding people for hard work.

Our Business Growth Agenda details a large number of initiatives, but I would like to specifically talk about the export markets. I know that my colleague John Hayes earlier spoke about the export markets, but if I could actually add to that. We will continue to pursue high-quality trade agreements. We all know how important they are. To ensure market access for New Zealand goods and services, the Government is currently negotiating free-trade agreements with 11 countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, including the United States, and separately with a number of other countries, including India, Russia, and Korea. We also know the kind of trade balance that the China - New Zealand free-trade agreement has produced.

International trade is an essential component for a country like ours, not just in goods and services but in cultural products. Although we have done really well with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and the Narnia movies, we need to do more. As most of the members know, I have been a champion of cultural content production and exchange, and of promoting New Zealand films overseas and Asian films in New Zealand, for a few years now. Through films and television the wide divide and cultural gap can actually be closed. Who would have thought a fat Korean comedian-singer known as Psy could capture a world audience with a song called “Gangnam Style” sung in Korean that everybody can understand—sort of—and at least dance to? It is estimated that every dollar spent making cultural content will produce at least 4½ times the value in downstream value. I was astounded to find out that a particular tree-lined walkway seen in a Korean film, where there was a romantic walk by a main character in that movie, generates 700,000 visitors from overseas to that particular walkway a year. What a fantastic result! That is a direct result of cultural content that was exported out of Korea. I feel very proud that on this side of the House we are not Hobbit-haters, and I hope that the films we produce in New Zealand can have the kind of downstream effect on tourism that Korea has seen for many, many years.

Another area that I feel passionately about is the social development area, where Minister Paula Bennett has done a fabulous job. The bell has just rung so I do not have too much time to talk about it, but just before the Christmas break I hosted the Hon Paula Bennett at a public meeting to talk about social welfare. It was heartening to hear stories and support from the public, particularly from the disability sector. They agreed that often the words “invalids benefit” made them feel invalid, and the changes we are making to the benefit title will actually give them more power to feel more confident. They want to work, they want the opportunity to contribute to society, and they feel that the Minister does a wonderful job for that particular community. I feel very, very proud that this is the kind of positivity that this Government is delivering.

The world is full of opportunities for New Zealand over the next couple of years. We need to seize every opportunity instead of complaining about it. As my mother says, nothing gets done by just talking about it. This National-led Government is about action. We are about producing results. National has demonstrated that we can provide stable leadership in tough times, and I am very proud to be part of the John Key - led National Government that is delivering for New Zealanders. Thank you.

BRENDAN HORAN (Independent): I want to amend the Prime Minister’s motion to delete all the words after “Government” and to substitute the words “providing that Government delivers an unequivocal commitment to New Zealand’s children and to ensuring they can grow up to be great New Zealanders, and requires the John Key - led administration to present such a commitment to the House.”

I would like to start by congratulating the honourable members David Clark and Nanaia Mahuta, two members who, along with the honourable Richard Prosser, have had children born during the current Parliament. I offer my heartfelt congratulations. Children are a great blessing, a taonga, a treasure beyond all compare. Their arrival heralds a new beginning, joy, love, hope, and promise for their entire family. There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and that village shares in the joy of that child’s successes. The honourable members are providing a home and an upbringing rich in culture. In short, the honourable members are building a cultural identity through solid parental responsibility.

I use the term “family cultural identity” because if we cast our eyes back 40 years or so, over half of our country’s families would be considered poor if we applied today’s standards. Families then were much larger, with several children, often more. They lacked technology but what they did not lack was family culture. In the main, children were born and the whole family participated in their upbringing. A free and equal education was available to all. Money may have been tight, but food was easily grown, and most homes had a vege garden. Many men knew how to hunt and fish, employment was readily available, and most jobs were jobs for life.

If we compare those conditions with today’s, many households have Sky television, a computer, and mobile hand-held devices, yet some of these households are in cultural deficit with parents being unaware of basic hygiene and support, and without the knowledge to rear a healthy, loved child. So it would be fair to say that the accepted family culture of our society is either in abundance or deficit, and with the shocking statistics that we have of children in poverty in 2011, 2012, and now heading into 2013, make no mistake—New Zealand is in a critical, parlous state of family cultural deficit.

We need to lift the measure of the culture into which our children are born. I believe that in the digital world this should be so much easier. Parenting programmes, support services, and educating a family on how to rear their child are all possible, but it means a real commitment from this Government, and indeed every member of this House, to raise the bar, effect positive change, and save the hundreds of thousands of New Zealand children at risk.

I wish to reflect on the role of Government and of Parliament. The Government is not the answer to everything that New Zealanders and their children need, nor is the Government able to be every answer, and nor should it. But surely the Government, whichever party or parties form it, must provide a basic starting point, a framework, a framework of security, in the home, in the street, and in employment, hope for the future that all New Zealanders can share, and an education to allow every child an equal opportunity. For New Zealanders who want to work, the adage should ring true that if you want to work and you work hard and fair, you will be rewarded. To achieve this we need a Government to create a framework where companies can be assured of a stable dollar relevant to an export-led recovery for New Zealand, a tax regime that will encourage growth and development in our manufacturing sector so that full-time employment is available, and to not have a Government claiming it has created new jobs, when many of them are only part-time or minimum wage jobs.

For the thousands of Kiwis who have lost their jobs, through no fault of their own, many in redundancies, many in our State-owned enterprises, where is the framework for upward mobility and for willing New Zealand workers to learn new skills and competencies? Our university students are coming out of university with qualifications, but they are also carrying the burden of student debt—some with debts of over $100,000. Sadly, many of these highly qualified graduates are unable to find employment within New Zealand, the country of their birth.

Today we heard the Prime Minister touch on digital media and he lauded National’s ultra-fast broadband roll-out. But at current levels we are still working towards the year 2019 before the majority of New Zealanders will be able to utilise this technology. How far behind the rest of the world will we be if we have to wait that long? Where is the ultra-fast wireless structure to take advantage of ultra-fast broadband? Ultra-fast broadband is a device-based technology, but where are the educative planning programmes to utilise these technologies?

I would like to touch on charter schools, as many New Zealanders are shocked to see a section in the bill that would remove from children the most basic of protections—the scrutiny afforded by the Official Information Act and the protection of oversight by the Ombudsman. It was the Ombudsman’s 2007 investigation that drew bullying in schools to a national focus. How can it be that we would make private charter schools exempt from such scrutiny? I am not at all confident that National’s plan for charter schools will even come close to meeting the needs of children, families, and communities in New Zealand and I am deeply concerned, along with most parents, at this Government’s lack of commitment to teachers. We have had the Novopay fiasco, where our teachers appear to be disrespected so much that after 3 months some are still not being paid correctly. Is this an indication of a Government that is taking education seriously?

In the Māori Affairs Committee we are inquiring into poverty. We have heard submissions in public session, and they have been heart-rending. The common denominator is all too familiar—the breakdown of the family unit and a failure of families to embrace education. Not one child in New Zealand chooses to starve, but it is happening. Not one New Zealand child chooses to be abused, but it is happening. Not one child chooses to have no loving home, but it is happening. We, the 121 members of Parliament, must act now.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the amendment be agreed to. Can I remind the member that he must furnish a signed copy of his amendment to the Table, otherwise it will lapse.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): May I offer a happy New Year, as others in this House have done, to colleagues on this side of the House of course and, let us be in the spirit, to the other side of the House, and all is well. It was a great speech by the Prime Minister earlier today—it was an excellent speech—and by others in this party. It has actually been quite distracting as one tries to write one’s own speech, having to listen to such wonderful quality from colleagues and being distracted by it, not that I am going to blame them for what is about to come next. But it was a great speech from the Prime Minister and from others. And why? Because it is a bold, strong start by National—a bold, strong start that speaks to a confident Government and a Government confident in where it has come from and where it is going.

I find myself, if I am allowed to share my own little anecdote, confident of where the year is beginning. A year is through now, and I am learning from that experience and stepping out, I would like to think, with the confidence of a second-year MP. I have enjoyed over the last few weeks being out and about in Tāmaki. It is arguably the finest place to spend one’s holidays. I am sure my colleague Scott Simpson on the Coromandel would want to disagree with that, and maybe even the member from Dunedin who was formerly a whip may be up there as well, but there is fine enjoyment in Tāmaki. The last few weeks have been a welcome opportunity to engage once again with my constituents and to hear their concerns. Their opportunities, though, begin, or rather, they see and feel an optimism for this National Government. The people of Tāmaki, strangely enough, are very optimistic about what this Government is doing and they are worried about what the other lot will do—the Opposition, be it Labour, the Greens, or New Zealand First on the other side.

What we have heard though today from the Opposition is a lot of rhetoric, and there has not been a lot of evidence or facts to back it up. We are hearing from the Opposition that this Government is out of ideas, that it has no plan, and that it has no policies.

Dr David Clark: Worst economic record for 50 years—fact.

SIMON O’CONNOR: We also hear from the Opposition the same tired rhetoric that is being demonstrated by my colleague Dr David Clark at the moment. It is the same tired rhetoric. A year in and he does not have anything original. We will have to get you a better press man. But what we are hearing is this rhetoric—out of ideas, they say the Government is, that we have no plan, no policies, and nowhere to go. This is from the same people who say the Government has done nothing over the last few years. Well, something does not quite stack up here. The facts tell us a different story. You see, all the rhetoric aside, the facts are clear. This Government has been busy, from day one, and has done a lot to build a brighter, stronger New Zealand.

So let us look at the facts, let us look at the facts—something I enjoy dealing with. I want to look at areas like education, health, and justice. This is where we have come from, since leaving the last Labour Government behind. These facts we are about to put out are just some of the pieces of work done by the National Party over the last 4 years. Let us deal with the facts. Let us look at education—70 percent of school-leavers are achieving National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 2. That is up from 65 percent from 2008. More people are getting NCEA level 2—that is a fact. There are 12,000 more tertiary places—people in our universities and polytechs. These are opportunities for young Kiwis. I note that 20 hours of free early childhood education has been maintained for our youngest and most vulnerable. We have extended it to Playcentres and kōhanga reo. We have put $60 million into the Positive Behaviour for Learning action plan to stop bullying in schools. These are real facts. The cost of lending for student loans has fallen almost 18 percent in the last 3 years. The cost has fallen from 47c in the dollar back in 2009 to 39c. We are seeing that student loan debtors are paying back an 11 percent increase in payments. These are facts.

We are lifting the profile—we just heard it in recent days through the Prime Minister’s speech—of apprenticeships. There are 10,000 new apprenticeships. An apprentice who enrols after 1 April will get $1,000 toward their tools and on-job costs, and the same amount is to be paid to employers. These are facts. These are real actions, real things that are happening.

National standards: this Government had the correct gumption to introduce national standards. We know the Opposition opposed this. It opposes information. It opposes sharing it with other people. I find it really weird because Opposition members often call themselves liberal, yet they hate the very idea that an individual might be allowed to access information and think for themselves. Within the broader area of education we have developed Callaghan Innovation. This mechanism, this conduit—I had the pleasure to sit on the Education and Science Committee and consider the related bill—will assist research in moving into industry and into innovation. These are facts. All the rhetoric, the complaining, the obfuscation cannot change them. We are better off now than we were 4 years ago. We are smarter than we were when Labour left office.

Let us look at health. We just heard announced today an initial $2.6 million funding for cochlear implants. People can hear better. Maybe that would help the Opposition. Real facts: there will be $400 million more for health spending this year on top of $1.5 billion over the next 4 years. There will be 35,000 more elective operations, and 93 percent of under 2-year-olds will be fully immunised. That is 93 percent; still 7 percent to go, but look at what it was before, only 76 percent under a Labour Government. It is scandalous, but those are facts. Finally, amongst other things in health is an immunisation programme for rheumatic fever. The other side waxed lyrical about these issues, but this Government acts and those are the facts. Our health system is better now than it was 4 years ago. We are healthier than we were when Labour left office.

Turning to justice—and I notice the Minister of Justice in front for me so now I am nervous—there are 600 more front-line police, the lowest crime rate in 30 years, law changes that protect the safety and privacy of jurors, the introduction of public protection orders, and since 2008 only 4.8 percent of our prisoners are testing positive for drugs, down from 13 percent. Also, if I may be so bold, we have restored QCs. Congratulations, Christopher Finlayson—a win there. This is great work that the Minister of Justice has done. The thin blue line is now thicker than ever, and we are safer than we were 4 years ago. This is only a sample of the accomplishments that this Government has achieved and there remain a huge range of activities to be done, from getting more Kiwis to use online services to the improvements in welfare, defence, primary industries, conservation, transport, trade, and not to mention all the great work that is going on in Christchurch. This Government is about action. It has been from day one, since the day it won the Treasury benches, every day since, and it intends to be for every day moving forward in this term and into the next election.

In the absence of any real plans from the other side all we are hearing from Labour members is wanting to be hands-on. You have got to actually ask yourself the question: what does this actually mean? Does it mean that their hands will be on your wallet? Does it mean that their hands will be on the throat of New Zealand industry? Of course it does. One needs only to look at the last 9 long years, fleecing the taxpayers and strangling industry. We cannot go back to that. Ordinary Kiwis know what a Labour Government means by being hands-on. It is a punch in the guts and it is a slap in the face. Labour should keep its hands to itself. It has no vision. It has no direction. It has empty rhetoric. It will not accede and accept the facts of what this Government is doing. Instead it has tiresome slogans of wanting to be hands-on. I repeat what I had mentioned earlier: it wants to fleece the taxpayers. It wants to get into those wallets. It wants to strangle industry and hold it back. It is a punch in the guts to ordinary New Zealanders and a slap in the face. New Zealanders will not stand for it. We heard today the Prime Minister’s statement in which he tabled a strong, bold, continuing vision for this country. All of us who stand here in this House on the Government benches stand proudly behind the Prime Minister and all the Ministers. Our hands are out, they are transparent, they are strong, they are ready, and they are continuing to work for New Zealanders. The facts have been spoken. This Government is happily in control and working for the betterment of all New Zealanders.

ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): Mr Speaker, let me begin by wishing you and all members of the House a very happy New Year. I just want to say I enjoy taking the call, but I am called upon to respond to what is dubbed the Prime Minister’s statement but what was, in fact, the Prime Minister’s panegyric. It was a very disappointing speech in the House and it was a very disappointing statement tabled in the House earlier today.

Simon O’Connor: What were you reading? What was being read over the summer break?

ANDREW LITTLE: A panegyric, Mr O’Connor—you understand exactly what that is. The message is very clear in the Prime Minister’s statement: nothing will change. Certainly, nothing will improve. Nothing will get better, but nothing will change. Never mind 7.3 percent unemployment, and let us remind ourselves what 7.3 percent unemployment actually means. It means 175,000 people unemployed. It means 295,000 jobless. It means 113,000 looking for and wanting and needing extra hours of work. Never mind a shrinking manufacturing sector and never mind falling median wages—3 percent last year alone. Never mind any of those things. Never mind growing poverty, grinding poverty, and never mind growing inequality. Little or nothing in the Prime Minister’s panegyric will address any of these issues.

The big announcement we have had—we had it in the statement today, we had it in the speech this afternoon, and we had it in the Prime Minister’s speech last Friday—is the apprenticeships scheme. The Government has discovered apprenticeships. It is only a few years late, but it has discovered them, nevertheless. Never mind that everybody else has known that there has been a skills shortage in this country for at least 5 years—and a skills shortage in the construction sector that has been deeper and more severe than at any time we have ever known, and certainly in many of the other trades—and never mind that the need for a major rebuild in Christchurch has been known about for at least 2 years, so quite why the Government has discovered apprenticeships now one can only wonder. But at least we now have a scheme.

Earlier in his speech in the House this afternoon, the Prime Minister has already claimed as an achievement the creation of 14,000 apprenticeships. That is what the target is over some years, and it does not start until January next year, but he has claimed it as an achievement. Of course, there will not be many new apprenticeships in the motor trades now that we have taken away one of the warrant of fitness checks that most cars are subject to. What is interesting about that, of course, is that the Government wants to save drivers $50 a year from one warrant of fitness check, but when it had the chance to reduce the ACC component of the registration that every motor vehicle owner has to pay, it left in place the levies that were paid last year when it had recommendations to the Cabinet to reduce them. That is going to cost motor vehicle owners $75 a year more than they need to pay. So much for saving on the warrant of fitness. Drivers will be paying that and more on their continued, unnecessarily elevated car registration fees.

Anyway, we have got the apprenticeships scheme. We have got the claim that it is going to create new places. Never mind, of course, that at the same time this Government is encouraging employers to recruit workers from overseas, and let us not forget that it was 20 years ago that it was the National Party in Government that destroyed the apprenticeships scheme we had then—destroyed apprenticeships then. No wonder we have had a shortage of apprentices growing over many years since that time, and no wonder we have the crisis in trades skills that we have at the moment.

What the National Government in the 1990s did when it trashed the apprenticeships scheme then was that it handed it all over to employers—mainly to employers—through the industry training organisations. Some of the industry training organisations had union representation on them, and it kept them on an even keel, and some of those ones did well, but most of the industry training organisations that did not have union representation or any strong union influence handed over the administration of apprenticeships and industry training to employers, and they ran it down. They could not do it. They could not handle it, because they forgot that one of the great, successful factors of the old apprenticeships scheme was that it was tripartite. It was not just the employer; it was the rest of the workforce, and it was the Government as well. Everybody played their role and nurtured young people in their trade skills, and grew those skills and developed them. We had a world-class apprenticeships system, which this party in Government ran down.

The building industry has had an interesting experience under the National Government apprenticeships scheme since 1992, and it is that by 2008, 50 percent of apprentices in the building and construction industry were so-called independent contractors. They were labour-only contractors. They had no certainty of employment, no security at all, and no commitment by those who were ostensibly their employers and engaged them to see them through their time. In fact, it is the apprentices in that industry who have had one of the highest rates of non-completion that we have had in the last few years. That is what happened when the National Government took over the apprenticeships scheme, trashed it, and handed it over to employers.

So now National has announced a new scheme where it is going to shovel barrow-loads of money at employers—and at the apprentices too, and I do not question that—but in the absence of any other change, what is going to happen? More labour-only contractors in the building industry signed up as apprentices, more non-completion, fewer tradespeople actually completing their time. So let us not look at this with rose-tinted spectacles. This is another disaster waiting to happen.

Remember, too, it was only 2 years ago that this Government took $55 million out of industry training. It has now announced a new scheme that from next year is going to cost $25 million a year, so we are still $30 million down from when it rorted the last lot. So this is not any great achievement of this Government; this is desperate measures because it is behind the eight ball. It has waited too long. It is too little, too late. More, as I say, needs to be done than just announcing more apprentices and shovelling more money at it.

Let us look at what else this Government has said in its statement and line that up against the great apprenticeships scheme. A good apprenticeships scheme delivers an apprentice, a young worker learning their trade when they need certainty and security and some direction from their employer. What is this Government and the rest of its policy platform for this year offering? It has trotted out the old weasel words. “Labour market reform”, it is going to say. It says it is going to boost labour market flexibility. Well, I can tell you what. There are 2.4 million wage and salary earners who know exactly what boosting labour market flexibility means. It means fewer rights, less job security, and less chance of a pay increase. And the Government says it is going to improve collective bargaining. What it means is that it is going to improve the rights of employers to curtail it, to truncate it, to minimise it, and to keep downward pressure on wages. That is what it is promising—so much for 14,000 new apprenticeships!

With no job security and with no certainty for young workers, this Government is not committed to retraining and re-skilling New Zealand. This is all just smoke and mirrors, as my leader, David Shearer, described it—just smoke and mirrors. This is just another recipe for more of a low-wage economy, more job insecurity, and more inequality.

You know, the funny thing is that the Prime Minister talks up Taranaki as an example of the part of the New Zealand economy where there is comparatively lower unemployment and there are higher wages. I come from Taranaki. I am a Taranaki boy and a New Plymouth boy. I spend most of my non-parliamentary time up there. I know New Plymouth very well and I know its industries. I know the industries that pay very well, but I also know the industries—and there are many of them—that do not pay very well, at all. Taranaki is a two-speed economy—a classic two-speed economy. If you work in engineering and oil and gas, you will do OK. If you work in the service industries, you are going to be struggling to make ends meet. But, if Taranaki is so important, and is so good and is such a model, and when Taranaki has several National Party MPs, some long serving—Shane Ardern, the longest-serving Taranaki MP we have had in a long time, and we have had MPs like Chester Borrows, who has served the party well—why is it that in the Cabinet reshuffle not a single Taranaki-based MP was promoted, given extra responsibility, or actually put into the proper Cabinet? None, at all. This is not a Government that takes Taranaki seriously, at all. It is taken for granted and it is not treated seriously.

What we are seeing in this Prime Minister’s panegyric is classic Tory politics—shovelling more money in the direction of those members’ mates to line their pockets and no real addressing of the real issues facing real Kiwis, hard-working Kiwis, who are looking for a break and looking for a better deal.

MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Mr Speaker, it is a pleasure to take a call today on the Prime Minister’s statement. I would just like to wish you and the House a happy New Year. I listened carefully to all the party leaders today, and the two who were standouts were the Prime Minister and the Hon Peter Dunne, for the simple reason that they actually had detail in their speeches, not like the Opposition’s speeches, which were padded out with clichés, airy-fairy emotive statements, or pie-in-the-sky dreams that it hopes will be seen as serious policy.

It was also sad to listen to the Green Party spend a lot of its time and energy trying to convince New Zealand and the rest of the world how bad we are at looking after our own country and environment. I cannot help but find this offensive, as I feel that, as Kiwis, most of us are very proud of our beautiful country and make a contribution, whether it be a small daily act of recycling or spending a weekend planting trees with the local community. The Green Party should be very careful about looking down its nose at the rest of us.

I was disappointed with the comments Hone Harawira made about the mistrust and dislike that his constituents have towards the police. We have the most professional, well-trained, and corruption-free police service in the world. I have seen other police services around the world that would give Mr Harawira a real excuse to moan if he were ever to come in contact with them. If there is tension that exists for his constituents, then perhaps it would be a good idea to reflect on what they could do differently to improve the relationship, rather than point the finger in one direction.

The Prime Minister clearly signalled today that the economy will continue to be a strong focus for the Government this year. The Deputy Prime Minister has been clear and consistent in managing the Government’s finances to return us to surplus and continue to reduce debt. We have already made a huge turn-round in the Government’s books by implementing the biggest changes to the tax system in a generation, reforming our welfare system to strengthen work obligations and to bring productivity into sharp focus. Where many of the Western economies are struggling to generate growth, our own economy has grown 2.5 percent. We are doing well when you consider we will have stronger growth than Canada, Japan, or the United Kingdom.

I was disappointed to hear the Green Party and the Labour Party attack and ridicule the proposed investment this Government has made in commitment to infrastructure. As a country it is critically important that we continue to invest in, improve, and develop our infrastructure, whether it is transport, energy, water, or telecommunications. For our businesses to invest in plant facilities and jobs they need to be confident that they have access to the infrastructure they need.

The Government has already invested billions of dollars in infrastructure over the past 4 years, which in turn is supporting thousands of jobs. If the Opposition parties had travelled north of Ōrewa over the summer they would have experienced firsthand why investment in roading and motorway infrastructure is so important. The people of Rodney, Northland, and Whangarei deserve a road that will be a gateway for regional economic growth and will support what is one of the fastest-growing residential areas in the country. Other benefits include reduced congestion, improved safety, and more reliable journey times. I will once again invite any of the Opposition members to come and see what this road means to the people of Rodney.

Tracey Martin: I’ll come.

MARK MITCHELL: Yeah, you know. I offered this last year, and I will not be surprised if yet again none of them want to come and hear what the people of Rodney have to say. The north has never had a proper roading infrastructure to connect it with the rest of the country. The time has come for them to have this critical link.

Finally, I would like to remind the House of the Opposition’s contribution to New Zealand’s growth, health, and well-being over the last 4 years. It has been opposed to tax changes, opposed to work expectations for beneficiaries, opposed to major roading and infrastructure projects, opposed to the free-trade agreement with the US, opposed to cutting red tape and compliance costs, and opposed to the 90-day trial period. It has been opposed to oil and gas exploration. Every piece of legislation or policy this Government has developed to encourage growth and jobs those members have opposed. Thank you.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I wish all my colleagues a happy New Year. I hope they have had a good time with their whānau. I would like to thank all the members and supporters of the Green Party who sent us here in record numbers just over a year ago.

Today we heard the Prime Minister give his statement to Parliament, which kicked off his fifth year at the helm of New Zealand. And what did John Key focus on? What was he focused on? Well, it was quite simple. He was trying to get a laugh instead of trying to get Kiwis a job. We heard from the Government that the direction is going to be, quite simply, business as usual—but for our usual businesses, they are plainly struggling through the lowest growth we have seen in this country in 50 years. Oddly, on “Planet Key” there is more talk about the Green Party and the Labour Party than there is about the National Party or its record. So 5 years on, under the helm of John Key, where is the plan? Where is the vision? Where are the jobs? Already, 5 years on, we can see the Key Government is resorting to excuses, fear, and scaremongering in its attempt to hold on to power. The Key Government is looking tired. It is looking defensive. It is constantly looking for distractions. The Key Government may have given up on making our country a better place, but we know New Zealanders have not. New Zealanders want vision. They want solutions, not the excuses and distractions we hear from the front bench of the National Government.

You can see it in the debate around mining and the environment, which has been touched on a bit this evening. This term the Government has moved to an extreme anti-environmental position, as if it is trying to look as if it is busy and active, creating jobs. From wrecking the emissions trading scheme to walking out of the Kyoto Protocol, to actually declining marine reserves, and to watching the Māui’s dolphin go extinct, and from intensifying dirty dairying to attacking freshwater scientists, this Government has moved from just talking and lip service about the environment to actively undermining it this term. You could bring back 20 Bluegreen Nick Smiths into the National Government Cabinet, but none of it would “greenwash” the active anti-environmental stance this Government has taken under John Key this term.

You can see it in deep-sea oil drilling—the huge promotion, the subsidies, the tax exemptions, the low royalties. It is symptomatic of the Government’s lazy approach to economic development. Look, there is a huge list of things the Government could be doing to support our Kiwis and to get our country working again, but it would rather sit on its hands and hope that some foreign oil company drills for our oil, risks our environment, and will send its profit offshore. Sure, the Government may get some royalties, but with the fourth-lowest rate in the world, not much. Sure, there might be a handful of jobs, but given it is the lowest job-creating sector in our economy, not much. There might be a few jobs for New Zealanders, but we know that, given this Government has changed the immigration laws so that foreign oil workers can skip through immigration, not much. Sure, there might be some taxes, but given the pages and pages of tax exemptions and write-offs, there will not be much going to the Crown. So what we know is, for all the environmental risk, we are going to see hardly any jobs, hardly any taxes, and hardly any royalties, and all those profits are simply going to flow offshore.

Surely, it is not the smartest plan for our country. It is lazy economics. There is no plan, there is no innovation, and there is no creativity. It is simply hoping that someone else will find some oil, will drill it, mine it, frack it, and they will pay us a pittance for the pleasure. But what happens when it is gone, and why do we not do that now instead of waiting until it is gone? But, you know, the hope-and-pray-that-oil-is-there-and-someone-finds-it plan is in tatters, and what we know is that the former Minister of Energy and Resources has gone the way of Petrobras, he has gone the way of Anadarko Petroleum, and he has gone the way of Apache and none of them is going to be seeing New Zealand oil drilled this year.

The clean economy that the Greens have been talking about—that is what is providing hope to New Zealanders. That is what they are looking for in terms of vision. That is what international leaders are talking about. That is what economists are talking about. It is what the business leaders—the successful business people behind Pure Advantage—are talking about. This offers a real alternative to what we heard today from the Prime Minister. A clean economy would not be putting our beaches at risk. It is those beaches that are iconic of summer, and iconic of our country. Summer in New Zealand means beaches, barbecues, sun, and sand. But it is our beaches that are directly under threat from this lazy, reckless gamble approach to economics. I hope members had a great opportunity to spend some time on some beaches this summer.

Late last year I launched a competition on www.bestbeaches.org.nz where Kiwis can vote for their most-loved beach. So far we have Kaiteriteri in front with over 1,400 votes, followed by Ōhope and the Mount. I guess the Mount is an interesting one to be third, because it is one of those beaches that has experienced oil washing on it, both from the Rena and the slow response we saw from Maritime New Zealand. For them in the Mount, oil on the beaches is not an academic theory; it is tangible, it is something they have seen, it is something they have touched, it is something they have smelt, and they do not want to see oil on their beaches ever again. Just round the corner, in the Pegasus Basin block, just off Wellington’s coast, we have the very same company that had a 25 percent stake in the Deepwater Horizon blowout, explosion, and oil spill prospecting nearly 3 kilometres deep, which is nearly twice as deep as Deepwater Horizon.

So the plan is a lazy approach that is putting our beaches at risk, but there is a better way. What we need is a smart Green economy. A smart Green economy would not risk our environment for a quick buck. It would put the environment at the heart of our economic vision. A smart Green economy would not throw our thriving IT industry and software industry under the bus, as they say is happening with the Government’s patent reforms and as it stands by passively as we still lack a second internet cable. A smart Green economy would not give up on our manufacturing sector. It would support it by driving down the pressure on the New Zealand dollar. We would support it with great research and development, better skills training, and incentives to export. A smart Green economy definitely would not stand by as we see 40,000 manufacturing jobs disappear over the last 4 years.

So, in summary, the Prime Minister has given his speech, which will fail to inspire anyone in this House or anyone outside. That tired old business-as-usual approach is failing our economy, our environment, and our people. This year, the Greens are going to step up. We are fighting for decent jobs, the elimination of child poverty, and the defence of our environment. We are going to do this through fresh thinking, new ideas, and through building a movement of people to stop the worst of the Government’s agenda. We have not given up. We are never going to give in. We are in for the future.

TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): It is a great pleasure to rise for the first time in my new position as junior Government whip, and I would like to thank my colleagues right across the House who have very kindly acknowledged that today. I have to say I am very excited and very humbled to have received the support of my colleagues in order to take on the position, and it is one I am looking forward to with relish.

I do want to pay tribute to my good friend Michael Woodhouse while he is in the House. I think Michael has been an outstanding senior whip for just over a year, since we were returned in 2011. I am delighted that he and my good friend Nikki Kaye, who is sitting beside me, were both appointed Ministers in the recent reshuffle. They are well-deserved promotions and I wish them all the very best in their new responsibilities.

A new year is always a time of great excitement, and I do join with other members in wishing you, Mr Deputy Speaker, a happy New Year. I want to say that, along with other members of the House, I was delighted to be in the House today to hear the Prime Minister outlining the vision for the year ahead. He made it very clear in his speech the other day on the North Shore that the economy will be absolutely at the centre of the programme in the coming year. It is not that other matters are not important; of course they are. When you are in Government, one of the responsibilities is to tackle such a wide range of issues. But without not only getting the economy on an even keel but also promoting a growth economy in New Zealand, there is very little in the social and environmental agenda that we can do.

So I want to say to Mr Hughes, who has just resumed his seat, that I always enjoy listening to him. He is certainly a very articulate speaker. But I have to say that some of the ideas that he has just been putting forward sound good in theory, but they are pie in the sky without ensuring that the fundamentals of the economy are put right. So that is what we will be focused on in the next year.

Dr David Clark: 5 long years.

TIM MACINDOE: I say to Dr Clark, who again is an articulate speaker, that although he enjoys his colourful interjections, again he—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the member, but the time has come for the House to rise.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.